Preferred Citation: Griffin, David Ray. Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8c6009k3/
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Unsnarling the World-KnotConsciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body ProblemDavid Ray GriffinUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford© 1998 The Regents of the University of California |
For Charles Birch, who inspired it
Preferred Citation: Griffin, David Ray. Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8c6009k3/
For Charles Birch, who inspired it
Acknowledgments
My primary intellectual debts for this book are to those authors I have cited extensively. Besides Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, these are especially Daniel Dennett, Nicholas Humphrey, William James, Jaegwon Kim, William Lycan, Geoffrey Madell, Colin McGinn, Thomas Nagel, William Seager, John Searle, Galen Strawson, and Peter Strawson.
The immediate stimulus for writing this book was the conference "Consciousness in Humans, Animals, and Machines" held in October 1994 under the auspices of the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California. I am especially indebted to Charles Birch, who proposed the conference, and Robert Valenza of Claremont McKenna College, who primarily made it possible, This book began as a "background paper" for that conference. I am also grateful to Peter Farleigh and Granville Henry who, along with Birch and Valenza, helped plan the conference and to those participants who gave helpful criticisms of the manuscript, especially (besides the aforementioned) John Cobb and Donald Griffin. The hope that the conference would enable me to improve the manuscript was also fulfilled because of presentations of some of the participants, especially William Seager on intentionality and Colin McGinn on supervenience; the latter led to the addition of chapter 10, on Jaegwon Kim's position.
I am grateful to Jaegwon Kim for reading chapter 10 and for assuring me that I had not misrepresented his position, and also to Donald Sherburne and two anonymous readers for the press, all of whom made many valuable suggestions that led to improvements.
Special thanks are due to my secretary, Sharon Thompson, who went far beyond the call of duty in getting this manuscript ready.
My primary ongoing debt is to my wife, Ann Jaqua, who, among many other things, provides a context in which I can focus on matters such as the mind-body problem.
Key to Abbreviations
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Introduction
This book suggests both a formal procedure for making progress on the mind-body problem and a substantive solution to it, with special attention to consciousness and freedom. The mind-body problem, which Arthur Schopenhauer called the "world-knot," has arguably been the central problem in modern philosophy since its inception in the seventeenth century. With regard to the twentieth century in particular, John Searle in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) has expressed his considered judgment that, "contrary to surface appearances, there really has been only one major topic of discussion in the philosophy of mind for the past fifty years or so, and that is the mind-body problem" (RM, 29).
As indicated by the titles of a number of recent books—for example, Nicholas Humphrey's Consciousness Regained (1983), William Lycan's Consciousness (1987), Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness (1988), Alastair Hannay's Human Consciousness (1990), Colin McGinn's The Problem of Consciousness (1991), William Seager's Metaphysics of Consciousness (1991), Daniel Dennett's modestly titled Consciousness Explained (1991), and Owen Flanagan's Consciousness Reconsidered (1992)—consciousness has widely come to be seen as lying at the heart of the mind-body problem. Consciousness, says McGinn, is "the hard nut of the mind-body problem" (PC, 1). Dennett says (somewhat optimistically), "Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery" (CE, 21). Seager, speaking of the difficulty of fitting psychology into the hierarchy of the sciences, says that "the source of the difficulty is consciousness" (MC, 185–86). Humphrey, in A History of the Mind (1992), says, "The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how states of consciousness arise in human brains" (HM, 2–3). John L. Pollock, in How To Build a Person (1989), has said, "The most perplexing problem for any materialist theory of the person is that of making sense of
consciousness" (HBP, 28). Thomas Nagel, whose work, especially "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" has provoked much of the current ferment, says, "Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable" (MQ, 165). In Mental Reality (1994), Galen Strawson, using "experience" synonymously with "consciousness," says that "the existence of experience is the only hard part of the mind-body problem for materialists" (MR, 93).
The problem of consciousness, as the central feature of the mind-body problem, is also widely seen as a problem for science (not simply for philosophy). Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield, editors of Mindwaves: Thoughts on Intelligence, Identity, and Consciousness (1987), say that "the nature of consciousness may come to be seen as the central problem of research on the brain" (MW, vii). A few recent books (besides some of those already mentioned) illustrating this point are Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (1989), Gerald M. Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (1992), and Israel Rosenfield's The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness (1992).
Whereas it is now widely recognized by dualists and materialists alike that human consciousness creates a serious, perhaps intractable, mind-body problem for modern philosophy and science, the fact that human freedom is part of that problem is much less widely recognized, especially among materialists. Nevertheless, I will argue, we all inevitably presuppose that we have not only consciousness but also (a significant degree of) freedom, so that any acceptable solution to the mind-body problem must also be able to account for our freedom. I have pointed to the equal importance of this issue by including "freedom" in this book's subtitle. Indeed, I consider chapter 9, in which freedom is defended, to be the most important chapter of the book. The earlier chapters, although important in their own right, prepare the way for understanding how the kind of freedom that we all presuppose in practice can be affirmed in theory.[*]
This book is based on the conviction that a development that has occurred in the intense and extensive current discussion provides an opportunity for a breakthrough with regard to the central metaphysical assumption that has led to the intractability of the mind-body problem, an intractability that has taken the form of a standoff between dualists and materialists. Although dualists were in the majority in the early part of the modern period and materialists have been in the ascendancy since the second half of the nineteenth century, each side has always faced insuperable difficulties. During most of this period, given the assumption that materi-
[*] Jaegwon Kim says, "Mental causation arguably is the central issue in the metaphysics of mind" (SM, xv). (Although the affirmation of mental causation is not ipso facto an affirmation of genuine freedom, it is a necessary condition.)
alism (sometimes called physicalism) and dualism were the only serious options, dualists were content to rest the case for their position primarily on the fact that materialism confronted insoluble problems. Materialists in turn rest their case primarily on the insuperable obstacles faced by dualism. Each side, accordingly, largely ignored or at least minimized the problems in its own position. The recent development that has occurred is a much greater willingness by advocates on both sides to admit the deep problems in their own positions.
On the dualist's side, Geoffrey Madell, in Mind and Materialism (1988), has been particularly frank about "the difficulties which any dualist position confronts" (MM, preface [n.p.]). While arguing that materialism's problems are so great that "interactionist dualism looks to be by far the only plausible framework in which the facts of our experience can be fitted" (MM, 135), he admits that "the nature of the causal connection between the mental and the physical, as the Cartesian conceives of it, is utterly mysterious" (MM, 2). He also concedes the "inexplicability" of the appearance of consciousness at some point in the course of evolution and in the development of each embryo, prior to which everything was understandable in terms of physical laws alone (MM, 140f.). He offers, accordingly, only "a limited and qualified defense of dualism" (MM, 9).
Madell's confession of inexplicable mystery was anticipated in 1977 by fellow dualist Karl Popper. In an earlier book, Popper had seemed confident of finding a solution. "What we want," he said, "is to understand how such nonphysical things as purposes, deliberations, plans, decisions, theories, tensions, and values can play a part in bringing about physical changes in the physical world" (OCC, 15). But in the 1977 book he wrote with John Eccles, The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism, he admitted that understanding how interaction occurred between nonphysical mind and physical brain was perhaps impossible. "Complete understanding, like complete knowledge," said Popper, "is unlikely to be achieved"(SAB, 105). Popper was not as ready as Madell now is to admit that this constitutes a serious problem for the dualistic hypothesis, but his admission is significant nonetheless.
More remarkable and extensive has been the change in attitude on the part of those who reject dualism in favor of some form of physicalism or materialism.[*] On this side, Thomas Nagel's writings have been especially influential. While rejecting a distinct mind or soul and hence dualistic in-
[*] Throughout most of this book I use "physicalism" and "materialism" interchangeably, in line with widespread practice (e.g., Jaegwon Kim [SM, 266n]). Accordingly, I normally refer to the position I advocate, panexperientialism, as an alternative to both dualism and physicalism. In chapter 10 as well as in a few anticipatory references, however, I point out that my kind of panexperientialism could be considered a form of physicalism. This usage implies a distinction between "materialist physicalism" and "panexperientialist physicalism."
teractionism (MQ, 182, 190, 211; VN, 29), Nagel has said that the drive to develop a physicalist account of mind has led to "extremely implausible positions" (VN, 15). Although he is not ready to conclude that physicalism must be false, he does say that "physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true" (MQ, 176). Colin McGinn, having been stimulated by Nagel, has created a considerable stir by going even further. While rejecting dualism and affirming physicalism more emphatically than does Nagel,[*] he argues that our present perplexity is terminal, that we will never be able to resolve the mystery of how consciousness could emerge from the brain (PC, 1–2, 7). William S. Robinson is equally emphatic. Although he thinks that a physicalistic approach can do justice to more mental phenomena than do Nagel and McGinn, he argues in Brains and People (1988) that it cannot handle sensations, such as pains. There is no imaginable story, he says, that leads from talk of neurons in the brain to "our seeing why such a collection of neurons has to be a pain." And this absence of understanding, Robinson adds, "is not merely a temporary limitation" (BP, 29). William Seager, although not ready to declare that physicalism will never solve the mind-body problem, says that the record thus far suggests that this may well turn out to be the case. In spite of holding that physicalism "still deserves our allegiance" (MC, 224), he says that "the degree of difficulty in formulating an explicit version of physicalism which is not subject to immediately powerful objections is striking" (MC, 4). Reviewing the various types of physicalism (type-identity theory, functionalism, token-identity theory, psychological instrumentalism, eliminative materialism), he says, "Taken as a group they appear as an orderly retreat becoming a rout" (MC, 32). The attempt to deal with consciousness in terms of the normal explanatory method of physically resolving higher phenomena into lower elements results, Seaget says, in "a 'principled breakdown' of the explanatory scheme," adding that "it remains true, and may forever remain true, that we have no idea what-soever of how the physical states of a brain can constitute consciousness" (MC, 195). In a similar vein, Galen Strawson says that the "mysteriousness, for us, of the relation between the experiential and the physical-as-dis-cerned-by-physics is . . . a sign of how much is at present, and perhaps forever, beyond us" (MR, 50). Likewise, Jaegwon Kim's 1993 book, Supervenience and Mind, concludes with the reflection that the physicalists' attempt to save the reality of the mental seems "to be up against a dead end" (SM, 367).
[*] Although (as I know from personal conversation) McGinn would reject physicalism or materialism under one definition, according to which it holds that consciousness is identical with the brain in such a way as also to be a spatial entity or property, he does, like Nagel, accept a two-aspect version of physicalism.
For good measure we can throw in a similar conclusion by an advocate of epiphenomenalism, which, being halfway between dualism and materialism, can be considered an aberrant version of one or the other. Keith Campbell, the second edition of whose Body and Mind appeared in 1984, at one time had accepted materialism. But he came to reject it after deciding that phenomenal properties, such as the feeling of pain, could not be properties material objects could have (BM, 105–9). His "new epiphenomenalism" says that we do have a spiritual mind, which is produced by the body, but that it does not act back on the body (which allows a physicalist, deterministic account of human behavior, the need for which is a regulative principle for Campbell [BM, 125]). Recognizing that his position shares an "embarrassing" question with dualism, namely, how a "spiritual mind"—our awareness with its phenomenal properties—can be "caused by changes in sense organs and brain," be says: "How this is done we do not know. . . . I suspect that we will never know how the trick is worked. This part of the Mind-Body problem seems insoluble. This aspect of humanity seems destined to remain forever beyond our understanding" (BM, 131).
This new situation—the recognition by leading advocates on all sides of unresolved and probably unresolvable problems within their own positions—provides an opportunity for a conceptual breakthrough insofar as it has led to the realization that a satisfactory solution will have to move beyond assumptions of long standing. Nagel has again led the way. "The world is a strange place," he says, "and nothing but radical speculation gives us the hope of coming up with any candidates for truth" (VN, 10). Suggesting the direction that this radical speculation should take, he says that "any correct theory of the relation between mind and body would radically transform our overall conception of the world and would require a new understanding of the phenomena now thought of as physical" (VN, 8).
Strawson[*] agrees. Saying that "the enormity of the mind-body problem" requires a "radical response," he predicts that a solution, if possible at all, will involve a "revolution" in our conception of the nature of the physical (MR, 99, 92). McGinn locates the intractability of the mind-body problem in "our inadequate conception of the nature of the brain and consciousness" (PC, 2n). Although doubting that we are up to the kind of radical reconception that would be needed, he does agree that "something pretty remarkable" would be necessary to find a constructive solution to the mindbrain relation (PC, 2, 86, 104).
John Searle has been particularly caustic in his treatment of the materialist tradition, saying that the "most striking feature of . . . mainstream phi-
[*] Because I discuss both Galen Strawson and Peter Strawson, referring simply to "Strawson" could be confusing. However, my discussion of Peter Strawson is limited to section V of chapter 9. All references to "Strawson" before that are to Galen Strawson.
losophy of mind of the past fifty years" is how much of it "seems obviously false" (RM, 3). It also, Searle suggests, reflects a neurotic-like pattern of behavior:
A philosopher advances a materialist theory of the mind. . . . He then encounters difficulties. . . . [C]riticisms of the materialist theory usually take a more or less technical form, but in fact, underlying the technical objections is a much deeper objection. . . : The theory in question has left out . . . some essential feature of the mind, such as consciousness or 'qualia' or semantic content. . . . And this leads to ever more frenzied efforts to stick with the materialist thesis and try to defeat the arguments put forward by those who insist on preserving the facts. After some years of desperate maneuvers to account for the difficulties, some new development is put forward that allegedly solves the difficulties, but then we find that it encounters . . . the same old difficulties. (RM, 30)
"After half a century of this recurring pattern in debates about materialism," Searle adds, "one might suppose that the materialists and the dualists would think there is something wrong with the terms of the debate. But so far this induction seems not to have occurred to either side" (RM, 49). Searle believes that the basic problem is that materialism has accepted the vocabulary and categories of Cartesian dualism, according to which if something is "physical" it cannot also be "mental," and if something is "mental" it cannot also be "physical" (RM, 14, 26, 54). A constructive solution will require a reconception in which this "conceptual dualism" (RM, 26) is rejected.
Although I do not believe, for reasons I will give later, that Searle's own way of rethinking the relation between physicality and mentality provides the basis for a satisfactory solution, I do believe that his formal recommendations about the kind of radical reconceptualizing that we need, along with those of Nagel, McGinn, and Strawson, point in the right direction. This growing awareness by both dualists and materialists of the inadequacy of their own positions, I have suggested, creates an opportunity for real progress on the mind-body problem, because it reveals the need for more radical reconceptualization. The perception of this need should lead, in turn, to a greater openness to alternative approaches. One philosopher who has especially realized this implication is Strawson. Taking alternative views such as idealism and panpsychism seriously, says Strawson, is part of "a proper response" to the fact that, given standard assumptions about the physical and the mental, the mind-body problem has proved to be intractable (MR, 75, 108). My book is an attempt to get a hearing for a particular version of one of these alternative approaches.
As my comments thus far should make clear, I think that the basic problem has been conceptual, which means that the solution must be a philo-
sophical one. This does not mean that I belittle the role science has to play. On the contrary. One of my central purposes is to remove from the back of scientists a false problem with which they have been saddled by bad philosophy, so that they will be free to work without distraction on the properly scientific dimensions of the problem of consciousness. That is, most scientists working in this area have been trying, among other things, to answer a question that is impossible in principle to answer. No amount of empirical research, no matter how brilliant, can answer such a question.
Little progress has been made on the "problem of consciousness," beyond the not unimportant progress of heightening the dissatisfaction with both dualism and materialism, I suggest, for a number of interrelated reasons.
1. Insufficient clarity has been attained on exactly what problem is being addressed.
2. Insufficient attention has been given to the role that both paradigmatic and wishful-and-fearful thinking play in determining our intuitions about regulative principles and data and thereby our theories.
3. The kind of common sense that can be overridden by scientific theory has seldom been distinguished from the kind that cannot.
4. Insufficient clarity has been attained about the regulative principles, both formal and substantive, that should be exemplified if a theory is to be considered a serious candidate for acceptance.
5. There has been insufficient clarity about the data to which an adequate theory should do justice.
6. It is seldom realized that the mind-body problem is rooted even more deeply in the "Cartesian intuition" about the body than in that about the mind.
7. In spite of widespread agreement, especially by nondualists, that "mind should be naturalized," the two fundamental features of mind, experience and self-determination, have generally not been taken to be fully natural. This has led to the false conclusion that dualism and materialism provide the only realistic options (with "realism" understood as the view that the physical universe really exists, independently of human perception and thought). This false conclusion has meant that the third form of realism, panexperientialism, has been virtually ignored.
These seven problems, I suggest, are the various snarls that together have constituted the world-knot. Unsnarling this knot will require overcoming each of these problems. The first seven chapters of this book deal with these seven problems in turn. Chapters 8 and 9 then provide a solution (begun in chapter 7) to the mind-body problem, focusing on consciousness and on freedom, respectively. Chapter 10 then makes the nature and adequacy of
this panexperientialist position clearer by means of a critique of materialist physicalism as articulated in Jaegwon Kim's Supervenience and Mind . Interestingly, it turned out that the order of the chapters, although determined in the light of the logical order in which the various issues had to be discussed, also reflected the difficulty of the various issues. Chapters 1 through 9, accordingly, became progressively longer.
One
What Is the Problem?
A perusal of books and essays on "the mind-body problem" or "the problem of consciousness" will often reveal that "the" problem being addressed actually comprises two or even more of the following distinguishable problems:
1. How could experience (whether conscious or not) arise out of, and perhaps act back on, nonexperiencing things (or events, or processes)?
2. How could a unified experience arise out of, and perhaps act back on, a brain?
3. How could conscious experience arise out of, and perhaps act back on, a brain?
4. How could self-conscious experience arise out of, and perhaps act back on, a brain?
5. How could conscious animal experience have arisen in the evolutionary process out of nonconscious animal experience?
6. How could self-conscious experience have arisen in the evolutionary process out of merely conscious animal experience?
The failure to distinguish among these various dimensions of the overall problem has led to many a confusion. The most serious has been the assumption that Problem 1 is necessarily part of, perhaps even identical with, any or all of the next three problems. This confusion is so serious because Problem 1 is based on a metaphysical assumption that is pure supposition, and one that, on reflection, is revealed to be dubious. After all, an amoeba, like a neuron, is a single-celled organism, and an amoeba shows signs of spontaneity suggestive of some slight degree of experience. If amoebas might have experience, why might not neurons in the brain have experi-
ence as well? It is, however, almost universally assumed that they do not, and it is this assumption that lies at the heart of the mind-body problem. For example, on the first page of The Problem of Consciousness, McGinn formulates the problem in terms of the question, "How could the aggregation of millions of individually insentient neurons generate subjective awareness?" In any case, whatever one's intuitions or judgments about these matters, it should not simply be assumed that a discussion of Problem 2 (and perhaps Problems 3 and 4) necessarily involves Problem 1.
Making this distinction is especially important if, as I maintain, Problem 1 is insoluble in principle (which Popper, Campbell, Nagel, and Seager have implied and McGinn and Robinson have explicitly asserted). This point has practical as well as theoretical importance: A good deal of money, much of it from taxes, is being spent on research programs in which the first three (and perhaps four) problems are simply equated.
To make this point is not to be antiscience. To the contrary, the point is to distinguish the properly scientific questions, which can in principle be answered by empirical research, from a confused metaphysical question, which cannot be answered. Given Problems 2 through 6, scientists (perhaps in cooperation with philosophers) have a difficult enough assignment without having to do the impossible as well.
Incidentally, although the distinction between Problems 5 and 6, on the one hand, and Problems 3 and 4, on the other, will not play a central role here, I mention it for the sake of completeness and because of its importance. It should not simply be assumed, for example, that an answer to Problem 4, which involves the relation between self-consciousness and the brain, would automatically answer Problem 6, which involves the evolutionary relation of self-conscious experience to prior experience that enjoyed consciousness but not yet self-consciousness. The emergence of distinctively self-conscious experience may have depended on certain social developments rather than, or at least as well as, further neurological changes. This distinction is related to the recent discussion, in physicalist philosophy of mind circles, of the extent to which the content of consciousness is related to "extrinsic" realities beyond the present, "intrinsic" state of one's body.
In summary, the formal point of this chapter is that scientists and philosophers need to become clear about exactly which problem or problems they are seeking to answer. The main polemical point is that Problem 1 is probably a pseudoproblem and should not, in any case, be simply assumed to be involved in any of the other problems. Because it is the problem that has made the "mind-body problem" intractable thus far and has led to the growing consensus that it is probably permanently insoluble, separating the other problems from this one is likely to be a precondition for answering them.
Two
Paradigmatic and Wishful-and-Fearful Thinking
Philosophers and scientists are supposed to be empiricists, in the broad sense of taking into account all the kinds of evidence that are relevant to the question at hand. Various factors conspire, however, to make the reality fall short of the ideal. The most important of these factors are paradigmatic thinking, wishful-and-fearful thinking, and the interaction between them.
Thomas Kuhn's discussion of the role of paradigms in science has led to much greater awareness of the power of paradigmatic thinking, both its inevitability and its dangers. Its chief danger, of course, is that it may blind us to genuine phenomena that do not fit the paradigm or, when these phenomena are forced on our attention, lead us dogmatically to reject them a priori. Although we may be genuinely motivated by the desire for truth, we may become so convinced that our present framework is the one and only route to truth that open-minded consideration of the evidence becomes virtually impossible. Strong social dimensions are also involved: We are usually socialized into a paradigm through our schooling, and the paradigm is more or less subtly enforced by hiring, promotion, and tenure committees, by grant-authorizing committees, by journal editors and referees, by book reviewers, and so on. If there are data that do not fit the currently dominant paradigm, it is very difficult for most philosophers and scientists to take them into account—or at least to do so publicly, so that these data would be brought to the attention of other thinkers.
The phenomenon of wishful thinking is also well known. We tend to believe what we wish to be the case. Equally important is the other side of the dynamic, which I follow Susan Haack in calling "fearful thinking."[1] We tend to reject a priori all those things that we do not want to be true, or at least do not want to be generally believed. For example, some thinkers seem to espouse a dualistic view of the mind-body relation primarily because they
want to support belief in life after death, perhaps fearing that a loss of this belief will lead to a general nihilism and loss of morality. Other thinkers, considering belief in life after death pernicious (perhaps the "opiate of the masses"), may adopt a materialistic view primarily to support the impossibility of life after death. The way these two types of thinkers weigh data and arguments may at least be significantly influenced by their respective wishes and fears. In this way, the wish (or the fear) may be the parent of the paradigm.
The causal relation can also work the other way, as there can be paradigm-induced wishful-and-fearful thinking, especially among intellectuals, whose personal as well as professional egos may be very attached to the way they have come to understand the world. John Searle regards this dynamic as essential to understanding why the currently dominant materialistic views are held so widely and so tenaciously, in spite of their iraplausibility:
One of the unstated assumptions behind the current batch of views is that they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the antiscientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives.(RM, 3)
"The deepest motivation of materialism," Searle suggests, "is simply a terror of consciousness" with its "essentially terrifying feature of subjectivity," which most materialists think to be "inconsistent with their conception of what the world must be like" (RM, 55).
Of special importance in trying to see through the assumptions that have made the mind-body problem seem insoluble is the evidence, reported by recent historians of science, that the dualistic worldview, which most scientists and philosophers now wish to avoid, was itself significantly a product of wishful-and-fearful thinking. One motive in the seventeenth century for affirming an absolute dualism between soul and body was to support the immortality of the former: In several of the "Renaissance naturalisms," self-motion, which Plato had seen as distinctive of soul, was attributed to all natural entities. On this basis, some "mortalists" were arguing that the evident fact that the soul is a self-moving thing is no argument for its immortality, for the body, which is clearly mortal, is also composed of self-moving things. The assertion by René Descartes, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and other founders of the early modern worldview that matter is totally inert and insentient provided the basis for saying that the mind or soul is different in kind from matter, therefore arguably immortal.[2] The view of matter as inert also provided an argument for God: Against those who were arguing for an atheistic, pantheistic, or panentheistic view of the universe as a self-organizing organism, Boyle and Newton used the view
that matter is essentially inert to point to the need for an external First Mover.[3] Newton also supported the existence of a transcendent deity by interpreting gravity in the light of the view that matter is devoid of all hidden (occult) properties: Because it is absurd to hold that the power to exert attraction at a distance is inherent in matter, he argued, the phenomenon of gravitational attraction points to the need for a transcendent explanation.[4] This denial to matter of the power to exert influence at a distance was also used by Fr. Marin Mersenne and others to snpport the notion that the Christian miracles, which had traditionally been taken as divine designations of Christianity as the One True Religion, did indeed point to supernatural intervention. A threat to this belief had been posed by Renaissance naturalists and Hermeticists who, by regarding the capacity to exert and receive influence at a distance as purely natural, described the so-called miracles in the New Testament and the lives of the Christian saints as simply extraordinary but not supernatural happenings, no different in kind from similar types of events in other traditions. To counter this threat, Mersenne chose the Democritean view of matter, recently revived by Galileo and Gassendi, in part because it declared influence at a distance naturally impossible, thereby pointing to the need for a supernatural intervention to account for the Christian miracles.[5] Still another motive behind the view of matter as totally inert and insentient, evident in both Descartes and Boyle, was the desire to be able to use the nonhuman world for human purposes without compunction.[*]
The mechanistic view of nature was the product of this kind of wishfuland-fearful thinking more than of any direct insight by the seventeenthcentury geniuses into the nature of what matter is in itself. Of course, thinking of matter as if it were nothing but what could be treated by the method employed by modern science has proved enormously successful for certain purposes in certain areas. But to assume that matter really is nothing but this may be a distorting result of another common form of wishful thinking, that of turning a method into a metaphysic.
The awareness that the dualistic paradigm was significantly based on this kind of wishful-and-fearful thinking becomes even more important when we realize that materialism is simply a decapitated version of the worldview created by the dualistic supernaturalists. That is, materialism lopped off God and the soul while retaining that worldview's idea of matter—even though this idea of matter had been constructed in large part precisely to show the necessity for an external deity and a different-in-kind soul.
[*] Descartes's denial of experience to "nature," which included all nonhuman animals, was used to justify exploitative practices such as hunting and vivisection (Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940], 15–16, 22, 47–48).
McGinn is exactly right, accordingly, in pointing out that materialism is "a comparatively recent innovation" and in surmising that it is connected to "the demise of the divine." He is also right to think that atheistic materialism "would probably have struck the Great Dead Philosophers as an absurd aberration" (PC, 48n). Indeed, they assumed that their view of matter precluded a materialistic view of the person and an atheistic view of the universe. In thinking that their successors would never, on the basis of this view of matter, move to a wholly materialistic worldview, they underestimated the power of paradigmatic and wishful-and-fearful thinking.[*]
Materialism, of course, involves the creation of a total worldview out of the method intended by the seventeenth-century thinkers to be used for only a portion of reality; but this is only one of the dimensions of the wishful-and-fearful thinking involved. In any case, one of the reasons why the mind-body problem has seemed so intractable may be that we have failed to be sufficiently aware not only of our own wishful-and-fearful thinking, which limits current thinking about options, but also of the wishful-and-fearful thinking that influenced the seventeenth-century paradigmestablishing ideas of mind and matter.
[*] Strawson, while endorsing (noneliminative) materialism, comments, "It is interesting that modern eliminativists appear to concur with the seventeenth-century view that the physical (matter in motion) cannot possibly be the realizing ground of conscious experience. . . . This led many in the past to believe in immaterial substance as a realizing ground of experience. Now it seems to lead some philosophers to deny the existence of experience. Things have clearly gone downhill in the last three hundred years" (MR, 101f.).
Three
Confusion about Common Sense
Another factor that has made the mind-body problem seem so intractable is confusion about common sense. Philosophers as well as scientists have failed to distinguish between the kind of common sense that science can sensibly reject and the kind that it cannot.
Science has widely come to be understood as a systematic assault on common sense. Common sense said the world was flat; science showed this to be false. Common sense said the sun and the moon were the same size; science showed this to be wrong. Common sense said the Earth was the center of the universe; science showed this to be false. Common sense said matter was solid; science has shown this to be false. And so on. Progress in understanding has come to be seen as the accommodation of common sense to the scientific worldview. As modern philosophers and scientists have dealt with the mind-body relation, accordingly, they have assumed that the same adjustment would occur. As Searle puts it, "the general form of the mind-body problem has been the problem of accommodating our common-sense and prescientific beliefs about the mind to our general scientific conception of reality" (MBWP, 215).
As the above litany of examples illustrates, furthermore, science is seen as successively revealing truths that in area after area show the illusory nature of common sense. Through this portrayal, common sense has come to be regarded as generally mistaken. Through this way of understanding the relation between science and common sense, the fact that a given scientific theory runs counter to our "commonsense intuitions" can be complacently dismissed. In fact, as Searle points out, this discrepancy with commonsense intuitions can be regarded as a point in the theory's favor:
The fact that the views in question are implausible and counterintuitive does not count against them. On the contrary, it can even seem a great merit of contemporary functionalism and artificial intelligence that they run dead counter to our intuitions. For is this not the very feature that makes the physical sciences so dazzling? Our ordinary intuitions about . . . the solidity of the table . . . have been shown to be mere illusions. . . . Could not a great break-through in the study of the mind similarly show that our most firmly held beliefs about our mental states are equally illusory? Can we not reasonably expect great discoveries that will overthrow our commonsense assumptions? (RM, 17–18)
Searle's criticism of this attitude, his contention that an adequate theory cannot deny "obvious" truths (RM, xi, 1, 3, 5), and his employment of "commonsense objections" to identism and eliminative materialism (RM, 39, 48) imply a distinction between two quite different meanings of "common sense," which can provisionally be called the weak and the strong meanings. The idea that not all things called "common sense" are analogous is implicit in Searle's criticism of what he calls the "heroic-age-of-science maneuver" of some eliminative materialists: "They claim that giving up the belief that we have beliefs is analogous to giving up the belief in a flat earth or sunsets" (RM, 48). However, Searle does not, to my knowledge, provide a criterion for distinguishing between the weak and the strong meanings of "common sense" and thereby between things that merely seem obvious to some people and things that really are obvious in the not-to-be-denied sense. This kind of criterion is also implicitly called for by Nagel's principle that, "given a knockdown argument for an intuitively unacceptable conclusion, one should assume there is probably something wrong with the argument" (MQ, x). The problem is that "intuitions" notoriously differ. Is there some criterion for distinguishing between those "commonsense intuitions" that are defeasible by a knockdown argument and those that are not?
The conviction that there is such a criterion lay at the root of the "Scottish commonsense tradition" associated primarily with Thomas Reid.[1] The criterion for what is common sense in the strong sense was formulated in various ways, but the basic idea was that there are certain notions that are "common" in the sense of universal—truly common to all people—and that they are such because they cannot be consistently denied: The very act of denying them verbally would involve an implicit affirmation. To deny such beliefs, Reid said, would be "metaphysical lunacy."[2] I have come to refer to common sense in this strong sense as "hard-core common sense,"[3] to distinguish it from common sense in the weak sense, which I call "softcore common sense." Common sense of the latter sort does not refer to truly common or universal notions but merely to parochial notions that can be denied without pain of implicit inconsistency. In any case, this tradition fell into disrepute and virtual oblivion in the late nineteenth century. One
reason seems to be that proponents came to claim the status of common sense in the strong sense for all sorts of ideas, including reactionary (such as antievolutionary) ones, that did not really match the criterion, a tendency not altogether absent in Reid himself. Another problem was that no naturalistic explanation for the origin of these commonsense notions was offered.[*] They were, instead, said to have resulted from a supernatural implantation in our souls.[4] With the demise of supernaturalism, accordingly, no explanation of these commonsense notions seemed possible.
The notion of common sense that is not truly deniable teemerged in twentieth-century philosophy. The best-known version of common sensism has probably been that of G. E. Moore; but his version fails to provide a clear criterion for distinguishing between weak and strong meanings of common sense. Better is the "critical common-sensism" of Charles Peirce.[5] But the best version, in my view, is that of Alfred North Whitehead. That Whitehead is a "commonsense" philosopher has not been widely recognized, however, for two reasons (besides the fact that most philosophers today simply do not bother to read Whitehead, probably in large part because they were not introduced to him by their own teachers during the rabidly antimetaphysical period of twentieth-century philosophy). One reason is that he used "common sense" in both the weak and the strong senses but failed to point this out. Second, those passages in which the criterion for hard-core common sense is stated do not themselves contain the term "common sense." However, by reading Whitehead with this issue in mind, one can ferret out his doctrine without great difficulty. One can also see that this issue is no merely minor theme in his philosophy but that be understands the very task of philosophy to be that of showing how the various hard-core commonsense notions are mutually consistent. A central task of epistemology, furthermore, is to provide a naturalistic explanation as to why we all share these notions.
Whitehead's clearest statement of the criterion for hard-core common sense is contained in a statement of what he calls "the metaphysical rule of evidence," namely, "that we must bow to those presumptions which, in despite of criticism, we still employ for the regulation of our lives" (PR, 151). Even this statement is not as clear as it might be. One question is who the "we" indicates: all human beings (perhaps all rational beings), or only a limited portion thereof, such as modern Western human beings? I interpret it to mean the former. And when Whitehead says that even if we criticize these notions, we still employ them for the regulation of our lives, does he mean that we inevitably do so, so that we could not do otherwise, or only that it is a contingent fact that all people thus far have done so (which would
[*] Reid spoke of these common notions as "those things, which all mankind have believed without being able to give a reason for it" (IHM, 12).
leave open the possibility that we could quit doing so, perhaps through sustained self-discipline or through adopting a worldview and self-understanding radically different from anything in the past)? Again, I take him to mean the former. Accordingly, I take his meaning to be that the ultimate criteria for theoretical thought are those notions that all human beings inevitably presuppose in practice, even if and when they deny them verbally . This interpretation is consistent with another explicit statement: "[Philosophy's] ultimate appeal is to the general consciousness of what in practice we experience. Whatever thread of presupposition characterizes social expression throughout the various epochs of rational society must find its place in philosophic theory" (PR, 17).
The idea that the notions in question are presupposed in practice is crucial. The contention that these notions are universal cannot be refuted simply by pointing to the fact that some people have verbally denied them. As the first quotation above indicated, Whitehead is speaking of notions that we continue to use in practice "in despite of criticism." The term "practice," in fact, is used in reference to Hume (PR, 81, 133, 242f.), who, denying that we have any direct experience of "causal efficacy" and of an "external world," said that these notions can have no place in our (philosophical or scientific) theory while adding that we must, nonetheless, presuppose them in practice. Against this antirationalism (PR, 153), Whitehead says,
Whatever is found in 'practice' must lie within the scope of the metaphysical description. When the description fails to include the 'practice,' the metaphysics is inadequate and requires revision. There can be no appeal to practice to supplement metaphysics. (PR, 13)
On the basis of these explicit formulations of the idea of hard-core common sense, in which the term "common sense" is unfortunately not used, we can locate many passages in which Whitehead does use the term with this meaning. He speaks of several notions that cannot "be dropped without doing violence to common sense" (PR, 128). He speaks of his "endeavor to interpret experience in accordance with the overpowering deliverances of common sense" (PR, 50) or, in a Searle-like statement, of "the obvious deliverances of common sense" (PR, 51). He speaks, for example, of the direct experience of actual entities beyond ourselves as a "a presupposition of all common sense" (PR, 52).
Whitehead can also, however, use "common sense" in the weaker sense (unfortunately, without a qualifier such as "soft-core" to warn the reader of the very different meaning). For example, he speaks of "the benumbing repression of common sense" (PR, 9). In a statement in Science and the Modern World in praise of then-recent developments in science, especially relativity and quantum physics, he says that "scientific theory is outrunning common sense" (SMW, 114). Elsewhere he says, "It is the part of the special
sciences to modify common sense" (PR, 17). Indeed, he can even speak of "the general common-sense notion of the universe" that he seeks to modify (MT, 129). In these passages, Whitehead is using "common sense" in a nontechnical sense. For example, after saying that science is "outrtmning common sense," he explains his meaning: "The settlement as inherited by the eighteenth century was a triumph of organized common sense. . . . It grounded itself upon what every plain man could see with his own eyes, or with a microscope of moderate power. It measured the obvious things to be measured, and it generalized the obvious things to be generalized" (SMW, 114).
Once we have seen the distinction in principle between soft-core and hard-core common sense, we can agree wholeheartedly that science not only has falsified common sense of the first type in the past but also will probably continue to do so. We will not, however, conclude from this fact that science should lead us to doubt commonsense ideas of the second type, because they are presupposed by the practice of science itself. This kind of common sense provides the "ultimate appeal" to which all theory, including scientific theory, must "bow."
Whitehead has thereby provided, I suggest, the kind of criterion Searle needs to distinguish the "obvious facts" that cannot be overridden by scientific theory from those that can. Whitehead, in fact, formulated his "metaphysical rule of evidence" cited above in response to those who, having "arrogated to themselves the title of 'cmpiricists,' have been chiefly employed in explaining away the obvious facts of experience" (PR, 145). The truly "obvious facts of experience," I suggest, are those that we inevitably presuppose in practice, even if we deny them verbally. One can see, indeed, that eliminative materialists verbally deny a range of notions that Searle rightly regards as obvious. Not having formulated this criterion of obviousness, however, Searle sometimes mixes things that fit it with things that do not. To illustrate: Searle speaks both of "the obvious facts of physics—for example, that the world is made up entirely of physical particles in fields of force," and of "obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states" (RM, 3), as if the truth of these two types of assertions were equally obvious and in the same sort of way. But they are not. The so-called obvious facts of physics, unlike the "obvious facts about the mental," involve a long series of sensory observations and (dubious) inferences. Also, one could deny Searle's statement about the physical world without pain of self-contradiction, whereas this would not (as Descartes pointed out) be possible with regard to the statement about conscious experience.
Yet another qualification is necessary with regard to the term "obvious." I have sought to show how this term could be defined so as to make an appeal to obviousness defensible as an ultimate criterion of philosophical
and scientific acceptability. It is, however, problematic. The word usually is taken (as by my dictionary) to mean "readily apparent." Now, some of our hard-core commonsense notions, such as the fact that we have conscious experience, are readily apparent (some eliminativist arguments notwithstanding), whereas others are less so. For example, it may take some argumentation to convince us, in the face of the great extent to which our behavior is conditioned, that we always presuppose that we have a degree of freedom or, in the face of the evidence for ethical relativism, that we always presuppose the reality of some normative ideals. Given the widespread rejection of both of these beliefs by philosophers and scientists in our time, it would be strange to refer to them as obvious . It is better, accordingly, to speak of the "inevitable presuppositions of our practice" or of our "hardcore common sense."
In any case, these hard-core commonsense notions can be seen to supply the kind of criterion Nagel is presupposing in saying that we should assume that there is probably something wrong with any argument that leads to an "intuitively unacceptable conclusion." Whitehead spells out the criterion of the intuitively unacceptable by speaking of "difficulties which take the shape of negations of what in practice is presupposed" (PR, 13). Without this criterion, Nagel's recommendation could lead philosophers to feel justified in rejecting any good argument for a conclusion they disliked with the flippant assertion, "It contradicts my intuitions." Whitehead countenances no such appeal to idiosyncratic intuitions: "It is a disease of philosophy when it is . . . merely a reflection of the temperamental presuppositions of exceptional personalities" (PR, 17). His appeal is instead to "the general consciousness of what in practice we experience" (PR, 17; emphases added), and he limits the appeal to those notions that all of us inevitably employ in the regulation of our lives (even if we are not conscious of them and even if we explicitly deny them). It is when a theory, whether called philosophic or scientific, contradicts intuitions in this sense that we should assume that something must be amiss.
