II CHAPTER
From the mind point of view
In the first chapter we found the impossibility of making sense of identity in a world of multiplicity. Whether we consider a subjective or an objective approach (or a combination of both) to the problem of identity, each of the two may be the outcome of mistakes or illusions. So we turned to the intuitive notion of the ‘self’, and we didn’t find any loop to penetrate its mysterious nature and help us to rationalize our conviction that we exist as separate entities, in an environment where there are other entities, some akin to our constitution and some not. All our efforts lead us in a dark area of skeptical bewilderment. Perhaps a better understanding of what our mind is will yield better results; perhaps we may find at least the reasons why we believe what we do about the self around which we try to build the elusive notion of identity.
FROM THE MIND/BODY POINT OF VIEW
The Mind/Body problem[1]
The mind is like an eye looking through a keyhole; the eye can see everything included in its limited visual field and not more than that; but if you are on the other side in its visual field and want to get even with the eye (the mind) and look back at it, you place your eye at your side of the keyhole and you see nothing but dark; minds are designed to see portions of reality not themselves.
Mythology versus philosophy and some of its history
For a pre-philosophical person, nature was magically explained by attributing a mind and intentions to it. Relics of this naive stance survived in philosophical doctrines like
that of Plotinus, hinted at in the first chapter; he posited the existence of a soul, a simple spiritual entity that permeated the magma of the world by infusing it with a transcendent unifying stuff that would separate portions of reality and make things out of one indistinct flux; the problem of multiplicity spiritually solved, what in the models of cognitive processes approach, with no religious connotation, has come to be known as ‘the binding problem’. A horse, a tree, a man are a conglomerate of particles unified by the soul and separated from the remaining universe; Plotinus’ doctrine was an alternative solution to the notion of substance in Aristotle, that was less animistic, a more materialistic naturalization of unity versus multiplicity, however forged on platonic perfect forms, essences, hidden behind the surface.
In spite of Plotinus and others, however, the path and the direction of the idea that nature has no mind and intentions has progressed to the point of re-disposing even the attribution of intentions, free will and the mind to human beings, by demoting them to either natural objects or illusions. Intentions and decisions have become epiphenomenal effects of natural phenomena in some doctrines. Useless danglers to be eliminated by science that in turn is charged with the task of finding nomological assertions connecting external stimuli and behavior in another doctrine. Epiphenomenalism and behaviorism are twentieth century schools of thought.
An old matrix of one other modern doctrine can be found in Anaxagoras, who claimed that “Mind…causes all things”, but then he adduced only physical causes to explain human action: an interesting apparent inconsistency that in some form reemerges in Kant and Anomalous Monism, a modern doctrine advocated by Donald Davidson.
In the 17th century Descartes, unable to bridge the mental and the physical, opened the path to the modern debate. The mental as he conceived it was strongly needed to salvage the human being from an ever growing mechanical conception of the nature of the universe. Cartesian interactionism seems designed to free us from falling within the mechanical nature of the physical world and as such completely subjected to rigid laws of nature.
But now the problem of how the mind can interact with the physical world was a full-fledged verbalized problem of philosophy. The insurmountable difficulties of explaining how a non-physical entity can have causal intercourse with the physical world revived the old Heraclitean and atomistic doctrines that the soul (the mind) is a physical entity. In the modern era this doctrine has seen different variations, both within reductionism and its ramifications.
So philosophical doctrines go on in form of waves, independent of one another up to a point, seemingly canceling or reinforcing each other;[2] doctrines based on opinions grow without any chronological order of progressive evolution. Relevant points of old doctrines are reformulated in more modern terms in order to gain consensus. Incompatible philosophical doctrines coexist in time. That is one difference between philosophy and science; while there may be a dominant scientific theory at each time, it is less likely that there is a dominant philosophical doctrine at the same time.
Without going too far back in time we can certainly find the roots of modern reductionism in the positivist thinking of the 19th century. Lamarck, Laplace, Darwin and even Freud believed that their doctrines would find their final explanation in natural sciences, like biology or its sub-branches, and finally in physics, understood as a universal science. A T.O.E., a theory of everything, is what they had in mind.