Using the term "intuitions" for our inevitable presuppositions would be less problematic than speaking of them as "obvious facts." True, this term can be misleading (because it can connote idiosyncratic hunches), but so can the term "common sense," if unqualified. With an adjective such as inevitable, deepest, or universal, the term "intuitions" can serve to refer to these universal presuppositions of practice.
In this relativistic age, of course, many philosophers, even given the above clarifications, will tend to be suspicious of, if not to reject out of hand, the idea that there are any notions or presuppositions that are universal. After realizing that this idea cannot be refuted simply by pointing out that probably every "obvious" idea has been denied by someone —because the claim is about presuppositions of practice, not explicit, verbal beliefs—many will
want to put the burden of proof on those making the positive claim. No universal claim, of course, can be proved by any number of instances. But a universal claim can be disproved by a single negative instance: As William James said, it takes only one white crow to prove that all crows are not black. So the burden is really on those who would deny the universal claim. They need to come up with at least one instance of someone, perhaps themselves, who can live without presupposing the notion in question. And, with regard to one or more of the notions, they may well succeed, especially with regard to some particular formulation of the notion. If we return to a form of commonsensism, we should, with Whitehead as well as Peirce, combine it with fallibilism. The claim that any particular notion is inevitably presupposed in practice is fallible; the attempt to formulate the notion verbally is even more fallible; and even the idea that there are such notions is fallible.
Insofar as claims for such notions survive all attempts to refute them, however, they should be taken as the ultimate criteria for judging a theory's adequacy, and this for a simple reason: If we cannot help presupposing these notions in practice, including the practice of scientific experimentation and theory-building, we are guilty of self-contradiction if our theory denies these notions . And the first rule of reason, including scientific reason, should be that two mutually contradictory propositions cannot both be true.
Is this foundationalism? As usually understood, foundationalism says that nonbasic beliefs are to be derived from basic beliefs and that basic beliefs themselves are not supported by nonbasic beliefs. In my position, however, hard-core commonsense beliefs function not as a foundation upon which all other beliefs are to be built but as a compass telling us when we have gotten off course. And part of the reason why we should have confidence in our hard-core common sense, I argue, is that we can understand in a naturalistic way why we have these beliefs (see pages 27 and 133).
One result of this third snarl in our knotty problem—the failure to distinguish hard-core from soft-core common sense—has been that the former has often been denied in the name of the latter. The idea that the units of the physical world, such as electrons and living cells, are "insentient," in the sense of being wholly devoid of experience of every sort, is one of the most widespread "commonsense" notions of the modern West. It does not, however, belong to our hard-core common sense: It is not universally accepted; it is not inevitably presupposed in practice; one can deny it without necessarily presupposing its truth in the act of denying it. And yet in the name of this parochial, merely soft-core commonsense idea, many modern philosophers and scientists deny other notions, such as freedom and the reality and efficacy of conscious experience, that do belong to our hardcore common sense. The counter-proposal, that soft-core common sense should never be allowed to trump the hard-core variety, brings us to the topic of the next chapter: regulative principles for theory-construction.
Four
Regulative Principles
All discussions of the mind-body relation presuppose various regulative principles. Some of these are formal, such as the principles just enunciated—that a theory should be self-consistent and that in a conflict between hard-core and soft-core common sense, the latter must submit. Others are substantive, such as the principle that a theory should be compatible with the evolutionary origin of human beings. In distinguishing a (substantive) regulative principle from an empirical hypothesis, Seager describes it helpfully as "a view of nature to which particular theories must conform, or else, embarrassed and uneasy, awkwardly await eventual conformation" (MC, 5). Regulative principles, by specifying the conditions to which any theory must conform to be potentially acceptable by the author or community in question, indicate the range of theories that can be eliminated a priori. For example, Seager says that when physicalism is accepted as a regulative principle, "a psychological theory which denied the compatibility of its posits with the purely physical nature of the brain or, more generally, demanded the existence of non-physical psychological entities could thus be ruled out a priori " (MC, 5).
It would greatly increase prospects for consensus on the mind-body relation if authors would state the decisive principles regulative of their theories, insofar as they are conscious of them, as precisely and systematically as possible.[*] This would facilitate mutual criticism and thereby refinement
[*] After completing the first draft of this book, I learned that Arthur Lovejoy, the eminent historian of philosophy, had made a similar proposal in 1917. In a presidential address to the American Philosophical Association called "On Some Conditions of Progress in Philosophical Inqniry" (Philosophical Review XXVI [1917], 127–63)—which he had thought of calling "What's the Matter with Philosophy?"—Lovejoy suggested that before developing a position with regard to some philosophical question, the philosopher should observe "as completely and exactly as possible . . . the 'considerations' pertinent to this question" (142). I learned of Lovejoy's proposal from Charles Hartshorne (DL, 390).
of the principles. Too often many of the crucial regulative principles, especially substantive ones, are left unstated. When some principles are stated, they are usually scattered throughout the writing, making criticism difficult. Mutual criticism is especially important because even when principles are explicitly formulated, they are often formulated ambiguously. Searle is admirable for stating some regulative principles explicitly. However, in stating his first formal principle—"we ought to stop saying things that are obviously false" (RM, 247)—he does not, as I indicated in the previous chapter, provide any criterion for discerning obvious (from merely apparent) falsity. One of Daniel Dennett's substantive regulative principles is that "dualism is to be avoided at all costs" (CE, 37). Although Dennett refers here to dualism "in all its forms," the context shows that dual-aspect theory is not in view. But this still leaves at least two very different doctrines: (1) the mind is not only numerically distinct from, but also ontologically different in kind from, the brain and interacts with it, and (2) the mind is numerically distinct in kind from, but not ontologically different from, the brain and interacts with it. Does Dennett mean that the second doctrine (nondualistic interactionism) is to be avoided as strongly as the first (Cartesian dualism)? And when he says that dualism is to be avoided "at all costs," does he really mean that this regulative principle should take priority over all others, such as self-consistency and adequacy to obvious facts of experience? If so, why?
The possibility of making progress toward consensus has been lessened by the fact that most discussions of other theories focus primarily on the theories themselves rather than on the regulative principles lying behind them. A theory, however, is largely determined by the author's regulative principles (which are in turn influenced by paradigmatic and wishful-andfearful thinking, discussed earlier, and data convictions, to be discussed below). Criticism of an inadequate theory that does not deal with the deeper convictions lying behind it will generally result only in another equally inadequate theory (as in the neurotic-like pattern of behavior discussed by Searle).
A clarification: Although Kant, with whom the notion of "regulative principles" is historically associated, thought of them as unchanging, I am, in harmony with Seager (MC, 6), thinking of them as revisable. Even if some of the formulations can be thought to reflect eternally valid principles, the formulations themselves should always be considered fallible attempts, which might be improved.
Another clarification: Any list of all the formal and substantive regulative
principles that guide one's thinking would threaten to approach infinity. But no exhaustive list is needed. Most of the principles by which we operate are noncontroversial or practically irrelevant to the subject at hand. We need only to try to state those principles that are both controversial and directly relevant to our approach to the mind-body problem. We will, no doubt, fail to list all such principles. But those that we do list will be out in the open for public discussion; and those that are missing will likely, as we become more adept at mutual "regulative principle criticism," be pointed out by others.
With these clarifications, I will now attempt a formulation of regulative principles—first formal, then substantive—that I think should guide discussions of the mind-body relation.
I. Formal Regulative Principles
1. We should assume the unity of truth and therefore the principle of noncontradiction —that no theory that is self-contradictory can be true and that if one theory contradicts another, they cannot both, as stated, be true.
a . An implication is that logical inconsistencies, as Whitehead says, should not be taken to "indicate anything else than some antecedent errors" (PR, xiii). They should not, for example, be taken to mean that the universe is inherently inconsistent, or that the truth about some aspect of reality is necessarily forever beyond human grasp. The latter may be true, but we should not jump to this conclusion before we have fully explored the possibility of "some antecedent errors." Here I agree with Nagel that McGinn's pessimism is premature (NYR, 40n7).
b . We should distinguish clearly between natural and artificial mysteries. Natural mysteries are those that are simply given to us, such as how our universe began, how a spider "knows" how to spin a web, and how our conscious experiences are related to our brains. Artificial mysteries are those that are created by the way we have defined an issue, such as why our creator, being benevolent and omnipotent, allows evil, or how the brain, being composed of nothing but insentient bits of matter, could give rise to conscious experience. Before we declare something a permanent mystery, we should see whether the problem lies in a (revisable) definition rather than in reality or our limited cognitive capacity as such.
2. We should not rest content with any theory until it seems to be adequate to all the relevant data.
a . We should not let fashionable exaggerations about the "theory-laden nature of all data" blind us to the fact (!) that a distinction between data and theories about them can usually be made. As Seager points out (MC, 6), the fact that data notoriously resist our systematizing efforts illustrates the transcendence of data over our perceptual and conceptual filters.
b . While we should strive for self-consistency as well as adequacy, we should not deny any obvious or well-attested data in the interests of a selfconsistent theory. Although we should in principle give equal allegiance to self-consistency and adequacy, we should in practice, when forced to choose, give higher allegiance to adequacy. (Searle's principle that "we ought to stop saying things that are obviously false" [RM, 247] was appropriately offered as the first of his principles.) Anomalous data, if kept in view, may evoke a reconciling theory, whereas simply eliminating recalcitrant data forecloses the possibility of an adequate theory. It is the violation of this principle that constitutes the central formal failure of the eliminative materialists. As Strawson says, "They are simply deciding to leave part of reality out of their scientific account of reality. They are just giving up on the great philosophical-scientific project of giving a unified account of the whole of reality, so far as we are acquainted with it and so far as we are able" (MR, 103).
3. The data to which we should give the highest allegiance are our hardcore commonsense notions . Again, because such notions are presupposed in all practice, including the practice of discovering facts scientifically and formulating scientific theories, such notions should take priority over any theories from which their falsity would follow. For example, just as we should reject any theory that says that the existence of human beings is impossible, we should reject any theory articulated with the purpose of proving that human purposes are nonexistent or at least without effect.
4. We should distinguish as clearly as possible what we really know from what we merely believe must be the case because of dubious interpretations of data, perhaps combined with wishful-and-fearful thinking.
a . John Searle has stated this regulative principle: "We ought to keep reminding ourselves of what we know for sure" (RM, 247).
b . Searle, however, illustrates that, apart from criticism from those with other points of view, this is easier said than done, as he goes on to say: "For example, we know for sure that inside our skulls there is a brain, sometimes it is conscious, and brain processes cause consciousness in all its forms." In the first place, we need to distinguish between the sense in which we know hard-core commonsense notions "for sure" and the way in which we may know other things "for sure" (beyond a reasonable doubt). With regard to Searle's present list of alleged truths of the second type, I would agree that we know that we each have a brain in our skulls. I would not agree, however, that we know for sure that it is sometimes conscious: We know that we are sometimes conscious but not that consciousness is a state, property, or attribute characterizing our brains as such; that is an inference based on the confidence that all forms of interactionism must be false. We also do not know for sure that every state of consciousness is entirely caused by brain events, which is what Searle means (see RM, 92, 111–12, 114, 116, 125).
Some conscious states may be partly caused by previous conscious states (as prima facie seems to be the case in memory); some conscious states may be partially caused by influences that have not been transmitted through the brain (as seems to be the case in moral, logical, and religious experience, not to mention clairvoyance and telepathy); and some may be partly caused by the conscious experience itself (as must be the case if our presuppositions about partial freedom and responsibility are true). So, in accepting Searle's formal principle, we should also remind ourselves of our need for mutual criticism and cooperation in trying to carry it out.
5. We should follow Nagel's formal regulative principle that "pursuit of truth requires . . . the generation and decisive elimination of alternative possibilities until, ideally, only one remains" (VN, 9). And in doing so it is essential that we follow two procedures:
a . All alternatives compatible with one's regulative principles must be examined. For example, if one has a substantive regulative principle that narrows the choice to the various theories that are realistic (in the philosophical sense of affirming the reality of the universe apart from our conception of it), then all realistic theories must be examined. In practice this means that, given the existence of panexperientialist theories, the choice cannot arbitrarily be narrowed down to dualistic and materialistic theories (barring, of course, some other regulative principle that allows all panexperientialist theories to be excluded a priori).
b . The strongest versions of each of the basic alternatives should be compared, rather than, say, the strongest version of one's personal favorite and the weakest (or a fabricated) version of any of the other alternatives. (These two procedures are so important, and so generally violated, that it is probably no exaggeration to say that the single thing that we could do to improve the quality of philosophy [including the philosophical aspect of science] would be to hold ourselves and each other responsible for abiding by these procedures.)
6. We should try to become aware of our own wishful-and-fearful thinking and to overcome its distorting effects as much as possible. This is not to say that wishful-and-fearful thinking necessarily leads to false conclusions; it may happen that our hopes about what is true will coincide with the way things really are. But we should suspect that this will often not be the case.
7. Having recognized the often-distorting effects of subjectivity, one aspect of which is wishful-and-fearful thinking, we should strive for objectivity in a more inclusive way, as Nagel says, which means overcoming the distorting effects of other subjective elements, such as prejudices of one's time and place, anthropocentric prejudices, and prejudices based on the distorting nature of sensory perception.
a . As Searle points out (RM, 19), objectivity in this epistemic sense must be kept distinct from objectivism in the ontological sense (according to
which all truly existing and effective things are devoid of subjectivity, in the sense of awareness, purpose, and point of view). Jacques Monod, for example, simply conflates the two meanings (CN, 21).
b . If the world truly contains subjectivity in the sense of points of view (and we know that it does), then a theory that is truly objective in the epistemic sense cannot be wholly objective in the ontological sense.
8. We should combine boldness with humility . The need for boldness was enunciated in Nagel's statement that "the world is a strange place, and nothing but radical speculation gives us the hope of coming up with any candidates for the truth" (VN, 10). Nagel has likewise expressed the need for humility with his observation that today's practitioners of philosophy "are at a particular and, we may hope, early stage of its development, limited by their own primitive intellectual capacities and relying on the partial insights of a few great figures from the past" (VN, 10). Accordingly, he says, "a pervasive skepticism or at least provisionality of commitment is suitable" (VN, 69). The need for this formal principle is illustrated by William Lycan's comment (even though it was obviously a deliberate overstatement) that he is prepared "to kill for" his particular (functionalist) solution to the problem of consciousness (C, 37). Two other dimensions of humility are pointed to by Whitehead: "Speculative boldness must be balanced by complete humility before logic and before fact" (PR, 7). Recent philosophy has given logic its due; (paradigm-threatening) fact has not fared so well, because philosophers practice the wrong kind of boldness: "Failure to include some obvious elements of experience in the scope of the system is met by boldly denying the facts" (PR, 6). Whitehead's statement, published in 1929, shows that the eliminative approach is not new.
9. Our epistemology should match our claims to knowledge . That is, as Nagel says, our conception of the world should include an explanation of "how beings like us can arrive at such a conception" (VN, 74).
a . This formal regulative principle is violated if the epistemic capacities ascribed (whether explicitly or only implicitly) to us are exceeded by the author's own assumed claims (whether explicit or only implicit) to knowledge. For example, my claim that we all share various hard-core commonsense notions should be supported by an explanation as to how we know these truths.
b . This principle should also make us suspicious of all claims, à la Locke, Kant, and McGinn, to be able to know the limits of human knowledge. Does not the claimed capacity to discern permanent barriers to human insight imply an epistemic capacity so great that we should be able to discern the truth about the matters said to lie beyond the barriers? As Hegel asked, What kind of reason was Kant using when he described the permanent limitations of human reason?
10. We should accept the formal regulative principle of simplicity or
parsimony in this sense: We should, all else being equal, prefer the theory that least multiplies independent principles. Any explanatory principle is stronger to the extent that it can explain apparently disparate phenomena.
11. If the acceptance of some dubious assumption has led to a problem that has remained insoluble for a long time, we should question this assumption. If the problem seems insoluble in principle, we should definitely try another approach. We should, in other words, change a losing game.
II. Substantive Regulative Principles
Although my substantive principles are given prior to my discussion of the kinds of data that should especially be taken into account, they are not independent of these data. The general dependence of these principles on data of experience in fact lies behind the point that our accepted list and understanding of such principles should be understood as revisable. In any case, I suggest the following substantive regulative principles.
1. We should accept only a realistic theory about the "physical world."
a . This substantive principle rules out all idealisms that deny full-fledged actuality to the "physical world," making its reality dependent on its being perceived or conceived by mind. (This principle would not necessarily rule out various types of "realistic idealism" or "idealistic realism.")
b . A theory is more adequate to the extent that it can provide an intelligible answer to Bishop Berkeley's question—What does it mean to say that physical things "exist"?—without succumbing to his idealistic answer that for them "to be" is "to be perceived."
c . To have a realistic view of the physical universe requires, especially given our evolutionary cosmology, a realistic view of time. In particular: How can we conceive of the reality of time apart from animal minds, so that we can speak of billions of years of cosmic and geologic evolution prior to the rise of animal life?
2. A theory should embody the following substantive principles about causation .
a . Efficient causation, meaning the influence of one thing (or event, or process) on another, should be understood as real influence (not mere constant conjunction).
b . Efficient causation and actuality should be strictly correlated: All actualities should be assumed to exert efficient causation (the "no-idlewheels" principle); and whenever efficient causation is discerned, it should be ascribed only to one or more actualities (the Aristotelian dictum dubbed the "ontological principle" by Whitehead), never to mere abstractions (such as "properties").
c . We should assume an unbroken causal nexus, according to which all
actualities are subject to efficient causation and in turn exert efficient causation.
d . The substantive principle of an unbroken causal nexus, however, does not necessarily imply determinism, because the exertion of self-causation by some actualities is not ruled out.
e . Efficient causation should be understood as temporally structured such that it always goes from the past to the present and the present to the future. There is no retrocausation exerted by the future back on the present, or by the present back on the past. There is also no efficient causation between events that are contemporaries in the strictest sense. Although it may sometimes seem as if the cause and the effect were strictly simultaneous, this would be true only in self-causation. In efficient causation, the cause must always occur before its effect, even if this be less than a billionth of a second. (If causes and effects were simultaneous, it would be arbitrary that one were the "cause" and the other the "effect"; also, assuming a relational view of time, according to which the temporal structure of reality is the result of the causal relations between events, no temporality would be generated if causes and effects were simultaneous.)
3. We should adopt a realist stance on explanation .
a . This principle means that we should strive for causal explanations that do in fact correspond significantly with causal relations that exist objectively to our thoughts about them.
b . This "correspondence" of theory with fact need not be thought to express the whole truth about the causal factors involved. It needs only to mean, in Jaegwon Kim's words, "that a causal explanation of E in terms of C is a 'correct explanation' only if C is in reality a cause of E" (SM, 256).
c . A realist stance does strongly suggest, however, what Kim calls the "principle of causal-explanatory exclusion" (SM, 281, 291), which says: "No event can be given more than one complete and independent explanation" (SM, 239). In other words, because an event in all its concreteness[*] cannot be thought to have two sufficient causes, it cannot intelligibly be given two sufficient causal explanations—such as a mechanistic explanation, in terms of efficient causes, and a purposive, teleological explanation, in terms of final causation in the sense of self-determination in the light of a goal.
[*] It is sometimes urged, against the principle of explanatory exclusion, that an event can be "overdetermined." A common example, mentioned by Kim (SM, 255), is that a man may be killed by two assassins whose bullets hit at the same time, although either bullet would have been sufficient to bring about the death. However, to describe the effect simply in terms of the man's death is a great abstraction from the event in all its concreteness. If we move close enough to the concrete effect to mention that the corpse contained two bullets, which had entered the body from different angles, it will be clear that neither bullet by itself was a sufficient cause of the effect.
Either each explanation must be considered insufficient or else the one explanation must exclude the other.
4. Our theory should be naturalistic .
a . This substantive regulative principle, which has recently been insisted on strongly by McGinn, entails not only the rejection of any explicit supernaturalism, according to which the natural causal nexus is said to be interrupted; it also entails the rejection of any doctrine that even implies the need for supernatural intervention.
b . Naturalism need not entail physicalism (at least as ordinarily understood). That would be the case only if it were specified that things (or events or processes) that are physical, by virtue of exerting and being subject to efficient causation, are exhaustively physical; but naturalism need not be so defined. Naturalism does involve, however, what Nagel calls the valid impulse behind physicalism: the desire "to find a way of thinking about the world as it is, so that everything in it, not just atoms and planets, can be regarded as real in the same way" (VN, 16).
c . Naturalism also need not entail determinism (contra McGinn and many others). That would be the case only if it had been specified that efficient causation is the only kind of natural causation; but naturalism need not be so construed (see 2d, above).
d . Naturalism also does not necessarily rule out seemingly "paranormal" types of causal influence, such as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. That would be the case if paranormal events were understood to be "miracles" involving interruptions of fundamental causal principles, but they need not be (and by parapsychologists usually are not) so understood. Naturalism would also rule out such events if it entailed that efficient causation between events occurs exhaustively between contiguous events; but naturalism need not dictate this. Naturalism can be relaxed enough to trust empirical research to answer the question of whether causal influence at a distance really occurs.
e . Naturalism also does not necessarily rule out any reference to a divine reality. For example, if a thinker were to refer to energy as divine or as God, this would not make her or him a supernaturalist. Naturalism does not even rule out every conceivable form of theism; it only specifies that theism, if affirmed, cannot be supernaturalistic. Naturalism only rules out supernaturalism.[*] It rules out, in Whitehead's words, "a deus ex machina capable of rising superior to the difficulties of metaphysics" (SMW, 156).
[*] In discussing the "naturalization" of mind, Kim distinguishes between a stricter sense, which involves "physicalization" (see 4b, above), and a looser sense, "which only requires expulsion of the supernatural, the theological, and the essentially normative-evaluative" (SM, 297). Naturalism as I am using it, to refer to a worldview, requires the expulsion only of the supernatural. It need not necessarily exclude the theological and the essentially normative-evaluative, if these can be conceived apart from supernaturalism.
f . Naturalism does entail the attempt, as W. D. Hart says, to "naturalize the mind, that is, to fit it into the causal nexus that constitutes nature" (EOS, 56). Naturalism does, accordingly, involve the view, as Flanagan says, "that the mind-brain relation is a natural one" (CR, xi). It does not, however, necessarily entail his further assertion that "mental processes just are brain processes." That would only follow if it had already been determined that there could not be a naturalistic form of interactionism.
5. A theory of the mind-body relation should embody the substantive principle of continuity .
a . This substantive regulative principle follows from the acceptance of evolution in a naturalistic framework, which forbids positing any jumps that would imply some supernatural insertion into the causal nexus. In evolutionary reconstruction, as elsewhere, we must avoid implying, as well as saying, "and then a miracle occurs."
b . The principle of continuity forbids, therefore, any ontological dualism, according to which the mind would be different in kind from the entities from which it arose. Being different in kind would include operating according to different causal principles, as if, à la vitalism, final causation (or self-determinism) could emerge in a world that had previously operated in terms of efficient causation alone.
c . The substantive principle of continuity even forbids jumps in degree that are too great to be intelligible naturalistically. For example, something as complex as a squirrel could not have emerged directly out of something as simple as a flea.
6. A philosophical theory should be compatible with the scientific worldview.
a . The "scientific worldview" contains all the fairly assured results of scientific discovery, such as atomic theory, the evolutionary nature of our universe, and whatever is truly known about brain function.
b . The scientific worldview does not necessarily include all currently dominant scientific theories, such as big bang cosmology, the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and the Copenhagen theory of quantum physics. One could question any of these without ipso facto having rejected "the scientific worldview."
c . Still less does it necessarily include the metaphysical worldview of materialism, or physicalism, with which science has been primarily associated for the past century. Science is a matter of method and results, and, just as it has changed its worldview in the past when this change enabled it to make greater progress (perhaps among other reasons), it may find a more
congenial worldview in the future (perhaps in part out of the realization that the current worldview will never be able to solve its mind-body problem). Accordingly, when we speak with Seager of "limits set by the range of models that science provides and accepts as legitimate explanation" (MC, vii), we must understand this to refer to science as such, not present-day mainline science. As Nagel says, it is scientism "at its most myopic" to assume "that everything there is must be understandable by the employment of scientific theories like those we have developed to date" (VN, 9).
d . Even the statement that "science is a matter of method" must be understood in a very general sense, because the worldview adopted by science in a particular period tends to constrain its methods. Also, we have to beware of the temptation to assume that a method that has produced spectacular results with regard to a limited range of phenomena is the scientific method, which must be employed in relation to all phenomena. As Nagel says, "Too much time is wasted because of the assumption that methods already in existence will solve problems for which they were not designed" (VN, 10). The formal regulative principle of humility should warn us against "the bizarre view that we, at this point in history, are in possession of the basic forms of understanding needed to comprehend absolutely anything" (VN, 10).
e . The scientific worldview should, however, be understood to include any and all hard-core commonsense notions. Because such notions, if they exist, by definition involve notions that are necessarily presupposed in practice, including the practices of observing, thinking, and testing, it would be selfdefeating for scientific theories to contradict them.
f . The scientific worldview should also be understood to include, in a somewhat more tentative manner, various regulative principles insofar as they follow from the hard-core commonsense notions in combination with generalizations from empirical discoveries. (The greater tentativeness is appropriate because of our limited capacities for generalizing from empirical discoveries and for discerning and properly formulating hard-core commonsense notions in all their variety well enough to see clearly what principles would "follow from" them.)
Five
Data
One reason that contemporary theories of mind vary so greatly is that different theorists are presupposing greatly different ideas about the kinds of data to which a theory must be adequate. Data that one theorist considers fundamental, perhaps devoting a hundred pages to defending, will be dismissed in a sentence by other theorists, if mentioned at all. The likelihood of approaching greater consensus would be increased if, instead of prematurely debating the merits of various theories, we would give more attention to the arguably relevant kinds of data. There has been, to be sure, considerable discussion of certain kinds of data, such as "qualia," "point of view," and "intentionality." But seldom if ever does one find an attempt to provide a somewhat complete list of the kinds of data that should be taken into account. Of course, one reason for this is that the currently dominant philosophy of mind has such a restricted view of what could possibly be experienced that the desire for self-consistency, while good in itself, leads, in Nagel's words, "to false reductions or to outright denial that certain patently real phenomena exist at all" (VN, 7). That is, while claiming to be "scientific" and thereby "empirical," these theories in fact allow the authentic data to be dictated by theory rather than by observation. But the formal principle of adequacy should lead us to resist systematizing until we have tried to assemble the various kinds of data that need to be unified. In Whitehead's words, "Philosophy can exclude nothing. Thus it should never start from systematization. Its primary stage can be termed assemblage " (MT, 2). I can do no full-scale assemblage here, of course, but I will illustrate what I have in mind by pointing to some of the kinds of data that would be most relevant to the contemporary attempt to understand the place of conscious experience in the world.
I. Hard-Core Commonsense Notions
I list these first because, as argued in chapter 3, they should be regarded as the data to which a theory should primarily be adequate. I will list here several of these notions, which we seem inevitably to presuppose in practice.
1. The reality of "the external world ." As Whitehead says, "Hume retained an obstinate belief in an external world which his principles forbade him to confess in his philosophical constructions" (PR, 140). Indeed, Hume himself pointed out that although he was a solipsist in theory, he could not be one in practice. This means, however, that we should not accept nonrealism even in theory; the theory, as Whitehead says, should be revised so as to include what is presupposed in practice (PR, 13). Asserting that the external world exists independently of our perception and conception of it need not imply, of course, that it exists in itself just as it appears to our sensory perception or just as it is conceived in our sensory-based conceptions. (For one thing, sensory perception may not be our only or even primary way of perceiving the world beyond ourselves.)
2. The reality of efficient causation understood as the real influence of one thing (or many things) on another. Again, Hume pointed out (and demonstrated in his historical writing) that he in practice could not help presupposing causation in this sense. None of us can. So we cannot rest content until we have found a way to affirm and conceptualize it in our theories. Real influence, of course, need not mean total determination (and cannot, at least universally, if this point is to cohere with the point below about freedom).
3. The reality of the past and the future[*] and therefore of time . Fullfledged solipsism would be, in George Santayana's phrase, "solipsism of the present moment."[1] But we all presuppose in practice that there has been a past and that there will be a future. Santayana spoke of these presuppositions as "faith," but that is too weak: We seem to know these things as strongly as we know anything.
4. The reality of our conscious experience with its emotions, pains, pleasures, perceptions, purposes, decisions, memories, anticipations. Descartes was surely right at least about this, that there is nothing we are more certain of than our present conscious experience and that to deny it (consciously) would be self-contradictory. As Searle says, "if your theory results in the view that consciousness does not exist, you have simply produced a reductio ad absurdum of the theory" (RM, 8). Strawson points out why this is the
[*] By "the reality of the future," I do not mean that future events already exist, which would imply determinism and the unreality of time. I mean only that subsequent events, causally influenced by present events, will follow on them and that the anticipation of the future in this sense is a fact about the present.
case. With regard to those eliminativists who "suppose that although it seems to one that there is experience—for this cannot be denied—there really isn't any experience," he says: "But this is an immediate reductio ad absurdum. For this seeming is already experience. . . . [These eliminativists] cannot hope to treat experience itself as some sort of total illusion, for illusion presupposes—it is a form of—experience" (MR, 51). In a passage on the way in which eliminativists discuss pain, Strawson expresses the principle that common sense (of this type) cannot be sacrificed to a theory based on alternative intuitions:
I find the suggestion that common sense makes any error about the qualitative or lived nature of pain inexplicable except as an extreme case of theorydriven Procrusteanism. If there is any sense in which these philosophers are rejecting the ordinary view of the nature of things like pain . . ., their view seems to be one of the most amazing manifestations of human irrationality on record. It is much less irrational to postulate the existence of a divine being whom we cannot perceive than to deny the truth of the commonsense view of experience. (MR, 53)
5. Bodily influence on conscious experience, at least with regard to some pains, pleasures, desires, and sensory perceptions. (Of course, some theories would claim that the body not only influences but completely determines our conscious experiences, and not only some but all of them. This claim, however, would go beyond anything inevitably presupposed in practice.) Given the universality of this presupposition, it did not have to wait on recent neuroscience. For example, we know—as Whitehead pointed out in his polemic against Hume's claim that we have no direct experience of causal efficacy—that we see by means of the eyes (PR, 62, 81). This means that there is a touch of exaggeration in McGinn's claim that introspection "tells us nothing about the physical network in which our conscious states are embedded" (PC, 73). Our introspectible experience involves what Whitehead calls "the 'withness' of the body" (PR, 81, 312).
6. The unity of our experience . Including this notion will likely evoke objections. And, indeed, the unity of our experience is subject to several important qualifications. Data from split-brain patients raise deep questions about just how to understand the kind of unity we have, as do some kinds of hypnotic phenomena, various kinds of brain disease, cases of multiple personality, and the relative autonomy of unconscious processes. Even our ordinary experience of ambivalence suggests something less than total unity, as does our capacity for self-transcendence, in which a dimension of the self seems to stand beyond the self. However, after all of these and other qualifications are made, it remains true that, insofar as we "retain our minds" so that we are not merely "human vegetables," there is a significant unity to our experience. We are not simply aggregates of experiential data;
what we call the mind is a unification of vast amounts of data into an experiential unity.[*]
For example, as Searle points out in including "unity" as one of the structures of consciousness (RM, 130), at any moment I simultaneously experience sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, bodily pains, bodily pleasures, bodily hungers, memories, and so on, while at the time feeling desires and emotions, anticipating the future, making decisions, and so on. Another way to realize the remarkable degree of unity we enjoy, in spite of all needed qualifications, is to recall that the brain is composed of more than 100 billion neurons. No case of multiple personality approaches that number.[**]
Even if we were to localize conscious experience in one portion of the brain, we would be speaking of unifying data from tens of billions of neurons. Seen from this perspective, our experience, especially our conscious experience, has a remarkable unity, of which we are directly aware. As Nagel says, "the unity of consciousness, even if it is not complete, poses a problem for the theory that mental states are states of something as complex as a brain" (VN, 50). This unity is also presupposed in points 7 and 8, below, which involve the active side of our experience. In summary, as Whitehead has observed, "what needs to be explained is not dissociation of personality but unifying control, by reason of which we not only have unified behavior, which can be observed by others, but also consciousness of unified experience" (PR, 108).
[*] Stephen Braude has argued convincingly, in First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind, that multiple personality not only is consistent with but also presupposes a unity underlying the multiplicity. Multiple personality disorder (MPD) does, he argues, truly involve the existence of two or more distinct "apperceptive centers," often with radically different personalities and perhaps even physiological conditions (e.g., one may be color blind, or near-sighted, the other not; one may be left-handed, the other right-handed; one may have severe allergic responses, such as rashes, to things to which the other is not allergic). Nevertheless, the alternate personalities tend to overlap in many respects, sharing not only memories but also usually language and many other complex abilities, such as the ability to drive an automobile, shop for groceries, and host parties. Having pointed out that MPD usually follows on a severe trauma (FPP, 39), Braude provides an insightful argument against the view, which he says is based on "the principle of compositional reversibility" (a chapter title), that the existence of post-traumatic (or in the case of commissurotomy, post-surgical) multiplicity provides evidence for pre-trauma (or pre-surgical) plurality, as if the disintegration of the personality were a reversal of an earlier process of partially integrating a colony of lower-order selves.
[**] According to Braude (FPP, 41), some recent surveys place the average number of personalities in MPD cases at sixteen, whereas others place it at six. In some cases, however, over a hundred alternate personalities are reportedly manifest. The highest number of reported "alters" is evidently about 4,500. As Braude says, "One can only wonder about the accuracy of such an estimate." Even if such an estimate were credited, however, the unity of the experience of the personality in executive control of the body at any given moment, as well as the memories, linguistic abilities, and other abilities shared by the various personalities, would still require explanation—an explanation that materialism seems unable to provide.
7. The efficacy of conscious experience for bodily behavior. The fact that we all presuppose the efficacy of conscious experience in practice is well stated by Ted Honderich, who speaks of the "axiom of the indispensability of the mental." The main recommendation of this axiom, he says, is "the futility of contemplating its denial." In a phrase reminiscent of Charles Peirce's criticism of "paper doubts," Honderich says of epiphenomenalism, "Off the page, no one believes it" (MBSC, 447). Some people do, of course, confess it on the page. For example, William Robinson, whose denial that sensations can be understood physicalistically was cited earlier, says that although epiphenomenalism does seem to conflict with common sense, this conflict is only apparent (BP, 51). Many other nondualists, however, reject epiphenomenalism. Flanagan, for example, rejects "conscious inessentialism"—the view that any intelligent activity done with conscious accompaniments can in principle be done without them—and thereby rejects epiphenomenalism as implausible, saying that our bodily actions are "individuated in part by the intentions and motives that constitute them" (CR, 5–6). Seager says that the "efficacy of consciousness . . . presents the aspect of a datum rather than a disputable hypothesis" (MC, 188). Kim suggests a reductio ad absurdum of epiphenomenalism: "If our reasons and desires have no causal efficacy at all in influencing our bodily actions, then perhaps no one has ever performed a single intentional action!" (SM, 104). The neurophysiologist Roger Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on split-brain patients, contributed to the current widespread rejection of epiphenomenalism by beginning in 1965, as he continued to do in Science and Moral Priority (1983), to speak of "downward causation" from the mind to the brain (SMP, 4, 79–81). Searle includes "the reality and causal efficacy of consciousness" (RM, 54) among the obvious facts about our minds, endorsing the "commonsense objection to eliminative materialism" that it is "crazy to say that . . . my beliefs and desires don't play any role in my behavior" (RM, 48). Indeed, it is worse than crazy. As Honderich says, it is futile, meaning self-refuting, because the very act of denying the efficacy of consciousness, whether by speaking or writing, presupposes it. In Whitehead's sardonic words, "Scientists animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study" (FOR, 16).
8. Freedom, in the sense of self-determination, which involves a decision among genuine alternatives, so that it is true that the agent could have done otherwise. It might be thought that freedom in this sense is implied by the rejection of epiphenomenalism, but this is not so. Freedom in this sense is rejected by most of the authors quoted under the former point. For example, although Sperry affirms downward causation from the mind to the brain, and sometimes on this basis speaks of freedom and self-determination (SMP, 27, 39, 69, 112), he in reality affirms universal determinism, according to which the mind is simply one more link in the deterministic
chain of causes and effects (SMP, 40, 69, 89). In opposition to Popper, Sperry says that the mind is in no sense a "first cause" or "prime mover." This denial means that it does not originate any activity (SMP, 89). But it is only if the mind is self-determining in the sense of originating activity, so that it is not totally determined by the efficient causation on it, that we have freedom in the sense that we all presuppose in practice. Whitehead refers to this fact in saying that our own decision, in which we form our purpose in the moment, "is the foundation of our experience of responsibility, of freedom, of emphasis." Against those who would say that this feeling must be an illusion, he adds, "This element in experience is too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction. It governs the whole tone of human life" (PR, 47).
Most modern philosophers, however, especially those who reject dualism, do put it aside, more or less explicitly, as a misconstruction. All those who advocate eliminative materialism, of course, include freedom among the "folk beliefs" to be eliminated. But even most materialistic philosophers who generally eschew the eliminative approach conclude that freedom is an assumption that cannot be saved. McGinn, for example, says that "it is much more reasonable to be an eliminativist about free will than about consciousness" (PC, 17n).
Some philosophers, however, find that freedom is something that they can consistently neither deny nor affirm. That is, while recognizing that they cannot deny it in practice, they can find no way to affirm it in theory. For example, Nagel finds himself of two minds on this issue: "I change my mind about the problem of free will every time I think about it" (VN, 112). On the one hand, he can find no way to give a coherent account of freedom, in part because he (rightly) rejects the view that genuine freedom is compatible with causal determinism (VN, 110–17). On the other hand, he sees that he cannot help presupposing freedom in practice: "I can no more help holding myself and others responsible in ordinary life than I can help feeling that my actions originate with me" (VN, 123). Searle's position is similar. On the one hand, he states, "Our conception of ourselves as free agents is fundamental to our overall self-conception" (MBS, 85). And the kind of freedom in question is not compatible with physical determinism, he says, because our sense of freedom is based on our conviction in all sorts of experiences that we could have done otherwise (MBS, 87, 92, 95). Because of this, we have an "unshakable conviction of our own free will" (MBS, 95), so that it is "impossible for us to abandon the belief in the freedom of the will" (MBS, 94). On the other hand, Searle argues, "Science allows no place for the freedom of the will" (MBS, 92; see also 86, 88, 93). In response to this "philosophical conundrum" (MBS, 88), Searle says, "Now, ideally, I would like to be able to keep both my commonsense conceptions and my
scientific beliefs. . . . But when it comes to the question of freedom and determinism, I am . . . unable to reconcile the two" (MBS, 86).
What makes Searle's position so important is that, as pointed out earlier, he sees the difference between the kind of "common sense" that is revisable and the kind that is not. With regard to such "commonsense beliefs" as the belief that the earth is flat or that the sun literally "sets" in the West,
it is possible to give up a commonsense conviction because the hypothesis that replaces it both accounts for the experiences that led to that conviction in the first place as well as explaining a whole lot of other facts that the commonsense view is unable to account for. . . . But we can't similarly give up the conviction of freedom because that conviction is built into every normal, conscious intentional action. (MBS, 97)
Having clearly stated the distinction in kind between what I have called soft-core and hard-core commonsense beliefs, he makes the further point that the latter, unlike the former, are inevitably presupposed in practice: "We don't navigate the earth on the assumption of a flat earth, even though the earth looks flat, but we do act on the assumption of freedom. In fact we can't act otherwise than on the assumption of freedom, no matter how much we learn about how the world works as a determined physical system" (MBS, 97).
Because Searle has seen and stated the point so clearly, one might assume that he would reconsider the assumption that "science allows no place for the freedom of the will," because that belief is not inevitably presupposed in practice. In fact, if we are speaking about the very practice of science—for example, the kinds of efforts that go into trying to make a breakthrough that will win a Nobel Prize—then it is clear that scientific practice, far from presupposing determinism, actually presupposes the opposite. Scientists, for example, often work eighteen-hour days, trying to make the desired breakthrough before scientists in a rival laboratory do. Even with regard to the entities that scientists study, it is not the case that scientists necessarily presuppose that they are strictly determined. This is most obviously the case in (human) psychology. But there is also no necessity that ethologists assume that the behaviors of the objects of their study, such as gorillas, dolphins, or even rats, are fully determined. Twentieth-century developments in physics have even cast doubt on the earlier assumption that the ultimate units of nature behave in a fully deterministic (predictable-in-principle) way. There are good grounds, to be sure, both in (soft-core) commonsense observations and in scientific experimentation, to believe that the behaviors of things such as stars, oceans, tectonic plates, billiard balls, and computers are fully determined. And Searle may, along with many others, think that this evidence is sufficient to show that all composite beings behave in
equally deterministic ways, so that the behavior of rats, gorillas, and human beings is as predictable in principle as that of billiard balls and computers (MBS, 87). But that extrapolation is far from self-evident. (In chapter 9, I will argue that there is a difference in principle between "aggregational societies," such as billiard balls and computers, and "compound individuals," such as rats and human beings; only the latter are said to have experience and freedom.) In any case, the belief that all composite things behave in a fully deterministic way certainly does not belong to those commonsense beliefs that are inevitably presupposed in practice by all of us. Accordingly, the received view that "science allows no place for freedom of the will" could be challenged.
Searle, however, does not do this. Saying that he sees no good reason to revise physical theory (as he has portrayed it), he affirms a view of the mind-body relation that does not allow for freedom while at the same time saying that "neither this discussion nor any other will ever convince us that our behavior is unfree," so that the problem of freedom and determinism is "likely to stay with us" (MBS, 98, 86). Accordingly, in spite of seeing clearly that freedom is one of those commonsense beliefs that cannot be denied in practice, Searle does not allow such beliefs to be decisive for theory. He thus ends up with an admittedly inadequate theory. This kind of inadequacy can only be avoided if we take our hard-core commonsense notions as the ultimate criteria for (scientific and philosophical) theory. What often occurs instead, however, is that our hard-core common sense is rejected in the name of merely soft-core commonsense beliefs. This occurs most often in relation to our present topic, freedom in the sense of self-determination in the moment. I will discuss at greater length in chapter 9 the way in which Searle allows widespread but dubitable beliefs to convince him that his unshakable presupposition of freedom must be illusory.
Clearly, freedom is the hard-core commonsense notion that is most challenging to any philosophy of mind that means to be adequate to all such notions. Of course, a few contemporary philosophers have defended freedom, but most of them, such as Popper, have affirmed dualism, which violates the principle of continuity and thereby has an insuperable problem of causal interaction. The question is whether a nondualistic philosophy can make sense of the kind of freedom we all presuppose in practice.
9. Our awareness of norms . McGinn expresses one aspect of this awareness in including, as one of three major problems for a physicalist account of consciousness, the question of "how a physical organism can be subject to the norms of rationality. How, for example, does modus ponens get its grip on the causal transitions between mental states?" (PC, 23n). In practice we all presuppose awareness of logical norms, and, more generally, we presuppose that there is such a thing as truth and that knowing or telling the truth is inherently good (which is not inconsistent with believing that its
inherent value may be overridden by other considerations, such as kindness or, less happily, self-interest). We also have presuppositions involving the other two members of the traditional axiological trinity: goodness and beauty. That is, we all presuppose in practice that some modes of behavior and intended outcomes are inherently better than others and that some states of affairs, whether internal or external, are more beautiful, pleasing, fitting, tasteful, or what have you, than others. We may differ in our judgments and even our criteria; but that a distinction between better and worse exists we all presuppose. We can, accordingly, expand McGinn's question to ask how to think about our minds so as to understand how they are subject to all such norms.
Having listed some of the hard-core commonsense notions that are most obviously relevant to the treatment of mind and consciousness, I will now mention some other kinds of data that are especially pertinent to the current discussion.
II. Evidence for the Evolution of Life in General
and of Human Beings,
Especially the Human Brain, in Particular
Of special importance is the evidence for a positive correlation of intelligence with brain size (in relation to body size) and complexity. Also of special importance, even if we do not quite know what to make of it, is the fact that the great increase in brain size in our ancestors occurred very rapidly by evolutionary standards (as discussed, for example, by Christopher Wills in The Runaway Brain ). In this book, however, it is only the implications of the more general fact of evolution that will be considered.
III. Evidence for the Dependence of (At Least Some) Conscious States on Brain States
Whitehead expressed this fact by pointing out that the external world is in a sense irrelevant to our perceptions, that all the essential events occur in the body: "It is an evident fact of experience that our apprehensions of the external world depend absolutely on the occurrences within the human body. By playing appropriate tricks on the body a man can be got to perceive, or not to perceive, almost anything" (SMW, 91). Searle has labeled this idea, that "the relevant causal processes are entirely internal to the brain," the "principle of neurophysiological sufficiency" (MBWP, 221, 229). According to this principle, "whenever a mental phenomenon is present in the mind of an agent—for example, he is feeling a pain, thinking about
philosophy or wishing he had a cold beer—causally sufficient conditions for that phenomenon are entirely in the brain" (MBWP, 229).
The difference between Whitehead and Searle is that Searle applies this point to all mental states whereas Whitehead is speaking only of our sensory perceptions. Recent studies, while not necessarily supporting Searle's notion that brain states are causally sufficient for mental states, and for all mental states at that (which is one expression of Searle's denial of selfdetermination to our conscious experience), do show that all of our capacities, such as memory and rational thought as well as consciousness itself, are heavily dependent on the state of our brains.
In trying to sort out the precise nature of this dependence, however, there is a baffling variety of evidence to account for. On the one hand, various studies, including those of brain-damaged and split-brain patients, suggest a high degree of localization of brain function. On the other hand, other studies suggest more holistic interpretations and a plasticity of the brain allowing for reallocation of functions.[2] Particularly startling, given all that has been assumed about the correlation between human intelligence and brain size, is the evidence from hydrocephalics, popularized by John Lorber, that some people with very little brain matter (having, instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, a mantle of only a millimeter or so, with the total brain weighing perhaps 50 or 150 grams rather than the normal 1.5 kilograms) are completely normal or even above normal in intelligence and social relations.[3]
IV. The Apparent Capacity of the Mind for Nonsensory Perception
1. In mathematical and logical experience, the mind seems to be in touch with entities that are not only nonphysical but even nonactual, which the brain's sensory organs are not suited to perceive. Of course, under the pressure of a materialistic worldview—for example, McGinn says that to affirm a causal relation between abstract entities and human minds would be to affirm a nonnatural, even "funny," kind of causation (PC, 53)—mathematics and logic can be interpreted as invention rather than discovery. But this interpretation is problematic and certainly does not seem the natural interpretation to many mathematicians and logicians.
2. Moral and aesthetic experience is also suggestive of apprehension of nonactual entities, whether they be called values, norms,[*] principles, forms,
[*] Kim makes our awareness of norms (logical as well as moral and aesthetic) central to his rejection of eliminative materialism's program to replace vernacular ("folk") psychology with a purely mechanistic cognitive science: "As long as we think of ourselves as reflective agents capable of deliberation and evaluation—that is, as long as we regard ourselves as agents capable of acting in accordance with a norm—we shall not be able to dispense with the intentional framework of beliefs, wants, and volitions" (SM, 215).
or something else (Nagel discusses the apparent objectivity of values at VN, 143–45).
3. The experience of choosing among possibilities seems to involve the apprehension of nonactual entities (the counter-factual possibilities).
4. Memory can arguably best be understood as direct apprehension by the present experience of the mind's prior experiences. Within a materialistic framework, of course, memory has been understood as based entirely in the brain. But if this were the total truth, it would be hard to understand how we would have the very notion of "pastness": Why would a vivid memory of a scene be qualitatively different from a present sensory perception of that scene, differing precisely in the fact that in the former case we say that we are "remembering" something that happened in the "the past"? Particularly with events that happened a second or two ago, it seems prima facie more likely that the present moment of experience directly perceives a previous moment of experience than that it somehow activates a "memory trace laid down in the brain." Of course, even dualists have usually not thought of memory as a form of (nonsensory) perception, because they have generally thought of the mind as a numerically self-identical "substance" enduring through time. Making a distinction between the mind and the brain, however, does not entail thinking of the mind as a substance in this sense.
5. Religious experience is, at least in some cases, prima facie suggestive of perceptual contact with a reality beyond oneself. Much energy in modern times, of course, has gone into giving alternative explanations of such experiences. But such explanations have generally been a priori, based on a materialistic worldview and a sensationist epistemology,[4] no more convincing to those with vivid religious experiences than reductionistic interpretations of mathematical or moral experience are to those with vivid experiences of those types. Religions experience at the least provides one more desideratum against the assumption that we have no contact with realities distinct from our minds except through our physical senses.
6. There is considerable evidence, some of it of quite high quality and some of it vouchsafed by people of otherwise undoubted intelligence and honesty, for telepathy and clairvoyance .[5] Current writers about the mind-body relation typically reject the possibility of extrasensory perception in this sense. But their rejections are usually a priori; few of them show signs of serious grappling with the evidence. Some philosophers and scientists who have seriously studied the evidence, such as Sir William Barrett, Henri Bergson, David Bohm, C. D. Broad, Alexis Carrel, Sir William Crookes,
Hans Driesch, C.J. Ducasse, Camille Flammarion, Sigmund Freud, William James, Pierre Janet, Gabriel Marcel, Gardner Murphy, H. H. Price, Lord Rayleigh, Charles Richet, and Henry Sidgwick,[6] became convinced (some of them, such as Freud, much against their wills) that these experiences sometimes really do involve nonsensory perception. Of all of the kinds of prima facie nonsensory perception listed above, this is the one form that is subject to empirical testing. It has, according to most of the small minority of intellectuals who have seriously examined the evidence, passed that test. To the extent that this evidence is accepted, it provides a scientific basis, by generalization, for also accepting the other forms of prima facie nonsensory perception for what they seem to be.
In any case, unless a treatment of the mind-body relation has dealt with all of these prima facie counterinstances, it is premature to say that we know that all mental states are dependent for all of their content on brain states. The task may be to develop a theory that accounts both for a high degree of dependence in some respects and for partial independence in other respects. Given Nagel's point about the relative immaturity of both our philosophy and our science, it should not be unthinkable that fully adequate theories may need to be far more complex and nuanced than those of current orthodoxy.
V. Altered States of Consciousness
Any adequate theory must also not contradict what is known about various altered states of consciousness, such as hypnotic states, multiple personality syndrome, religious ecstasy, and deep meditational trances.[7]
VI. The Apparent Capacity of Human Experience,
Unconsciously and Sometimes
Consciously, to Exert Extraordinary Causal Efficacy
"Extraordinary" here means any influence that apparently conflicts with the received view that the mind can directly influence only its motormuscular system.
1. The "placebo effect" and the power of our mental attitude to contribute to physical illnesses such as ulcers and cancer are now rather widely accepted, as is the power of a deeply hypnotized mind to produce dramatic bodily changes, such as raising welts on the skin where the person has been told that he or she has been burned.[8] The power of "faith" to bring about dramatic cures is somewhat less widely accepted but well documented.[9] The same is true for stigmata.[10] These effects seem for the most part to be produced unconsciously. But studies involving meditation and biofeedback have shown some ability to produce extraordinary effects through con-
scious intent.[11] Also, although the relation between cause and effect may be debatable, it is interesting to note that in some cases of multiple personality disorder, the different personalities will have differing biochemistries (e.g., the body under one personality may have diabetes but not under the other[s]).[12]
2. Whereas those effects all occur within the body, there is also ample evidence of the power (usually called psychokinesis or telekinesis) of some people, at times, to produce extraordinary effects beyond the body.[13] The most dramatic effects tend to be produced unconsciously (as in "poltergeist" cases),[14] but some significant statistical effects and even some examples of conspicuous psychokinesis have evidently been brought about by conscious intent.
I have, probably to the annoyance of some readers, listed several kinds of data that are especially difficult for a materialistic view of the mind to accommodate. I have done this deliberately, because most recent discussions, among both scientists and philosophers, have weighted the evidence one-sidedly in favor of evidence meant to be embarrassing to views that distinguish mind from brain, especially those that attribute some autonomous powers to the mind. What we need to do, assuming that we are motivated by the concern for truth, not simply by party spirit, is to weigh evenhandedly all the relevant evidence. As Whitehead has said, "It is easy enough to find a theory, logically harmonious and with important applications in the region of fact, provided that you are content to disregard half your evidence" (SMW, 187). In the current discussion, the tendency has been to stress the evidence that supports a materialistic view and then to look only at that part of the contrary evidence, such as consciousness itself, that is too obvious to everyone to be completely ignored. My discussion has sought to redress the imbalance.
It is very difficult, of course, for philosophers and scientists who have been socialized into one worldview to take seriously data that are, from that perspective, not respectable. Some of the reasons for this were discussed in the section on paradigmatic and wishful-and-fearful thinking. Although it is difficult to transcend these factors so as to give the data a chance to be seen, we can, through becoming aware of the blinding effects of these factors, achieve a degree of transcendence over them.
In any case, we need a theory that takes account of all the relevant facts—those that have been regarded as supportive of materialism, those that have been regarded as supportive of dualism, and those that may count against both materialism and dualism.
Six
Problems of Dualism and Materialism and Their Common Root
As I discussed in the introduction, there is widespread agreement that both dualism and materialism are inadequate. Of course, materialists have always found insuperable problems in dualism, and dualists have always found equally insuperable problems in materialism. But now members of each camp are admitting deep problems in their own positions, holding these positions not as adequate solutions but only as the least inadequate of the options. This attitude raises the question as to whether another option, perhaps more adequate than either, has been overlooked. I discuss that question in the next chapter. Here, I prepare the way for discussing that option—an option against which the modern mind has been so biased that much preparation is necessary—by pointing out that the problems of dualism and materialism are both rooted in the same source: the Cartesian intuition about matter.
The phrase "Cartesian intuition" has generally been used with regard to Descartes's view of the mind, as if it were the basic source of the mind-body problem. His view of the mind is indeed problematic (as I will discuss in chapter 8), but even more problematic is his view of matter. By this I mean his view, not unique to Descartes but associated primarily with him, that matter is completely different in kind from mind. Matter is spatially extended, mind is not. Mind has temporal duration, matter does not (in the sense that it can exist at an "instant," not requiring any temporal duration to be what it is).[*] Mind has an "inside," consisting of thoughts, desires, feelings, and volitions, and thereby has intrinsic value; it is pour soi, something for itself. Matter is all "outside" and is therefore devoid of any
[*] See footnote, p. 49, below.
value for itself; it is only en soi. (Descartes expressed this idea by saying that [spatial] extension is the only essential attribute of matter; but other thinkers, while rejecting this reduction of matter to extension, have agreed that matter has only an outside, no inner reality, such as feelings.) Matter exerts causal efficacy only by efficient causation (for Descartes, only by impact; Newtonians would disagree); mind exercises final causation or self-determination.
Searle is right: To be willing to entertain a radically new view of the mind-body relation, we need to see that dualism and materialism, widely supposed to be the only real options, are both false (RM, 2–3). To develop an alternative that really solves the problem, however, we need to see what the root cause of the problem has been. Searle moves in the right direction by questioning the "conceptual dualism" inherited from Descartes, according to which if something is "physical" it cannot also be "mental" and vice versa (RM, 14, 26, 54). But he does not take this insight far enough. He ends up, accordingly, with simply one more problematic version of materialism, because he continues to assume that most physical things are not also mental. It is precisely this assumption, I will argue, that creates the insuperable problems of the various dualisms and materialisms alike.
Although I have thus far, like most writers, referred simply to "dualism" and "materialism," as if these terms were unambiguous, I now need to specify more exactly how I use them. "Dualism" I always use in the sense of ontological (or Cartesian ) dualism . This doctrine contains a double thesis: (1) that the mind is an actuality numerically distinct from the brain (the quantitative or numerical thesis) and (2) that it is ontologically different in kind from the entities of which the brain consists (the qualitative or ontological thesis).
Many writers use "dualism" as a synonym for dualistic interactionism . There are, however, parallelist forms of ontological dualism, which say that the interaction of mind and brain is merely apparent. Some parallelists have explained the appearance by reference to God (Malebranche, Geulincx), whereas those not able or willing to call on supernatural assistance have left the synchronization an even greater miracle. Because most thinkers today employ regulative principles ruling out miracles, whether explicitly supernatural or not, few dualists today are parallelists. Another form of dualism that does not affirm interactionism is full-fledged epiphenomenalism, according to which the mind is a semi-actuality numerically distinct from the brain. It receives causal influence from the brain, and may even be capable of determining some of its own states, but it cannot exert any downward causation back on the brain (which is why it can be considered only a semi -actuality). However, although Keith Campbell, quoted in the introduction, is one, there are few confessing epiphenomenalists in this sense
today. So for most practical purposes, "dualism" as I intend it can be equated with dualistic interactionism, and I always use it with this meaning unless indicating otherwise.
A widespread practice that should be avoided, however, is the use of "dualism" to refer to all positions that affirm interactionism or, which amounts to the same thing, the use of "interactionism" as a synonym for dualistic interactionism . The problem with these practices is that they imply that there could not be a nondualistic interactionism, thereby serving to restrict our thinking about alternatives. To call a position "dualistic" simply because it posits a distinction between brain and mind (the numerical thesis) creates the impression that any such position would necessarily have all the problems of Cartesian (ontological) dualism, and that might not be true.
Finally, dualism in the ontological sense is often called "substance dualism" (to distinguish it from so-called property dualism, which is generally best classified as a form of materialism). I do not use this term, however, partly because the term "substance" suggests its Cartesian meaning of "requiring nothing but itself in order to exist," whereas many ontological dualists today see the mind as dependent on the body for its existence. Also, the term "substance" suggests an entity of long duration, whereas a contemporary ontological dualist might well speak of a dualism of types of "events" or "processes."
By "materialism" I mean materialistic monism, which contains the double thesis (1) that there is only one kind of actual entities, namely, material or physical ones (the qualitative or ontological thesis), and (2) that what we call the "mind" is somehow numerically identical with the brain (the quantitative or numerical thesis), so that there is no interaction between mind and brain. (The other possible quantitative meaning of "monism," that there is in reality only one actuality, as Spinoza suggested, is not in view. In this respect, contemporary materialism is a form of pluralistic monism, being monistic qualitatively but pluralistic quantitatively.) Because this is how virtually everyone today uses the term, the simple use of "materialism" (unlike the simple use of "dualism") occasions no problems. The widespread practice of sometimes using "monism" as a synonym for materialistic monism, however, is problematic, because it suggests that there are no nonmaterialistic forms of (pluralistic) monism, and this is false. In any case, by "materialism" I mean the twofold thesis that (1) all actual things are material and (2) there is no mind or soul in the sense of an actuality numerically distinct from brain. In fact, it is a threefold thesis, because the statement that "all actual things are material" must be specified to mean that at least most actual things, certainly the most fundamental ones, are devoid of any experience. For example, Strawson says that materialists "believe that there was once no experiential reality on earth but plenty of nonexperiential reality, and that experiential reality came to exist as life evolved" (MR, 66).
Because of this usage, I classify as materialists some who are sometimes regarded as questioning full-fledged materialism, such as Strawson, Searle, and Nagel (although if Nagel were to turn his flirtation with panpsychism into full-fledged embrace, he might be a proponent of one of the nonmaterialistic monisms to which I referred above).
With these clarifications, I will now summarize the major problems of dualism and materialism, showing how all of these problems are rooted in the Cartesian intuition about matter. I will divide this discussion into those problems that are unique to dualism, those that are unique to materialism, and those that are common to both dualism and materialism.
I. Problems Unique to Dualism
1. The chief problem of dualism has always been to understand how two totally different types of things could causally influence each other . How could that which is spatially extended and embodies physical energy but is devoid of any duration,[*] therefore of any "inside," therefore of any feelings and desires, and therefore of any intrinsic value, be capable of exerting causal influence on a nonphysical mind? As John Passmore says, according to dualism a "body can only push" (PRE, 55). How could a body exert efficient causation on that which takes up no space (at least not in an impenetrable way) and embodies no physical energy (which is one side of the problem suggested by speaking of the mind as the "ghost in the machine")? What would such a body have to offer something that lives in terms of values? Likewise, as Passmore says, according to dualism "the only force the mind has at its disposal is spiritual force, the power of rational persuasion" (PRE, 55). How could it exert causal efficacy on something that is constituted so as to be affected by other pushy things (which is the other half of the ghostin-the-machine problem)? Things with final causation inwardly and the
[*] It may seem that matter as conceived in modern thought is not devoid of duration, because it endures through time. What is meant, however (as the ensuing discussion will gradually make clear), is that matter as usually conceived is thought not to require any lapse of time in order to exist, which means that it can exist "at an instant" (with "instant" understood to be a durationless slice in time). In matter thus conceived, in Whitehead's words, "the lapse of time is an accident, rather than of the essence, of the material. The material is fully itself in any sub-period however short. Thus the transition of time has nothing to do with the character of the material. The material is equally itself at an instant of time" (SMW, 50). "Matter," accordingly, "involves nothing more than spatiality" (MT, 132). Whitehead's contrasting view is that what we call the physical world is made up of events, that "an event in realizing itself displays a pattern," and that "the pattern requires a duration involving a definite lapse of time, and not merely an instantaneous moment" (SMW, 124). Put otherwise, each primordial element is "an organized system of vibratory streaming of energy," and such a system is, like a note of music, "nothing at an instant, but . . . requires its whole period in which to manifest itself" (SMW, 35).
power of persuasion outwardly, on the one hand, and things with no final causation inwardly and the capacity outwardly to cause and be caused only by pushing power, on the other, are ill-suited for the kind of interaction at which our minds and bodies seem quite good. We can, accordingly, sympathize with Descartes when he finally said, in response to Princess Elisabeth's persistent questioning as to how mind and body could interact, that the human mind is not capable of conceiving this very distinctly.[1] We can also understand why other thinkers, given their unquestioning belief in supernaturalistic theism, would assign the interaction, whether real (Reid) or apparent (Malebranche, Geulincx), to God.[2] We can understand, further, why a contemporary dualist reluctant to call on a deus ex machina, such as Popper, would return (as cited in the introduction) to Descartes's confession of ignorance. Popper does try to mitigate the problem by saying that quantum physics has superseded Descartes's idea of causation, according to which bodies push each other around (SAB, 483, 499, 510). But then, in explaining what he means by affirming the "ghost in the machine," he says, "I think that the self in a sense plays on the brain, as a pianist plays a piano" (SAB, 494f.). How a physical-physical (finger-piano key) relation can be used as an analogy for the psychical-physical (mind-brain) relation is not cleared up by telling us that physical-physical relations are not as pushy as Descartes had thought.
Some dualists have tried to finesse the problem of causal interaction between ontologically unlike things by appeal to Hume's contention that only experience can tell us what in fact can or cannot cause what—in other words, that we have no basis for a priori claims that physical events cannot be the cause of mental events and vice versa. However, Hume's contention presupposed his analysis of (efficient) causation, according to which it refers merely to regularity of sequence ("constant conjunction"), and this understanding of causation was ruled out in the substantive regulative principles: Efficient causation is real influence, not mere constant conjunction. Furthermore, if one returns to a realistic view of causation as real influence, one cannot—philosophers such as C.J. Ducasse and H. D. Lewis to the contrary—validly appeal to Hume's rejection of all a priori ideas about causation.[*] So the problem of the interaction of ontologically unlike things remains.
2. Dualism also violates the principle of continuity . The idea that somewhere
[*] C.J. Ducasse, with an appeal to Hume, says, "The Causality relation is wholly neutral as to whether the cause-event and the effect-event are both physical, or both psychical, or either of them physical and the other psychical" (MMB, 85). And yet Ducasse rejects as "patently invalid" Hume's view of causality as merely empirical regularity of sequence. The term causation means, Ducasse insists, that the event called the cause etiologically necessitates the effect (MMB, 83). A similar position has been taken by H. D. Lewis (EM, 26–99, 123, 173). Neither seems to see that Hume's first point presupposes the second.
late in the evolution of the universe an entirely new type of actuality has sprung into existence would seem either to require a supernatural cause or to constitute an even more incredible miracle. In truth, this problem could be counted as one of the problems shared with materialism, because materialists also affirm an essential discontinuity; and, indeed, I will raise this point below. But it is proper to include the problem here because dualism, in affirming the emergence of a new type of actuality, generally with a new type of causal power (that of final causation or self-determination), violates the principle of continuity in a particularly egregious way.
3. A third charge against dualistic interactionism is that it apparently violates the principle of the conservation of energy . Eccles has regarded this charge as the problem to which he as a dualist needed to provide an answer (HS, 23, 79, 140, 168). This problem, however, has been greatly exaggerated. For one thing, we do not know the absolute truth of this principle. Do we know, for example, that the energy of the universe has remained constant from the big bang, assuming that there was one, to the present? Do we know that the principle, insofar as it holds absolutely in some domains or contexts, does so in all? We certainly have less reason to be confident of the absolute, universal truth of this principle than we do of the mutual influence of mind and body. So, if forced to choose between them, one should give up the absolute truth of the principle of conservation. But perhaps the dualist need not choose. W. D. Hart has recently argued, in defending dualism, that energy may be conserved in the interactions between mind and body. That is, the principle of the conservation of energy depends on understanding energy as a quantity that is conserved while being converted into various forms, such as mechanical, electromagnetic, thermodynamic, and chemical (EOS, 62–64). Perhaps, Hart suggests, the idea of "psychic energy" should be taken literally, so that it would be one more form that would be interconvertible with the other forms (EOS, 127, 149, 152, 178, 186n). It may be, accordingly, that Eccles (tragically) devoted much of his life to the solution of a pseudoproblem.
In any case, although Hart properly describes his position as Cartesian dualism, insofar as he speaks of "two basic or fundemental sorts of things" (EOS, 1, 8), his resolution, in ascribing energy to both mind and matter, actually moves away from Cartesian (ontological) dualism toward a form of nondualistic interactionism. However, he does not go all the way, so his position still suffers, like that of Eccles and other dualists, from the problems of discontinuity and causal interaction between ontologically unlike things.
Whereas materialists typically use these problems unique to dualism (plus some others, to be mentioned below, that are in fact shared by materialism) to rule out dualism, materialism has even more problems unique to it .
II. Problems Unique to Materialism
1. One of materialism's problems is that of accounting for our unity of experience (as discussed in chapter 5). The idea that there is no mind over and above the brain, which is composed of 100 billion or more neurons, each of which is in turn composed of myriad particles (in which all agency is said finally to be lodged), creates a great puzzle as to why we should enjoy the kind of unified conscious experience we normally do. Dennett tries to mitigate this problem by saying that the unity is a mere appearance (CE, 23, 458). But if in reality there are billions of "miniagents and microagents (with no single Boss)" and "that's all that's going on" (CE, 458, 459), the very appearance of unity is utterly mysterious. Searle is more forthright: After illustrating the unity of consciousness—"I have my experiences of the rose, the couch, and the toothache all as experiences that are part of one and the same conscious event"—he adds, "We have little understanding of how the brain achieves this unity" (RM, 130). Dualism is more intuitively adequate here, because it can attribute our experienced unity to the actual unity of the mind. Eccles, for example, says that "a key component of the [dualist] hypothesis is that the unity of conscious experience is provided by the self-conscious mind, not by the neural machinery" (HS, 22). Indeed, dualism could identify the mind with the unification of various influences from the brain—if only it could explain how the mind, being ontologically different from the brain cells, could receive influences from them.
2. The mirror image of this problem is that of accounting for the unity of our bodily behavior . How can I pat my head with my hand while beating time to music with my foot while smiling at my wife while thinking about the mind-body problem while . . . ? If there is in no sense a "single Boss," so that all of our behavior, inner and outer, is produced by an aggregate, how can there be such remarkable coordination? Dualism, with its distinction between the (more or less) unified mind and the aggregational brain, again seems better able to handle the phenomena—if only it were not unable to explain how the mind can affect the body at all.
3. Closely related is the problem of freedom . If the "mind" is just the brain, or some aspect or function thereof, then it would seem impossible to ascribe self-determining freedom to us. Even if quantum indeterminacy is taken to qualify the older notion of absolute causal determinism, how the indeterminacy of trillions of particles could account for our sense of freedom would be far from clear. In any case, the indeterminacy of the individual particles or events is generally canceled out in aggregates by the "law of large numbers." And, indeed, at least virtually all materialists do deny freedom (as illustrated in chapter 5). In Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, Dennett tries to convince us that freedom in this sense is
not "worth wanting" anyway, ascribing to us only kinds of freedom that are compatible with causal determinism. McGinn, while rejecting Dennett's eliminativism with respect to consciousness, joins him with respect to free will (PC, 17n).
Even Searle, after berating most materialists for denying obvious facts of experience, articulates a theoretical position that denies freedom, although he agrees (as seen in chapter 5) that it is "obvious" in the sense of being one of our hard-core commonsense notions. After noting that Howard Gardner's comprehensive summary of cognitive science in The Mind's New Science does not contain a chapter or even an index entry on consciousness, Searle comments sarcastically, "Clearly the mind's new science can do without consciousness" (RM, 249). But Searle's book The Rediscovery of the Mind has nary a chapter or even an index entry on freedom. Clearly, one could retort, the rediscovered mind can do without freedom!
There is no doubt that Searle still denies freedom. (I speak here of his theoretical, philosophical position; as I reported in chapter 5, Searle pointed out in his earlier book [MBS ] that in practice he cannot give up his conviction of freedom.) Although he lists a dozen structural features of consciousness (RM, 127–41), he does not include freedom. When Searle does finally mention "free will" in a list of features of consciousness, he puts after it the qualification "(if there is such a thing)" (RM, 227). This implicit denial to conscious experience of any capacity for self-determining freedom is made explicit in a passage in which Searle explains in what sense consciousness is and is not an emergent feature:
A feature F is emergent2 if F is emergent1 and F has causal powers that cannot be explained by the causal interactions of a,b,c. . . . If consciousness were emergent2, then consciousness could cause things that could not be explained by the causal behavior of the neurons. The naive idea here is that consciousness gets squirted out by the behavior of the neurons in the brain, but once it has been squirted out, it then has a life of its own. (RM, 112)
Searle then adds, "On my view, consciousness is emergent1 but not emergent2" (RM, 112). In other words, consciousness is totally produced by the brain, and, once produced, it has no partially autonomous power by which it could determine some of its own states, such as its desires, attitudes, and volitions, which then might influence the brain with something that had not been simply produced by it. His position is then the same as Sperry's: Nothing goes down that had not first been sent up. Searle, in fact, had explicitly said this in his earlier book: "Top-down causation only works because the top level is already caused by and realized in the bottom levels" (MBS, 94).
In short, the datum of freedom, like the data of the unity of experience
and the unity of our bodily behavior, favors dualism over materialism—or at least would if the problems of discontinuity and dualistic interaction could be ignored.
4. Whereas the three preceding problems should be felt as real problems by materialists, they have received relatively little treatment. The problem that has received by far the most attention is, not surprisingly, the most obvious one, which is what it can mean to say that we, with our conscious experience, are wholly material (or physical) beings. Conscious experience, with all its features, evidently has to be portrayed as somehow reducible to, or somehow resolvable into, purely material stuff, entities, processes, structures, functions, or something that can in principle be adequately described from a wholly externalist, third-person perspective. The basic problem of all of these programs is the simple point raised by Nagel: If the world contains experiences, points of view, beings that it is like something to be—and we know that it does—then every purely externalist description will necessarily leave something out. Most of those materialists who have recognized this point have abandoned the various forms of identity theory and moved to eliminative materialism. They simply eliminate consciousness, experience, points of view, from the list of realities to which a theory must be adequate. As Paul Churchland has said, "If we do give up hope of reduction, then elimination emerges as the only coherent alternative."[3] (If you can't join 'em, eliminate one of 'em.) This is the process that Searle has described as a long pattern of neurotic-like behavior and Seager as "an orderly retreat becoming a rout" (MC, 32).
Whereas Seager, however, agrees with Nagel, Robinson, McGinn, and Strawson that no solution is on the horizon, Searle believes that he has produced one. Although he criticizes materialism, his position is still within the materialistic framework, as I have defined it. That is, Searle says that the mind is not an actuality numerically distinct from the brain, that reality is "entirely physical" (RM, 54), and that the fundamental units of the world are "material" or "physical" in the sense of being devoid of any experience, any "point of view." (Although Searle says "we do not know at present how far down the evolutionary scale consciousness [by which he seems to mean experience of any sort] extends," he is "not inclined to ascribe any consciousness" to amoebas [RM, 89, 74]; he asks, "How do unconscious [by which he seems to mean totally nonexperiencing] bits of matter produce consciousness?" [RM, 55]; and he says, of objects about which we have a point of view, "the objects themselves have no point of view" [RM, 31].) He is critical of hitherto dominant forms of materialism insofar as they assume that if something is "physical" it cannot also be "mental," or, more precisely, that "the same phenomenon under the same aspects cannot literally satisfy both terms" (RM, 10, 14). He sees this notion, which he criticizes, to be
closely related to the assumption that "reality is objective (meaning accessible to all competent observers)" (RM, 16), which he sees in turn as closely related to the assumption that "the objectivity of science requires that the phenomena studied be completely objective," which is in turn "based on a confusion between the epistemological sense of the subjective-objective distinction, and the ontological sense" (RM, 10, 19). I think Searle is right about all this (except the assumption that the same thing under the same aspects can be both physical and mental). But the way that he develops his alternative position is (partly because of that faulty assumption) as problematic as the theories he has rejected.
According to Searle's revisionist materialism, "materialists [can] cheerfully embrace consciousness as just another material property among others" (RM, 55). According to Searle's "biological naturalism," more precisely, "the mental state of consciousness is just an ordinary biological (that is, physical) feature of the brain" (RM, 1, 13). What can Searle mean in referring to consciousness as "ordinary," as "just another material property among others"? He emphatically does not mean that it, like all others, can be described "objectively" in the sense of "from a third-person point of view." His realization that this is impossible is the basis for his protest against eliminative materialism and most forms of reductionism. He insists that "the actual ontology of mental states is a first-person ontology," that "the real world contains . . . elements that are irreducibly subjective" (RM, 16, 19). So what does it mean to say that these irreducibly subjective states are entirely physical?
One of the root problems in Searle's book is that although he tells us what he does not mean by "physical," he never tells us what he does mean. One common meaning is "devoid of experience"; but Searle is denying that this is a necessary feature of the physical, because he thinks that some physical things (brains) do have experience. Nagel, who does accept this definition of the physical, puzzles over the meaning of Searle's position: "But however great the variety of physical phenomena may be, ontological objectivity is one of their central defining characteristics; and as we have seen Searle insists that consciousness is ontologically subjective" (NYR, 40). Another candidate for the meaning of "physical" is "publicly observable"; but Searle also rejects this definition, because our own subjective experience is not publicly observable. If it means neither of these, however, what does it mean? If he were to say, for example, that to be physical is simply to embody energy, he could affirm a truly nonmaterialistic pluralistic monism, in which all units have mental as well as physical features, which would open the way to a resolution of the mind-body problem quite different from the position he has hitherto taken.
In any case, we still need to explore the intelligibility of Searle's claim
that conscious states are just another, ordinary physical property, analogous to others. To make this case, Searle offers several analogies. Two of his favorites are liquidity and solidity:
Consciousness is a higher-level or emergent property of the brain in the utterly harmless sense of 'higher-level' or 'emergent' in which solidity is a higher-level emergent property of H2 O molecules when they are in a lattice structure (ice), and liquidity is similarly a higher-level emergent property of H2 O molecules when they are, roughly speaking, rolling around on each other (water). Consciousness is a mental, and therefore physical, property of the brain in the sense in which liquidity is a property of systems of molecules. (RM, 14)
Lying behind Searle's analogy is the notion that at least many features of big systems can be causally explained by the behavior of the little systems of which they are composed: The macrophenomena are explicable in terms of microphenomena (RM, 87). He is claiming, then, that consciousness is a surface phenomenon caused by microphenomena in the brain, just as the solidity of ice and the liquidity of water are surface phenomena caused by the microphenomena beneath the surface. He uses the language of "supervenience"[*] to express this relation: Consciousness is supervenient on neurophysiological states just as liquidity is supervenient on certain molecular states.
Is there a genuine analogy here? Seager, in response to an earlier version of Searle's position, pointed out one reason why this type of analogy breaks down. Seager distinguishes between constitutive supervenience, which holds in ordinary physical explanations such as those of solidity and liquidity, and merely correlative supervenience, which consciousness seems to exemplify in relation to the brain. In the former, the lower states are somehow constitutive of the supervenient states in a way that allows us to understand why that supervenient state should emerge:
Roughly speaking, in cases of constitutive supervenience the dual evidence provided by a knowledge of a system's basic components and their link to its behavior is decisive for ascription of the supervenient property. . . . [I]t makes credible the idea that the joint activity of the various components,
[*] For a thorough discussion of the meaning(s) of "supervenience," see Kim's Supervenience and Mind . According to the evidently dominant usage, the core meaning is that the observable, macroproperties of an entity are fully determined by its microproperties—although perhaps not reducible to them (SM, 275f., 339f.). As Searle's use of "supervenience" in place of "emergence" suggests, the two terms can be considered virtnally synonymous. In fact, as Kim points out, one of the early evolutionary emergentists, Lloyd Morgan, used "supervenience" as a stylistic variant of "emergence," and some nonreductive physicalists today speak of their higherlevel, supervenient properties as "emergent" (SM, 134, 348). I will continue to use primarily the language of "emergence" until discussing Kim's position in chapter 10.
through their own causality, could reasonably be claimed to produce the system's overall behavior. (MC, 179)
However, Seager points out, the relation of consciousness to brain states is not like that: Nothing about the behavior and property of the neurons as studied from without would lead us to expect some brain states to produce consciousness. The supervenience remains brute, merely correlative. Seager approvingly cites Simon Blackburn's statement that supervenience of the psychological on the physical is part of the problem, not the solution (MC, 180).[*]
In response, Searle agrees that the kind of supervenience that is relevant to the mind-body problem is causal supervenience, not constitutive supervenience (RM, 125). But then, it would seem, all of the analogies he employs—photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis, electromagnetism, and transparency (RM, 90, 104) as well as solidity and liquidity—are of no intuitive help in understanding how consciousness is related to the brain, because they are all cases of constitutive supervenience. The only thing that causal and constitutive supervenience have in common is that in both the higher-level property is said to be "caused" by the lower,[**] and in the case of consciousness we have been given no clue as to how this "property" could have emerged out of its causes. Strawson agrees. With regard to the idea that experiential properties are "reducible to nonexperiential physical properties in a way that is ultimately similar to the way in which the property of liquidity is held to be reducible to van de Waals molecular-interaction properties," he says: "This reduction is very hard—impossible—to imagine" (MR, 68). Searle's analogies may at first glance give the appearance of providing a glimmer of intuitive understanding, but on closer examination they are more confusing than helpful. As Nagel has said, "much obscurity has been shed on the [mind-body] problem by faulty analogies" (MQ, 202).