It is hard to see how even the most primitive biological system's behavior, such as that of a virus or a bacterium, can ever be explained in terms of atoms and their relations, or in terms of curved space, since their overwhelming complexity requires—at least at the present moment—a language that is completely alien to any language of physics and, as far as I can see, by any stretching of that language in future sciences. What role speed, mass, energy, electricity and magnetism may have in explaining the purposive behavior of even the most primitive living organisms like prokaryotes is a farfetched goal (although there are indeed attempts to explain mind activity, in particular consciousness, in terms of electromagnetic fields).
Notice that our problem is the reduction of mental to biological properties. I believe, contrary to the present philosophical trend, that it is a different, most improbable form of reductionism (with respect to reduction of branches of science to more basic branches). The main reason, from my point of view, why reduction of the mental to physical is a different case is that there are no notions in natural science that can explain free will. Stochastic laws are most of the time the expression of epistemological uncertainty rather than the capturing of a form of freedom in nature.
FREE WILL
What is free will? Some scholars, notably computer scientists, apply the notion of probability to the problem of free will. But if probability governs our choices as an intrinsic property then it is obvious that we are not free to choose: probability would govern our choices. When the behavior of a subatomic particle is explained in terms of probability, in a sense that particle is not free anymore. Some scientists, notably Einstein, have suggested the existence of hidden variants, unknown forces that if known would make our prediction of subatomic particles behavior completely deterministic. John Bell showed that Einstein was wrong. There are no hidden variants to explore, so the probability is in the event itself, not in our limited knowledge.
Hence, some scientists have seen in this subatomic phenomenon a form of free will, and I believe this is a mistake. For suppose that a behavioral science may predict that the probability of me performing A instead of B is 50%. I am free to take A as many times as I am confronted with the choice. Can a particle do the same thing? This is why probability does not apply to free will. Of course, we use probability in social sciences to measure dispositions, tendencies, or cultural biases of groups towards certain actions, and this is the source of confusion between what people tend to do, as groups, or even as individuals when not aware of the prediction; but, free will is independent of any knowledge that uses probability.
The attribution of free will to subatomic particles is justified by the fact that probability does not belong to the knowledge of the subatomic particles but it is intrinsic to their nature. Analogously free will is independent of knowledge, but its nature is different from the choice-like nature of the subatomic particle, as my example shows: I can disconfirm at will any prediction of my behavior including a stochastic one. The physical world cannot do so.
Another suggestion about free will comes from Artificial Intelligence consisting in a denial of the existence of free will. According to Sloman (1988) the notion of free will evaporates when attributed to intelligent systems with motives. He shows how more and more designs can be added to a system that reaches a level of complexity such that it becomes difficult even for the agent who designed the system to establish the incidence of the combination of all determinants and predict the behavior of the machine.
Of course, the parallel with creatures like human beings, seen from the perspective of evolution is very tempting. Once again, the problem is, according to me, a confusion. In the case of the machine it is a problem of decidability connected with our knowledge. Free will, if such a thing exists, is independent of motives, reasons, determinants. If we can show that in the light of a goal and its rationale, a certain choice is the best case, and the agent can still act by choosing a different action, probably the best contrary to the goal in mind, then free will is ensured and untouched by such arguments.
More difficulties behind reduction
Another reason why reducing the mental to the physical is a different problem from, say, reducing biology to physics, is illustrated by the next argument. Suppose that one day a certain science (it has already been partially done for molecular biology, where chemical bond theory has been reduced to physics) can be reduced to quantum mechanics, where the uncertainty principle reigns. There, we are told, sometimes it is useful to consider a phenomenon the expression of waves and sometimes of particles. For some thinkers this is enough to conclude that those phenomena cannot be separated by the scope and intentions of the observer, who becomes an integral part of the explanation of them. If they are right, this would be a good reason to believe that ontology cannot be separated from epistemology, and hence from the mind.[3]
But suppose they are wrong, and there is a reality out there that one day can be better explained by eliminating the observer. Our problem, the reduction of the mental to the physical, is different: here we are not seeking any explanation of external entities or properties in terms of other external properties, we are seeking rather an explanation of internal entities in terms of external entities, the subjective explanandum eliminated by the objective explanatum. For suppose that reduction is achieved. I could be exactly the individual I am. I may even simulate evidence of self awareness, self reflection and self reference in my speech, without having a consciousness, i.e., in the words of Dennett, “...a lot of hustle and bustle but there is nobody home!” This is an absurdity to be disregarded on the basis of common sense, unless we stretch our skepticism all the way, to the point of doubting our existence altogether as an illusion.
We may find things in physics that are hybrids, waves and particles according to the perspective at work, with mutually exclusive properties, space and time inextricably connected and forming one fabric; and an obsolete ontology, like that provided by Mendel, may capture truths that are the same captured by the more up-to-date ontology provided by modern genetics.[4]
Can't we extend these counter-intuitive but largely accepted notions among scientists to the mind-body problem? An immediate objection arises from what has been said so far: here we must face the problem of subjectivity versus objectivity, which is an additional problem not affecting physical to physical reduction.
Then again, although the idea of attempting to make the physical mental—which seems to me a subjective notion of the mental—is a much less absurd option, nonetheless it has its shortcomings.
Let's make our knowledge of the physical, including the, brain, mental as well. In the very moment that we accept everything is mental the mental loses force, it cannot be contrasted anymore. Against what should we gauge it? This brings up a problem already mentioned: when we make everything mental, what happens to objectivity, the backbone of knowledge and science? Here the situation is not as desperate as it may seem: we may speculate that individual perspectives are characterized by similarities and similarity in turn may be justified by extrapolation of relevant factors, the essence of objectivity and science. We are in a quagmire though, wavering from mental to physical and vice versa, not knowing which side of it will be within our reach and salvage us.
Let's look at the work of serious philosophers who have sought definitions of mental and physical. Davidson suggests that once we define the mental, the physical is recessive, so to speak, with respect to it: whatever is not mental is physical. Next, he suggests a Brentanian definition of the mental (and I believe that Brentano is under some referential illusion): there is no physical reality that is not made such by a mind.
Others suggest that we refer to the present theory of physics to define the physical. No kidding! There we find masses that curve space-time, particles that behave disrespectfully of everything we believe matter is all about, superstrings whose dimensions are perhaps forever hidden to us, and tachyons that are faster than light—which may not even exist because nothing can be faster than light! Physics is so creative that it is overwhelmingly richer than whatever we can state existing with direct or even indirect evidence. So physical reality seems to coincide with thought, for science, rather than the physical world as we understand it!
Many hypotheses in physics are the factual interpretations of mathematical equations, most of the time in conflict with common sense, lacking evidence and as such very vulnerable to the under-determination of theories.[5] There are physicists who are Pythagoreans without knowing it.[6] Parmenides said that reality is identical with thought twenty five hundred years ago!
In the last century the scenario has apparently changed in dramatic ways. Reductionism concerning the mind/body problem, in the Cartesian formulation, has been mended by what we may call Spinozistic therapy. In short, we may consider the individual being not a combination of two substances, like in Descartes’ doctrine, but a single entity with two sets of different properties, the physical and the mental properties—pending a clarification of their relation which in turn depends on a definition of the physical, which is still lacking.
The maneuver of moving the dichotomy to properties from entities seems promising at a first glance; this is because, through it, we have the impression of salvaging the unity of the individual, while charging the ontology with the burden of explaining the relation between mental and physical properties. For a complete and clear account of the modern scenario, however, refer to Jaegwon Kim; for my part, I will use Kim’s words from his article “Non Reductive and Mental Causation”. Kim in turn cites Oppenheim and Putnam (1958) for a more complete account of the modern approach.
Kim writes, “The ontological picture that has dominated on the mind problem is strikingly different from the Cartesian picture. The Cartesian model of a bifurcated world has been replaced by that of a Layered world, of a hierarchically stratified structure of 'levels' or of 'orders' of entities and their characteristic properties. It is generally thought that there is a bottom level, one consisting of whatever micro-physics is going to tell us are the most basic physical particles of which all matter is composed...As we ascend to higher levels, we find structures that are made up of entities belonging to the lower levels, and moreover, entities at any given level are characterized by a set of properties distinctive of that level...Sometimes one speaks in terms of 'levels of description', or 'levels of analysis', or 'levels of language'...Thus the world as portrayed in the new picture consists of two components: a set of entities constituting the domain of particulars for that level and a set of properties defined over this domain...” From here Kim goes on to ask legitimate questions—to be answered if this layer picture must have any sense—about the relation between sets of properties of adjacent levels.