[*] Kim agrees, saying that supervenience "is a 'phenomenological' claim, not a theoretical explanation. Mind-body supervenience, therefore, does not state a solution to the mind-body problem; rather it states the problem itself." Kim adds that although the research strategy of explaining psychological functions in terms of the interactions of subsystems conforms to the generally accepted scientific approach, "whether such microstructural explanations really 'explain' mentality in the sense of making mentality, in particular consciousness, intelligible—something that the emergentists despaired of ever attaining—may be another question" (SM, 168).
[**] As Kim portrays it, supervenience is a relation of dependency but not of causal dependency. The macropropeties are said to be determined by the microproperties without being caused by them. The difference is that the causal relation is temporal—the cause is antecedent to the effect—whereas in supervenience, the determining and the determined are simultaneous (SM, 354, 359). As Kim points out, however, this distinction has little import (SM, 359), so the language of "causal supervenience" seems to do no violence to anything essential to the idea of supervenience.
Searle's position is not really as different from previous forms of materialism as he suggests. In spite of his emphatic rejection of "property dualism," his position, as Nagel points out (NYR, 40), seems to be another variant of it. I will return to Searle's position when I consider the problem of the emergence of experience out of nonexperiencing entities, which materialists and dualists alike share; at that time I will consider Searle's claim that his position is really that of "property polyism" (MBWP, 228).
5. A fifth problem for materialism is that it implies an epistemology that does not allow us to know various hard-core commonsense notions (which we all do know). I refer here to an epistemology based on the sensationist view of perception (along with assumptions, of course, that prevent us from knowing these things a priori, or through divine revelation, or otherwise transcendentally). This problem could be included under the problems that materialism and dualism share, because many dualists in modern times (beginning at least with Locke) have accepted a sensationist theory of perception (although Locke himself could still appeal to supernatural revelation to explain how he knew things he should otherwise not have known). However, dualists need not accept a sensationist view of perception, because a mind distinct from the brain might be able to perceive some things directly, without the aid of the brain and its sensory organs. This problem, therefore, is best included under problems unique to materialism.[*]
Although each of the five examples I will give would be worthy of an entire chapter, if not a book, I can mention them only briefly. Two of them are most closely associated with Hume: knowledge of efficient causation and knowledge of a world external to the mind . Although there have been enormous efforts to get around Hume's demonstrations, they remain valid: If sensory perception, understood as perception providing only sensory data, were the only mode of perception we have, we should not know what efficient causation (in a non-Humean sense) is or that there is a real world to which the sensory data may refer. Likewise, as Santayana showed in an extension of Hume's argument, if this were our only mode of perception, we should not know (as distinct from taking on "animal faith") the reality of the past . With no knowledge of the past, furthermore, we would have no knowledge of time . Finally, our inexorable presuppositions about objective norms, such as truth, goodness, and beauty, are notoriously difficult to ex-
[*] Many modern philosophers simply assume the equation of perception with sensory perception. For example, in the editor's introduction to an anthology entitled Perceptual Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Jonathan Dancy simply asserts on the first page that perceptual knowledge is the sort of knowledge we get by "using our senses." Some philosophers, however, state the sensationist position explicitly. Willard Quine, for example, says, "The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world" (Ontological Relativity and Other Essays [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969], 75–76).
plain from within a materialistic, sensationist perspective. (The implicit contradiction that results is illustrated by those philosophers and scientists who support their preference for a materialistic worldview in terms of aesthetic criteria, such as "simplicity" and "beauty," ignoring the fact that such a worldview denies the possible knowledge and even existence of such norms.) A position that could fully allow the genuineness of our knowledge of all these things and that could explain it naturally, without forcing, would be in this respect more adequate than any of the materialistic positions.
6. A related problem for materialists, given the virtual necessity of their restricting perception to that which occurs through the physical sensory organs, is the impressive evidence for extrasensory perception, in the sense of telepathy and clairvoyance.[4] D. M. Armstrong, for example, has referred to psychical research as a "small black cloud on the horizon of a Materialist Theory of Mind." Herbert Feigl and Keith Campbell have both said that if the alleged evidence for extrasensory perception were authentic, materialism could not handle it.[5] And many dualists point to the data from psychical research as decisive evidence in favor of dualism.[6] Of course, these alleged data are rejected out of hand by most materialists, such as those just mentioned and McGinn (PC, 53), Humphrey (HM, 11), and Churchland (MAC, 17). However, these rejections generally demonstrate little if any familiarity with the evidence and discussions of it by otherwise reputable philosophers, such as William James, C. D. Broad, C. J. Ducasse, and H. H. Price. (By contrast, Seager, who shows more familiarity with the evidence, is more open to it [MC, 188, 241].) These rejections seem to be based more on paradigmatic and wishful-and-fearful thinking, in other words, than on considered judgments, after serious investigation, that good evidence is really lacking.[*]
[*] While doing the final revision of this manuscript, I learned that Humphrey had recently written a book, Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995), in which parapsychology is extensively discussed. Humphrey does indicate that he has become at least somewhat familiar with the available evidence and knows that some of it is good. He says that "the evidence that has accumulated over the ages [for ESP] is undeniably impressive" (115), and he refers to "the hundreds of experimental studies that over the last century have made strong claims to demonstrate the reality of PK or ESP" (138). He even says that in many cases one who is trying to explain the phenomena in normal terms may be "baffled" (115). However, he studiously avoids an examination of the actual evidence, which, he says, "would be tedious" (116). He instead constructs purely a priori arguments against the reality of extrasensory perception, concluding that, because the phenomena do not meet his "advance expectations" of how ESP would work if it were genuine, be need not take any of the evidence seriously (138). He is thereby able to conclude that parapsychology provides no credible evidence against a "materialism of the strictest order" (36). A more empirical thinker, I suspect, would not escape so unscathed. In any case, Humphrey's book does not provide a counterexample to my statement that few philosophers have evidently arrived at "considered judgments, after serious investigation, that good evidence is really lacking." He in effect admitted that the evidence was too good to be challenged on its own terms.
To the extent that this evidence is studied and is found convincing, materialism has another count against it.
7. Insofar as materialism rules out the possibility that our mind—our feelings, thoughts, desires, decisions—can have any power to exert causal influence other than that of the brain, it would also not be able to accommodate psychokinesis, the direct production by the psyche of changes in the extrasomatic world. And yet good evidence for psychokinesis exists.[7] Insofar as psychokinesis is accepted, this will be another count against materialism's numerical identification of mind and brain. Of course, the inability of materialism here can be regarded as simply a part of its more general inadequacy to the fact, which we all presuppose in practice, that the mind has power of its own with which it acts back on the world (usually first of all its own body). But psychokinesis, when accepted, provides particularly dramatic evidence of this power, more difficult to interpret otherwise than more ordinary phenomena.
To summarize the problems unique to dualism and materialism: Those unique to dualism are all clearly due to the fact that the matter of which the body is composed is said to be different in kind from the mind. The problems unique to materialism can be seen to be due to the fact that, finding dualistic interactionism impossible, materialists gave up interactionism altogether, so that the mind is no longer thought to be a numerically distinct actuality (which could perhaps account for our unity of experience and of action and therefore our freedom, and which might be capable of the various forms of nonsensory perception arguably implied by various data and might even be capable of direct extrasomatic effects on the world). The problems unique to materialism are finally, therefore, traceable to the Cartesian intuition about matter, because it was the resulting problems of dualism that led to materialism's numerical equation of mind and brain. I turn now to problems, originating from the same root, that dualism and materialism have in common.
III. Problems Common to Dualism and Materialism
1. One problem shared by materialists and dualists alike—Campbell also lists this as one of the "embarrassing questions" his epiphenomenalism cannot answer (BM, 135)—is exactly where to draw the line between experiencing and nonexperiencing things. Given the continuity suggested by the evolutionary perspective and the increasing discovery of continuity where gaps once seemed to exist, any place that is chosen will seem arbitrary. Descartes's decision to draw the line between the human mind and the rest of nature, so that even his dog was said to be an insentient machine, has
seemed arbitrary to most. The most popular position has been to draw the line between those animals with and without a central nervous system, but where exactly is that? Having a central nervous system in borderline cases is a matter of degree.
This point is related to the problem of continuity raised in relation to dualism, but it is different. There the point was the philosophical one that any essential dualism seems to contradict the principle of continuity. Here I am raising the additional point that once this essential discontinuity has been accepted (whether by dualists or materialists), then there is the empirical problem of specifying a nonarbitrary place where that discontinuity allegedly occurs. Dualists and materialists typically avoid this problem: Because they "know" that the discontinuity must have happened somewhere in the evolutionary process, they are content to indicate only vaguely where that might have been. Searle, as I pointed out, thinks amoebas do not experience, but he says that he has no idea whether fleas, grasshoppers, crabs, and snails do (RM, 74, 81). Flanagan, while recognizing that scallops and paramecia receive information from and respond to their environments, seems confident that they do not feel or experience anything (CR, 35). McGinn supposes that consciousness must have arisen "when some of the fancier models of mollusc took up residence in the oceans, or when fish began to roam the depths. . . . [S]entience reverberated in the seas: awareness was born, quite late in the game" (PC, 44). But if these thinkers would try to specify exactly where this magical line is, the arbitrariness of the spot and the disagreement about it would make the problematic nature of the supposition more apparent. For example, evidence has been provided suggesting that bacteria make decisions (of a primitive sort) on the basis of memories (of a primitive sort).[8] If our (soft-core) intuition is that experience and "life" go together, do we attribute experience to prokaryotic as well as eukaryotic life? Furthermore, the virus has some but not all of the features generally regarded as characteristic of living things. If we have included bacteria, do we attribute experience to viruses too? And if we do, then what about the remarkable DNA and RNA macromolecules, which certainly manifest organismic characteristics? And so on. On what basis could one claim to know, for example, that the apparent lack of complete determinism at the level of quantum physics does not reflect an element of spontaneity and thereby experience in subatomic events? Of course, Nagel is sociologically right: "If one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all" (MQ, 168). But that there actually is such a place does not belong to our hard-core common sense. It belongs at most to our merely soft-core common sense, the type empirical facts and rational reflection can modify.
2. A second problem is that of the Great Exception . This problem is generally raised by materialists against dualists. In fact, Michael E. Levin makes
this point "the main positive evidence for materialism," even more important than the problem of dualistic interaction. Appealing to the regulative principle of simplicity or parsimony, Levin says,
So far as we know, everything, except possibly the psychological states of sentient beings, is physical. . . . [Against dualism] it is simply more reasonable to think that the properties expressed by psychological predicates will turn out to be physical. Given that most of the universe is explicable physicalistically, the view which least multiplies independent principles is that the entire universe is explicable physicalistically. (MMBP, 87)
This point, however, can be turned back against materialism,[*] especially in light of the agreement by Nagel, McGinn, Seager, and Searle, not to mention countless dualists, that conscious experience is not "explicable physicalistically." That is, would it not be strange that if human beings and many other animals (wherever one draws the line) are not fully explicable physicalistically (that is, in completely externalist categories), the rest of the universe would be? Because we know that we are not, the only way to avoid the problem of the Great Exception is to rethink the rest of the universe.
3. Yet another problem for dualists and materialists, because they both assume that experience arose at some late date in cosmic evolution, is to explain how the evolutionary process could have had the time—literally—to have gotten to the point at which time is said to have emerged . That is, as most of those who have thought much about it, such as the archmaterialist Adolf Grünbaum, have realized, time, in the real sense, presupposes experience: Without experience there would be no "now," and without a "now" there would be no distinction between past and future.[9] (Incidentally, Newton's "absolute time" is usually thought to have been an exception to all relative views of time, according to which temporality is dependent on some kind of actual events; but, as Milic[*] Capek[*] has pointed out, this interpretation fails to recognize that Newton, quite a heretic, held a temporalistic view of deity: So-called absolute time reflected God's temporal experience.[10] ) Assuming this necessary connection between time and experience, those who believe that experience arose historically must also hold that time arose at some point in the evolutionary process. This is the position of J. T. Fraser, who has probably (along with Capek) thought and written about time more than any other thinker in history. This position is reflected in the title of one of
[*] The fact that materialism has the problem of the Great Exception is illustrated by Herbert Feigl, one of the first formulators of materialistic identism. After speaking of the "identity" of matter and experience, Feigl clarified that "nothing in the least like a psyche is ascribed to lifeless matter." This implies that the language of psychology is applicable "only to an extremely small part of the world" ("Mind-Body, Not a Pseudoproblem," in Dimensions of Mind, ed. Sydney Hook [New York: New York University Press, 1960], 32, 33).
Fraser's books, The Genesis and Evolution of Time . The problem with this position, of course, is that it is circular, because evolution itself presupposes the existence of time. The paradox is expressed in Fraser's assertion that, although we cannot help thinking of several billion years passing between the big bang and the rise of life (which is where Fraser thinks time in the real sense of the word arose, evidently because that is where he dates the emergence of experience), we must say that all the events "prior" to the emergence of life were in truth all "contiguous with the instant of Creation" (GET, 132). Of course, the immediate response of most dualists and materialists will be that there must be something wrong with the assumption that time requires experience. (Indeed, the dominant position has been that time originated when there was sufficient organization of matter for entropic processes to begin; but that would only push the problem back: How would there have been time for cosmic evolution to proceed even to that stage?) To those who so respond, I would recommend reading Fraser and Grünbaum. If the argument is found convincing, what adjustment should be made? If you are a dualist or a materialist, are you more certain of the reality of time throughout the history of our universe or of the doctrine that experience as such emerged out of nonexperiencing things?
4. Although all of these problems are serious, perhaps the most serious problem shared by dualism and materialism is how the emergence of experience out of nonexperiencing entities is conceivable . I touched on this problem above in pointing to the problem of discontinuity for dualism and the problem of the meaning of the materialist's assertion that we, with our conscious experience, are entirely physical beings. I broached, especially with regard to Searle's position, the problem of the disanalogy between the alleged emergence of experience and the forms of emergence with which it is commonly compared. But the problem of this disanalogy runs even deeper. I will introduce this problem by citing a provocative statement by the materialist J. J. c. Smart: "How could a non-physical property or entity suddenly arise in the course of animal evolution? . . . [W] hat sort of chemical process could lead to the springing into existence of something non-physical? No enzyme can catalyze the production of a spook!" (M, 168f.). Although Smart directs this comment against dualism, it call be directed back at his own materialism. One can equally well ask, How can an enzyme catalyze the production of even the appearance of a spook? Regardless of whether one refers to a mind as a distinct actuality or does not (which is the only difference between dualists and materialists once the latter agree that mind, with its point of view and other subjective features, is irreducible to purely externalist description)—that is, whether it is called a real spook or only an apparent spook—how a mind could emerge out of enzymes or anything else assumed to have only external features is equally mysterious.
Nagel states the issue clearly in "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" "One can-
not derive a pour soi from an en soi . . . . This gap is logically unbridgeable. If a bodiless god wanted to create a conscious being, he could not expect to do it by combining together in organic form a lot of particles with none but physical properties" (MQ, 189). A pour soi is something that exists for itself, being a subject of experience with feelings; an en soi, which is said to exist in itself but not for itself (being what Whitehead calls a "vacuous actuality"), is thought to have "none but physical [meaning purely external] properties." An en soi has only an "outside," having no features beyond those that are perceivable in principle by others and describable in externalistic language; it is hence nothing but an object (for others). A pour soi, by contrast, has an "inside," having features that are not externally perceivable by others and describable in externalistic terms; it is thus a subject (for itself). A subject or a pour soi, in other words, is something about which we can intelligibly ask, "What is it like to be one of those?" Strawson expresses this point by speaking of "the 'what-it's-like-ness' characteristics of experience" (MR, 45). Nagel is saying that it is inconceivable that a subject, something that it is like something to be, could arise out of mere objects naturally. This type of alleged emergence violates the principle of continuity and thereby implies a violation of naturalism.
Many philosophers, both dualists and materialists, have not yet seen the distinction between this alleged emergence and the nonproblematic types and thereby continue to think of them as analogous. Searle's analogies of experience with emergent properties such as solidity, transparency, and liquidity, considered earlier, provide an example. Searle, as I mentioned then, has described his position not as property dualism but as "property polyism," explaining that "there are lots of different kinds of higher-level properties of systems, and mental properties are among them" (MBWP, 228). This fits, of course, with Searle's attempt to portray "mental properties" as fully "ordinary,"just one more example of ordinary physical properties.
We have here a prime example of a category mistake . (I use this term, associated with Gilbert Ryle, to articulate a point quite opposed to Ryle's own philosophical behaviorism.)[*] The alleged emergence of subjectivity out of pure objectivity has been said to be analogous to examples of emergence that are different in kind. All of the unproblematic forms of emergence refer to externalistic features, features of things as perceived from without, features of objects for subjects . But the alleged emergence of experience is not
[*] I refer here to Ryle's position in The Concept of Mind as it has usually been interpreted. As either a clarfication or a modification of his position in this early book, Ryle later eschewed behaviorism. For example, while still rejecting Cartesianism, he also said that "no account of Thinking of a Behaviourist coloration will do" (Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers, vol. II: Collected Essays 1929–1968 [London: Hutchison, 1971], viii).
simply one more example of such emergence. It involves instead the alleged emergence of an "inside" from things that have only outsides. It does not involve the emergence of one more objective property for subjectivity to view, but the alleged emergence of subjectivity itself. Liquidity, solidity, and transparency are properties of things as experienced through our sensory organs, hence properties for others. Experience is not what we are for others but what we are for ourselves . Experience cannot be listed as one more "property" in a property polyism. It is in a category by itself. To suggest any analogy between experience itself and properties of other things as known through sensory experience is a category mistake of the most egregious kind.
In describing this confusion, which can be called the emergence category mistake, I am simply trying to drive home Nagel's point about faulty analogies. Although most contemporary commentators on the mind-body problem have accepted Nagel's point about the indispensability of including points of view in our world-pictures, many have evidently not seen the full force of his point about faulty analogies. Nagel says,
Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. (MQ, 166)
In a passage only parenthetically cited earlier, Nagel says that "much obscurity has been shed on the [mind-body] problem by faulty analogies between the mental-physical relation and relations between the physical and other objective aspects of reality" (MQ, 202). Although Nagel does not use the term "category mistake," the thought is there.
Once alerted to the emergence category mistake, we can see it committed all over the place, by dualists and materialists alike. For example, Eccles, from a dualist standpoint, says, "Just as in biology there are new emergent properties of matter, so at the extreme level of organized complexity of the cerebral cortex, there arises still further emergence, namely the property of being associated with conscious experience" (FR, 173). Conscious experience is spoken of as simply one "further emergence," no different in kind from all others. Popper, coauthor with Eccles of The Self and Its Brain, almost shows recognition of the difference in kind, saying that the "incredible" invention of consciousness (out of wholly insentient neurons) "is much more incredible than, for example, the invention of flight" (SAB, 560). This recognition of incredibility does not, however, lead Popper to be incredulous.
The recognition that we have no real analogies for the alleged emergence of experience out of wholly insentient entities is what lies behind the
recent turn by McGinn to pessimism about ever finding a solution to the mind-body problem. McGinn is more explicit than most writers about the principle that no solution can require supernatural causation, even implicitly: "It is a condition of adequacy upon any account of the mind-body relation that it avoid assuming theism" (PC, 17n). But he also sees that no naturalistic explanation of the emergence of conscious experience out of "insensate matter" is possible (PC, 46). He is certain that this emergence is not "inherently miraculous" (PC, 2). He is equally certain, however, that no one can show that it is not.[*] "The difficulty," says McGinn, "is one of principle: we have no understanding of how consciousness could emerge from an aggregation of non-conscious elements" (PC, 212). In that passage, he is discussing the possibility of strong AI;[**] but he makes the same point with regard to the brain, saying that we also cannot "see how an entity constructed naturally from mere matter can be conscious" (PC, 205). Supernaturalism, accordingly, cannot be shown to be unnecessary.
McGinn compares the fact of conscious experience with the fact of complex organisms. Both could at one time have reasonably been pointed to as evidence for supernaturalism. The theory of evolution, however, "undermined the theism required by the creationist thesis." But no such explanation for consciousness is available or even on the horizon: "In the case of consciousness the appearance of miracle might also tempt us in the 'creationist' direction, with God required to perform the alchemy necessary to transform matter into experience. . . . We cannot, I think, refute this argument in the way we can the original creationist argument, namely by actually producing a non-miraculous explanatory theory" (PC, 17n). McGinn goes on to say, "But we can refute it by arguing that such a naturalistic theory must exist ." This, of course, is simply a confession of faith, not a real argument.
Another passage in which McGinn continues this comparison states the problem so clearly that it is worth quoting in full, partly because it embodies the recognition that it would be a category mistake to regard the emergence of sentience as analogous to the emergence of life, as if no greater violation of the principle of continuity were involved.
A basic continuity between the inorganic and the organic can . . . be demonstrated. No miraculous jump in the fortunes of the universe need be ruefully
[*] Strawson expresses a similar view: "Insofar as we are committed to naturalistic no-miracles materialism, we seem obliged to hold that the appearance of radical disconnection between experiential properties and nonexperiential properties is a kind of illusion. . . . But it won't go away, and it constitutes a vivid proof of the limitations on our understanding of reality" (MR, 75).
[**] "Strong AI," for Strong Artificial Intelligence, is a term for the position of those who believe that the "artificial intelligence" of computers could involve consciousness.
accepted. The Soft Rustle could therefore have occurred without the benefit of God's intervention. But in the case of consciousness we have no such understanding: we do not know how consciousness might have arisen by natural processes from antecedently existing material things. Somehow or other sentierice sprang from pulpy matter, giving matter an inner aspect, but we have no idea how this leap was propelled. . . . One is tempted, however reluctantly, to turn to divine assistance: for only a kind of miracle could produce this from that . It would take a supernatural magician to extract consciousness from matter, even living matter. Consciousness appears to introduce a sharp break in the natural order—a point at which scientific naturalism runs out of steam. (PC, 45)
McGinn adds in a note:
I do not know if anyone has ever tried to exploit consciousness to prove the existence of God,[*] along the lines of the traditional Argument from Design, but in this post-Darwinian era it is an argument with more force than the usual one, through lack of an alternative theory. It is indeed difficult to see how consciousness could have arisen from insentient matter; it seems to need an injection from outside the physical realm. (PC, 45n)
This recognition that the alleged emergence of experience is sui generis, without analogy to anything else, is the basis for McGinn's agnostic physicalism. He compares his position to that of Locke's "idea that our Godgiven faculties do not equip us to fathom the deep truth about reality. Locke held . . . [that] only divine revelation could enable us to understand how 'perceptions' are produced in our minds by material objects" (PC, 4n).
Not all physicalists agree with McGinn's agnosticism, of course. Flanagan, in fact, offers his book as a response to McGinn's view that consciousness is "terminally mysterious" (CR, xi–xii). "The gap between the subjective and the objective," Flanagan argues, "is an epistemic gap, not an ontological gap" (CR, 221). McGinn, of course, agrees with that. But Flanagan goes on to argue, against Nagel and McGinn, that "we do understand how physicalism can be true":
It can be true if every mental event is realized in the brain. Those of us who believe that all mental events . . . are tokened in the brain do not believe that the theory that eventually explains how they are tokened will capture "the true character of the experiences" as experiences. The whole idea that the qualitative feel of some experience should reveal itself in a theoretical de-
[*] The answer to McGinn's query is Yes. His former Oxford colleague Richard Swinburne, for example, argues in chapter 9 of The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979) that God is needed to explain consciousness. Swinburne summarizes this argument in The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986): "The ability of God's action to explain the otherwise mysterious mind-body connection is just one more reason for postulating his existence. . . . God, being omnipotent, would have the power to produce a soul thus interacting" (198–99).
scription of how that experience is realized fails to acknowledge the abstract relation between any theory and the phenomena it accounts for. (CR, 93)
No language, Flanagan says, can "convey phenomenal feel!" (CR, 99). But surely McGinn and Nagel understand that . Their point is quite a different one—that a theory couched entirely in externalistic (third-person) language is the wrong kind of theory for referring to conscious states. Of course, to describe my wife, or my neighbor's cat, as "feeling pain" does not convey the phenomenal feel of their experience. But it at least indicates that I think there is some phenomenal feel (some "what-it's-like-ness") there, whereas the language of chemical processes or neuron firings does not. Flanagan has simply missed the main point. That this is so is shown by the fact that, even after reading Nagel and McGinn, he proceeds to commit the emergence category mistake:
If we operate with more sensible standards of intelligibility, several credible stories can already be told to explain how such things as sensory qualia supervene on certain patterns of neural activity. Just as ordinary water is H2 O and is caused by H2 O, so too are experiences of colors, tastes, and smells identical to and caused by activity patterns in certain brain pathways. (CR, 221)
His solution, in other words, is essentially the same as Searle's. It does not provide any basis for considering McGinn's agnosticism baseless. Strawson sees this point clearly:
As an acting materialist, I . . . assume that experiential phenomena are realized in the brain. . . . But this assumption doesn't solve any problems for materialists. . . . [W]hen we consider the brain as current physics and neurophysiology presents it to us, we are obliged to admit that we do not know how experience—experiential what-it's-like-ness—is or even could be realized in the brain. (MR, 81)
One temptation, whenever there is an alleged gulf between ontological unlikes to be spanned, is to assume that unlike things can be connected if we posit a sufficient number of intermediaries in between, so that the gulf need not be spanned in one leap. The transition can be made gradually. For example, many theological worldviews, positing an absolute difference between the ultimate divine reality (e.g., as totally timeless) and the world as we know it (e.g., as fully temporal), portray a hierarchy of intermediate realities. The one at the top is virtually godlike, sharing many divine attributes (e.g., being virtually timeless) and having only a hint of worldliness (e.g., being slightly temporal). The next one down has a little less divinity and a little more worldliness, and so on, until the nature of the lowest intermediary is so like that of the world that interaction between them does not seem too miraculous to swallow. That lowest intermediary can likewise
interact with its immediate superior, and so on, so that, finally, interaction between the divine and the world seems possible, in spite of their absolute heterogeneity.
Contemporary physicalists, being as human and therefore as unresistant to temptation as their forebears who operated out of a theological paradigm, sometimes employ a similar strategy. Dennett provides a good example. In his chapter "The Evolution of Consciousness," be begins by stating clearly the assumption that at one time there was no experience: "In the beginning, there were no reasons [i.e., final causes]; there were only [efficient] causes. Nothing had a purpose . . .; there was no teleology in the world at all. There was nothing that had interests" (CE, 173). Dennett's task is to get from that starting point to us, with our reasons, purposes, and interests. And, like McGinn, he makes clear that the explanation must not require, even implicitly, a supernatural injection somewhere in the process. He states repeatedly, even to the point of including a cartoon, that one of the steps in the explanation cannot say, in effect, "then a miracle occurs" (CE, 38, 239, 255, 455). Unlike McGinn, however, he thinks that an explanation devoid of miracle can be given. Let us see.
After millennia, Dennett says, simple replicatots emerged. Did they have purposes? Dennett's answer is ambiguous: "While they had no inkling of their interests, and perhaps properly speaking had no interests, we . . . can nonarbitrarily assign them certain interests—generated by their defining 'interest' in self-duplication" (CE, 173). Has he said that things with final causes (reasons, interests, purposes) have (miraculously) emerged out of things that operate mechanically, by efficient causes alone? No, at least not yet: In spite of his weasel word "perhaps," he seems to grant that the replicators "properly speaking had no interests," and he uses scare quotes in speaking of their assigned "defining 'interest' in self-duplication." Dennett explains his meaning, furthermore, by saying, "If these simple replicators are to survive and replicate . . ., their environment must meet certain conditions" (CE, 173). No miracle, evidently, has occurred. But then he continues:
Put more anthropomorphically, if these simple replicators want to continue to replicate, they should hope and strive for various things; they should avoid the 'bad' things and seek the 'good' things. When an entity arrives on the scene capable of behavior that staves off, however primitively, its own dissolution and decomposition, it brings with it into the world its 'good.' That is to say, it creates a point of view . (CE, 173–74; emphases added)
Although Dennett begins this statement with the disarming assurance that it is "put anthropomorphically," which seems to mean that it is a purely as-if account, by the end it seems that the miracle has really occurred: Replicators really do, "however primitively," have a point of view and hence interests,
purposes. Teleology has emerged out of pure mechanism. Once Dennett has, thanks to his quiet little miracle, crossed this divide, he can account for human consciousness in terms of greatly increased complexity alone: "The point of view of conscious observers is . . . a sophisticated descendant of the primordial points of view of the first replicators who divided their worlds into good and bad" (CE, 176). But even if the miracle occurs long before the rise of human consciousness, it is no less a miracle (unless, of course, Dennett is giving a purely externalist, and thereby wholly inadequate, account of a "point of view").
Humphrey provides a similar explanation based on tiny steps. He says, "Before life emerged . . . there were presumably no minds of any kind at all. It follows that four thousand million years ago the world was totally unexperienced. . . . [E]verything . . . in nature was insentient" (HM, 16, 217). Humphrey's task is to get from there to the existence of animals, for whom, "whether at the level of an amoeba or an elephant," there is a boundary wall between "me" and "not-me" (HM, 18). His story describes "how present-day sensory activities could have developed step-by-step from primitive beginnings, starting with a local 'wriggle of acceptance or rejection' in response to stimulation at the body surface" (HM, 180f.). (Note how externalist language ["wriggle"] and internalist language ["acceptance or rejection"] are combined, just as in theological accounts the intermediaries embodied both divine and worldly features.) What occurred first, according to Humphrey, was a slight degree of "sensitivity" (HM, 18), which at first could be understood in purely externalist categories. But then natural selection selected for this sensitivity, so that it became more sophisticated. Pretty soon, an inner, phenomenal life of sorts emerged: "The phenomenology of sensory experiences came first. Before there were any other kinds of phenomena there were 'raw sensations'—tastes, smells, tickles, pains, sensations of warmth, of light, of sound and so on" (HM, 21). At some point, then, "certain events were being responded to as good or bad . . ., as of significance to 'me'" (HM, 19). Subjectivity had emerged out of pure objectivity.
Humphrey thinks this explanation has answered McGinn's problem: "A seeming miracle? No, as close to a real miracle as anything that ever happened. The twist may be that it takes only a relatively simple scientific theory to explain it" (HM, 219). The theory is indeed simple; but it is deceptively simple. The deception is that an infinite step has been made to seem a tiny one.[*] No matter how tiny, far back, and innocuous one tries to make
[*] After writing this, I learned that McGinn had addressed this issue in an earlier book, The Character of Mind . There he argues that although life admits of borderline cases, such as bacteria and organic molecules, which can be considered partly living and partly not, this is not the case with experience: Either there is "something 'inner,' some way the world appears to the creature," or there is not. Accordingly, whereas with life "we have to do with a gradual transition from the plainly inanimate to the indisputably living," with regard to experience "we cannot take such a gradualist view, admitting the existence of intermediate stages." The emergence of experience "must rather be compared to a sudden switching on of a light, narrow as the original shaft must have been." We must, therefore, think of the lowliest minds "as consisting in (so to speak) a small speck of [experience] quite definitely possessed, not in the partial possession of something admitting of degrees" (CM, 14). Although McGinn couches his argument in terms of "consciousness," I have phrased it in terms of "experience," because I do not, unlike McGinn, equate the two, and because I, thinking of consciousness as a very high-level type of experience, do believe that it can emerge gradually. With regard to the fimdamental issue, however, which is that an entity must either have an inner aspect or not—regardless of what term is used for this inner aspect—he seems absolutely right. The problem that McGinn's clarity on this point creates for a materialist, of course, is precisely the problem that Dennett and Humphrey are trying to circumvent: If an inner aspect suddenly emerges in things that previously had been completely devoid of any such aspect, the miraculous character of this alleged emergence, and thus its seeming impossibility within a naturalistic framework, is driven home.
it, however, it is still a miracle. For McGinn, the task is "to take the magic out of the link between consciousness and the brain" (PC, 2). This is because, for him, the question "How is it possible for conscious states to depend on brain states?" is assumed to be identical (see my list of problems at the outset of chapter 1) with the question "How could the aggregation of millions of individually insentient neurons generate subjective awareness?" (PC, 1). But if we assume that experience emerged earlier, perhaps with single-celled organisms such as amoebas, we would have the "experience-organelle problem," that is, the problem of how "to take the magic out of the link between" an amoeba's experience and its organelles. In other words, magic is implicit regardless of the level at which the first emergence of experience is said to occur.
This concern about magic, incidentally, is not new. At a conference on evolution in 1974, the great evolutionist Sewall Wright, a panexperientialist, declared in his paper, "Emergence of mind from no mind at all is sheer magic" (PS, 82). Theodosius Dobzhansky, an equally great evolutionist, replied, "Then I believe in magic!" Dobzhansky's reply, delivered in his thick Russian accent, brought the house down; but it also brought out the apparent trilemma: panexperientialism, supernatural intervention, or (Dobzhansky's choice) natural magic. McGinn, however, believes that there is another alternative. But this alternative is nothing but physicalist piety.
McGinn's "nonconstructive solution" (PC, 31) to the mind-body problem is simply to assert that there must be something purely natural about consciousness and therefore the brain that accounts for the relation between them, but that we are so constructed that we will never be able to know what this is. This must be the truth, he says, or else naturalism would be threatened: "The radical emergence of mind from matter has to be
epistemic only, on pain of accepting inexplicable miracles in the world" (PC, 6). Then, having thereby confessed that his position is based on paradigmatic and wishful-and-fearful thinking, he proceeds to speak as if he knows it to be true. For example, having stated that we cannot refute a creationist account of consciousness "by actually producing a non-miraculous explanatory theory," he says that "we can refute it by arguing that such a naturalistic theory must exist " (PC, 17n). How does this response differ from that of the traditional Christian theologian who, speaking "from faith to faith" to fellow sharers in the orthodox paradigm, argues that although we cannot actually refute the charge of self-contradictory nonsense by producing an account of how Jesus was fully divine and yet fully human, we can refute the charge by arguing that such an account must exist? McGinn begins his book by telling us that his solution has given him a great sense of relief, one that he tries to induce in his readership (PC, vii). But this sense of relief rests entirely on faith. "The philosophical problem," he says, "arises from the sense that we are compelled to accept that nature contains miracles." But, he continues, "we do not need to accept this: we can rest secure in the knowledge that some (unknowable) property of the brain makes everything fall into place" (PC, 18). (Believers commonly gain a sense of security by thinking of their faith as knowledge.) McGinn says that a proposal is adequate to the degree that it avoids the seeming necessity to choose between eliminativism and accepting a miracle, and proclaims his own proposal a success because "it allows us to resist the postulation of miracles" (PC, 18n). All it really does, however, is declare that no miracle occurred while giving not a hint as to how the feat was accomplished without one. Having pointed out that we do not know how to reduce consciousness to the brain, McGinn explains: "We need to distinguish being able to give a reduction from knowing that a reduction exists " (PC, 31n). But McGinn's position here is similar to that of reductionists who base their present confidence in physicalism on promissory notes about the future glories of neuroscience—except that McGinn gives no such note, saying instead that we will never be able actually to give a reductionistic explanation.
Indeed, in calling his position "agnostic realism" (PC, 120), McGinn recognizes that he is similar to an "agnostic theist" (PC, 119). In answering the question as to how he can so enthusiastically believe in something about whose nature he can say nothing, he claims that we "can know that something exists without knowing its nature. We can assert that a gap is filled without being able to say how it is filled" (PC, 119). His comparison with agnostic theism is apt. One of the main reasons for rejecting theism is the problem of evil: Why, critics ask, if God is both omnipotent and good, is there such horrendous evil in the world? One of the most popular answers today, employing a combination of claimed knowledge and agnosticism analogous to McGinn's, goes something like this: "Because we know that
God exists, and because we know that God is perfect in wisdom and goodness, we can know that God must have a perfectly good reason for allowing all these evils. We can know this without having the slightest inkling as to what that reason might be. In fact, we can see that it is perfectly reasonable, given our finite natures, that we should not be able to figure out what that reason is." This kind of argument, of course, is viciously circular: The socalled knowledge is based entirely on faith—a faith, in fact, that is insulated from the possibility of falsification.
In spite of all his talk of knowledge, McGinn does finally admit that it is something less. Of his naturalism, which he describes as "the thesis, metaphysical in character, that nothing that happens in nature is inherently anomalous, God-driven, an abrogation of basic laws," he says: "It is, I suppose, an article of metaphysical faith" (PC, 87).[*] One can sympathize with Flanagan and others for not finding the relief that McGinn had hoped his "solution" would provide. Blind faith is blind faith whether it be of the supernaturalistic or the naturalistic variety, and blind faith does not provide a secure resting place for most intellectuals.
I am not at all, given my regulative principles, objecting to McGinn's naturalistic faith; I share it myself. But it should be a faith seeking understanding. Just as I hold that a theistic faith is not reasonable unless it can provide an intelligible and persuasive theodicy, which for me means rejecting supernaturalism in favor of a version of naturalistic theism,[11] so any form of naturalism is precarious insofar as it cannot provide an intelligible and persuasive account of the mind-body relation. This account must be more than simply a restatement of faith.
McGinn's position is meant to be based, to be sure, not simply on faith but also on an argument. This argument, however, involves a fallacy, which can be dubbed the actual-possible fallacy . The best way to show that something is possible is to show that it is actual. Actually going to the moon settled all the doubts as to whether it was possible. That part of the argument is unassailable. Insofar as we take a particular paradigm for granted, however, we are apt to insinuate theoretical inferences into our statement of empirical fact. Some theists, for example, have answered the question as to whether an individual could be both fully human and fully divine by pointing to Jesus: Because it happened, it is obviously possible.[**] Likewise,
[*] Strawson sees this point more consistently. "Belief in the truth of materialism is a matter of faith," he says, adding: "My faith, like that of many other materialists, consists in a bundle of connected and unverifiable beliefs" (MR, 43, 105).
[**] Millard J. Erickson provides an example: "We sometimes approach the incarnation the wrong way. We define deity and humanity abstractly and then say, 'They could not possibly fit together.' . . . If, however, we begin with the reality of the incarnation in Jesus Christ, we . . . recognize that whatever [the two natures] are, they are not incompatible, for they once did coexist in one person. And what is actual is of course possible" (Christian Theology [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1985], 737).
in response to questions as to whether it is possible for a purely spiritual being to act upon a material world (an aspect of the mind-body problem writ large), one would commit the actual-possible fallacy if one pointed to the world as God's creation as proof. To a physicalist, these theistic examples of the fallacy are obvious, but physicalists are then likely to commit their own versions. For example, McGinn says, "It is just as hard to see how an entity constructed naturally from mere matter can be conscious as it is to see how an intentionally created material object can be. But we know that the former is possible, because we have seen it done" (PC, 205).
This argument may seem unobjectionable until we recall the theoretical idea packed into the term "mere matter," which entails that the "grey matter" of the brain is composed entirely of "individually insentient neurons" (PC, 1). It is one thing to say that we know that it is possible for conscious states to arise out of a brain, because it actually occurs. It is something entirely different to say that we know that it is possible for conscious states to arise out of a brain composed of neurons that are individually insentient, because it has actually happened. This we do not know; it is pure supposition. This actual-possible fallacy, I suspect, provides the basis for McGinn's twofold conclusion that the relation between the brain and consciousness is a purely naturalistic relation, meaning one consistent with physicalism, but that we will never be able to understand this relation.