In the course of a discussion of modern mind/body problem theories, I think it is legitimate to insist, once again, on asking questions such as: “Does the notion of identity, the notion of properties and attributes, the notion of individuals or entities, natural kinds, events, the notion of causation taken as a relation among individuals, or embedded in nomological accounts of reality between types, have any real ontological status?” Philosophy struggles to separate metaphysics from ontology, epistemology from reality, and in the end the outcome depends always on personal views, often guided by language analysis. But we have good reasons to question the ontological status of many notions, and we ought to pursue a clear separation of mental and physical if we want to be externalists.
Reductionism, in the form of the identity theory as it was presented to us during the last century by Armstrong and Smart, is the thesis according to which there is nothing behind and above the physical world, and therefore the mind is identical with the brain or any more extensive portion of the physical world (the heart, or the spinal cord or any peripheral extension of the nervous system). The identity theory in its type or token version and the several foes of it are all construed on concepts that are mental in nature. In my view, events, properties, the notion of identity, causality and supervenience, are all abstract mental constructions.
When I began to wonder about the mind/body problem I fancied an analogy that still serves its purpose today; it has lost its fragrance, and I will consider some of the reasons for this.
The Brain as a projector
A projector, a screen, or a cassette tape recorder plus a TV set are, in my analogy, the brain; the movie projected represents the mind. The analogy has limits but also strong points of affinity with the mind/body problem as I understand it, and not only because the brain may be thought of as a projector (a pain in the finger is a projection, for instance). The properties of the tape are completely different from those of the story narrated by the movie. Although the physical properties are correlated with the conceptual content of the movie in a correlation that up to a point can well be defined as a sort of nonsymmetrical supervenience, the analogy cannot be stretched too much. Different projector systems (VCR, old projectors) may project (instantiate) the same movie on different screens. This would not suit any supervenience concept in its classical understanding, but could serve Turing machine functionalism’s tenets perhaps.
Also, the analogy falls short of coping with the whole mind/body problem on the account that it does not contain any possibility of speculation concerning the reverse relation: the mental causing the physical, as it is called in the current literature. The movie, being the mental, is caused by the physical gadget. But, in order to have a mental to physical causation, we should include some kind of blue print, the idea or the project in the mind of the director of the movie.
At this point the analogy would complicate itself to an unbearable extent. Let me use the analogy for a lower level of questions. My first ontological question is: is the movie and the gadgets one thing or two things or maybe three or four? Let’s take the case where we have a tape, a video recorder, a TV set and the movie, the ultimate scope or product in which we are interested: three apparently spatially separated physical things, and one mental thing. The three physical things are connected but at least spatially separated. If you look at the three physical objects from an intuitive, material point of view, they are three. But if you look at them from a functional point of view they are one. What criterion should count? If the function of the video recorder is that of running tapes, in the very moment you are watching the movie, they may look one thing to some minds or more than one to others.
How do we decide? Ontology depends much on perspectives and purposes; it is bent, inevitably bent, to mental perspectives and their purposes.[7] Physics sees a multitude of atoms where the naked eye sees one object, and it postulates the existence of entities that are particles and waves, or idealizations of entities that are time/space stuff. Chemistry sees a multitude of atoms and molecules, while psychology and sociology see invisible things out of a complex combination of those things.