The actual-possible fallacy with regard to our question is not at all rare; in fact, it seems to be committed by a good share of dualists and materialists alike. It goes back to Descartes, who was persistently questioned by Princess Elisabeth as to how mind and body, if they were totally different, could interact. After it was clear that reference to the pineal gland at best answered only the question of where, not that of how, Descartes finally admitted that he did not know how. He added that this is not very important, however, because it is empirically obvious that they do interact.[12] It evidently did not occur to him that this empirical fact counted against his own characterization of the body, or the mind, or both. This same fallacy is committed by the contemporary Cartesian H. D. Lewis. In response to John Passmore's question, cited earlier, as to how minds, capable of only rational persuasion, can affect bodies, capable only of pushing and being pushed, Lewis says,
It seems quite evident that my putposing to put on my spectacles or wave my hand is not itself a physical state or process. . . . But if we find that this nonspatial purpose does in fact normally bring about a physical change, how can we possibly question this just because it defies further explanation? . . . [W]e must accept [the world] however remarkable it may seem to be in some respects. (ES, 34)
Lewis, like Descartes, fails to distinguish between the "evident" facts and his theoretical construal of them. In response to Bernard Williams, Lewis says,
We may indeed admit that there is "something deeply mysterious about the interaction which Descartes's theory required between two items of totally disparate natures." . . . But there is a limit to explanation and a point where we just have to accept things as we find them to be. . . . [W]ould it not be better for philosophers, rather than trying to explain away or discredit extraordinary facts of experience, to stop and wonder at them and their possible further implications? (ES, 38f.)
Lewis, having so deeply internalized the dualistic paradigm, evidently fails to consider that there may be nothing "extra-ordinary" about the facts of experience at issue, but that it is only the dualistic construal that makes them seem so, and that what at least some critics are doing is discrediting that construal, not the facts. Nor does he evidently consider that, having accepted interaction of mind and body, the "possible further implications" are that the Cartesian construal of mind or body or both is erroneous.
I return now to materialistic examples of the actual-possible fallacy, beginning with one provided by Dennett: "How could a complicated slew of electrochemical interactions between billions of neurons amount to conscious experience? And yet we readily imagine human beings to be conscious, even if we can't imagine how this could be" (CE, 433). Ergo, the conclusion is, consciousness has arisen out of insentient neurons. Humphrey makes a similar move, contrasting the problem of turning water into wine, which he considers unsolvable in principle, with the problem "of getting consciousness into the brain." The "interesting difference" between them, he says, is that "while the former has never been known to occur, the latter occurs all the time" (HM, 6). The latter part of that statement is certainly true, but Humphrey assumes that this fact carries with it the fact that consciousness has arisen out of a "foam of insensate matter." (It is, incidentally, puzzling that both Dennett and Humphrey, after having given an evolutionary sketch according to which an elementary form of sentience is present in amoebas, which are single-celled organisms, persist in thinking of neurons, which are single-celled organisms, as insentient.) Humphrey does not know, however, that consciousness has arisen out of brains composed of insentient neurons; he only believes this. What he knows, at best, is that conscious experience has arisen out of brains.
By recognizing the actual-possible fallacy for what it is, we can overcome the widespread assumption that we know that conscious experience has somehow emerged out of insentient matter, an assumption on the basis of which thinkers, both philosophic and scientific, set themselves the impossible task of trying to figure out where and how this occurred. We can
thereby realize more clearly that the problem is simply that of trying to figure out how conscious experience arose out of brains, a problem whose solution may require us to modify our inherited assumptions about the components of those brains.
The main purpose of this chapter has not been simply to rehearse the problems of both dualism and materialism; those are known well enough (although it is usually not appreciated how many problems they have in common). The main purpose has been to show that all of those problems are rooted in the same intuition: the Cartesian intuition about matter. As Whitehead points out, almost all schools of thought have "admitted the Cartesian analysis of the ultimate elements of nature" (SMW, 145). This was an analysis that completely excluded mind from nature. What is suggested, accordingly, is that a solution to the mind-body problem may need to be based on a philosophy that would regard mind as fully natural, thereby rejecting the Cartesian intuition about bodies. This is the topic of the next chapter.
Seven
Fully Naturalizing the Mind
The Neglected Alternative
I. The Exclusion of the Panexperientialist Alternative
As the previous chapter has shown, the philosophical aspects of the mindbody problem (as distinct from its empirical aspects) are due to the assumption that what we normally call the physical or material world, at least below some level, is wholly devoid of experience, of any "within." Once this is seen, the long-standing standoff between dualism and materialism over the "world-knot" can be seen for what it is: a family quarrel. It is a squabble, apparently interminable, among those who have accepted early modernity's absolute exclusion of all experiential features from the basic units of nature. As pointed out earlier, the naturalistic materialism of late modernity simply eliminated God and the nonphysical soul from the dualistic supernaturalism of early modernity, leaving intact its view of nature as insentient matter. To bring out the similarity between the two positions even more, we can say, with Searle, that materialism is "really a form of dualism," insofar as it has accepted the dualistic analysis of the meaning of "physical" and "mental" (RM, 26). Charles Hartshorne, from a different perspective, argues that materialism is really dualism in disguise (CSPM, 9, 27). His point is that materialists must in some sense acknowledge the existence of experiencing things, because they are examples thereof; they, accordingly, implicitly affirm that the universe contains two metaphysically different types of actual things: experiencing and nonexperiencing.
If their common Cartesian intuition about matter is the basic reason why neither dualists nor materialists can provide an adequate account of the mind-body relation, the way forward in the discussion would seem obvious: Let's try out the version of realism that they excluded from the family,
panpsychism—or, better, panexperientialism. "Panpsychism" is the term that has generally been used for this position. "Panexperientialism" is preferable, however, for two reasons: (1) The term "psyche" suggests that the basic units endure through long stretches of time, whereas they may be momentary experiences; and (2) "psyche" inevitably suggests a higher form of experience than would be appropriate for the most elementary units of nature.[*] Nevertheless, I will in this chapter sometimes use "panpsychism," because it is the term used by the various authors I quote.
To affirm panexperientialism would be finally to carry through the regulative principle that mind should be naturalized, because it would involve attributing the two basic features that we associate with mind—experience and spontaneity—to all units of nature.[**] As Searle has pointed out, when materialists talk about "'naturalizing' mental phenomena, they mean reducing them to physical phenomena" (RM, 2). What this reduction implies is that those aspects of the mind that do not fit the materialist paradigm, the mind's experience and spontaneity, are not really natural. The early modernists' dualism between natural matter and supernatural mind is still assumed.
This assumption is revealed in McGinn's discussion of why he locates the unknowable property that explains the relation between consciousness and the brain in the hidden structure of consciousness, not merely in the brain. He says,
It is consciousness that cries out for naturalistic explanation, not cerebral matter. Consciousness is the anomalous thing, the thing that tests our naturalistic view of the world. It is what threatens to import . . . weird properties that cannot be instantiated by physical objects. . . . Consciousness needs to have a nature that renders it incorporable into a world whose fundamental constituents are physical particles and the forces that govern them. . . . The stigma of the occult must be removed from consciousness. (PC, 68)
(Although McGinn speaks of consciousness here, not merely experience, he typically does not distinguish them, using "consciousness" inclusively for
[*] Although Hartshorne, after long using the term "panpsychism," replaced it with "psychicalism," he has recently said that he sees advantages in the term "panexperientialism" ("General Remarks," in Hartshorne, Process Philosophy and Theology, ed. Robert Kane and Stephen H. Phillips [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989], 181). I first (to my present knowledge) proposed "panexperientialism" as the preferable term in MN, 97–98.
[**] The term "units" implies a distinction between true individuals and aggregational organizations of such, which I will explain in the following chapters. For now the point is that panpsychism or panexperientialism does not, in spite of a host of detractors wishing to be able to dismiss it in a phrase as obviously ludicrous, necessarily imply (for example) that "rocks have feelings." The "pan" in the panexperientialism to be advocated here refers not simply to all things but only to all genuine units or individuals . This means that experience is not attributed to aggregational things, such as rocks and chairs, as such.
all forms of experience.) How unnatural experience seems to one who has imbibed the physicalist version of naturalism is brought out by the fact that "properties that cannot be instantiated by physical objects" are considered "anomalous," even "weird" and "occult." Although physicalists—for example, Flanagan (CR, 1f.)—typically regard dualists as supernaturalists for affirming the existence of a nonphysical mind, they no more than dualists regard the mind's experience and spontaneity as fully natural, as present to some degree in all natural units.[*] Panexperientialism is hence the only form of realism that truly regards the mind as natural. As Whitehead says,
Any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences. If there be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact of nature is mere bluff. . . . We should either admit dualism . . ., or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experiences with physical science. (AI, 185)
Materialistic monism's inability to solve the mind-body problem, in spite of ostensibly rejecting dualism, is due to the fact that its claim to naturalize human experience has been "mere bluff." A panexperientialist monism might be able to do better. We should at least give it a try.
The panexperientialist or panpsychist option has, however, been virtually ignored in most discussions. Almost all authors write as if there were only two realistic options, dualism and materialism. For example, Dennett, saying that he will defend a functionalist form of materialism, contrasts materialism with the "other idea" that "conscious thoughts and experiences cannot be brain happenings, but must be . . . something in addition, made of different stuff. . . . The idea of mind as distinct in this way from the brain, composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff, is dualism, and it is deservedly in disrepute today" (CE, 33). The idea that there might be a third option, according to which the mind is distinct from the brain but not composed of a different kind of "stuff," does not come up. Dualists also generally keep the discussion within the family. For example, Geoffrey Madell writes in the preface to Mind and Materialism that he has sympathy with "the underlying motivation behind materialism" because of "the difficulties which any dualist position confronts." He concludes, however, that the difficulties of materialism are even greater, so that there is no alternative but to return to dualism, in spite of its serious difficulties (MM, 9, 135, 145). The idea that there might be a third option is not se-
[*] It should be noted that I am generalizing experience to all individuals; consciousness, by contrast, is understood as a very high level form of experience, a way of focusing a light, as it were, on a few ingredients of experience; more on this in the next chapter. In speaking of spontaneity, I refer to an at least rudimentary anticipation of what becomes self-determination in high-grade individuals.
riously considered. The books by Dennett and Madell provide only two of countless writings in which we are told time and time again that the choice must be between dualism and materialism (sometimes phrased as dualism and monism, with the assumption that monism means materialism). These writers will sometimes explore two or three varieties of dualism and even more varieties of materialism (the large number of which reflects what Searle calls the neurotic-like pattern of behavior based on the assumption that some version of materialism must be true). But much more time will be devoted to each of those versions of dualism and materialism than to all the versions of panexperientialism or panpsychism combined.
If panpsychism is even mentioned, it is usually dismissed in a paragraph, if not a sentence. For example, Madell devotes one sentence to it, dismissing it with the statement that it does not have "any explanation to offer as to why or how mental properties cohere with physical" (MM, 3). But against which version of panpsychism this complaint is lodged he does not say; he does not even show evidence of having studied any actual author advocating panpsychism. Humphrey, after having said that "there was a time in history when consciousness existed nowhere," adds this parenthetical comment: "(The alternative idea, that consciousness has always been inherent in every particle of matter, sometimes called 'panpsychism', is one of those superficially attractive ideas that crumbles to nothing as soon as it is asked to do any sort of explanatory work.)" (HM, 193). Besides the fact that most forms of panpsychism do not attribute consciousness (as distinct from experience, feeling, sentience, or protoconsciousness) to particles of matter, the reader is left to take on faith Humphrey's declaration that when it is asked to do any explanatory work it "crumbles to nothing." Again, no reference to any actual version of panpsychism is given. Seager, as usual more openminded than most about unorthodox ideas, says that panpsychism does not seem "outright impossible" (MC, 106). And he states (in an endnote) that panpsychism might make sense of the relation between consciousness and the brain. But, he adds, "I am not sure that such a theory is even intelligible and I am certain it is implausible" (MC, 241–42n). He at least gives a hint as to the kind of panpsychism he has in mind, namely, one that "maintained that high level mental features were assembled from 'mental atoms' in some way similar to that relating micro-structure to macro-structure in the physical realm." I agree that such a panpsychism would be implausible. But the unknowing reader would be left with the impression that this is what "panpsychism" is, although this doctrine is not referred to any actual philosopher and, in fact, no philosophers are mentioned who have actually developed any form of panpsychism.[*]
[*] Up to this point, I have been referring to Seager's position as stated in his 1991 book, Metaphysics of Consciousness . However, after reading an earlier version of my manuscript for this book, Seager articulated a version of panpsychism with features that, he says, "ameliorate its implausibility" (CIP, 283n14). While offering "a defence of it only with great diffidence" (CIP, 279), Seager says that "the philosophical objections against panpsychism [can] be answered" (CIP, 284). I will discuss Seager's version later.
If philosophers take seriously the regulative principle that when arguing for the truth of one position by eliminating all alternatives but one, all alternatives must really be examined, then in their examination of realistic, naturalistic philosophies they cannot simply ignore panpsychism or dismiss it as obviously false without examining any actual examples of it. A second aspect of the principle is that the strongest version of each basic option should be examined, not one of the weaker versions (and certainly not a made-up caricature). This second aspect of the principle, of course, introduces a matter of judgment, but Whitehead and Hartshorne, both of whom have been included in the "Library of Living Philosophers," are clearly the two most distinguished twentieth-century philosophers who have developed versions of panpsychism. It would not be unreasonable, accordingly, to assume that they have developed the strongest versions. My own treatment draws on what I consider the best ideas in both.
Nagel, who explicitly advocates the principle of seeking truth by excluding all alternatives but one, was evidently the first contemporary analytic philosopher dealing with the mind-body problem to take panpsychism seriously. (His discussion, in fact, seems to be the source of the brief comments about panpsychism made by several other contemporary philosophers.) Nagel is puzzled by panpsychism. On the one hand, he sees that some version of panpsychism (a two-aspect version) seems to follow from realism combined with the denial of a soul, the nonreducibility of experiential states to nonexperiential properties, and the fact that a pour soi cannot be formed (naturalistically) out of entities devoid of experiential states (MQ, 181–82, 188, 192). On the other hand, he finds this conclusion "unsettling" (VN, 49), perhaps in part because he is describing himself when he says that "if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all" (MQ, 168). Another difficulty is puzzlement as to what the protomental properties of an atom could be (VN, 49–50). The chief problem, however, seems to be the thought that panpsychism is "perhaps unintelligible," because it seems impossible to understand how "a single self [could] be composed of many selves." The reason for this is that the only concept of a part-whole relation we have, he believes, is a physicalist one, such as "how a muscle movement is composed of myriad physico-chemical events at the molecular level" (MQ, 194; VN, 50). But Nagel is not dogmatic: After saying that this model will not work and that we lack the concept of "a mental part-whole relation" that would do justice to the experienced unity of consciousness, he adds
that he may be working with "false assumptions about the part-whole relation" (VN, 51).
The weakness of Nagel's discussion, bold as it is given modern prejudices, is that it is not based on an examination of any actual panexperientialist position developed by a twentieth-century philosopher. In particular, it does not come close to the form articulated by Alfred North Whitehead, who was called, in the (hostile) article on panpsychism in the 1972 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "the most distinguished champion of panpsychism in the twentieth century" (see Sec. III, 7 below). Nagel, accordingly, has not fulfilled his own principle of examining the strongest version of each of the basic options. Insofar as it is any particular view of panpsychism that he discusses, it seems to be a kind deriving from Spinoza, which is how Nagel describes his own dual-aspect theory, according to which "mental phenomena are the subjective aspects of states which can also be described physically" (NYR, n6). No one would think, however, that exploring Descartes's version of the mechanistic view of matter, or Hobbes's version of materialism, would fulfill the principle of exploring the strongest version of each position. In any case, I will suggest in chapter 9 that Whitehead and Hartshorne have provided an experiential concept of the part-whole relation (which Hartshorne calls a "compound individual") that is quite different from the aggregational concept quite rightly considered inadequate by Nagel and others following him.
One of these is McGinn, who devotes a little more attention to panpsychism than do most contemporary philosophers. This is not true of his 1991 book, The Problem of Consciousness, however. Only a few brief references to panpsychism are scattered throughout this collection of essays. In a footnote, McGinn says, "Attributing specks of proto-consciousness to the constituents of matter is not supernatural in the way postulating immaterial substances or divine interventions is; it is merely extravagant" (PC, 2n). This is on the same page, incidentally, on which he says that "something pretty remarkable is needed if the mind-body relation is to be made sense of." If we take these two assertions to constitute a formal regulative principle, McGinn has given us a difficult assignment: Our solution must be "remarkable" and yet not "extravagant." In any case, McGinn concludes this note by saying he will "be assuming that panpsychism, like all other extant constructive solutions, is inadequate as an answer to the mind-body problem." In another note, McGinn says that if neurons had conscious or protoconscious states, it would be "easy enough to see how neurons could generate consciousness" (PC, 28n). This is a startling statement from one who is arguing that the mind-body problem is permanently insoluble. Should we not explore this alternative, the reader might wonder, before succumbing to pessimism prematurely? But McGinn blocks this path of inquiry, assuring the reader that this view of neurons is, in a word, "false." Actually, his main
objection (the objection that it is false is inserted parenthetically) is that this view of neurons "just pushes the question back . . .: for how do these conscious properties of neurons arise from their physical nature?" This is a good question, being, in fact, the question I raised above about the attempts by Dennett and Humphrey to speak of "points of view arising out of purely insentient material particles. McGinn, however, knows that there is another possibility, which is that experience, like the lady's turtles, goes all the way down. McGinn gives a three-word parenthetical response to this possible answer: "(Panpsychism now threatens.)"
Exactly what panpsychism threatens is not explicitly stated, but the answer seems implicit. What is threatened is the rock-bottom ontological premise of the modern paradigm, which is that the fundamental units of nature are material or physical in the sense of being devoid of all experience. Having inherited the early modern dualists' idea of matter, late modern materialists, in rejecting the dualism of their elder siblings, are not content simply to espouse a nondualistic or monistic view according to which all actual things would embody physicality. They insist that the fundamental units of nature must be physical not only in this broad sense but also in the sense established by their elders—that they be wholly devoid of all experience whatsoever. This love-hate relationship with dualism is what prevents materialism from being truly monistic. Even though panpsychism might solve modernity's central philosophical problem, it is seen as a threat, not an opportunity, because it would solve the problem by rejecting what has probably become the most deeply ingrained soft-core commonsense notion of the modern mind, so deeply ingrained that many are willing to sacrifice several hard-core commonsense notions to carry through its implications. Paradigms are powerful.
McGinn's rejection of panpsychism is particularly interesting in the light of his unearthing a passage suggesting that Kant assumed a panpsychist solution to the mind-body problem. Here is the passage (from the First Critique) quoted by McGinn (PC, 81):
The difficulty peculiar to the problem consists . . . in the assumed heterogeneity of the object of inner sense (the soul) and the objects of the outer senses, the formal condition of their intuition being, in the case of the former, time only, and in the case of the latter, also space. But if we consider that the two kinds of objects thus differ from each other, not inwardly but only in so far as one appears outwardly to another, and that what, as thing in itself, underlies the appearances of matter, perhaps after all may not be so heterogeneous in character, this difficulty vanishes, the only question that remains being how in general a communion of substances is possible.[1]
Kant suggests, in this remarkable passage, that the soul, as we know it from within, and objects of sensory perception, as they are in themselves, may
not be different in kind, that they may appear to be thus different only because we know them in different ways: The soul knows itself from within but knows an outer object only insofar as that object "appears outwardly" to it. That some kind of panpsychist position should be assumed by Kant, even if not trumpeted after he took his critical turn, should not be surprising in light of the fact that before that turn he had held a somewhat Leibnizian viewpoint. That this is the view alluded to here is suggested by the assertion that the only remaining question is "how in general a communion of substances is possible": Leibniz, of course, given his monadology, had no special problem with mind-body interaction but, given his views on the self-identity of enduring substances, described his monads as "windowless," as he could allow no genuine "communion" (efficient causation) between his substances. (The present passage discovered by McGinn corresponds to a footnote in Kant's Dreams of a Ghost-seer [Pt. I, chap. 1, n1], in which Kant says that we must either remain agnostic about what the objects of our sensory perceptions are in themselves or else agree with Leibniz that they are psychical entities of a nonhuman kind, but that, if we were to adopt the latter course, we could not understand how they could interact to form a cosmos.)
What is McGinn's response to this discovery? On the one hand, he says that Kant diagnoses a "sort of error we are prone to make: mistaking the phenomenal for the noumenal" (PC, 84). On the other hand, he resists Kant's solution. Formulating the issue in terms of "heterogeneity" and "homogeneity," McGinn suggests, is "too restrictive" and perhaps "the wrong way to think about it" (PC, 82). McGinn himself, however, later asks: "How can consciousness be physically governed . . . and yet be so utterly unlike that which governs it?" (PC, 100). His real objection to Kant's suggestion is that Kant "attributes the problem-resolving hidden structure to matter, not to mind" (PC, 82). We have already seen that McGinn is loath to give up his Cartesian intuition about matter and that he thinks that it is mind, not matter thus construed, that is anomalous. He goes right back, accordingly, to contrasting his own experience, as known from within, to his brain, as known from without, saying, "I should be amazed that this vivid experience of red could result from chemical perturbations in that little bit of wet cortex" (PC, 85).
Even his discovery that Kant still took panpsychism seriously after his critical turn, then, does not lead McGinn to take it seriously. In any case, although McGinn evidently did not think it important enough to mention in The Problem of Consciousness, he had, in an earlier book, devoted about two pages (CM, 31–33) to refuting panpsychism. However, as indicated in the preface (CM, v), the version he there treats is the one articulated by Nagel. Although McGinn seems to think that his refutations apply across the board, to every possible version of panpsychism, this is not the
case. For one thing, although the Whiteheadian-Hartshornean version of panpsychism emphasizes the distinction between compound individuals and aggregational societies, McGinn assumes that all visible entities must exemplify essentially the same type of whole-part relation. Combining this assumption with his own assumption that to have experience is necessarily to have conscious thoughts, he indicts panpsychism for holding the absurd view that rocks have thoughts (CM, 32). Also, McGinn's approach to panpsychism is heavily colored by his twofold assumption that experience must be wholly derivative from ("supervenient upon") the purely physical properties of things and that the behavior of all things, including electrons and animals as well as rocks and billiard balls, must be amenable to description and prediction in terms of scientific laws, whereas the WhiteheadianHartshornean version of panexperientialism is largely devoted to showing why this twofold assumption, which leads to the rejection of our hard-core commonsense beliefs about freedom, need not be accepted.[*] After having developed this version of panexperientialism in more detail, I will, in an interlude in chapter 9, show more fully why McGinn's attempted refutations miss the mark.
I have been documenting the exclusion of the panexperientialist form of realism and suggesting that the main reason for this exclusion is that it is dictated by the Cartesian intuition about matter at the root of the modern paradigm, shared by dualists and materialists alike, according to which the elementary units of nature must be devoid of both experience and spontaneity. Although modern philosophers have by and large been unphilosophical in their exclusion of panexperientialism from consideration, this exclusion is understandable. Philosophy is a human enterprise, carried on by fully human beings, and paradigmatic thinking and the associated wishful-and-fearful thinking are part and parcel of the human condition. People who become professional philosophers, furthermore, are probably even more prone than most people to think paradigmatically. The criticism of the fact that panexperientialism has been ignored, accordingly, is not meant to be an indictment of any individual or the mainline philosophical community in general. It is meant only to emphasize the point that there is another alternative, an alternative that may point the way forward. Although we are all paradigmatic and wishful-and-fearful thinkers to a great extent, we are not, in spite of claims to the contrary by some extremists, completely at the mercy of such factors. Although they do greatly color our interpretation of data, they do not completely determine it: The "stubborn facts" retain some of their transcendence over theory. We are, accordingly,
[*] The problems that arise from the standard physicalist account of "supervenience," along with the way in which the mind can be said to be supervenient on the brain in panexperientialism, will be discussed at more length in relation to Kim's position in chapter 10.
able to objectify our own theories, including the paradigmatic intuitions they embodr and come to see their inadequacies and to consider alternatives. That this is currently happening, among dualists and materialists alike, is what stimulated my own writing of this book: The time seems to be ripe for a presentation of the panexperientialist alternative. In the next section I summarize the main reasons why this alternative should be given serious consideration by contemporary philosophers.
Before moving to that discussion, however, I will briefly examine the position of one materialist philosopher who has already seen that panex-perientialism should be given careful consideration, Galen Strawson. Recognizing that discussions of the mind-body problem cannot avoid metaphysics and that the metaphysical task is to give a unified account of all of reality (MR, 48, 79, 103), Strawson says that what stands in the way of this unified account is the mind-body problem, which is essentially the problem of "the relation between experience and matter " (MR, 44). "Serious materialists" cannot deny the reality of experience, he says, because "it is still, after many centuries of philosophy, the thing of which we can be most certain," and they must also, by virtue of holding that reality is entirely physical, say that "all experiential properties are themselves entirely physical properties" (MR, 57). In saying this, however, they must admit that they really do not know what they mean: "We don't understand how experience itself can be a physical thing, given our current physics" (MR, 180).
Nevertheless, the recognition that experience must be a purely physical property, if materialism is true, means that the inherited language must be changed. "Serious materialists, then,. . . cannot talk of the physical as opposed to the mental or experiential at all. If they do talk like this—and they do all the time [indeed, Strawson himself continues to do so at times]—they can only really mean to talk of the nonexperiential physical as opposed to the experiential physical" (MR, 58). This linguistic reform, however, does nothing to mitigate the mind-body problem, which is now how to understand the relation between the physical that is experiential and the physical that is not.
The problem, more precisely, is "the relation between the experiential or mental, on the one hand, and the physical as conceived of by current physics, on the other" (MR, 58). It seems impossible to integrate them into a unified account because experiential predicates and the predicates employed in the descriptive scheme of current physics are not "theoretically homogeneous," due to the fact that the descriptive scheme of current physics makes no reference to experiential qualities: "We have an atomic physics . . ., but we don't have a qualitative-character-of-experience physics at all" (MR, 88, 89). The integration of these two realms, which "seem radically disparate in their intrinsic character," would, therefore, "require a kind of theoretical homogenization that seems at present unimaginable" (MR, 75,
89). Thus far Strawson sounds very much like McGinn. In fact, he even suggests that McGinn may be correct, saying that "perhaps we experience and conceptualize the nonexperiential physical in such a way that the existence of the experiential physical will always appear mysterious or inexplicable, relative to our conception of the rest of the physical" (MR, 89). Strawson's position is different from McGinn's, however, on a crucial point. McGinn, as we saw, believes that the hidden structure that would resolve the mind-body problem, if only we were privy to it, belongs to the mind, not to matter. He rejects the Kantian suggestion as to the way to overcome heterogeneity, accordingly, because it "attributes the problem-resolving hidden structure to matter, not to mind" (PC, 82). Strawson, however, has the opposite intuition. He is well aware that "the [conventional] notion of the physical is usually accepted as an untroublesome terminus for thought," so that "the majority view in contemporary philosophy of mind [is] that the principle cause of the intractability of the problem lies in the defective nature of our existing concepts of the mental or experiential" (MR, 32, 104). According to this dominant viewpoint, the "mental notions will give way," with the result that "we will be able to give, at least in principle, a full and satisfactory account of the general nature of reality using only those notions that we already deploy in 'contemporary physical science'" (MR, 100; citing Dennett, CE, 40). But, says Strawson, "this view seems astonishing. It is a very great act of faith" (MR, 100).
Much more likely, holds Strawson, is the opposite view, "that all the blame for the intractability of the mind-body problem should be laid on the inadequacy of our current conception of those phenomena that are traditionally called 'physical,'" which means that "it is the descriptive scheme of physics that will have to change dramatically if there is to be an acceptable theoretical unification with the mental scheme" (MR, 99, 104). Strawson bases this minority view on his conviction that "we cannot be as wrong about the mental, and in particular the experiential, as we can be about the physical." With regard to the experiential character of pains, for example, "how they seem is how they are. There is no room for error of the sort envisaged [by those who think that we are entirely wrong about the nature of pains and other experiences]" (MR, 50–51). By contrast, there is plenty of room to be "very wrong about the nature of the physical" (MR, 1). Strawson, in fact, considers "unjustified" the "modern faith that we have an adequate grasp of the fundamental nature of matter at some crucial general level of understanding" (MR, 105). Indeed, he says, "this cannot be right if materialism is true" (MR, 105). This is so because, to repeat, the materialist must hold "that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena. But if they are, then it seems that we must be ignorant of the nature of the physical in some fundamental way, for experiential phenomena . . . just do not show up in what we think of as our best account of the
nature of the physical: physics (or physics plus the sciences that we take to be reducible to physics)" (MR, 47).
Of course, one can, as an act of faith, simply declare that experience is fully physical, while recognizing that its properties remain different in kind from the properties ascribed to the rest of the physical by our current science of the physical. One remains, accordingly, without even a glimmer of understanding as to how these two kinds of properties—the experiential and the nonexperiential—can both belong to the same thing. This train of thought leads Strawson to affirm "agnostic materialism," which means affirming that everything is fully physical or material as an act of faith while holding that "we must be radically ignorant about fundamental aspects of the nature of the physical," which means assuming that "our current conception of the physical is fundamentally incomplete" (MR, xii, 43, 98).
That Strawson's agnosticism differs from McGinn's by assuming our fatal ignorance has to do with the nature of matter, instead of the nature of mind, leads to a second difference: Whereas McGinn assumes our ignorance to be permanently invincible, Strawson evidently believes it might be overcome. This second difference follows from the first, in that McGinn evidently embodies what Strawson calls the modern faith that the conventional view of matter is adequate "at some crucial general level of understanding," whereas Strawson, not sharing this faith, believes that we might eventually develop an adequate conception at this level. He holds, in any case, that if we are ever to solve the mind-body problem, we will need a "revolution" in physics, meaning a "radical and currently unimaginable extension or modification of the descriptive scheme of current physics, of a kind that would bring it into theoretical homogeneity with experiential predicates" (MR, 92, 99).
This modification of the descriptive scheme would have to hold "at least some experiential properties to be fundamental physical properties" (MR, 60). Some of his fellow materialists, Strawson is aware, "will think this very alarming" (MR, 61). But this is either because they "are not really realists about experiential properties" or because they have not realized that, if they are, they have only two choices: "either these experiential properties are reducible to other, nonexperiential physical properties, and do not feature as fundamental in an optimal physics; or they are not reducible to nonexperiential physical properties, and at least some of them feature as fundamental in an optimal physics. There is no other possibility" (MR, 61). Because there are only these two possibilities (Strawson rightly says), and because there is good reason to believe that the first one is false, materialists must hold the second one to be true, which means that an optimal physics will attribute experiential properties to the most fundamental physical entities or processes. Expanding on the notion that there is not a third possibility, which would reject this conclusion and yet affirm nonreducibility,
Strawson says: "Some have been lulled into thinking that there is a comfortable and strictly materialist middle position that combines rejection of the idea that any experiential properties are fundamental physical properties with endorsement of the idea that they are in principle irreducible to nonexperiential properties" (MR, 62). Once it is seen that no such comfortable middle position exists, it follows that if the mind-body problem is ever to be solved, we must look forward to a conceptual revolution that will show how some experiential properties can be fundamental physical properties.
This solution would seem to involve panexperientialism. Indeed, Strawson says: "In theory a panpsychist version of materialism could handle the idea that experiential properties might be fundamental physical properties" (MR, 62). And although Strawson does not endorse panpsychism, he also presents no argument against it and, in fact, says that "the problem of the relation between the experiential and the nonexperiential is so difficult that panpsychism deserves to be taken seriously" (MR, 75).
As we have seen, panexperientialist views have generally not been taken seriously. This tendency not to take them seriously, by either ridiculing or simply ignoring them, was especially strong in those who believed that some version of dualism or standard materialism could solve the mind-body problem. The recent flurry of attention to the problem of consciousness, however, has created a growing suspicion that such a solution may be impossible in principle. It is likely, furthermore, that a growing number of philosophers will come to share Strawson's double insight—that the source of the intractability is less the conventional view of mind than the conventional view of matter, and that the problem is not our ignorance about certain details, which might be remedied by further scientific discoveries (about, say, quantum physics or the nature of the brain), but involves the received general conception of matter, which makes it seem different in kind from experience. Accordingly, Strawson's book, which appeared only after I had completed the first draft of the manuscript for this book, provides the strongest support yet of the hunch leading to my decision to write it—that the growing awareness of the unsatisfactoriness of the standard solutions would create a climate in which this alternative solution could be taken more seriously than would have been likely in earlier decades. In any case, I turn now to a discussion of just this point: why panexperientialism, especially of the type advocated here, should be given serious consideration.
II. Reasons to Consider Panexperientialism
Some of the reasons listed here summarize points made above. Others anticipate points to be developed later.
1. Panexperientialism truly naturalizes mind, conceiving of it as fully natu-
ral. From a panexperientialist standpoint, accordingly, our own conscious experience, which is the aspect of the world that we know most immediately—the only aspect that we know from within, by identity—no longer needs to be considered either supernatural or even "anomalous." Conscious experience therefore can, as Searle hopes, be studied as "a worthy topic in its own right," not simply as "an annoying problem" (RM, 250).
2. Panexperientialism is, as McGinn has pointed out (PC, 2n), a naturalistic form of realism. Of course, those who have absorbed the physicalistic version of naturalism tend to consider the assertion that experiences are actual things a violation of naturalism; but that merely shows how far they are from truly naturalizing mind. Indeed, as the examination of McGinn's reflections suggests, it is only from a panexperientialist standpoint that a constructive solution without (an at least implicit) supernaturalism is possible.
3. Panexperientialism is truly monistic (in the qualitative sense). It thereby fulfills what Nagel calls the valid impulse behind physicalism: "to find a way of thinking about the world as it is, so that everything in it, not just atoms and planets, can be regarded as real in the same way" (VN, 16). Panexperientialism, unlike physicalism itself, allows that impulse to be carried out.
4. Panexperientialism can handle Berkeley's question —"What is matter in itself?"—without resort to idealism, whether explicit or implicit. Berkeley's idealistic answer, that for matter "to be" is "to be perceived," has been verbally ridiculed but implicitly accepted by dualists and materialists alike insofar as they described matter in purely externalist terms. Panexperientialists, by contrast, can say that just as for us "to be" is "to experience" as well as "to be experienced," the same is true for natural units (true individuals) all the way down. Panexperientialism thereby further fulfills the urge of both realism and monism to regard all levels of the actual world as real in the same sense.
5. Panexperientialism would thereby provide a new basis for the ontological unity of science, a dream that under the physicalist paradigm has, as Seager says, come to be widely considered a "hopeless pipedream" (MC, 11). There would still be a practical division between true individuals (whether simple or compound) and aggregational societies of individuals, in that the latter as such have neither experience nor spontaneity, so that purely externalistic and deterministic descriptions would apply. But philosophers and scientists would be aware of an underlying ontological unity with regard to individuals, for which internalist and externalist accounts would be combined. By thereby assigning both experiential and objective (externalist) predicates to all individuals, from quarks to humans, we would have the "theoretical homogeneity" that Strawson sees to be necessary for a unified account of reality (MR, 99).
6. A careful examination of varieties of panexperientialism, especially those that appear strongest, is necessary to fulfill the philosophical obligation to examine all the alternatives, at least those not eliminated by the criteria of naturalism and realism. The criterion of continuity, which suggests qualitative monism, should lead philosophers, furthermore, to take panexperientialism more seriously than dualism.
7. While philosophical self-respect alone should lead to the examination of the strongest versions of panexperientialism, this examination should today also be motivated by growing awareness of the fact that the failure of the approaches built on the Cartesian intuition about matter, which have been tried for several hundred years, appears to be terminal . If philosophy is, as some claim, a kind of game, it should follow the regulative principle accepted by all winners: Always change a losing game . The old game plans involved trying to relate our conscious experience to something utterly alien or else, as Nagel says, trying to beat the mind into the shape of the physical, understood in externalist categories (VN, 15). Panexperientialism suggests that we try a new strategy: Begin with experience, which we know exists, and see if we can understand the various phenomena we call "physical" in terms of various degrees, organizations, and external perceptions of it . Trying this strategy should not hurt: We have nothing to lose but our mindbody problem.
8. Panexperientialism provides a concrete example of the "radical speculation" and "radical conceptual innovation" that Nagel (VN, 10) and McGinn (PC, 104) have respectively perceived to be necessary if the mind-body impasse is to be overcome. Of course, it is common for a thinker to call formally for radical innovation and then, when being confronted with a substantive exemplification thereof, to reply, "I didn't mean that !" It is, indeed, hard to see how a proposal could be "remarkable" without at first looking "extravagant." As Whitehead says, "almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced" (SMW, 47). In any case, as Searle says, the long standoff between dualists and materialists suggests that "there is something wrong with the terms of the debate" (RM, 49). He has in mind, in particular, the very meanings of "physical" and "mental" assigned by dualism and accepted by materialism. Panexperientialism, giving new meanings to those terms, changes the terms of the debate, thereby providing the "entirely new conceptual tools" for which Nagel calls (VN, 52) and, in particular, an example of the "revolution" in the conception of the physical for which Strawson has called. Recognizing this fact, Strawson has listed panpsychism as one of the few "appropriately radical responses to the enormity of the mind-body problem" (MR, 99). Seager introduces his own recent defense of panexperientialism (see fn., p. 80, above) by saying: "The generation problem [of explaining why and how experience
is generated by certain peculiar configurations of physical stuff] seems real to me and sufficiently difficult to warrant fairly untrammeled speculation" (CIP, 279).
9. The most important reason for trying a panexperientialist position, of course, is that it provides hope of actually solving the mind-body problem . Promising in this regard is that it avoids the problems that plague both dualism and materialism. By rejecting ontological dualism, it avoids all the problems that are unique to dualism, namely, discontinuity, interaction between ontologically unlike actualities, and (possibly) the violation of the conservation of energy (more on this later). It also avoids the problems common to dualism and materialism: It does not have to decide at what arbitrary place to draw a line between experiencing and nonexperiencing individuals. It does not have to think of experience as the Great Exception. (Conscious experience is a great exception, but it is so only by virtue of the fact that it is conscious, not merely by being experience.) It avoids the problem of how evolution could have occurred before time emerged, because panexperientialism implies pantemporalism.[2] And it avoids the problem of how experience could have been generated by nonexperiencing entities, events, or processes.[*] The way in which panexperientialism avoids the problems unique to materialism, all of which involve materialism's numerical identification of mind and brain, depends on the adoption of a (nondualistic) interactionist form of panexperientialism. This form of panexperientialism, which is made possible (although not necessitated) by the rejection of the Cartesian view of the body, will be discussed in chapters 8 and 9.
III. Some Common Objections to Panexperientialism
Panexperientialism, as we have seen, is usually dismissed in a sentence or two, if not simply a phrase. I deal here in summary form with the most common objections, including for the sake of relative completeness some that have already been mentioned.
1. The objection that panexperientialism is not naturalistic . I have already dealt with this charge, quoting McGinn's recognition that panexperientialism does not involve supernaturalism and pointing out that it, in fact, seems the only constructive position capable of avoiding supernaturalist implications.
2. The objection that panexperientialism is a form of vitalism . The charge
[*] Seager, saying that "the acceptance of the reality of the generation problem and the subsequent perception of its extreme difficulty leads quite naturally . . . to the idea that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the world," suggests that "panpsychism is the most natural way to incorporate consciousness as truly fundamental" (CIP, 286). I would speak of experience, not consciousness, as fundamental.
of "vitalism" is one that some philosophers and scientists throw at any doctrine that violates their physicalist assumptions, but it does not apply here. Vitalism is the doctrine that nature, prior to the emergence of life, operated solely in terms of mechanistic principles, but that with life an entirely new causal force emerged. This kind of dualism is an example of exactly what panexperientialists want to overcome. Whitehead, for example, explicitly rejects vitalism because it "involves an essential dualism somewhere" (SMW, 79). Strawson, besides seeing that panpsychism is a form of monism, even says that there can be a "panpsychist version of materialism" (MR, 62). In chapter 10, I will develop this idea, except for calling it a version of physicalism (instead of materialism).
3. The objection that panexperientialism is a form of idealism, therefore not realistic. This charge has recently been made by Gerald Edelman, who thinks that panpsychism is a version of Berkeleian idealism, which he also misunderstands, thinking that Berkeley held that we autonomously create the physical world by perceiving it (rather than by having sensory data impressed on our minds by God). On the basis of this double confusion, Edelman refutes panpsychism with a reductio ad absurdum based on evolution: It would be impossible to see how the environment and the bodies that give rise to animal minds could also be mental events wholly dependent on those minds (BABF, 35, 212). That is, an evolutionary worldview says that the existence of animal (including human) minds depends on their bodies and the more general physical environment, whereas panpsychism (in Edelman's misunderstanding of it) says that what we call physical things, including our own bodies, depend on our minds! This is a good objection, but it should be directed toward those physicists who make all quantum events dependent on conscious observation, not toward panpsychists (or, for that matter, personal idealists, who have their problems but are not guilty of this silliness).
4. The objection that panexperientialism is implausible . I have dealt with this charge above, showing that it can hardly mean "as compared with dualism or materialism": Their forms of implausibility only seem more acceptable because familiarity breeds contentment. If this charge is not simply an autobiographical report that the speaker personally finds it implausible, but is the claim that "no intelligent person acquainted with scientific facts and philosophical standards of acceptability could believe it," one can cite many examples to the contrary (including Leibniz, Fechner, Lotze, James, Bergson, Peirce, Montague, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Wright, Waddington, Rensch, and Bohm).[3] It is interesting to note that Seager, after having earlier summarily dismissed all versions of panpsychism as implausible, quickly changed his mind after giving serious consideration to an actual example of panexperientialism and comparing its advantages and difficulties with those of dualism and materialism. While still saying that the assertion that
atoms have experience "remains undeniably implausible," he now holds that there is "a coherent view of panpsychism" that can sufficiently "ameliorate" this implausibility so that, all things considered, panpsychism of this sort seems less implausible than any version of dualism or materialistic physicalism (CIP, 282, 283n14, 286). Seager's example suggests that the widespread dismissal of panexperientialism as implausible is based more on a prejudgment than on an actual examination of any of the strongest extant versions of this alternative and the advantages thereof. Seager's experience was to "find it remarkable that a number of issues involved in the question of consciousness get a surprisingly unified treatment under panpsychism" (CIP, 286), meaning that it scores well on parsimony.
5. The objection that panexperientialism might be unintelligible . This objection, as we have seen, has to do primarily with the question of whether there can be a conception of an experiential part-whole relation that is different in kind from the ordinary physical part-whole relation, which surely provides no model for how myriad low-level experiences could be constitutive of a high-level experience. Seager, calling this "the combination problem," considers it "the most difficult problem facing any panpsychist theory of consciousness" (CIP, 280). It is important, of course, that this objection, articulated by Nagel and repeated by others, is that panexperientialism (panpsychism) might be unintelligible. It leaves open the possibility that some concrete version of panexperientialism might provide an intelligible conception of an experiential part-whole relation. And, indeed, Seager's version of panpsychism involves a type of part-whole relation in which the whole is different in kind from aggregations of physical things that are "just the sum of their parts" (CIP, 284). This issue will be at the center of the discussion of "compound individuals" in chapter 9.
6. The objection that panexperientialism violates our intuitions about the physical world. Popper cannot attribute experience any further down than single-celled animals (SAB, 79f.), evidently because he shares "with oldfashioned materialists the view that . . . solid material bodies are the paradigms of reality" (SAB, 10). Of course, Popper knows that although we continue to speak of elementary particles, the entities of quantum physics are not analogous to billiard balls and other "solid material bodies." Indeed, Popper himself assigns "propensities" to them (SAB, 79f.). If the entities, events, or processes at the quantum level have spontaneity and propensities, why should it be counterintuitive to think of them as having experience as well? Popper's statement about his intuitions returns us to the question of whether we are to give priority to our soft-core common sense or to the implications of our hard-core common sense. That is, the (sensory-based and culturally influenced) soft-core commonsense intuition has been that the ultimate units of nature are analogous to rocks, being devoid of experience and spontaneity. But this assumption leads to violations of various
hard-core commonsense intuitions, such as those involving mind-body interaction and freedom, or else to a contentment with mystery. Should we allow our "intuition" that the ultimate units of nature are devoid of experience and internal spontaneity stand in the way of developing a worldview that is both intelligible and adequate to the ideas that we inevitably presuppose in practice? That this would be foolish seems especially evident given the fact that most of our (soft-core) "intuitions" about the ultimate units of nature, based on analogy with "solid material bodies" such as rocks, have already been violated, insofar as we have been forced to give up ideas of solidity and determinism and have even been led to speak of "propensities." Why should the remaining intuitions—that the ultimate units of nature lack experience and internal spontaneity—be considered inviolate, when all the other intuitions with which it was associated have been mistaken?
7. The most prevalent version of the previous objection is based on the claim that panexperientialism implies that things such as rocks and telephones have experiences . This is probably the most common charge made by those interested in an easy reductio . For example, Popper and Eccles both dismiss panpsychism on the grounds that it implies that things such as telephones and minerals have feelings (SAB, 55, 517). This is true of those forms of panpsychism, such as Spinoza's, Fechner's, and Rensch's,[4] that do not distinguish in principle between true individuals and aggregational composites of such individuals. But it is not true of versions, such as those of Leibniz, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, that make a big point of this distinction. Hartshorne, indeed, says that in making this distinction, "Leibniz took the single greatest step in the second millennium of philosophy (in East and West) toward a rational analysis of the concept of physical reality" (PP, 95).[*] So, in spite of thousands of one-line dismissals to the contrary, such as McGinn's quoted above, panpsychism does not necessarily say that rocks have consciousness, or even feelings. (I may perhaps be forgiven for over-
[*] The main difference between my position and the version of panpsychism developed by Seager involves this point. Discussing the idea that quantum coherence could be at least a partial explanafon of the consciousness of humans and other animals, he suggests that living brains would be quantum coherent systems, in which qnantum properties would be preserved (I would say amplified ), whereas computers would not sustain quantum coherence but would instead deamplify quantum effects, so that they could not support unified states of conscioushess. This distinction would, Seager suggests, be "a modern reincarnation of an old idea, which goes back at least to Leibniz, distinguishing unified entities, or what Leibniz called organisms, from mere aggregates" (CIP, 285). So far so good. But he then concludes that any quantum coherent system, such as liquid helium, would support a unified experience. He seeks to mitigate the strangeness of this idea by suggesting that because the structure of liquid helium, compared with that of a living brain, is "informationally impoverished," it would have "an extremely primitive state of consciousness" (CIP, 285). My alternative suggestion would be that insofar as quantum coherence is crucial, we should think of it as a necessary but not sufficient condition of the emergence of a unified experience.
stressing this point. The charge in question is really made ad nauseam, even in spite of attempts to forestall it. For example, in a recent edited volume in which I discussed panexperientialism in the introduction, I went to reasonable lengths, I thought, to make clear the distinction between true individuals and aggregational entities, pointing out that I attribute experience and spontaneity only to the former and distinguishing my position from some contributors in the volume who did not accept that distinction. Indeed, at the conference out of which the book arose I had argued, against some of the participants, that failure to make the distinction would lead panexperientialism to be dismissed out of hand. Nevertheless, the criticism of the book leveled by a reviewer was that Griffin thinks rocks have feelings.[5] So, now I'm trying the tack of going to unreasonable lengths to forestall this misunderstanding.)
It is with regard to this issue that philosophers hostile to panpsychism are most likely to violate the principle that we, in assessing the intelligibility of some opposing doctrine, are obligated to examine the strongest, not the weakest, version of that doctrine. An example is provided by the article on panpsychism in Paul Edwards's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which he assigned himself to write.[6] In an evaluative section entitled "Is Panpsychism an Intelligible Doctrine?" he examines primarily the version of panpsychism articulated by F. C. S. Schiller, who argued that rocks have feelings. The other panpsychist to whose position Edwards devotes the most attention is Fechner, who also did not make the Leibnizian distinction between aggregational composites and true individuals, on which Whitehead and Hartshorne insist. Having left the reader with no doubts about the unintelligibility of panpsychism, Edwards then says in a note in small print:
Little was said in this article about A. N. Whitehead, probably the most distinguished champion of panpsychism in the twentieth century, chiefly because his views on the subject could not have been discussed without consideration of other features of his difficult system. Whitehead would have disagreed with many other panpsychists about the "units" that are regarded as bearers of psychic life. These, he held, are not stars and stones but the events out of which stars and stones are constituted and which Whitehead called "occasions." . . . Panpsychist views strongly influenced by Whitehead are put forward by Charles Hartshorne.[7]
Given the recognition that Whitehead is the century's "most distinguished champion of panpsychism" and therefore, one could assume, probably presents the strongest version of it, surely a stronger version than those of Fechner and Schiller, should Edwards not have at least tried to summarize this version? His failure to deal with Whitehead himself instead of these earlier and less precise thinkers is especially irresponsible in the light of the fact that Edwards's main basis for considering panpsychism unintelli-
gible—the idea that things such as stars and stones are experiencing units—is lifted up as the main point on which Whitehead differed from these other panpsychists. Edwards would surely be irate if someone were to write a critique of materialism in an analogous way. If he really thought Whitehead's position too complex and difficult for him to summarize, should he not have assigned the article to someone able to do so, or at least have discussed the position of Hartshorne—which is similar and yet much less difficult—before implying that panpsychism (in all its forms) is unintelligible?
8. The objection that panexperientialism is a form of parallelism, so that, in denying true interaction between mind and brain, it does not allow for human action to be genuinely free . This charge, which is made by Popper (SAB, 53–55, 516) and Eccles (HS, 5), amounts to saying that panpsychism forces us to swallow a difficult pill that produces no real benefits. But this charge, again, applies only to some versions of panpsychism—in general the same ones to which the previous objection applied. That is, those versions of panpsychism that take the "pan" to mean that literally all things have experience, making no distinction in this regard between genuine individuals and aggregational or nonindividuated things, tend to think of the "physical" and "mental" features of things as simply parallel aspects, or at most of the mental aspect as somehow dependent on the physical but not vice versa. In any case, these versions allow for no causal influence of the mental as such on the physical.[8] But those forms of panexperientialism that do distinguish between aggregational societies and compound individuals can speak, in relation to the latter, of causal interaction between the "dominant" experience and the lower-level experiences. Of course, Leibniz, although he distinguished between the "dominant monad" and the rest, did not allow for any real causal interaction between them, only for the appearance of such. But Whitehead and Hartshorne installed windows in the Leibnizian structure (by conceiving of enduring individuals, such as minds, cells, and electrons, as "temporally ordered societies" of momentary "occasions of experience," each of which begins by receiving influences from the environment into itself [as will be explained in chapters 8 and 9]). There is, accordingly, interaction in this view, which provides the basis for affirming freedom (assuming that the dominant experience, or mind, is assigned some power of self-determination). Of course, the charge that panexperientialism does not allow for freedom would not be a mark against it for many philosophers, given the widespread assumption that causal determinism reigns in nature generally, so that a view that naturalizes the mind would necessarily acquiesce in causal determinism for the mind-body relation. But freedom is, after all, a hard-core commonsense notion, so it is a condition of adequacy that a theory show the possibility of freedom.
9. The objection that panexperientialism violates the objectivity required
by science . This charge is sometimes based on a confusion, as Searle has stressed, between epistemological or methodological objectivity (overcoming wishful-and-fearful thinking and other distortingly subjective prejudices on the part of the scientist), which science does indeed require, and objectivity or objectivism in the ontological sense (according to which the entities studied by scientists must be said to be devoid of all subjective experience), which science does not require.[*] The supposition that science does require ontological objectivism is what led to behaviorism in psychology—which psychologists now generally agree, even increasingly with regard to nonhuman animals,[9] to have been a big mistake. It is now widely recognized that psychology requires discussion of both the within and the without of things, the inner experience and outer (including neuronal) behavior, trying to correlate the two as best we can. Once the necessity of this dual perspective is recognized in two scientific domains (ethology as well as human psychology), there is no reason in principle why it could not be extended all the way down. Nothing about science, in other words, would prevent the replacement of the dualistic and materialistic paradigms by panexperientialism as the dominant paradigm of the scientific community and the development of a dual-perspective methodology thereon (remembering, of course, that this dual perspective would apply only to individuals and hence would not change geology, astronomy, classical dynamics, and other sciences dealing only with aggregational societies).
There are still some more objections to panexperientialism that have been raised by McGinn, which I will treat when I discuss McGinn's attempted refutation of panpsychism in chapter 9. At this point, however, I will deal with a potentially more serious objection, which is implied by McGinn's position.
IV. Are We Incapable of Radical Conceptual Innovation?
This further objection to panexperientialism, which could be constructed from The Problem of Consciousness, can be put this way: (1) Panexperientialism purports to provide a constructive solution to the mind-body problem. (2) But we have good reason to believe, not simply from the intractability of the problem thus far (although this is suggestive) but primarily from an examination of our concept-forming capacities, that we simply are incapable of providing a constructive solution. (3) Therefore, panexperientialism, which purports to give a constructive solution, must be wrong. McGinn
[*] I have discussed the confusion between these two kinds of objectivity in the introduction to The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 3–4, 26.
does not explicitly offer this type of a priori argument against panexperientialism. But something like this seems implicit (as when he says that he will "be assuming that panpsychism, like all other extant solutions, is inadequate as an answer to the mind-body problem" [PC, 2n]). In any case, I have constructed this somewhat artificial objection for a purpose: I believe that McGinn's insightful analysis of why our concepts lead us astray provides the most helpful clue in the current discussion to the kind of solution we need. McGinn did not mean to be doing this, to be sure, but just the opposite: to show why we cannot come up with a constructive solution. He has, however, been even more helpful than he intended. I will conclude this chapter, thereby preparing the way for the next one, by examining McGinn's argument.
McGinn's reason for thinking the mind-body problem to be permanently insoluble involves a twofold point: (1) Solving the problem would require radical conceptual innovation, but (2) we are simply incapable of that innovation. I will suggest that McGinn's attempt to show why this is so actually takes us part of the way toward precisely the kind of radical conceptual innovation that is needed and that, by transcending some dubious assumptions behind McGinn's analysis, we can see how to go the rest of the way.
McGinn begins by suggesting, sensibly enough, that the source of the mind-body problem lies in "our inadequate conceptions of the nature of the brain and consciousness" (PC, 2n). We have had inadequate conceptions of the "essential nature" of both body and mind (PC, 20). If this is the problem, one might say, then the solution would be to get better conceptions. McGinn believes, however, that this is just what we cannot do. The problem is that our conception-forming capacities are biased away from finding the correct explanatory theory (PC, 5). We have two bases for forming conceptions about things. On the one hand, we have sensory perception, which forms the basis for conceptions about outer objects (including the brain as known from without). On the other hand, we have introspection, which provides the basis for conceptions about mind or consciousness. I will begin with McGinn's analysis of conceptions based on sensory perception.
The problem with our senses, says McGinn, is that Kant was right about them, that "the form of outer sensibility is spatial" (PC, 12). The problem, in other words, is that "the senses are geared to representing a spatial world; they essentially present things in space with spatially defined properties. But it is precisely such properties that seem inherently incapable of resolving the mind-body problem" (PC, 11). Because of this feature of outer perception, "our faculties bias us towards understanding matter in motion, but it is precisely this kind of understanding that is inapplicable to the mindbody problem" (PC, 18). However, we might protest, our thinking about nature need not be based on ordinary sensory perceptions. For one thing,
we can use microscopes and other perception-enhancing instruments. Second, and more important, we can develop hypotheses based on conceptions that radically transcend perceptually based conceptions. McGinn agrees with the first point but rejects the second. With regard to it, he does not argue that perceptual closure to the secret of the mind-body relation in itself entails cognitive closure (PC, 12). But he does argue that our concept-forming capacity is severely constrained by our perceptions (whether raw or enhanced). Rejecting what he calls a "magical emergentism with respect to concept formation," he argues that theoretical concepts are formed only by "a sort of analogical extension of what we observe" (PC, 13). That is, although we can extend our concepts some distance beyond our perceptual starting points, "we cannot prescind from them entirely" (PC, 27). So, after we "receive sensory inputs by directing our senses onto the brain as a physical object in space," we then "use our theoretical faculty to reason about what is received." The resulting conception of the brain is necessarily "a perception-based conception" (PC, 60). This conception leaves us without a clue as to how consciousness could emerge from the brain. Through perception-based conceptions we understand whole-part relations in terms of spatial composition; but this (as Nagel had pointed out) provides no model for understanding the relation of brain parts to conscious experience (PC, 79).
Introspection, our faculty for learning about mind or consciousness, is also biased. The problem here is that introspection generates "isolationist illusions" by insinuating the autonomy of consciousness (PC, 77n, 107), suggesting that it is isolated, only contingently related to the rest of the world (PC, 106). This critical observation about consciousness raises what turns out to be the key issue in McGinn's analysis: Is introspection more or less distorting with regard to its object than sensory perception is with regard to its objects? In one place, McGinn seems to say that introspection is more reliable with regard to its object (PC, 66). His dominant position, however, is that introspection is even less privileged with regard to giving a complete science of its object than unaided sensory perception is with regard to its material objects (PC, 79). Although introspection does tell us something about consciousness, it gives us only the tip of the iceberg (PC, 64, 78). What introspection leaves completely in the dark is the "physical network in which our conscious states are embedded" (PC, 73): "Events in the nervous system constitute the predominant causal background to events in consciousness, but all of that whirring background is concealed from introspection. You can introspect religiously from dawn till dusk and you will not figure out the physical causes of the conscious events you experience" (PC, 74).
At this point, one might protest: We can grant that Descartes thought
about both matter and mind in these ways and that the Cartesian intuitions about both matter and consciousness have had a tremendously constraining influence on subsequent modern thought. But now that we understand what happened and that this way of thinking of both matter and mind leads to an impasse, we can change our concepts of both, revising both radically enough to show how consciousness can arise from the brain. McGinn's claim, however, is that the concepts that block the way to a solution are not simply culturally and therefore contingently constrained, so that with sufficient energy and ingenuity we could transcend them. Rather, he argues, they are constrained by our very natures, the way we are: "the enemy lies within the gates" (PC, 19).
Our concepts of matter and consciousness are constrained, respectively, by our faculties of perception and introspection—and concepts so constrained will not be capable of explaining the psychophysical link. Our perceptual access to material things, including the brain, sets limits on the way we can conceive of these things; and our introspective access to consciousness sets limits on the way we can conceive of it. We need a manner of conception that abstracts radically away from these two fundamental ways of apprehending the world, but we simply have no such manner at our cognitive disposal. We have no faculty that would enable us to form concepts of consciousness and the brain capable of solving the mind-body problem. (PC, 120f.)
Now that we have before us McGinn's analysis, must we not ask a question similar to Hegel's question about what kind of reason Kant was employing in diagnosing the permanent limitations of human reason? Given all that human imaginative reason can do, including this type of analysis of its own limitations, must we not wonder whether we are as constitutionally incapable of radical conceptual innovation as McGinn has proposed? I would at least think that we should tentatively accept an alternative construal—that McGinn's analysis does indeed tell us about strong constitutional tendencies that people in all cultures have had, which have made an ontological dualism between matter and consciousness a quite widespread "folk philosophy"; but that these universal tendencies have been strengthened by contingent historical developments in the West, especially from the seventeenth century to the present. According to this analysis, the "enemy within the gates" would be one that has in part been put there by our ancestors, and to whose presence we have continued to acquiesce. According to McGinn's wholly constitutional analysis, "given the way we form our concepts, we cannot free ourselves of the conceptions that make the problem look insoluble" (PC, 29). But with the alternative analysis, which combines constitutional tendencies with historical accidents, so that the problem of the "we" we are diagnosing is not simply human nature as such but a cul-
tural exaggeration of universal tendencies, we might be able, with effort, to break free from inadequate concepts of both brain and mind. We should at least explore this possibility.
And indeed, having referred to Kant, we can recall that McGinn himself discovered a passage in which Kant suggested a solution (although McGinn declined the assistance), which we can construe in the following way: Communion between mind and body seems impossible because they seem to be different in kind. On the one hand, the mind knows itself to have experience, which essentially has temporal extensiveness (duration) but does not seem to be spatial, at least not in the sense in which the objects of sensory perception (especially vision and touch) seem to be spatial. On the other hand, these objects of sensory perception, while being spatial, show no sign of being temporal, in the sense of requiring some minimal duration in order to be what they are;[*] and if they have no inner duration, they could not conceivably have experience. However, this appearance of absolute opposition may be mere appearance, due to different modes of apprehension. Through what is sometimes called our "inner sense," we know our own minds as they are in themselves. And what we know thereby is that they are something for themselves (which is the basis for an ethic of treating all other people as ends in themselves). Through our "outer senses," however, we are knowing not ourselves but other things. We are, therefore, not knowing them from within, by identity, but from without: We are knowing them as they appear to us from without . Not only that, we do not even know them from without directly, but indirectly, through a very complicated bodily sensory system. (I leave aside the question whether this realistic interpretation of the body is consistent with Kant's general interpretation of the physical world.) Accordingly, we need not assume that our purely spatial and externalistic conceptions of these objects exhaust what they are in themselves. In particular, we need not assume that they are devoid of internal duration. And, if they have an inside, with duration, then this would need to be "filled" with something. The clue to what this is can come from our knowledge of our own mind, which is the one part of the world that we know from within. By analogy, in other words, we can suppose that what outer objects are in themselves is analogous to what we are in ourselves: experiencing things. In them-selves they are, like our minds, something for themselves. (This insight, carried through, could have led Kant to an ecological ethic.) The apparent heterogeneity between mind and body is, accordingly, mere appearance, so that it constitutes no problem to intercommunion. We do not have to ask how an en soi and a pour soi can relate. The only problem, Kant concludes, is how to understand enduring experiencing things (which he called "substances") such that mutual influence is conceivable.
[*] See fn., p. 49, above.
The question of how much of this argument can be attributed to Kant (as he was in and for himself) I leave to Kant scholars. My point is that we can at least read into his suggestive comment the first step of a radical conceptual innovation that would overcome the mind-body problem. McGinn suggests that there is not "any road we can travel in forming our concepts of the brain" that would explain how consciousness could emerge from it (PC, 28). Perhaps Kant pointed out the entrance to that road, even if he himself did not take it.
McGinn's analysis of our introspection of our mind and our sensory perception of physical objects leads him to a reasonable conclusion: "We must therefore be getting a partial view of things" (PC, 28). But he thinks that we are stuck with our heterogeneous concepts about mind and body because we can derive conceptions about the mind only from introspection and concepts about the body only from sensory perception. Why should we assume, however, that we are this constrained? The suggestion I have read into Kant is that, beginning with what we know about the mind from introspection and assuming a pluralistically monistic form of realism, we could, through imaginative generalization, use this knowledge to fill in and thus correct our concepts of "physical objects." We could perhaps also, to take the suggestion a step further, use what we know about things through sensory perception to fill out and thus correct our concepts of our minds. I used "fill in" in the former case and "fill out" in the latter deliberately: What we do not learn from sensory perception of outer objects is what they are like inside, or even if they are like anything; what we do not learn about our minds by introspection is how they "appear" to others—how, for example, they exert causal influence on neurons. In any case, by taking what we know from our two approaches, we could thereby perhaps partially overcome the "partial view" of each, at least enough to see how they can commune with each other.
McGinn provides an opening to this possibility: "These two faculties—sense perception and introspection—have different fields, meaning by this that they take different kinds of object of apprehension. . . . (Alternatively, if we want to make room for some kind of monism, we can say that they present the same reality in different ways, from different perspectives.)" (PC, 61). After making the dualistic-sounding statement about "different kinds of object," McGinn notes parenthetically that we may want "some kind of monism." We certainly do: The regulative principles of realism, continuity, and naturalism seem to commit us to a pluralistic monism, in which there are multiple instances of one kind of actuality. This could be taken to mean that minds and neurons are of the same ontological type, so that we could use what we know of each (from introspection and perception, respectively) to enlarge our view of the other. But McGinn cannot adopt the approach I suggest, because he presupposes physicalism's quantitative
meaning of monism, according to which mind and brain must somehow be numerically one. This is one of the dubious assumptions leading McGinn to the view that introspection and sensory perception both fall hopelessly short of discerning the true nature of their objects.
Consider how the situation looks to McGinn, given his assumption that the terms "mind" and "brain" finally refer to the same entity. The knowledge that the mind has of itself has to seem extremely superficial. I quoted earlier the passage in which McGinn says, "Events in the nervous system constitute the predominant causal background to events in consciousness, but all of that whirring background is concealed from introspection" (PC, 74). It would be easy to read this passage in an interactionist or at least epiphenomenalist sense, according to which the brain as one entity provides the "causal background" for the mind as another entity. But if mind and brain were one and the same entity, all of that "whirring background" would actually be part of the mind itself. This is what McGinn means in saying that introspection provides only the tip of the iceberg. (He does not mean, by contrast, that introspection knows so little of the mind because most of it is unconscious experience not open to conscious introspection; he rejects the idea of unconscious experience.) McGinn's meaning is reflected in an adjacent passage: "[Introspection] tells us nothing about the physical network in which our conscious states are embedded. . . . Introspective data do not (by themselves) provide us with information about the condition of our nervous system. Introspection does not deal in physical concepts" (PC, 73). From this perspective, we can see why McGinn says that introspection does not even give us the essential nature of the mind, let alone the whole truth about it. After all, if the mind is numerically one with the brain—and if the brain is known to be composed of insentient neurons—then introspection, in giving us conscious experience, is giving us very superficial stuff. "Superficial" is, indeed, the term McGinn uses. In rejecting the view of those eliminativists who think of "folk psychology" as a primitive theory employing inferential entities to provide underlying causal explanations, McGinn says, "Folk psychology is . . . not a naive and pitiful attempt to carve out the natural kinds and laws that obtain at the hidden level; its business is strictly superficial" (PC, 125). McGinn's criticism of folk psychology eliminators is on target. But McGinn "defends" introspective psychology only by saying that it is so superficial that it does not even provide the essential nature of the mind. This is why McGinn says that introspection provides an even less privileged access than does sensory perception with respect to giving us a true science of the mind/brain (PC, 79).
According to McGinn, to be sure, sensory perception provides only limited information. It does, at least when magnified, give us much that introspection does not, providing knowledge about "the underlying causal machinery," such as "the theory of the neuron and its electro-chemical
processes" (PC, 75). But it does not, as we have seen, give us the slightest clue as to why the brain should have conscious experiences. That is, given the assumption that the brain and the mind are numerically one, so that it is correct to say, as most physicalists do, that "the brain is conscious," then conceptions based on sensory perception must leave us woefully ignorant of the true nature of the brain.
The reason, in short, that we cannot use concepts from either introspection or sensory perception to correct the partial view provided by the other, according to McGinn, is that neither view tells us about the essential nature of what anything is in itself. It is not, as my wishful-reading of Kant suggested, that introspection provides the essential nature of the mind, which could then be generalized to objects of sensory perception (such as brain neurons) as they are in themselves. Indeed, McGinn reverses Kant's suggestion, believing instead that if either approach comes closer to providing the essential nature of things, it is conceptualizing on the basis of sensory perceptions. For example, in an essay entitled "Consciousness and Space," McGinn says:
I am presupposing here a robust form of realism about the natural world. The constraint to form our concepts in a certain way does not entail that reality must match that way. Our knowledge constitutes a kind of 'best fit' between our cognitive structure and the objective world; and it fits better in some domains than others. The mind is an area of relatively poor fit. (CS, 230)
The implication is that our sensory-based concepts of matter correspond to reality better than do our introspection-based concepts of consciousness.
We here see another crucial distinction between the agnosticism of Strawson and that of McGinn. Strawson, in asking whether conscious experience can be radically wrong about its own nature, grounds his claim on phenomenology, observing that, with regard to the what-it's-like-ness of experience itself, there is no basis for a distinction between appearance and reality. He concludes that insofar as the mind-body problem implies that we must be radically ignorant about something, that something must be the nature of matter. McGinn, by contrast, allows a purely speculative belief—that mind and brain are numerically identical—to distort the seemingly indubitable deliverances of a phenomenological analysis of experience. So, even though his own analysis of the conventional view of matter, showing it to be rooted in our spatializing sensory perception, could provide strong grounds for Strawson's radical agnosticism about the true nature of matter, McGinn concludes that the mind-body problem is overwhelmingly due to our radical ignorance about the nature of consciousness—which perhaps leads to impatience with views that suggest radically new ideas about matter.
McGinn's form of agnosticism, which implies a permanent inability to
solve the mind-body problem, follows in part from his lack of agnosticism about the numerical relation between mind and brain. McGinn simply takes it for granted that these terms refer to one and the same entity (which is illustrated by the fact that of the unknown property that is postulated to account for the link between brain and consciousness, he says that "it cannot be a property of the brain and not a property of consciousness" [PC, 68]). Let us, however, tentatively assume the other possibility, that mind and brain are numerically distinct (which would be a possibly helpful thesis to explore, given that all of the problems distinctive of materialism in our earlier discussion were due to its numerical equation of mind and brain). In that case we could return to our suggestion built on Kant's cryptic comment: While it is true that sensory-based conceptions do not describe the essential natures of things—what they are in themselves as distinct from how they appear to us through our sensory apparatus—what we sometimes call introspection does give each of us, as Strawson says, the essential nature of one actuality in the world, our own mind. That is, we know that this actuality is experiential in nature.[*] In Berkeley's language, to be, for the mind, is to perceive . As will become clearer, I think of "perception" in a very broad sense: Besides not assuming most perception to be conscious, I also do not assume most of it to be sensory. For this double reason, I certainly agree that conscious introspection reveals only the tip of the iceberg (to use that externalist metaphor). But just as we can assume that the iceberg is ice all the way down, so that in knowing the tip we know the essential nature of the iceberg (although things get dark and sometimes frightening beneath the surface), so in knowing the superficial part of our experience we know the essential nature of our mind: We can assume that it is experience (devoid of the light of consciousness, of course) all the way down. (This notion, incidentally, implies Searle's antifunctionalist statement that "the mind consists of qualia, so to speak, right down to the ground" [PC, 20].) This is the interpretation I would put on McGinn's statement that "omniscience does not follow from inerrancy" (PC, 63): It is fully consistent with the recognition that we are far from omniscient about the contents and workings of our minds to hold that our direct knowledge by acquaintance—nay, stronger: by identity—of our mind is inerrant about its essential nature. At least this is true insofar as we take this to be experience, not conscious experience.
[*] Strawson says that "there is a sense in which we cannot be wrong about experience that has no parallel in the case of the nonexperiential" (MR, 103). The only difference between our views on this issue is that whereas I distinguish between conscious experience and experience as such, Strawson equates them (MR, 3), which would certainly make it more difficult to adopt the panexperientialist position that experience goes all the way down, to the most elementary units of nature.
That distinction points to a further dubious assumption behind McGinn's belief that there is an epistemically unbridgeable gap between mind and brain: Finding no metaphysical problem with the Cartesian intuition that he has inherited, he speaks of consciousness, rather than simply experience, as the stuff of the mind: "Logically, 'consciousness' is a stuff term, as 'matter' is; and I see nothing wrong, metaphysically, with recognizing that consciousness is a kind of stuff. At any rate, I shall persist with the intuitive use of the term 'consciousness' without fretting unduly over its proper interpretation" (PC, 60n). One can wonder, however, how much fretting might be due, given our location almost one hundred years not only after Freud but also after William James's article "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" in which he denied its existence precisely in the sense of a stuff (suggesting instead that consciousness is a particular function of experience). In any case, to persist in thinking of consciousness as the stuff of the mind creates at least two problems with regard to the mind-body connection. On the one hand, it is arguably the mind's identification of itself with its conscious experience that creates the illusion of the mind's isolation from the world, about which McGinn rightly complains; more on this in the next chapter. On the other hand, thinking of consciousness (rather than experience) as the stuff of the mind provides us no notion that can be generalized to lower-level entities, so as fully to naturalize mind. I would agree with every rejecter of panpsychism that we cannot think of neurons, let alone molecules, as conscious. One of the reasons for preferring the term "panexperientialism," as I said earlier, is that it less readily suggests the extension of conscious experience to all individuals. The relation between experience and consciousness will be discussed in the next chapter. For now I will stress the difference by saying that experience essentially involves feeling, not consciousness.[*]
According to McGinn's analysis, we have two approaches to trying to find the link between mind and brain. One is the "top-down strategy," in which we reason on the basis of concepts derived from introspection. The other is the "bottom-up strategy," in which we reason on the basis of conceptions derived from perception (PC, 60). McGinn's conclusion is that neither strategy gets very far toward the middle, so that an epistemically unbridgeable gap remains. We have seen that two dubious assumptions lie behind McGinn's conclusion that the top-down strategy does not take us
[*] It is interesting that Strawson, who also equates experience with conscious experience, says that the "problem of experience in its entirety" is raised by a worm, "if worms can feel" (MR, 83). He is absolutely right about the point he is making. But does his use of the language of "feeling" here not also suggest that although we can meaningfidly and plausibly suppose that worms have experience of a sort (so that it's like something to be a worm), the attribution to them of consciousness would be less plausible?
very far down: the assumption that mind and brain are numerically identical and the assumption that the stuff or essence of the mind is consciousness. We now need to look at McGinn's bottom-up strategy, to see if it also contains a dubious assumption that prevents this approach from taking us very far up.
I have talked glibly about generalizing experience to the objects of sensory perception—not the objects qua perceived, of course, but as they are in themselves. McGinn's point, however, is that sensory perception gives us no basis whatsoever for such a move. Here we must recall McGinn's crucial point about our physical senses, that "they essentially present things in space with spatially defined properties." And, as McGinn rightly adds, "it is precisely such properties that seem inherently incapable of resolving the mind-body problem" (PC, 11). Given that point, plus his (correct) conceptual empiricist point that concepts to be meaningful must be based on perceptions, he concludes that we can have no concepts of the physical world that provide a link to conscious experience. Here is his fullest analysis:
We can, it is true, extend our concepts some distance beyond [their perceptual] starting-points, but we cannot prescind from them entirely. . . . [O]ur concepts of the body, including the brain, are constrained by the way we perceive these physical objects; we have, in particular, to conceive of them as spatial entities essentially similar to other physical objects in space, however inappropriate this manner of conception may be for understanding how consciousness arises from the brain. . . . [I]t is precisely the perceptually controlled conception of the brain that we have which is so hopeless in making consciousness an intelligible result of brain activity. No property, however inferential the ascription, seems capable of rendering perspicuous how it is that damp grey tissue can be the crucible from which subjective consciousness emerges fully formed. (PC, 27)
In other words, the Cartesian definition of matter as consisting of spatial extensiveness is not arbitrary but is based on the fact that that is how sensory perception (especially vision) portrays the world to us: as spatially extended. If we can think of it only in such terms, however, we cannot attribute experience, even conceived as simple feeling, to it. This is why, McGinn would say, we cannot generalize experience from our introspection to outer objects of sensory perception. And, because we must interpret our brain in the same terms as we interpret all other objects of sensory perception, we cannot attribute experience to neurons either. Hence the permanent mystery: How can insentient neurons generate conscious experience?
Although this analysis seems exactly right, given its presuppositions, one of those presuppositions—that perception of the world through our external sensory organs is our only way of perceiving things beyond ourselves—
is arguably false, because it ignores two other types of perception: proprioception and nonsensory perception. I will begin with the former.
Sensory perception is of two types: perception of the world beyond the body, which originates in receptor cells called "exteroceptors," and perception of various parts of one's own body, which originates in internal receptor cells ("proprioceptors") of basically the same type. In one respect, these two types of sensory perception are the same: The information originates in receptor cells in various parts of the body and is conveyed to the brain by means of routes of nerve cells. In another respect, however, these two types of sensory perception are significantly different.
This difference is most obvious in relation to those proprioceptions that result in pain and pleasure. Such perceptions provide the basis for very different conceptions of the physical world than do our sensory perceptions, especially visual and tactile, of the extrasomatic world. For example, in feeling the pain in my back, I do, it is true, conceive the pain in spatial terms: I can say pretty clearly where the pain is and indicate, more or less clearly, the spatial extensiveness of the pain. But this twofold spatial nature (location plus extensiveness) of the pain is hardly its dominant feature: This dominating feature is that it is pain, that it hurts! We have, accordingly, another "property" aside from spatiality to attribute to bodily parts: We have to say, at least, that they are the kinds of things that can produce pain. And, having said that, it would not seem a great inferential leap to think of them as things that can feel pain. (After all, in thinking of a ball as something that can cause a perception of roundness, we suppose that the reason the ball can cause this perception is that it itself is round.) Of course, the leap does seem too great to most philosophers, inheritors as they are of an almost four-centuries-old distinction between primary and secondary (and sometimes tertiary) qualities. The primary qualities—which are really quantities —such as shape, are really out there, says this tradition, whereas secondary qualities—which really are qualities—such as colors, are not, being somehow created by the perceiving mind out of purely quantitative elements, such as wavelengths. Pains fit into the category of secondary (or, in some analyses, the even more mind-dependent tertiary ) qualities.
There are at least two prima facie reasons to entertain the possibility that this distinction is false. First, there is the well-known but usually ignored fact that the clear-thinking Bishop Berkeley argued persuasively that so-called primary and secondary qualities are all in the same epistemic boat, so that if the one category is mind-dependent, so is the other. The good bishop used this argument, to be sure, to bolster his idealist view of nature. Insofar as we cannot refute the argument but are convinced of the need for a realistic view of nature, we may need to consider the possibility that nature is not reducible to matter in motion with none but quantitative
properties. The second reason to entertain dubiety about the primary-secondary distinction is that it is based precisely on the dualism of mind and matter that generated the mind-body problem in the first place. The fact that the problem has proven intractable, given the seventeenth-century distinction between the physical and the mental, is good reason to become skeptical of that very distinction, as Searle suggests. Part and parcel of that skepticism should be skepticism about the primary-secondary distinction based on that physical-mental distinction.
In any case, to employ the primary-secondary distinction to reject the possibility that bodily parts feel pain is circular, because it is to presuppose precisely the Cartesian intuition about matter that the panexperientialist, in saying that bodily parts feel pains, is denying. So, I ask the reader for a temporary suspension of disbelief (or, put otherwise, suspension of belief —in the Cartesian intuition) while the alternative hypothesis is sketched.
Let us assume, for the sake of entertaining a-possible solution to the mind-body problem, that bodily cells feel pain and that we feel pain—unless an anesthetic, hypnotic trance, or some other inhibitor prevents it—because we perceive our bodily parts sympathetically. Let us, from the standpoint of this hypothesis, look back at McGinn's argument regarding perception-based conceptions. Here are the final two sentences of the lengthy passage quoted above:
It is precisely the perceptually controlled conception of the brain that we have which is so hopeless in making consciousness an intelligible result of brain activity. No property, however inferential the ascription, seems capable of rendering perspicuous how it is that damp grey tissue can be the crucible from which subjective consciousness emerges fully formed. (PC, 27)
Now that we have distinguished between two kinds of sensory perception, this passage no longer seems so self-evident. What if, even with regard to sensory perception, we have two types of "perceptually controlled" conceptions—those based on sensory perceptions of external objects and those based on perceptions of our bodily states? From the second type, we have seen, we can make the not-too-wildly-inferential ascription of pain-feelings to at least some bodily cells. This would mean, of course, that bodily cells experience. We would no longer have to wonder, accordingly, how insentient neurons could give rise to our conscious experience: They could not; but we, fortunately, have sentient ones.