A physicist may reason in this way about the ontology under scrutiny, “We may think that radio waves are completely different physical objects or events than gamma-rays. They are produced in very different ways, and we detect them in different ways. But are they really different things? The answer is 'no'. Radio waves, visible light, X-rays, and all the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are fundamentally the same thing.”[8] Now compare it with a parallel ontological problem in biology, where your DNA and the DNA of any organism is made up of the same four bases symbolized by the letters A, T, G and C. The case is very similar to the physicist’s problem concerning the nature of electromagnetic waves, where she is prone to conclude, not disturbed by complications of her assumptions, that waves are all of the same type. Here you would be unlikely to find a biologist willing to accept that a fruit fly is fundamentally the same as a human being just because they share the same DNA blocks, and yet from a technical point of view the two cases are strikingly similar.[9] Are there different ontologies for different disciplines? Different universes within the same universe? My insistence on ontological issues may be nagging, but most of my rejection of a non-perspectival, objective ontology depends on these reflections: we have no universal criteria for ontology, in spite of what logicians try to impose. Different ontologies can coexist because they serve different purposes, not only within different individual’s minds but within the same mind.
Consider the ideal case of reduction offered by my projector example. What are we to make of a movie whose subject is the projector itself, a documentary on film gadgets for instance, that describes the gadget that is projecting its own story? If we allow the movie to be the mental and the gadget itself to be the physical, we have apparently a real case of strict identity: each concept describing the gadget is true of itself. Weight, shape, color, material, dimensions that constitute the phrasing of the movie while the images of the object are running, refer exactly to the object that is projecting them, the physical object. A perfect case of identity, it appears to be.
But the problem is that those predicates true of the object are conceptual extrapolations, that do not exist in reality as our concepts represent them! We see dimensions, recognize matter according to its constituent elements, abstract shapes from objects because we are mind-havers, not because things out there “have” those things for us to be picked up.[10] Worse, the description of the gadget may change or improve, and it can be implemented by revision while the movie is still the same.
In physics, nowadays, they talk about more dimensions that are hidden from us, and allow that there is no guarantee that all the possible sentients of the universe would see only three dimensions as we do! The most elementary observational sentence is entrenched with conceptuality.
Let’s look at the brain within the projector metaphor. I am having a thought while an improved version of PET[11] shows me simultaneously the events taking place in my brain. The thought is a memory of ‘my mother offering me an apple’. Now I am sitting in front of the monitor of a computer that is showing me an image of my brain, the area where my thought is taking place. I see the flow of blood in a specific area of the brain, and I even see the neurons’ interchanges, the activity of transmitters, the chemical reactions, the entire circuit of my thought in the brain, and I can read specifications and explanations of what is technically happening.
But in the very moment I understand what is going on in my brain, I am having a new thought different from my memory! Call the memory ‘Mommy-thought’ and the next ‘Brain-thought’, I cannot say that Mommy-thought and Brain-thought are identical! The latter is a different thought from the former and it should show a different brain image if the brain must account for the difference! Supporters of the identity theory would maintain that this identity is not different from ‘Scott is the author of Waverly’ and ‘lightning are phenomena of electric discharge’, identities discovered in the world. But they are wrong! In the last two cases everything that can be said of the first term is true of the description and vice versa (within the framework of certain known limitations). In the case of my memory this does not hold: the property of kindness that can be predicated of my mother does not apply to any neurophysiologic event.
In search for identity between mind and body we have triggered an infinite regress of non identical statements.[12] Is supervenience the right relation between these events? We can imagine that one day the PET technique will improve even further to the extent of being able to translate in pixels that are the loyal reproduction of my memory in images: so I see my mother from my point of view of fifty years ago in the movie while she is offering me an apple. There will still be a difference between the movie and the memory, one is placed in the virtual space of my mind the other is an object of visual perception and located in my visual field.
Let’s surmise the last possibility: suppose that future techniques are able to trigger specific thoughts in my brain and I am informed in advance what I am going to think or remember. I would explain this further farfetched case in terms of causal relations, not in terms of identity. In fact, to construe an identity between the act of triggering a thought in my brain and my thought cannot be the same thing, just as the passage of a rabbit in the garden is the cause of my answer ‘yes’ to the question “is it a rabbit?”[13]
The most respectful American philosopher after Quine, from whom he learned the pragmatic lesson that he finally rejected, is Donald Davidson. His effort has been that of translating in serious philosophical terms his belief that the ‘physical’ is indisputable: realism, physicalism, and materialism are variations on the same theme, which is based on the overwhelming intuition that reality exists. Davidson writes (1999): “I believe in the ordinary notion of truth: there really are people, mountains, comets and stars out there just as we think there are and those objects and events frequently have those characteristics we think we perceive of them to have. Our concepts are ours but that doesn't mean they don't truly, as well as usefully, describe an objective reality.” (We may well read in this passage a form of Aristotelian logical atomism, a teleological isomisomorphism between mind and reality!)
Consider that interesting, suggestive lapsus, a slip of the tongue, “there really are...out there”. Aren’t we out there as well? Why does Davidson place himself on the other side of the out there? According to anomalous monism, his doctrine of the mind, mental events are physical events, so he is out there with everything else. I believe that he is struggling with strong pragmatist temptations, in his attempt to separate the ‘indisputable’ existence of the world in this case, from epistemology. The world exists, and this intuition belongs to the forgotten first steps of our lore.
But intuition is often wrong: Aristotle’s intuition that weight was the only force acting on falling bodies whose natural state is to be at rest is shared by everybody lacking elementary knowledge of physics. And you can still ask people around who, unaware of physics, would tell you that heavier objects will reach the ground sooner than lighter ones. Euclidean geometry was believed to be the intuition of the real space before Riemann, Lobachevski, Gauss, and Einstein. But our belief in the external world is a good intuition as long as we do not take it for granted at the philosophical level.
Philosophers are reluctant to depart from common sense and say that everything is mental; this is all the more true in an era when science and its technology govern our life from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed. It may well be that the world exists, but when we need to account for it we must inevitably accept that we have access only to a personal, mental perspective of it. We have access to a subjective distortion, a transmutation, if I can borrow a term from alchemy and the Rosicrucians.
In another passage in "Mental Events" (1970), Davidson had written, while struggling with the attempt to separate the physical from the mental according to his usual logico-linguistic method, “...take some events one would intuitively accept as physical, let’s say the collision of two stars in the distant space. There must be a purely physical predicate, let’s say “PX” true of this collision and of others, but true of only this one at the time it occurred. This particular time may be pinpointed as the same time Johns notices that a pencil starts to roll across the desk. The distant stellar collision is thus the event x such that PX, and x is simultaneous with John’s noticing that a pencil starts to roll across his desk. The collision has now been picked out by a mental description and must be counted as a mental event. This strategy will probably work to show every event to be mental, we have obviously failed to capture the intuitive concept of the mental. It would be instructive to try to mend this trouble, but it is not necessary for the present purposes. We can afford Spinozistic extravagance with the mental since accidental inclusions can only strengthen the hypothesis that mental events are identical with physical events.” The truth is that there exists no physical event without being picked up by a mind or another. Every event is indeed mental!
Furthermore, if mental events are identical with physical events, identity being symmetrical, physical events are mental events! But the problem is that an arbitrary proviso is added to its supervenience notion: while all mental events are physical, not all physical are mental events. The idea I would support is that if there is identity it is symmetrical. But, we may ask, does it make any sense to talk about identity between spheres that are anisotropic in principle? Couldn’t it be that the mind/body thing is one complex structure that includes things that we see and things we don’t? If you start from the physical you end up in the mental and vice versa! This could well mean that this fabric, the mind-body thing is one thing, and accessible to us only through a bifurcation. The physical reality is one and yet if relativity is correct, it is forged on a four dimension fabric of which we see only three dimensions. The mental does not need to be identical with the physical in order to be inextricably connected with it. The mental could well be the only perspective available to us to know the physical and yet be inseparable from the physical just as quarks cannot be expunged from nuclei. Still, we must face another problem the very moment we accept that everything is mental: if we have no background against which the mental is gauged, it loses meaning and force.
A simple case of possible identity between mind and body is a headache. If the mental is identical with the physical, then for each mental entity there is a physical entity that is identical to it.[1] My modest example is a headache, which must be identical with some physical brain state, let’s say C fiber firing.