At this point, however, an obvious objection arises: How can we conceive of cells as having experience of any kind, such as feeling pains and pleasures? More pointedly, given the fact that cells have no sensory organs, how could we conceive of some cells as somehow perceiving the pain of other cells and then passing along this pain-feeling to still other cells higher up
in the nervous system? The assumption behind this argument, of course, is that our own perceptual experience is essentially sensory perception. Given this assumption, the analogical extension of the notion of experience to entities devoid of sensory organs would be implausible.
The assumption that perception is essentially sensory perception, however, is dubious. As I pointed out in chapter 5, there is good evidence for extrasensory perception, in the sense of telepathy and clairvoyance. Also, one can argue, as I will in the following chapter, that memory should be considered a form of nonsensory perception, in which one moment of experience, understood as an actual entity, directly perceives ("prehends") a prior moment of experience, understood as another actual entity. For now, however, I will speak only of a third example: our direct perception of our own brains. Sensory perception, whether of the external or proprioceptive sort, presupposes this kind of nonsensory perception. For example, in seeing a tree by means of my eyes, the information about the tree is gathered by the exteroceptors in my eyes and then transmitted to my brain. But all of this would do me no good unless I had the power to perceive my brain. I am not referring to the kind of perception of the brain with which McGinn deals, in which one, by means of a mirror, can see one's own brain after a surgeon has opened up one's skull. That external sensory perception of one's own brain from without presupposes the internal perception of the brain to which I refer.
I do not, of course, have any sensory organs between my experience (my mind at the moment) and my brain with which to see it: I simply perceive it in a direct, nonsensory way. By analogy, some philosophers have recognized that all bodily action, through which one acts on the outer world, presupposes a direct, "basic action," in which one acts directly on the brain (given an interactionist view). Likewise, we can say, all sensory perception, which is indirect, presupposes a "basic perception," in which one directly perceives the brain. This nonsensory perception, in being presupposed by sensory perception, is more basic than it. If our basic form of perception is nonsensory, the idea that it cannot be generalized to individuals devoid of sensory organs is not self-evident. That it can be generalized will be argued in the following chapter.
As a materialist, of course, McGinn might well resist talk of the mind as perceiving its brain, because this talk seems, by presupposing that the mind is distinct from the brain, to beg the question. But McGinn himself speaks of the brain as causing conscious experience ("Brain states cause conscious states, we know" [PC, 6]). And perception can be understood as simply the reverse end of the causal relation: My perception of the tree is, from the tree's end, the result of its causal influence on me. So, if the brain exerts causation on the mind, then the mind perceives the brain. Insofar as the
body in general exerts causal influence on the mind, the mind perceives the body. In any case, we are trying out the hypothesis that mind and brain are numerically distinct, so that this talk of the mind's (nonsensory) perception of its brain is not ruled out in principle.
By refusing the equation of perception with external sensory perception, accordingly, the bottom-up strategy will take us up far enough to meet the descent of the top-down strategy in the middle of the supposed gap. By combining reasonable inferences from proprioception and evidence for nonsensory perception, we can say that mind and body have experience in common, with experience understood fundamentally in terms of feeling, not consciousness. This feeling-experience is the hidden feature that McGinn seeks—the feature partially hidden by introspection, with its tendency to focus on consciousness, and totally hidden by sensory perception of the extrasomatic world. By challenging the equation of perception with external sensory perception, we can carry out the solution at which Kant hinted.
Mention of Kant, however, reminds us that we have moved too fast. We have overlooked the key point of McGinn's analysis, that the purely spatial cannot be thought to have experience of any sort. What reason do we have for thinking of the objects constituting nature as having some kind of temporal extensiveness, as having duration analogous to that of our own experience, so that we can think of them also as having some degree of experience? Our bodily parts are analogous to physical things outside the body; in fact, everything inside was once outside. We cannot assume a magical transformation on entry (and another one on exit). What good reason is there to think of the basic units of nature in general as having temporal as well as spatial extensiveness?
One argument is from the very fact that our bodily members do seem, as argued above, to be capable of experience. This provides a reason in itself for supposing that they, internally, have duration, insofar as experience and duration seem to presuppose each other. Then, from the fact that things within and without the body must be similar, we can infer that all natural units are temporal as well as spatial units. As Whitehead has argued,
It is the accepted doctrine in physical science that a living body is to be interpreted according to what is known of other sections of the physical universe. This is a sound axiom; but it is double-edged. For it carries with it the converse deduction that other sections of the universe are to be interpreted in accordance with what we know of the human body. (PR, 119)
Whitehead's statement in context applies the point to the notion of causation (which will be discussed in the next chapter). But we can use it also to argue for the idea that nature in general is composed of spatiotemporal units.
However, if this were the only reason to ascribe inner duration to natural units, with everything else pointing to the physical world as purely spatial, it would carry little weight. This could have seemed the case in Kant's time, so that there would have been little basis for carrying out his suggestion systematically. Then as well as now, of course, there is another consideration: If we take a relative (rather than absolute) view of time, according to which time arises from relations among things, then those "things" must be events that have a temporal as well as spatial dimension, or we would have a purely spatial, timeless world. Unless the world is composed of units with a temporal dimension, in other words, it is hard to see why time exists: A billion trillion times nothing is still nothing. Of course, many thinkers, including Einstein, have thought of the world as essentially timeless, considering time an illusion. One of many problems with this view, however, is that we all in practice presuppose the reality of time. (As Einstein admitted, time is a stubborn illusion.)[*] Also, it is hard to see how an essentially timeless world could generate even the illusion of time. We can understand, however, that this consideration would not have weighed heavily on Kant: Part of his soft-core common sense was traditional (supernaturalistic) theism, according to which God, who is the ultimate reality, is essentially timeless, which implies that reality as such is essentially timeless. With the shift to a naturalistic worldview, however, there no longer exists this basis for overriding our hard-core commonsense presupposition as to the ultimate reality of time. We must, accordingly, think of the world's ultimate units such that time as we presuppose it could be derived from them.[10] This gives us a second reason for ascribing duration to the fundamental individuals of the world (and, of course, any compound individuals formed out of them).
Advances in science that had not been provided by the science of Kant's time provide further reasons for thinking of the fundamental units of nature as temporal. A third reason is that quantum physics suggests that there is a minimal time period for events. The world as infinitely divisible temporally is an abstraction. In the actual world, there is no "nature at an instant." It seems to take a certain minimum time to be. This suggests that the ultimate units of nature are durations, that is, that they have a temporal as well as a spatial dimension.[11]
This same conclusion, that nature is composed of spatiotemporal events, is suggested by relativity physics as well, with its notion that space and time are inseparable, so that we must speak of space-time, or time-space.[12] If this is so, and if we hold a relative view of both space and time, then it would
[*] Einstein's statement, "For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one," is quoted in Banesh Hoffman (with Helen Dukas), Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 258.
seem that the units from which space-time are derived must be temporal as well as spatial. This is a fourth reason for ascribing some minimal duration—which could be less than a billionth of a second—to the ultimate units of the world.
To the degree that this is a plausible hypothesis, it is no longer unthinkable that these units would enjoy experience, to at least some slight degree. A brief duration can be taken as a sign of a slight experience.
The method employed thus far has been that of taking what we know from our own experience—which is precisely that we have (or are ) experience—and then asking whether there are bases for using this knowledge, by means of imaginative generalization, to fill in those conceptions of the physical world that are based on sensory perception alone. This is only half of the complete method, however, which is that of mutual enrichment. The other half is to take what we know of nature through sensory perception and natural science to fill out and even modify our introspection-based conceptions of our own minds. If we think, for example, of physical things, such as electrons, as composed of rapidly repeating momentary units with very brief durations,[*] as suggested above, then we could generalize this idea to think of the mind as composed of a series of momentary experiences, rather than simply as a single, enduring actuality, numerically one through time. This might be one way in which we would come to see conceptions based on introspection alone as partially illusory, rather than privileged in all respects. Soft-core common sense could be modified in the light of science, as long as we honor whatever hard-core commonsense intuition of self-identity through time is shared by all of us (including, for example, Buddhists). I will develop further in the next chapter this twofold method of mutual enrichment and modification.
My conclusion in this section is that in spite of the brilliance of McGinn's analysis, he has, because of dubious assumptions, been premature to deny
[*] It might be objected that quantum physics gives us no basis for thinking of electrons and other subatomic entities in this or any other way. This is true of the dominant, orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation. But now, thanks to David Bohm and Basil J. Hiley's The Undivided Universe (1993), we have, as the subtitle indicates, an ontological interpretation of quantum theory, which does describe the behavior of particles apart from our observations of them. This interpretation, furthermore, is consistent with the Whiteheadian view of particles. The fact that Bohm's realistic interpretation has finally been presented in a reasonably complete form is, incidentally, relevant to Strawson's point that we need a satisfactory understanding "of the relation between experiential and nonexperiential phenomena" (MR, 87). A possible objection to this claim, he points out, could be based on the observation "that quantum mechanics, often called the most successful theory in the history of science, notoriously fails to provide us with the feeling that we can really explain or understand why things happen as they do at the quantum level" (MR, 87). The desire for this kind of understanding was precisely what motivated Bohm and Hiley to present their ontological interpretation (UU, 1–5).
that there is "any road we can travel" that will lead us to the clue to unsnarling the world-knot. I have been implying, in fact, that Whitehead has already blazed the trail.
It is not surprising that many philosophers today do not know of Whitehead's pioneering work, given the almost complete disregard of his philosophy, with its radical conceptual innovations, during a period when AngloAmerican philosophy was largely content with either the conceptions of "ordinary English" (which was, in fact, heavily shaped by Cartesian-Newtonian intuitions) or the conceptions of a more-or-less sophisticated scientism. Given this contentment, Whitehead was ahead of his time. But now that this dual contentment is dissipating, in large part because of the intractability of the mind-body problem to either approach, philosophers who were not introduced to Whitehead by their contented professors may want to take a look. A large percentage of each of Whitehead's books in his last (American, metaphysical) period, from Science and the Modern World to Modes of Thought, can, in fact, be described as sustained reflections on the mind-body problem.[*] Prior to this metaphysical period, he had written what he called the philosophy of natural science, by which he meant trying to understand nature without taking mind into consideration.[**] Having decided that this project could not finally succeed, he moved to a metaphysical approach, which meant including the human mind in the overall description. His whole enterprise, in other words, was to naturalize the mind. His ideas were partly based on the works of others: Bergson, for example, made the breakthrough of overcoming the dualism of individuals with and without duration;[***] and James ultimately came, more or less clearly, to see the enduring mind as a series of momentary drops of experience. But the position was developed most fully and adequately by White-
[*] Whitehead's books in this period, in order of appearance, are Science and the Modern World (1925), Religion in the Making (1926), Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), Process and Reality (1929), The Function of Reason (1929), Adventures of Ideas (1933), and Modes of Thought (1938). Another volume, Essays in Science and Philosophy (1947), is, as the title suggests, a collection of his essays.
[**] The books in this earlier period of Whitehead's thought were The Organisation of Thought (1917), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principle of Relativity (1922). The Aims of Education, published in 1929, also contains essays from this earlier period. Whitehead's distinction between the "philosophy of natural science," which is limited to nature as that which we know through sensory perception, and "metaphysics," which "embraces both perceiver and perceived," is found in The Concept of Nature, 28.
[***] For an account of Bergson's overcoming of his early dualism between inner duration and outer spatiality, see Pete A. Y. Gunter, "Henri Bergson," in Griffin et al., Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy, 133–63, esp. 135–41.
head, with some further refinements made by Hartshorne. I will spell out the position in more detail in the following chapters, giving special attention to the question of consciousness, the way in which the "compound individual" provides a conception of a part-whole relation that is unlike sensory-based physical conceptions, and how this conception allows for freedom of action.
Eight
Matter, Consciousness, and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
The crux of the mind-body problem is that, given what is assumed to be the scientific conception of nature and therefore the human body, including the brain, it is impossible to understand how our conscious experience, which we know exists, could arise out of the body, and also how this experience could have the dual capacity for self-determining freedom and for employing this freedom in directing the body, which we all presuppose in practice. We are confronted by a paradox: What we in one sense know to be the case seemingly cannot be. The solution to be suggested here is based on Whitehead's proposal that "the paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstraction for concrete realities" (SMW, 55).
Whitehead's statement occurs in the midst of his historical-philosophical examination of the effects on modern Western thought of its "acceptance of the [seventeenth-century] scientific cosmology at its face value" (SMW, 17). What was accepted at "face value" was "scientific materialism," which "presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations," material that is "senseless, valueless, purposeless . . . following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being" (SMW, 17). The view of nature articulated by this "scientific materialism," which is still widely presupposed, lies at the root of the mind-body problem—a fact illustrated by Searle's statement of the problem: "We think of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, rational agents in a world that science tells us consists entirely of mindless, meaningless physical particles" (MBS, 13). This view of nature, Whitehead suggests, results from "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness."
Whitehead connects his own philosophical reconstruction, which is de-
voted to explaining and overcoming this fallacy, directly to the mind-body problem:
The living organ of experience is the living body as a whole. . . . In the course of [its] physical activities human experience has its origin. The plausible interpretation of such experience is that it is one of the natural activities involved in the functioning of such a high-grade organism. The actualities of nature must be so interpreted as to be explanatory of this fact. (AI, 225)
We need, in other words, a philosophical cosmology that explains the fact that our minds seem to be fully natural. The reason a cosmology based on scientific materialism cannot provide such an explanation is that the abstraction on which this materialism is based involves precisely the removal of mind from nature. The science that has provided the most help toward a reinterpretation of the actualities of nature, Whitehead suggests, is physiology, because "the effect of physiology was to put mind back into nature" (SMW, 148). Whitehead is not naive: He knows that physiologists "are apt to see more body than soul in human beings" (AI, 189). What he means is that physiology has had the effect of overcoming the dualism of mind and body formulated by Descartes and Locke and that overcoming this dualism will require us to reconceive the nature of the body as well as the mind.
In this chapter I lay out the various kinds of evidence and argument employed by Whitehead in justifying his reconstrual of both mind and body. Because it contains my answer to the question of the relation of "matter" and "consciousness," and because this answer will be presupposed in the following chapter (on freedom), this is the key chapter in the book. Unfortunately, however, it is also the most difficult one. There are three reasons for this difficulty. First, the mind-body problem is inherently a difficult one, as more than three centuries of discussion have demonstrated. Second, this chapter is where the radical conceptual innovation called for by several thinkers, and promised in the introduction, is encountered. Now, it is one thing to call formally for radical reconceptualization; it is something quite else to encounter an example of it in which deeply ingrained ways of thinking are challenged, new words (such as prehension ) are employed, and old words (such as feeling, physical, and mental ) are given new meanings. One will probably find it difficult to keep the meanings straight, and the new way of looking at things may seem so odd that one will wonder if it is worth the effort. Third, this chapter's argument is developed in the form of an exposition of Whitehead's thought, and I quote rather extensively from Whitehead's own statements, which sometimes, especially when containing technical terms and taken out of context, are not as clear as one might like. I use this method, in spite of the added difficulty it creates, because one of my purposes is to show that, although this fact has not been widely appreciated (even among Whitehead scholars), Whitehead's phi-
losophy can best be read as an extended solution to the mind-body problem. Also, exactly what the various elements in his solution are, and how they fit together, have not been widely understood (again, even among Whitehead scholars), so it is necessary to show, by means of extensive quotation, that the points I make really are Whitehead's points. I hope thereby to contribute not only to a viable solution to the mind-body problem but also to a much wider appreciation of the power and relevance of Whitehead's thought, now that philosophy is emerging from its antimetaphysical slumbers.
Before moving to the heart of this chapter, which is an exposition of Whitehead's new understanding of both mind and body, I need to discuss the fallacy that he sees as lying at the root of modernity's mind-body problem.
I. The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
What is common to all forms of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the "error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete" (SMW, 51)—of assuming an abstraction from a concrete reality to be the totality. The version of this error most germane to our topic is that of assuming nature as it actually is to be composed of matter understood as having "simple location." For a bit of matter to be "simply located" would mean that it could properly be said to be right here in space and time in a way that required no essential reference to other regions of space-time (SMW, 49). In other words, the concrete units of nature would have no essential reference either to the past or to the future.
This notion of nature creates obvious difficulties. As Hume pointed out, it makes the justification for scientific induction difficult.
For [Whitehead says], if in the location of configurations of matter throughout a stretch of time there is no inherent reference to any other times, past or future, it immediately follows that nature within any period does not refer to nature at any other period. Accordingly, induction is not based on anything which can be observed as inherent in nature. (SMW, 51)
Thinkers in the early modern period were not bothered by this fact, because they held that matter obeyed rigorous laws imposed by its creator; even Darwin retained a deistic form of that belief. But what is the justification for induction in a naturalistic framework? It is freeloading to keep the imposition while rejecting the Imposer. It seems that we are again presupposing something in practice for which orthodox theory provides no basis. Also, if nature's units have no reference to the past, our own memory, given the assumption that we are fully natural, would be difficult to explain (SMW, 51).
A second feature of the materialistic view of the concrete units of nature, besides simple location, is the notion that they can exist at an instant, in the technical sense of an idealized slice in time completely devoid of duration. According to this view, "if material has existed during any period, it has equally been in existence during any portion of that period. In other words, dividing the time does not divide the material" (SMW, 49), which means that "the lapse of time is an accident, rather than of the essence, of the material. . . . The material is equally itself at an instant of time" (SMW, 50). There is, accordingly, no inner motion, no internal becoming; the only kind of motion ascribable to the units of nature is locomotion, motion through space. Combining this second feature with the first, we get the notion of the "simple location of instantaneous material configurations" (SMW, 50).
A third feature of this view of matter is that because the concrete units of nature are assumed to have no inner duration, they are assumed to have no intrinsic reality whatsoever, which means that they are assumed not to have any intrinsic value, not to be things that exist for their own sakes. They are "vacuous actualities" (PR, 167), meaning actualities totally devoid of experience. "Nature is thus described as made up of vacuous bits of matter with no internal values, and merely hurrying through space" (MT, 158).
According to this view, the units of nature, being completely timeless, are totally different from our conscious experience as we know it immediately. We have memory, whereas natural units are said to have no reference to the past. We experience a present duration, in which we enjoy intrinsic value and make choices among possible values, whereas the reality of the units of nature is said to be exhausted by their outer features. Finally, our present experience, with its purposes, includes an anticipation of the future, whereas nothing analogous is said to occur in the units of nature. Our experience is temporal through and through; the units of nature are purely spatial.
The idea that our experience could arise out of natural units thus conceived is indeed paradoxical. But this paradox only arises, Whitehead says, because we have committed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Employing Bergson's term to express the nature of the error involved, he says that we tend to "spatialize" the objects of sensory perception (SMW, 50; PR, 209). This tendency is so strong because it arises from the conjunction of at least three factors: (1) We cannot perceive contemporary events while they are becoming; we can perceive events only when they are past, after their internal becoming is finished. (2) Objects of sensory perception are aggregational societies of large numbers of individuals and, as such, are predominantly spatial entities. (3) Conscious sensory perception itself spatializes its data, removing in the process any inherited affective tone. The meaning of these three points will be filled out in the ensuing discussion;
for now, the point is the old one of being suspicious of appearances. Modern philosophy, in stressing the illusory nature of sensory appearances, has congratulated itself on having fulfilled its duty to be suspicious by distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities while accepting unquestioningly the deeper illusion: the notion of instantaneous bits of matter simply located in space (which lay behind the distinction between primary and secondary qualities). Whitehead is much more suspicious than McGinn of the conception of matter based on spatializing sensory perceptions.
Philosophy's task, Whitehead suggests, is to be "the critic of abstractions." By playing this role, it can be helpful to society, including society's science (SMW, 59, 87). For a period, of course, society in general and science in particular were not interested in this help, thanks to the "narrow efficiency" of the scheme of ideas based on scientific materialism. That is, this scheme of ideas was extremely successful in directing attention to, and getting relevant knowledge about, "just those groups of facts which, in the state of knowledge then existing, required investigation" (SMW, 17). This scheme of ideas was efficient precisely because it was narrow, suitable only for a particular range of facts that needed to be considered first, namely, the "simplest things" (MT, 154). The great success of this method made it impervious to philosophical criticism, such as that of Berkeley and Hume (SMW, 59, 66). Because of "its expulsion by science from the objectivist sphere of matter," philosophy "retreated into the subjectivist sphere of mind," thereby losing "its proper role as a constant critic of partial formulations" (SMW, 142).
Now, however, Whitehead says, this scientific materialism, with its abstractions, has become too narrow for science itself, "too narrow for the concrete facts which are before it for analysis. This is true even in physics, and is more especially urgent in the biological sciences" (SMW, 66).
Whitehead's attempt to provide a "wider basis for scientific thought" (SMW, 67) has, of course, been largely ignored. Like previous philosophical critics of the abstractions that the scientific community has inherited from the dualists of the seventeenth century, Whitehead has until now been left crying in the wilderness. However, the present attempt to develop a science of mind or consciousness, which requires putting mind back into nature, provides the context in which Whitehead's analysis of misplaced concreteness may get a hearing. The attempt to produce a fully naturalistic science of mind makes abundantly obvious—even more so than does biology, including physiology—that the received ideas are "too narrow for the concrete facts which are before [science] for analysis." This is the recognition behind the dissatisfaction of Madell, the perplexity of Nagel, the agnosticism of Strawson, and the pessimism of McGinn, Robinson, and Campbell. The basic reason for the problem, as these thinkers more or less clearly recognize, is the one Whitehead gave—that this scheme of ideas "provides
none of the elements which compose the immediate psychological experiences of mankind. Nor does it provide any elementary trace of the organic unity of a whole" (SMW, 73).
Whitehead bases his criticism of these abstractions, as well as his own proffered replacements, on the conviction that although the tendency to spatialize the objects of sensory perception is a very general tendency, it is not, as McGinn's analysis seems to suppose, an inherent necessity of the intellect (SMW, 51; PR, 209). He rejects the idea that "the abstractions of science are irreformable," offering his own program of reform "in the interest of science itself" (SMW, 83).
Besides hindering the progress of science, Whitehead says, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, resulting in the idea of instantaneous matter with simple location, has been "the occasion of great confusion in philosophy" (SMW, 51). This confusion has not been limited, however, to the abstract view of matter. The usual notion of the mind, as consisting essentially of consciousness and distinctively mental operations, is also a high abstraction (SMW, 58). This twofold abstraction lies behind the reason that neither the top-down strategy nor the bottom-up strategy, as described by McGinn, could go very far toward overcoming the gap between matter and mind. Closing the apparent gap requires overcoming both parts of the twofold abstraction. That is, although my Whiteheadian approach agrees with Strawson that the primary reason for the intractability of the mind-body problem has been the received view of the physical body, not, as the majority view holds, the received notion of conscious experience, my approach holds that this notion of consciousness shares some of the blame—partly because it contributes significantly to the false view of the body.
The mind-body problem has been generated, Whitehead suggests, because the bits of matter that enter into scientific description, as well as the conscious minds thought to be doing the observing and describing, are entities "of a high degree of abstraction" resulting from "a process of constructive abstraction" (SMW, 52, 58). Unlike extremists on this point, Whitehead does not say that the very notion of matter is a complete fiction, created out of whole cloth, with no correspondence to reality. Nor does he, unlike other extremists, say this about consciousness. Rather, he says, "'matter' and 'consciousness' both express something so evident in ordinary experience that any philosophy must provide some things which answer to their respective meanings" (SMW, 143). To speak of them as abstractions is to say that, rather than being simply fictions, they are "simplified editions of immediate matters of fact" (SMW, 52). Overcoming the twofold abstractness of vacuous bits of matter and consciousness as the stuff of mind can be described as the central purpose of Whitehead's philosophy.
The fallacious view of matter resulting from misplaced concreteness, Whitehead believes, can be overcome by starting from the bottom, with
physics, or at the top, with human psychology, supplemented by physiology. The "organic realism" toward which he is heading (PR, 309) could also be reached, he says, by beginning in the middle, with biology, which most readily suggests the concept of organism in place of mechanism (SMW, 41, 103) and which, with its doctrine of evolution, demands a doctrine of elementary units that are capable of evolution (which the aboriginal stuff of the materialistic philosophy is not [SMW, 107]). But he devotes most of his attention to psychological and physiological studies of human beings and to physics, reporting that he in fact arrived at his own convictions by means of an analysis of fundamental notions in physics (SMW, 152). Part of what he means can be learned from chapters 1 through 10 of Science and the Modern World or, more briefly, from chapter 7 of Modes of Thought .
Developments in modern physics, he argues in these chapters, have undermined all the elements on which the materialistic view of nature was based. In the new view, in particular, "there is no nature at an instant" (MT, 146), and the notion of passive, enduring matter has been undermined: "Matter has been identified with energy, and energy is sheer activity" (MT, 137). Physics as such, to be sure, does not completely overcome the dualism between experience and matter, because of the limited interests of physics: "In physics there is an abstraction. The science ignores what anything is in itself," that is, its intrinsic reality, considering its entities only with regard to their extrinsic reality, and only certain aspects of this, namely, the modifications of spatiotemporal specifications of other things (SMW, 153).[*] Also, although the notion of energy as fundamental is an advance on the older idea of matter, "the physicists' energy is obviously an abstraction" (SMW, 36). But, in sweeping away the Cartesian-Newtonian "essential distinction between matter at an instant and the agitations of experience," the new
[*] I quoted earlier Strawson's statement that physics provides "what we think of as our best account of the nature of the physical" (MR, 47). Although Strawson's statement can be accepted as a sociological statement about the dominant view today in scientific and philosophical circles, from Whitehead's analysis it follows that we emphatically should not think of (present-day) physics as performing this role. To do so involves doubly misplaced concreteness, given the double abstraction involved in the conceptions provided by (present-day) physics. Of course, Strawson's statement does not mean that he himself is guilty of this fallacy, given his assertion that the account of the physical provided by present-day physics must, at a general level, be radically incomplete. It does seem, however, that by and large scientists and philosophers reinforce each other in this fallacy of misplaced concreteness: Most philosophers seem to think that the materialistic view of nature's ultimate units is vouchsafed by physics, whereas most physicists, generally being aware that, because they deal only with abstractions, they are not in a position to settle philosophical questions about the nature of nature, seem to assume that the materialistic view of their realm is based on good philosophical reasoning (whether of professional philosophers or of tellow physicists functioning as their own philosophers). If philosophy would, as Whitehead proposes, recover its role as the critic of abstractions, this vicious cycle might be broken.
physics now at least allows "bodily activities and forms of experience [to] be construed in terms of each other" (MT, 115). That is, we can add content to the notion of "bare activity" by fusing experience and nature (MT, 166).
The bottom-up approach from physics, however, can only take us part of the way. Bridging the apparent gap requires supplementation from the top-down approach. That approach, however, faces great obstacles, especially given inherited modes of thought. I turn now to this approach.
II. Overcoming Misplaced Concreteness with Regard to Both Matter and Mind
The abstract understandings of matter and mind are mutually supportive. Overcoming misplaced concreteness with regard to one will, therefore, require overcoming it with regard to the other. While this is true, it is also the case that the most important direction is from mind to matter. While overcoming the fallacious view of matter will help overcome the fallacious view of the mind, getting a correct understanding of the human mind, especially the status of its sensory perception and consciousness, is essential for overcoming the erroneous view of matter .
Whitehead's argument, especially how the various elements in it are related, is not always as clear as one might wish. A careful reading, however, reveals that there are six major dimensions of his contention that we can generalize from our own experience to understand what matter is in itself . I have organized this section in terms of these six dimensions.
A. The Status of Human Experience in Nature
The first dimension of Whitehead's argument is that we know our own experience, which we normally refer to as our "mind," as a fully natural actuality. Accordingly, what we know about it from within can be generalized to other actualities, which we know only from without.
Regarding the idea of the mind as fully natural: As we saw earlier, Whitehead accepts what he calls the "plausible interpretation" of human experience, according to which it is "one of the natural activities involved in the functioning of . . . a high-grade organism" (AI, 225). He even refers to it as the "total bodily event" (SMW, 73). By this he means not that it is simply the numerical sum of the bodily happenings but that it is the experiential unification of those happenings: "It has its own unity as an event" and exists as "an entity for its own sake" (SMW, 148). This fact, however, does not make it different in kind from other things: Whitehead takes it to be, except for its unusual complexity, "on the same level as all other events" (SMW, 73). He bases this conclusion not only on general philosophical and scientific considerations, such as the evolutionary origin of humans, but also on
direct experience: "We seem to be ourselves elements of this world in the same sense as are the other things which we perceive" (SMW, 89).
Included in that statement is the notion that we are not only natural but also actual. To be an actual entity is to be able both to receive and to exert causation, and we directly experience both sides of the causal relation. On the one hand, a large portion of our experience is of the overwhelming degree to which our experiences, such as our pains, pleasures, and sensory perceptions, are caused by our bodies. On the other hand, as discussed in chapter 5 and more fully in chapter 9, we are also directly conscious of, and constantly presuppose, the efficacy of our experience for our bodily actions.
Taking, then, my own experience to be simply one of the many actualities in nature, a unique feature of it is that it is the one that I know from the inside, by identity. Referring to our experience, which unifies various bodily activities into a totality, Whitehead says that its knowledge is simply "the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence" (SMW, 148). Because I perceive myself in this unique way, I may tend to think of myself as different in kind from the other things I perceive, but this conclusion need not follow: "The private psychological field is merely the event considered from its own standpoint" (SMW, 150). Whitehead here expresses the point made by Kant in the passage discussed by McGinn.
On the assumption that my own experience is one natural actuality among others, no different in kind from others, my self-knowledge gives me an inside viewpoint on the nature of nature. I can then generalize what I thereby know about the nature of natural units to other such units (SMW, 73), taking due account, of course, of the fact that most of them (all except other human experiences, as far as we know) are evidently less complex.
This first dimension of Whitehead's argument will be met by two immediate objections. In the first place, our experience is constituted by consciousness and sensory perception. How can one possibly generalize our experience to amoebas, let alone to electrons? In the second place, even if the most primitive dimensions of human experience could be understood so as to make this suggestion not seem completely absurd, what empirical foothold do we have for making such a generalization? That is, what is there about our experience of physical things that could provide the slightest excuse for attributing even the lowliest type of experience to them? These are formidable questions. The remaining five points will be devoted to Whitehead's answers to them.
B. The Status of Consciousness in Human Experience
The first precondition for Whitehead's generalization from our own experience to the intrinsic reality of other things is his repudiation of the "im-
plicit assumption of the philosophical tradition . . . that the basic elements of experience are to be described in terms of one, or all, of the three ingredients, consciousness, thought, sense-perception." In Whitehead's philosophy, "these three components are unessential elements in experience," belonging to a derivative phase of experience "if in any effective sense they enter at all" (PR, 36). I will deal with consciousness and thought in this point, saving sense perception for the next.
Whitehead specifically connects the derivative nature of consciousness with the program to generalize. Just after saying that, because of analogies, "bodily activities and forms of experience can be construed in terms of each other," he adds:
This conclusion must not be distorted . . . [by] a distorted account of human experience. Human nature has been described in terms of its vivid accidents, and not of its existential essence. The description of its essence must apply to the unborn child, to the baby in its cradle, to the state of sleep, and to that vast background of feeling hardly touched by consciousness. Clear, conscious discrimination is an accident of human existence. It makes us human. But it does not make us exist. It is of the essence of our humanity. But it is an accident of our existence. (MT, 116)
This notion means that the unity of a moment of experience—the unity of reception, enjoyment, and action—is not dependent on conscious operations. With regard to a moment of experience's reception of causal influences from its body, Whitehead uses the term "prehension," which means a taking account that may or may not be conscious, or cognitive (SMW, 69). Whitehead is here pointing to the most basic form of the operation that lies behind what philosophers, following Franz Brentano, have called "intentionality," meaning "aboutness." By using the term "prehension," however, Whitehead means no merely external reference but the way an experience "can include, as part of its own essence, any other entity" (AI, 234). Accordingly, in speaking of a moment of our experience as a "unit occurrence," he says: "This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of . . . the various parts of its body" (SMW, 148f.). One point of this description is "to edge cognitive mentality away from being the necessary substratum of the unity of experience" (SMW, 92), because that unity occurs prior to, and perhaps without the accompaniment of, consciousness or cognition.
Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organizing a real togetherness of alien things. But this psychological field does not depend on its cognition; so that this field is still a unit event as abstracted from its self-cognition. Accordingly, consciousness will be the function of knowing. But what is known is already a prehension of aspects of the one real universe. (SMW, 151)
As Whitehead put the point more concisely later, "consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness" (PR, 53). Whenever I speak of the mind, accordingly, the reader should understand this "process of unification," which Whitehead puts in place of "mind" as usually understood in philosophy (SMW, 69).
If consciousness is not the substratum of experience, what status does it have? In discussing this question, Whitehead refers to James's essay "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" Whitehead accepts James's rejection of consciousness in the sense of an "aboriginal stuff . . ., contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made" (SMW, 144; quoting James). He also accepts James's view that consciousness is a particular function of experience. (Note that consciousness is said to be a function of experience [which is an "aboriginal stuff," although not one "contrasted with that of which material objects are made"] rather than a function of the brain.) This function (as indicated in the extract above) is the function of knowing or (as indicated in the previous extract) the function of clear discrimination of the prehended objects.[*] Whitehead later works out this view more technically, defining consciousness as the "subjective form" of an "intellectual prehension." To clarify this definition will require a discussion of Whitehead's account of the phases of a moment of experience.
Whitehead also accepts James's idea (although he had evidently come to it independently) that one's experience, although it may seem like a "stream," consists literally of "buds or drops of perception," which "come totally or not at all" and in that sense are not divisible (PR, 68). Such a "drop" has the internal duration stressed by Bergson. Whitehead's technical term for these "drops" is "occasions of experience." This term involves a further specification of his other technical term for an actual entity, "actual occasion," which is used to indicate the temporal and spatial extensiveness of an actual entity (PR, 77). He thereby overcomes the dualism between physical entities as having spatial but not temporal extension and minds as having temporal but not spatial extension. His view is that all actual entities are actual occasions, thereby having both spatial and tempo-
[*] Given this distinction between distinctively conscious experience and experience itself (which essentially involves prehensions, which may not clearly discriminate among any of the prehended objects), it would be implansible in the extreme to attribute consciousness to amoebas, let alone atoms and electrons. Those philosophers who insist that all experience is conscious experience, such as McGinn, Seager, and Strawson, must be presupposing some very different notion of consciousness. Of course, there is no "right" way to define consciousness. However, it is puzzling that, so many decades after Freud, Jung, and others have provided extensive evidence of unconscious experience in human beings, many philosophers still define their terms in such a way that, as Strawson puts it, "the expression 'conscious experience' is, strictly speaking, pleonastic" (MR, 3).
ral extension, and that all actual occasions are occasions of experience . But that is to anticipate. For now the focus is on a human occasion of experience.
An occasion of experience consists entirely of prehensions. A prehension always involves—besides the occasion of experience that is the subject of the prehension—two aspects: (1) the object that is prehended and (2) the subjective form with which it is prehended. The most basic kind of subjective form is emotion, but there are other subjective forms as well. Every prehension has both an objective datum and a subjective form. There can be no "bare" grasping of an object, devoid of subjective feeling. (This position, incidentally, agrees with McGinn's view that "the subjective and the semantic are chained to each other" [PC, 30] so that there cannot be content without subjective experience.) Given this twofold meaning of prehension, Whitehead uses as a virtual synonym[*] the term "feeling," which suggests both that something is felt and that it is felt with affective tone (AI, 233). The term "feeling" suggests the operation of "passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question" (PR, 40). Prehensions or feelings can be simple or they can be more or less complex, involving integrations of simpler feelings.[1]
An occasion of experience, although not divided or divisible in fact, can be divided intellectually into phases. Each phase has different types of prehensions. The first phase consists of physical prehensions, which are prehensions whose objects are other actualities, that is, other occasions of experience or groups thereof. To speak of a "physical feeling," accordingly, does not necessarily mean that the object is some portion of one's body. The only requirement is that the object be an actuality, not a mere possibility. Feelings of one's body are, however, of overwhelming importance in one's physical experience. (To speak of "physical experience," of course, is to challenge the dualistic use of these two words, which put them in opposition: To be "physical" was to be devoid of experience, whereas to have "experience" was to be mental.) In any case, all higher forms of experience presuppose physical experience.
Physical prehensions stand in contrast with mental (or conceptual ) prehensions, in which the object is a possibility, an ideal or abstract entity (what is often called a "mental object," meaning an object of mental apprehension). These conceptual feelings occur in the second phase of an occasion of experience, being derivative from physical feelings. For example, out of a particular set of physical feelings originating from a red object, I may lift out redness as such, in abstraction from its exemplification in this particular object. The feeling of redness itself is a conceptual feeling; it is mentality.
[*] There is a technical difference, in that there are both positive prehensions, which are termed feelings, and negative prehensions, which exclude their data from feeling (PR, 23). For our purposes, however, the terms "prchension" and "feeling" can be used interchangeably.
Mentality, however, does not necessarily involve consciousness and, in fact, in this second phase cannot . (As we will see, consciousness cannot arise prior to the fourth phase.) Mentality is essentially appetition, either for or against some possible form of experience. It can be a blind urge to realize, or avoid, some form of feeling. In any case, conceptual feeling is derivative from physical feeling, with which experience originates.
This account of the relation between the physical and mental types of experience agrees, then, with Hume's claim that experience originates with "impressions," not "reflections"; but it disagrees with Hume's opinion that the data of these "impressions" are mere universals, such as sense data, rather than actual entities (PR, 160). For Whitehead, perceptual experience begins with the direct perception of other actualities, such as those comprising our bodies. This is the ground of our realism, our knowledge that we exist in a world of other actual things. This Whiteheadian view agrees, therefore, with McGinn's view that "physical facts [rather than "mental items" in the sense of abstract objects] are the basic kind of intentional object" (PC, 48n), except that what McGinn refers to as "mental states" would be included among the "physical facts," that is, among the actual entities that can be the objects of physical prehensions. For example, in "remembering" what I meant to say when I started this sentence a few seconds ago, my present occasion of experience is prehending some earlier occasions of experience. This perception of those prior "mental facts" is an example of a physical prehension, because the data are prior actualities, not mere possibilities. In any case, the basic point is that mental experience, which in its most sophisticated forms may seem to be completely detached from the actual world, always in fact arises out of physical experience,[*] with the body being the most powerful source of physical experience.
In the third phase of experience, there is an integration of prehensions from the first two phases, resulting in propositional feelings, which are prehensions whose objects are propositions. A proposition is a union of an actuality (from a physical feeling) and a possibility (from a conceptual feeling). An example is "this stone is grey." Of course, the conscious judgment that "this stone is grey" would belong to the fourth phase, in which intellectual feelings arise. But the proposition involving the stone could constitute part of the content of such a feeling. Other examples would be "my body is tired" and "my back is painful," both of which happen at the moment to be true. More important in a sense are untrue propositions, such as one in which I imagine my back as not painful. Such a counterfactual proposition, which may lead me to take remedial action, best illustrates the basic role of propositions in experience, which is to serve as lures for feel-
[*] This point is the basis for calling panexperientialism of this sort a species of "physicalism," which I do in chapter 10.
ing. (To serve as objects of "judgment" is simply a highly intellectualized version of this role.) This description of their role depends on the previous point that mentality is basically appetition: A proposition serves to lure its experiencer either toward or away from the conjoining of some particular possibility with some particular fact(s). Propositional feelings, then, are feelings in which such propositions are entertained.