A digression in other sciences will serve as a paradigm. In natural sciences like biochemistry we have law statements of the form: (L) x (Fx → Gx), standing for “all F are G”, such as “all hemoglobin molecules form bonds with oxygen molecules”. This is roughly speaking a law of nature, although a ceteris paribus one. The interaction between two different entities, let’s say, gives rise to or causes a third entity, or they fuse in one, under favorable circumstances. There are those who claim that ceteris paribus concerns all natural sciences including physics; there are no strict laws of nature and the ceteris paribus property would make the unpredictability of the mental less a determinant factor of diversity. But the problem of the brain is deeper: in my modest case of the headache some questions arise. Are my headaches all of a type or do they differ, for instance, in intensity? We may presuppose that they may differ in intensity but still belong to a type that can be identified with C fiber excitation. Remember that in my view types are superimpositions, post litteram notions, not rooted in ontology.
But let’s say that there are no reasons to question the type attribution to the phenomenon under scrutiny. And we may attempt to construe a law governing headaches similar to the hemoglobin example above. But what about the causal role played by the headache under different circumstances and for different people? Let’s suppose that the relevance of intensity may be the cause of different actions by each individual: like that of taking or not taking an aspirin pill, going to sleep, or massaging the head according to some esoteric treatment, or doing nothing. The intensity must be evaluated within each individual organism even if we suppose the existence of an objective scale of measurement of intensity; to equal intensity you and I may react in different ways according to our accrued experience, or strength of character and so on, although better predictions can be made regarding the mind of each one individual; but even within one single individual, behavior is unpredictable as individuals change, grow or weaken in moral strength, adopt new strategies and make decisions. Our freedom to make decisions is indisputable, and this freedom is at odds with natural laws. For, once again, mention any alleged law to be respected by my behavior, and I will violate it for the sake of showing that my actions are not governed by any natural law.
On the basis of all the above considerations, a headache must be dealt with as a token, a unique event, not a type occurrence. To hold to the existence of by now superfluous types would be to be a conservative radical stance. Davidson seems right on this, I think, insofar as it is impossible to generalize over mental events—granted for the sake of argument that events do exist—as each mental event is embedded in a different network that is peculiar to each individual; and the network is alive, which is to say, it changes continually even within one single individual. This goes before considerations of our decision-making ability, which eschews causal networks (if I am right and any such ability does exist).
But for Davidson causality between individual events is ontological in nature, and it is linguistic when generalized in laws. My point is that causality is always linguistic in nature, even between individuals, provided that they exist—since they are the upshots of our arbitrary ontology, a construction of the mind; causality derivatively suffers from the arbitrariness of basic notions like object, identity, and property.
How do I know that a headache is an event and not just an obscure flux interacting randomly with other fluxes? How do I extrapolate from the experiential flux that one single thing is one?[2] This is not something to be solved with linguistic analysis, as Davidson believes. In order to solve this problem we should know what reality is all about without epistemological interference, a forlorn and hopeless enterprise.
Here we are not dealing with mental objects only but all objects. How do I know that the sun is a single object, and its properties and relations are what we, in our culture, have established? Can’t we imagine that a different culture may view what we call the sun as a part of a larger object that includes everything that it affects in spite of some spatial discontinuity, seeing the solar system as one object? The spatial discontinuity is present even in atoms and between them. Couldn’t the sun system be conceived as one object only with portions of it placed remotely in space?
In Newton, gravitation became the only force that can act at a distance. But if distance does not constitute empirical evidence of separation between two objects, as is the case in contact physics, and we know that inter-space is present even at the atomic level, then our ontology is arbitrary, as we can posit one object in place of two and talk about internal relations. Gravitation is a force that affects macro objects like the moon and the earth, and electrons within an atom. We are made up of atoms, and atoms are divided by space; in the end, deciding how many things there are is a question of relative convenience.
Reductionism in the doctrine of Patricia Smith Churchland preaches no prime philosophy, but inadvertently she privileges a prime philosophy of her own when she says she is a materialist and believes in reductionism: her reductionism concerns only scientific psychology and excludes folk psychology. The distinction is ill posed, I believe: there are no rational strategies, memories, perceptions, independent of a pre-established ontology.