This description of propositions as basically "lures for feeling," rather than as essentially objects of intellectual judgment, allows their functioning to be generalizable to nonhuman occasions of experience, by virtue of minimizing the sophistication of the mentality needed to entertain them. Even with this definition, however, propositional feelings in their full-fledged form could not be generalizable to the lowest types of occasions of experience. In a propositional feeling, the possibility, such as redness, is lifted up as such, that is, as a possibility, in abstraction from its presence in the immediate feeling. That operation takes considerable sophistication. Whitehead, accordingly, distinguishes propositional feelings in this full-fledged sense from "physical purposes," in which this abstraction from the present feeling is only latent.[*] In a physical purpose, the possibility embodied in the physical feeling is felt with blind appetition, either positive or negative. Even in human experience, most of the feelings in the third phase would seem to be mere physical purposes rather than full-fledged propositional feelings. In any case, "propositional feelings" should here be understood to include "physical purposes."
In the fourth phase, if it occurs, there is an integration of a propositional feeling (from the third phase) with primitive physical feelings (from the first phase). The result is an intellectual feeling . A peculiarity of intellectual feelings is that their subjective forms involve consciousness. One species of intellectual feelings, in fact, is that of "conscious perceptions" (PR, 266f.). But intellectual feelings also include judgments, which would cover most of what is usually meant by "thought," including that kind of thought that we are inclined to call knowing or cognition.
Whitehead's point is that consciousness, as a subjective form of a feeling, can occur only in a feeling that has an adequate datum or content (PR, 241f.). His notion that this datum must involve a synthesis of a proposition and a fact connects his position with the widespread agreement that consciousness is always associated with negation . Whereas experience always in-
[*] Another difference between a "physical purpose" and a "propositional feeling" is that, in the latter, the actual entity that was physically felt in the first phase is reduced to a bare "it" in becoming the logical subject of the proposition (PR, 261). This twofold difference between physical purposes and propositional feelings is especially important in indicating (as I do below) how organisms as simple as neurons, which presumably cannot entertain propositions, can nevertheless experience an incipient intentionality, in the sense of aboutness.
volves some minimal awareness of what is, we should not speak of consciousness unless there is also awareness of what is not: "Consciousness is the feeling of negation: in the perception of 'the stone as grey,' such feeling is in barest germ; in the perception of 'the stone as not grey,' such feeling is in full development. Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness" (PR, 161). More precisely, consciousness involves the contrast between what is and what might be, between fact and theory. It involves awareness both of something definite and of potentialities "which illustrate either what it is and might not be, or what it is not and might be. In other words, there is no consciousness without reference to definiteness, affirmation, and negation. . . . Consciousness is how we feel the affirmation-negation contrast" (PR, 243). This is the kind of datum that consciousness presupposes, without which it cannot be provoked into existence.
This account of the phases of a moment of experience, culminating in the conscious entertainment of an intellectual feeling, constitutes an explanation of the rise of what has come to be called conscious intentionality, in the sense of "aboutness." Whitehead's account, describing consciousness as the way in which an intellectual feeling (the contrast of a proposition and an alternative possibility) is entertained, agrees with the widespread doctrine that consciousness is always consciousness of something . One virtue of the account by Whitehead is that, rather than implying that conscious intentionality somehow emerged in full-blown form out of wholly nonintentional objects (such as neurons as conventionally understood), he portrays it as emerging out of experience that involves intentionality but not consciousness. That is, in the third phase of a moment of experience, there are numerous propositional feelings, only a few of which, if any, will become full-fledged intellectual feelings and thereby be entertained consciously. To be sure, this point by itself would not be relevant to the mind-brain relation if neurons are too simple even to entertain propositional feelings. However, propositional feelings, as I have indicated, can be regarded as simply more sophisticated versions of "physical purposes," which neurons (by hypothesis) do have. So, neurons, while (presumably) being devoid of conscious intentionality, are not devoid of intentionality, or at least an incipient intentionality, altogether. This is one way of explaining how this kind of panexperientialism, in portraying minds and neurons as different only in degree, avoids (ontological) dualism while affirming interactionism.
This summarizes Whitehead's technical account of his view that thought, consciousness, and cognition are "unessential elements in experience." Far from being foundational, they are not even necessary. When they do occur, they are surface elements, being derivative from the basic operations of an occasion of experience. In most occasions of experience, the fourth phase does not occur, or is latent at best. Without the integration of integra-
tions that can occur only in that phase—that is, without intellectual prehensions—consciousness, which is the subjective form of an intellectual prehension, cannot arise. It is provoked into existence only by the right kind of experiential content. In a sense, then, Whitehead would agree with Dennett's functionalist claim that content is "more fundamental than consciousness" (CE, 455). However, Dennett here seems by "consciousness" to mean any subjective experience whatsoever, not simply consciousness as a very high-level form of experience. Whitehead would, as I indicated earlier, support McGinn's antifunctionalist point that subjective experience and content are inseparable.
In any case, one of the implications of Whitehead's view of consciousness as a "function" is that consciousness is not a preexistent stuff lying in waiting, as it were, to be filled by this content or that . That assumption, which Whitehead rejects, has led to the related assumption that those elements that are most clearly lit up by consciousness must be the elements that actually arise first in experience . The opposite is, Whitehead insists, more nearly the case. That is, because "consciousness only arises in a late derivative phase of complex integrations," it tends to illuminate the data of that late phase, not the data that were in the first phase, except for those relatively few elements that are carried into the late phase (PR, 162). From this point follows Whitehead's criticism of what he considers the basic error of modern epistemologies:
Thus those elements in our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts; they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process. . . . [T]he order of dawning, clearly and distinctly, in consciousness is not the order of metaphysical priority. (PR, 162)
It should be recalled that we are exploring Whitehead's claim that the ordinary (especially in modern times) notions of "mind" and "matter" as stark opposites arise from mistaking the abstract for the concrete. I have just reviewed much of his explanation as to why the common understanding of the "mind" as consisting essentially of "consciousness" and "thinking" involves such a mistake. I will now, building on this account of consciousness, do the same for the notion that perception is essentially sense perception. That will provide the basis, in turn, for explaining his related idea that the ordinary notion of matter is derived from a process of constructive abstraction rather than from any truly primary elements in our experience.
C. The Status of Sensory Perception in Human Experience
The assumption that sensory perception is a primary element in our experience follows from the equation, false from Whitehead's perspective, of primacy in consciousness with genetic primacy in experience . Sensory perception is a derivative form of perception, resulting from an integration that occurs
in a late phase of experience. It thus tends to get clearly illuminated by consciousness. That sensory perception gets lit up clearly follows not from the fact that our perceptual experience begins with sensory perception but from the fact that it does not .
Sensory perception, in Whitehead's analysis, is derivative from two simpler modes of perception. The first of these is called "perception in the mode of causal efficacy." Perception in this mode has already been discussed, because it is simply physical prehension described in the language of perception.
It is through perception in the mode of causal efficacy that we know most of those things that we inevitably presuppose in practice, which I have called hard-core commonsense notions . Modern philosophy has had difficulty explaining how we knew them, thereby relegating them to the category of "practice," "faith," "a priori forms of intuition," or even "dispensable common sense," because it has not recognized this more primal mode of perception underlying sense perception. It is through this more basic mode of perception, for example, that I have the category "other actualities besides myself" and know that there is an external world beyond my own experience, because I directly prehend other things, such as my bodily actualities. This is the basic reason why we are all realists in practice: "Common sense is inflexibly objectivist. We perceive other things which are in the world of actualities in the same sense as we are. Also our emotions are directed towards other things, including of course our bodily organs" (PR, 158).
This same mode of perception is, likewise, the basis for our knowledge of the reality of causation as real influence; this point is implicit in calling it "perception in the mode of causal efficacy." In prehending my body, for example, I prehend some of its parts as causally efficacious for my own experience. This applies not only to various pleasures and pains but also to external sensory perception itself. In opposition to Hume's claim that "impressions" arise in the soul "from unknown causes," Whitehead points out that Hume reveals elsewhere "his real conviction—everybody's real conviction—that visual sensations arise 'by the eyes.' The causes are not a bit 'unknown,' and among them there is usually to be found the efficacy of the eyes [although sometimes it may be alcohol]. . . . The reason for the existence of oculists and prohibitionists is that various causes are known" (PR, 171). "The notion of causation arose," Whitehead adds, "because mankind lives amid experiences in the mode of causal efficacy" (PR, 175).
It is through this mode of perception that we also know about the past and therefore the reality of time . I mentioned earlier that memory is an example of a physical prehension, because the present occasion of experience prehends prior experiences. This explains why we are not in practice afflicted by Santayana's "solipsism of the present moment." This prehension of our own past occasions of experience also provides an explanation for
our sense of self-identity through time—which needs an explanation in any philosophy such as that of Buddhism, Hume, and Whitehead in which the notion of a soul or mind as a numerically self-identical substance through time is denied (AI, 184, 186, 220f.; MT, 117f., 160ff.).
Perception in the mode of causal efficacy, which is a nonsensory mode of perception more basic than sensory, also serves to explain another assumption presupposed in the mind-body problem: our close sense of identification with our bodies . In a statement expressing a fact so obvious as to be seldom noticed, Whitehead says,
Nothing is more astonishing in the history of philosophic thought than the naive way in which our association with our human bodies is assumed. . . . [The body] is in fact merely one among other natural objects. And yet, the unity of "body and mind" is the obvious complex which constitutes the one human being. . . . [O]ur feeling of bodily unity is a primary experience. It is an experience so habitual and so completely a matter of course that we rarely mention it. No one ever says, Here am I, and I have brought my body with me. (MT, 114)
Whitehead's explanation: "There is . . . every reason to believe that our sense of unity with the body has the same original as our sense of unity with our immediate past of personal experience. It is another case of nonsensuous perception" (MT, 189). This sense of unity arises from what I in the previous chapter called "basic perception," in which one prehends one's own brain and through it the remainder of one's body.
I might add here that although Whitehead's method is certainly based on what can be called "introspection" in a broad sense, he is critical of introspection as it has typically been practiced by philosophers.
The attitude of introspection . . . lifts the clear-cut data of sensation into primacy, and cloaks the vague compulsions and derivations which form the main stuff of experience. In particular it rules out that intimate sense of derivation from the body, which is the reason for our instinctive identification of our bodies with ourselves. (AI, 226)
The reason the top-down approach has not gotten very far in overcoming the gap between mind and body is that it has usually started too far up, with the superficialities of human experience rather than with its essential ingredients. It has started with what makes our minds human, not with what makes them actual. I move now toward that higher level of superficialities.
The second mode of perception, derivative from the first, is called "perception in the mode of presentational immediacy." It is thus named because in this mode the data are immediately present, in themselves telling no tales of their origin. Taken by themselves, sense data, such as those constituting the yellow round shape before me, arise, in Hume's words, from "unknown
causes." In fact, when they are considered in isolation, we should not even call them sense data, because this term implies that we do know that they are derived from the senses. If this kind of perception were our only mode of perception, as Hume's theory held, then we would not even have the idea of causal influence: "Hume's polemic respecting causation is," Whitehead says, "one prolonged, convincing argument that pure presentational immediacy does not disclose any causal influence" (PR, 123). Pure presentational immediacy also does not disclose other actualities, a past, time, or much of anything else. Insofar as it gets reduced to visual data, as it often does (MT, 168), it gives us nothing but space, shapes, and colors. Given the modern tendency to equate perception with perception in this mode of presentational immediacy, it is no wonder that modern philosophy has had epistemological problems (such problems, in fact, that many philosophers Want to give up the whole epistemological enterprise).
These problems have arisen because of the false assumption, discussed earlier, that those elements that are primary in consciousness must be primary in the perceptual process . After the passage in which Whitehead argues that "those elements of our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts; they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process," he writes:
For example, consciousness only dimly illuminates the prehensions in the mode of causal efficacy, because these prehensions are primitive elements in our experience. But prehensions in the mode of presentational immediacy are among those prehensions which we enjoy with the most vivid consciousness. These prehensions are late derivatives in the concrescence of an experient subject. (PR, 162)
"Most of the difficulties of philosophy," Whitehead continues, are due to assuming the opposite: "Experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first" (PR, 162).
What, then, is sensory perception? It is a synthesis of these two more primitive forms. It is thus a form of "perception in the mode of symbolic reference," because data from one of the two former modes (usually presentational immediacy) are used to interpret data arising from the other mode (usually causal efficacy). To continue the example begun above, I use the yellow round patch that is immediately present to my mind to interpret the feeling of causal efficacy from my body, particularly my eyes. I say, accordingly, that I am seeing the sun. I may be wrong about that. I cannot be wrong about experiencing the yellow shape; and I cannot be wrong about feeling the causal efficacy (although I may be wrong in thinking that it originated from the eyes). In those two pure modes of perception, there is simple givenness. But perception in the mode of symbolic reference introduces interpretation and thereby the possibility of error (PR, 168, 172).
The fact that sensory perception includes perception in the mode of causal efficacy explains why we are all realists about sensory perception. We do not, as Whitehead says, begin dancing with sense data and then infer a partner (PR, 315f.). However, the fact that presentational immediacy generally far outweighs causal efficacy in consciousness, especially when one is involved in philosophical introspection, has led most philosophers simply to equate sensory perception with presentational immediacy. Some of the problems of this equation have already been mentioned. Another problem—which I touched on in the previous chapter—is the resulting assumption that entities without sensory organs can have no perceptual experience at all . This assumption lies behind the fact that most philosophers and scientists, even if they will allow some form of experience to most animals, draw the line at the point where there seem to be no sensory organs. However, if presentational immediacy and therefore sensory perception are derivative forms of perception even in us, then it is not impossible in principle to generalize some kind of perceptual experience to all individuals, however primitive . This point is the basis for Whitehead's generalization:
The perceptive mode of presentational immediacy arises in the later, originative, integrative phases of the process of concrescence. The perceptive mode of causal efficacy is to be traced to the constitution of the datum by reason of which there is a concrete percipient entity. Thus we must assign the mode of causal efficacy to the fundamental constitution of an occasion so that in germ this mode belongs even to organisms of the lowest grade; while the mode of presentational immediacy requires the more sophistical activity of the later stages of process, so as to belong only to organisms of a relatively high grade. (PR, 172)
Besides taking as primary a mode of perception that could not possibly be generalized to all levels of the actual world, the "topsy-turvy" interpretation of our experience also ignores, or takes as secondary, those dimensions of our experience that in principle could be generalized. The fallacious assumption that the notion of causation depends on vivid sense data, I have just argued, rules out the generalizability of perception in the mode of causal efficacy. Other relevant dimensions of experience are our emotions and purposes. In fact, just after the "topsy-turvy" sentence quoted above, Whitehead says: "In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have been made to follow upon Hume's impressions of sensation" (PR, 162). If we think, instead, of our experience as consisting most fundamentally of emotional, appetitive, and purposive (recall the discussion of "physical purposes") responses to physical feelings of other things, most basically our body and our own past of a split second ago, then we have elements some faint analogy to which can less implausibly be ascribed all the way down.
This completes my formulation of Whitehead's response to the first question, raised at the end of the first point in this section, regarding the plausibility of generalizing any aspect of human experience to the simplest actualities. Because much skepticism will surely remain, let me recall Whitehead's challenge:
Any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences. If there be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact within nature is mere bluff. . . . We should either admit dualism,. . . or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science. (AI, 185)
Assuming that the threat of (ontological) dualism is sufficient to prod even the most skeptical of my antidualist readers into continuing, I will proceed to the second question, which asks what basis there is in experience for thinking of the units of nature as the kind of entities to which primitive emotions, appetites, and purposes could be ascribed.
D. The Spatializing Nature of Sensory Perception's Presentational Immediacy[*]
The general thesis of the remainder of this section is that "among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience" there is no element that is experienced as simply located or vacuous, with "vacuous" understood to mean void of all experience (SMW, 58; PR, 29, 167). The points below (E and F) treat the positive side of this thesis, which is that the truly given elements of experience are all given so as to suggest just the opposite—that the units of nature contain experience and references to the past and the future. The present point treats the negative side of the thesis, which is that the conception of matter as having the twin characteristics of vacuity and simple location is based on constructed, not given, elements in experience.
In this discussion, I will, as the above head indicates, be thinking of sensory perception in terms of its dimension of presentational immediacy (which is overwhelmingly dominant in it and with which it is usually simply equated). The main point is that the view of nature on which scientific materialism is based, in which matter is seen as having none but spatial properties, is a result of the spatializing nature of presentational immediacy. Because of the prominence of presentational immediacy in sensory
[*] I distinguished, in the final section of chapter 7, between two kinds of sensory perception: perception of things external to one's body and "proprioception" of parts of one's own body. In this section, I distinguish between sensory perception as such, but especially of external things, and perception in the mode of causal efficacy.
perception, the perceptual mode of causal efficacy, which suggests a quite different view of nature, is virtually if not totally ignored. By misunderstanding the status of presentational immediacy within sensory perception, we are led to construct a false view of nature.
The point that presentational immediacy is a derivative, not a direct, mode of perception has already been made. Whereas nonsensory prehension of our own body is perception of nature as directly given to experience, in sensory perception that provides information of things beyond the body we have nature as constructed, not simply given. This is a point on which our usual epistemological assumptions should be partly corrected by our science: "Unless the physical and physiological sciences are fables, the qualitative experiences which are the sensations, such as sight, hearing, etc., are involved in an intricate flux of reactions within and without the animal body" (MT, 121). Sense data, in other words, are produced by an amazingly complex, indirect process. Philosophers tend to give lip service to this fact and then continue to think of nature in terms of the purely spatial matter that is a product of (external) sensory perception.
One respect in which sensory perception is illusory—we now know, thanks to modern physics, chemistry, and biology, with their atomic, molecular, and cell theories—is that sensory perception hides the true individuals composing material things. A stone, for example, is composed of billions of individuals engaged in energetic activity. Sensory perception, however, gives us a single, passive, enduring substance, numerically one both temporally and spatially (MT, 154; PR, 77). Even when we know better, we may continue, with Popper, to take "solid material bodies" as the paradigms of reality.[*] Historically, what happened was that the characteristics originally attributed to the stone were reassigned to the molecule and the atom. In Whitehead's words, "The metaphysical concepts, which had their origin in a mistake about the stone, were now applied to the individual molecules. Each atom was still a stuff which retained its self-identity and its essential attributes in any portion of time—however short, and however long" (PR, 78). When it became clear that the concept of passive, enduring matter did not apply to the atom, its application was shifted to the (revealingly named) "elementary particles." Even though quantum physics suggests that the whole concept is a mistake, it continues to be assumed. This
[*] Even Strawson seems to continue this practice. Although he says that experience must be taken to be fully natural and to be as real as any other properties or phenomena of physical things, emphasizing that the reality of experience is "the thing of which we can be most certain" (MR, 57), he nevertheless, when naming "paradigm cases of physical phenomena," names "rocks, seas, neurons, and so on" (MR, 110). The logic of his argument would seem to require him, instead, to take human beings, especially himself as known from within, as paradigmatic.
is the power of the perception-based conceptions suggested by perception in the mode of presentational immediacy.
Whereas the former point is well known (even if its implications are usually ignored), Whitehead's further point about the constructed nature of sensory data is among his most original and, to conventional ways of thinking, most challenging ideas. It is also one of his most important ideas, lying behind his greater suspicion (compared with McGinn) about the adequacy of our conceptions based on sensory perception with its tendency to "spatialize" its objects. The idea in question is that the transition from the perceptual mode of causal efficacy to that of presentational immediacy involves an inversion of emphasis, so that the features that were prominent in the data as received in physical prehension are radically played down by presentational immediacy, whereas other features, which were only faintly present in the primal perceptual mode, are greatly emphasized in the derivative mode. Let us deal with a case of visual perception, in which I perceive the early morning sky as red. I, as the prehensive unification of the relevant activities in my brain at that moment, receive, in the perceptual mode of causal efficacy, both a sensum and certain geometrical relationships to the environment (PR, 171, 312). In that mode of perception, the sensum is strongly felt in terms of its primary status in the nature of things, which is as a qualification of affective tone (AI, 245). Whitehead knows that this is not the conventional view about sensa: "Unfortunately the learned tradition of philosophy has missed their main characteristic, which is their enormous emotional significance" (AI, 215). In a physical prehension, it is this aspect of the sensum, in this case red, that is primarily felt.
In their most primitive form of functioning, a sensum is felt physically with emotional enjoyment of its sheer individual essence. For example, red is felt with emotional enjoyment of its sheer redness. In this primitive prehension we have aboriginal physical feeling in which the subject feels itself as enjoying redness. (PR, 314f.)
The geometrical relationships that I inherit from the feelings transmitted through the brain from the optic nerve, however, are only vaguely felt in this mode of perception; they are ill-defined, having only faint relevance to any particular region. The sensum is felt with strong emotion, accordingly, but is "unspatialized" (PR, 114, 172).
In the perceptual mode of presentational immediacy, by contrast, this relationship is inverted. The geometrical relationships are lifted into prominence, with the result that the sensum is projected onto a contemporary region of space (which may or may not be the locus from which the red originated). In this process, the sensum is transmuted from being primarily a qualification of affective tone into being primarily a qualification of an
external region (PR, 172; AI, 215, 245). The sensum has, accordingly, been "spatialized." Here is a summary statement:
The more primitive types of experience are concerned with sense-reception, and not with sense-perception. . . . [S]ense-reception is 'unspatialized,' and sense-perception is 'spatialized.' In sense-reception the sensa are the definiteness of emotion: they are emotional forms transmitted from occasion to occasion. Finally in some occasion of adequate complexity, [a transmutation] endows them with the new function of characterizing nexus[*] .[*] (PR, 114)
This spatializing nature of presentational immediacy is of its essence: "presentational immediacy is the mode in which vivid feelings of contemporary geometrical relations, with special emphasis on certain 'focal' regions, enter into experience" (PR, 324).
We have now arrived at Whitehead's explanation as to how sensory perception tends to lead us astray in ontology, once more because of our tendency to mistake an abstraction for the real thing. "The separation of the emotional experience from the presentational intuition," he says, "is a high abstraction of thought" (PR, 162f.). We are so accustomed to thinking about the world in terms of high abstractions, such as "the tree as green," furthermore, that "we have difficulty in eliciting into consciousness the notion of 'green' as the qualifying character of an emotion" (PR, 162). Although more than one reader is probably having that difficulty right now, we do have some reasons from ordinary experience to think that colors are, down deep, emotional in nature. If sensa had no tendency to evoke affective, aesthetic responses, it would be difficult to explain how art is possible (PR, 162; AI, 216). Also, many people experience irritation in the presence of red (PR, 315). There is further support for Whitehead's view, I might add, in recent studies demonstrating the differing emotional and behavioral responses of people depending on whether they are in red rooms or green rooms.
Whitehead's position on sensa does agree with the orthodox view that, for example, colors as we see them are "secondary qualities," which as such do not inhere in the objects onto which we project them. But Whitehead's view has quite different consequences. The orthodox view is that these secondary qualities have arisen, mysteriously, out of so-called primary qualities, which are, in fact, purely quantitative factors. It is generally held, for example, that colors are "really" nothing but wavelengths, which are said to be turned into colors by one's mind (often in spite of its being assigned purely epiphenomenal status, so that a miracle is performed by an illusion). Whitehead's view is that secondary qualities are produced by the mind out of values, or emotions. Recalling that such things are sometimes spoken of
[*] "Nexus" is the plural of "nexus."
as "tertiary" qualities, we could say that secondary qualities are produced in the mind out of tertiary qualities that are in the body and even nature in general. From Whitehead's standpoint, however, these terms need to be reapplied, because what was tertiary in the dualistic view is primary in the panexperientialist view: "Value" is the term Whitehead applies to the intrinsic reality of every actual entity (SMW, 93). The qualities called primary in the dualistic and materialistic views are for him simply features of things as viewed from without. For example, in the transmission of light, the events intrinsically are "pulses of emotions," while from the outside these appear as "wave-lengths and vibrations" (PR, 163). Lest this seem an idea that could not be reconciled with "real physics," it should be recalled that before turning to metaphysics Whitehead produced an alternative interpretation of relativity physics.[2]
In any case, the central point of the foregoing discussion is that the idea of matter as devoid of any inherent values, and as instead consisting of purely spatial features, is a result of misinterpreting the status of presentational immediacy within sensory perception, especially the fact that it "spatializes" the data as received in the more primal mode of perception, thereby submerging their emotional significance by turning them into qualifications of geometrical regions. The perception of matter that leads to the notion of vacuous actuality, accordingly, does not arise from nature as immediately given to human experience but from nature as constructed by a derivative mode of perception. The building of a worldview (with an insoluble mind-body problem) on the basis of this type of perception is the result of failing to see that the prominent side of sensory perception, the perceptual mode of presentational immediacy, gives us an artificial, constructed view of the world. We have failed to see the deeper significance of the fact that our sensory perception in respect to its "prominent side of external reference is very superficial in its disclosure of the universe" (MT, 153). It is implicit in that statement, however, that there is another side to our sensory perception: its "bodily reference." The next points will deal with that other side, in which nature is perceived more concretely. These points involve overcoming philosophy's tendency to concentrate on visual feelings to the neglect of visceral feelings (PR, 121).
E. Implications of the Bodily Origin of Sensory Perception
"How do we observe nature?" Whitehead asks. "The conventional answer to this question," he says, "is that we perceive nature through our senses" (MT, 158). We are likely, he adds, to narrow this down to sight. However, he points out, we should be suspicious of this answer. (For all their talk about suspicion, most philosophers who think of themselves as "postmodern" have remained true believers in this respect.) This suspicion should
follow from what Whitehead has called the "physiological attitude" (SMW, 148). Besides the fact that we are directly (if only vaguely) aware of the intervention of the body even in visual perception,
every type of crucial experiment proves that what we see, and where we see it, depend entirely upon the physiological functioning of our body. . . . All sense perception is merely one outcome of the dependence of our experience upon bodily functionings. Thus if we wish to understand the relation of our personal experience to the activities of nature, the proper procedure is to examine the dependence of our personal experiences upon our personal bodies. (MT, 158f.)
The most direct way to observe nature, in other words, is to observe it working in ourselves, as it influences our own experience (which is, we recall, as much a part of nature as anything else). If we are empiricists, we should draw our conclusions about the nature of nature from our best vantage point: "The human body provides our closest experience of the interplay of actualities in nature" (MT, 115). Of course, many today have adopted a "physiological attitude" with respect to the mind-body relation. The dominant approach, however, interprets the physiological and psychological evidence in externalist categories derived from sensory perception. Whitehead means something quite different: an approach that interprets what we know from physiology in terms of what we know about the body from within . This approach, while including an introspective element, is not a return to introspective psychology in the old sense. First, as pointed out earlier, the introspective element here does not focus on the high-level, superficial aspects of our experience, even its medium-level mentality, but on the truly fundamental, originating, physical dimension of our experience, in which it takes its rise largely from bodily activities. Second, it involves a coordination of this internal observation of nature in action with the information acquired from the external physiological approach.
The moral of Point D must not be forgotten. The purely external, purely physiological approach to the study of the body is an approach in which "all direct observation has been identified with sense-perception" (AI, 217). But the central lesson of physiology itself is that sense perception is not direct observation of its objects . The physiologist looking at my brain is not directly observing my brain cells. As Whitehead repeatedly stresses, "unless the physicist and physiologist are talking nonsense, there is a terrific tale of complex activity" that occurs between my brain cells and the brain cells and conscious experiences of the observing physiologist (MT, 121). It is simply credulous to accept the results of sense perception (even if magnified by instruments), accordingly, as giving us direct information, and indeed the only kind of relevant information, about the nature of brain cell activity. Sensory perception gives very indirect information, mediated through bil-
lions of events and then modified by the constructive and abstractive processes of one's own unconscious and conscious experience. Although I from within am not consciously aware of my individual brain cells and their "firings" (all this kind of knowledge must come from physiology) and am not even directly aware of the existence of a brain in my head (except perhaps when I have a headache), I do in effect observe the brain insofar as I am directly aware of the kinds of influences that flow into my own experience from it . And I am conscious of receiving influences from various other portions of my body, such as my eyes, my hands, my skin in general. The purpose of the present point and the next is to see what can be learned from this direct observation that can be used to interpret the more indirect findings of physiology.
In speaking of (external) sensory perception thus far, I have for the most part been assuming the equation of it with its dimension of presentational immediacy, which conveys information about the world external to the body. This information, albeit highly abstract, is still information (when all goes well) about that external world. As I took pains to stress in Point D, however, sensory perception involves an integration of the perceptual mode of presentational immediacy with that of causal efficacy. If we attend to that other mode, then even (external) sensory perception tells us something about the body. The remainder of the present point explores implications of the fact that sensory perception does arise out of our perception in the mode of causal efficacy of our own bodies. Points F and G will then explore the information directly learned from that mode.
One thing that an examination of our own sensory perception tells us is based on the recognition that the human body is the "self-sufficient organ of human sense-perception" (AI, 214). Although generally, to be sure, the body in producing sensory perceptions in us does convey information transmitted through the body from the outside world, this need not be the case: By doing various things with the body, such as with drugs or electrodes, the same kinds of sensory impressions can be generated; and our dreaming activity shows most clearly that the body can be quite self-sufficient in producing sensory imagery. The pertinent question from this realization is: What does this fact, plus the fact that waking sensory perception normally does convey information about the world external to the body, tell us about the bodily parts themselves? Whitehead's answer: It tells us that our bodily units must incorporate within themselves aspects of the world beyond themselves .
Your perception takes place where you are, and is entirely dependent on how your body is functioning. But this functioning of the body in one place, exhibits for your cognisance an aspect of the distant environment. . . . If this cognisance conveys knowledge of a transcendent world, it must be because the event which is the bodily life unifies in itself aspects of the universe. (SMW, 91–92)
For example, if my sensory perception of the sun arises completely from my prehension of my brain cells and yet my sensory data in some sense correspond to the sun itself (and who really doubts that? ), then my brain cells must in some sense incorporate aspects of the sun into themselves. This recognition implies that the notion of these cells as "simply located" is false. The functioning of the brain cells in conveying this information suggests that each cellular event contains a reference to the past world, in this case the events that occurred on the surface of the sun eight minutes ago, and to the future, in this case to my experience that comes immediately after the neuronal events. (If you doubt that a temporal distinction can be made here, simply think about the cellular events in the eye: They certainly occur prior to the mind's sensory perception based on data received from them, so in this case the temporal relation is clear.) Each event seems essentially to prehend aspects of past events and to pass on aspects to future events, which prehend it . What we know from sensory perception by combining inner and outer knowledge, accordingly, is that bodily cells are analogous to our own experiences, at least in respect to being prehenders . And if they are prehenders, they cannot be purely spatial entities: They must have an inside, into which the prehended material is taken before it is passed along to subsequent prehenders. Having an inside would mean that they have an inner duration, which is the time it takes each event to occur—the time between its reception of information and its transmission of this information to subsequent events. Looking at sensory perception from this perspective, accordingly, gives us a much different idea of the nature of nature than we get simply from the sense data of presentational immediacy alone.
In light of this idea, I will pause to look at a particularly interesting part of McGinn's argument, which I passed over before. In discussing intentionality, he says that the most fundamental question is not the nature of its content but "what this directedness, grasping, apprehension, encompassing, reaching out ultimately consists in" (PC, 37). It is this feature of our own experience that leads McGinn, given his assumption that the mind is ontologically reducible to the brain, to despair of ever solving the mind-body problem in physicalist terms (which would require an epistemic reduction). "Phenomenologically, we feel that the mind 'lays hold' of things out there, mentally 'grasps' them, but we have no physical model of what this might consist in." To make the point vivid, he says: "If I may put it so: how on earth could my brain make that possible? No ethereal prehensile organ protrudes from my skull!" (PC, 40).
In light of Whitehead's analysis, we can give a twofold answer. First, we need not think of the brain as somehow having the ontological unity to prehend other things into the unity of experience that we know directly ("phenomenologically"). By distinguishing between the brain as a multiplicity and the mind-event as a unification of aspects of brain events into
an experiential unity, we can attribute that unifying capacity to the mind. Second, we can, however, think of each brain cell event as indeed having a grasping or prehensive capacity, by which it unifies aspects of what it has received from beyond itself into an (albeit much less complex and sophisticated) experiential unity. This means, of course, that we must think of the remainder of the bodily cells in a similar way; for example, those constituting the remainder of the central nervous system must be able to prehend and be prehended so that the information from the surface of the body can be transmitted to the brain cells.
In any case, besides learning from this dual mode of observation that our bodily units must be prehensive events, we learn that they must embody, to use the current jargon, "qualia." This conclusion follows from the same kind of reasoning, being already implicit in the analysis of "secondary qualities" in the previous point. Sensory qualities such as red as we see it, it is agreed on virtually all sides, do not exist in external nature; for example, the molecules in a red ball are not red as we see it apart from someone's seeing it, and they certainly do not see red. But we do see red, and this sensory quality surely arises out of our bodily activities. It is impossible to understand how, apart from supernatural intervention, this could be so if these bodily activities were purely quantitative in nature, devoid of all qualia. A naturalistic perspective leads to the inference that our bodily cells must embody qualia of some sort, even if they do not experience them in the same way that we experience them in conscious sensory perception. That is, cells surely do not enjoy red as we see it . But perhaps red for them is an emotion. Perhaps red as it exists throughout most of nature is a subjective form of immediate feeling, whereas it is only in the conscious presentational immediacy of animals with sensory organs that that subjective form is turned into an objective datum projected onto outer things. "Red as seen," then, would be a transmutation effected by more or less high-level experiences out of "red as felt." This is a kind of transmutation that requires no supernatural assistance.
This suggestion, of course, will be widely repudiated out of hand. Many philosophers will respond angrily, or at least smile knowingly, muttering, "This suggestion violates common sense." That is true: It violates soft-core common sense based on an uncritical acceptance of the deliverances of sensory perception reinforced by several centuries of dualistic thinking and language. Most philosophers (including scientists qua philosophers) have become so strongly enculturated with this soft-core commonsense perspective that they are willing to carry out its implications, to violate several of our hard-core commonsense convictions, even though this leaves them with a violent contradiction between their theories and the presuppositions of their practice, including the practice of formulating theories. Alternatively, they are willing to countenance an unintelligible dualism, to accept a magi-
cal emergentism, or to proclaim the mind-body problem permanently insoluble. Is Whitehead's suggestion, in spite of its violation of long-standing soft-core prejudices, not both more rational and more empirical? Do we not indeed have good reason to be suspicious of the conceptions of matter based on (sensory) perception-based categories alone? Has Whitehead not provided good reason to reject the notion that entities in nature in themselves have only the spatial properties that we assign them on the basis of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy? Has he not provided good reason to think, instead, that bodily events involve prehension and therefore an inside? And does that not remove one of the basic reasons for assuming that cells could not experience subjective forms such as emotions of a lowly sort? This is a defensive paragraph, but I do know from experience what kind of response to expect from the suggestion that colors are emotions and that cells could experience them. My response is an appeal to Searle's regulative principle that we constantly remind ourselves of what we know for sure. This carries with it the negative principle that we keep reminding ourselves of what we do not know. We do not know directly that cells do not feel emotions, and we do not know anything from which this could be deduced. However, we do know a lot of things that this idea helps us make sense of.
The present point is based on inference: We derive such and such from our brain, therefore the brain's units must embody such and such. The next point appeals to direct experience.
F. Information about Nature Derived from Direct Prehension of Our Bodies
The recognition that our bodily members are not simply located objects can be based not simply on inference, as above, but also on our experience of being causally influenced by them in our physical experience. To provide the basis for this argument, we can begin with the relation between my present experience and previous occasions of my own experience. In illustrating physical prehension (nonsensory perception of other actualities), Whitehead, in an argument against the Humean view that our experiences are completely separable one from the other, uses the example of a speaker saying "United States."
When the third syllable is reached, probably the first is in the immediate past; and certainly during the word 'States' the first syllable of the phrase lies beyond the immediacy of the present. . . . As mere sensuous perception, Hume is right in saying that the sound 'United' as a mere sensum has nothing in its nature referent to the sound 'States', yet the speaker is carried from 'United' to 'States', and the two conjointly live in the present, by the energizing of the past occasion as it claims its self-identical existence as a living is-
sue in the present. The immediate past as surviving to be again lived through in the present is the primary instance of non-sensuous perception. (AI, 182)
The point here is that our own experience certainly does not have the property of simple location. The present moment is essentially constituted by its prehension of the previous moment. And that previous moment has (at least) a twofold existence: It existed in the past, and yet it is here in the present occasion. One might argue that this example provides no example of one actuality's being present in another, because our mind as enduring through time is a single entity. Whitehead's response:
[The former experience] is gone, and yet it is here. It is our indubitable self, the foundation of our present existence. Yet the present occasion while claiming self-identity, while sharing the very nature of the bygone occasion in all its living activities, nevertheless is engaged in modifying it, in adjusting it to other influences, in completing it with other values, in adjusting it to other purposes. The present moment is constituted by the influx of the other into that self-identity. (AI, 181)
In other words, although in one sense my present experience and that earlier experience are parts of one (enduring) individual, the unity over time is not that of an individual in the strictest sense, because the present occasion incorporates not only that prior experience but also many other influences. One of those influences, for example, might lead the speaker to reject the earlier occasion's intention to follow "United" with "States of America" by saying instead "States of Europe." With such different purposes, we could hardly say that the two or more experiences constituted a single individual in the strictest sense. This example, accordingly, presents an instance of our direct awareness of former actualities existing and energizing in a present actuality, thereby showing that simple location does not, at least, characterize all actualities. And it provides a model for inferring that the same is true for our bodily members.
Whitehead argues, in a passage partly quoted earlier, that our sense of identity-with-difference in relation to the body is similar:
Our dominant inheritance from our immediately past occasion is broken into by innumerable inheritances through other avenues. Sensitive nerves, the functionings of our viscera, disturbances in the composition of our blood, break in upon the dominant line of inheritance. In this way, emotions, hopes, fears, inhibitions, sense-perceptions arise, which physiologists confidently ascribe to the bodily functioning. So intimately obvious is this bodily inheritance that common speech does not discriminate the human body from the human person. Soul and body are fused together. . . . But the human body is indubitably a complex of occasions which are part of spatial nature. It is a set of occasions miraculously coordinated so as to pour its inheritance into various regions within the brain. There is thus every reason to believe that
our sense of unity with the body has the same original as our sense of unity with our immediate past of personal experience. It is another case of nonsensuous perception. (AI, 189)
This unity with our body, however, is no more strict identity than is our unity with our own past experience. Rather: "The body is that portion of nature with which each moment of human experience intimately cooperates. There is an inflow and outflow of factors between the bodily actuality and the human experience, so that each shares in the existence of the other" (MT, 115). In other words, because there is mutual efficient causation between the body and our experience, they cannot be understood as strictly (numerically) identical. The body is in this sense composed of others —that is, of entities that are distinct from our experience or mind as such: "Actuality is the self-enjoyment of importance. But this self-enjoyment has the character of the self-enjoyment of others melting into the enjoyment of the one self" (MT, 117f.). Precisely because self and body are not one in the strictest sense, the intimate relationship between them provides us with direct observational evidence against the idea that "spatial nature" is purely spatial, being capable of only external relations.