Take perception: its structure contains the nature of fragmentation in internal/external and multiplicity. I may believe I have a mind and a brain, and you are a materialist and believe you have only a brain. Is my transplanted liver internal or external? You may consider your relations with nature as internal relations, and identify yourself with the whole Nature. I may be a dandy in the sense Sartre attributed to Baudelaire and identify myself with a sophisticated anti-naturalist thinker, or with the Nietzschean super man. Which version of identity is right? Science may well find one day in the brain the “gubbins” responsible for the unity of the individual entity; but what is included in each individual is a question that forever escapes any scientific investigation. How do we know that the neurological unifying mechanism is there to couple a real thing or an illusion? While the unifying gismo may be a physical neurological mechanism, what it unifies may vary from individual to individual and there is no science that can tell us which unification is the right one.[3]
It may happen that the all battery of qualia may be reduced to localized structures in the brain; but when it comes to more conceptual affairs, the brain is a very plastic, dynamic organ and may be activated by different causes. Some internal and some external configurations—depending on conditions that vary constantly from posture to weariness and many others—may be the triggering factor: I may focus on the problem ‘who would be the best president of the USA’ in concomitance with bad news coming from the economy, or I may think of the same exact problem in relation to my hope that the war in Iraq will end soon and come up with different answers. Different situations, different patterns of activation; it’s hard to imagine they will ever have a place in a nomological network.
In spite of supervenience’s elegant layer picture, something may be wrong. I have already hinted at the difficulties caused in physics by the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, where the presence of the experimenter is a factor not to keep out of the outcome, and how time becomes a subjective factor relative to the individual perspective in relativity. It seems that the bottom layer, physics, goes unexplained without the top layer, the mind; the system is a dog biting its own tail.
Reductionism is a natural epistemological tendency; we tend to simplify and reduce. But as I have said before, I believe we must distinguish two forms of reductionism: the physical to physical reductionism and the mental to physical reductionism. For the former, sporadic successes have been achieved (see Chomsky in ‘Language and Thought’ for a short historical overview of reductionism and its limits) for the latter, the idea of reductionism seems very wrong, at least in the light of our knowledge of physics. The idea of mental reduction to the physical, at the present time, is analogous to the idea of accommodating a smaller box in a larger one or, if you like an analogy that is very close to the problem, think of the idea of retranslating meta-language into object language, without ingenerating paradoxes.
If the identity theory is correct, we should be able one day to re-construe from the sequences of a brain configurations that we can call the mental content. Suppose the content of a mind M is the analytic-synthetic distinction at a time T. How could we ever get to analyticity by inspecting an area of the brain which would generate only synthetic judgments? Analyticity may be a post litteram mental construction, useful to formal languages and not grounded in natural language, but whatever it is, we understand it and it is an irreducible concept.
Reduction of mental to physical should be a two ways, symmetrical relation: we could re-construe the mental by inspecting the physical. Thus we should be able to re-construe the concept of ‘mother’ by analyzing the sounds of the word. The sounds which m-o-t-h-e-r correspond to—in succession and/or isolation—have no apparent properties that somehow are connected with what we mean by the word ‘mother’. Somehow this point is analogous, in my understanding, to Davidson's exemplar case of the notion of truth. Following Tarski, Davidson concludes that truth is mental because there is no physical predicate, no matter how long and complex, that is coextensive with all the true sentences of a language. This brilliant point is made on the basis of the existence of the physical vocabulary.
But is there a physical vocabulary? I think not, and this is my argument. I read the word 'and' and I know, independently of any problem of meaning, its syncathegorematic status and so on, that it stands for the sound ‘and’ which in turn can be broken down to the three sounds ‘a’, ‘n’, and ‘d’. So this word belongs in the English dictionary because I know that this physical symbol stands for something that is mental in nature, the sound ‘and’.
How do I know it is mental if I can make it physical by uttering it? The knowledge of recognizing the word precedes my ability to utter it. For suppose that you stumble into what you may believe is a written language of six thousand years ago, sequences of letters, pictograms, or hieroglyphics or what have you. Suppose furthermore that this is a language that is radically different from any other known language of the past, in the sense that it has no affinity with any of the languages we know, antique Chinese, Acadian, Babylonian, and the like. It would be impossible on the basis of those purely physical symbols to trace back the sounds they stand for, let alone the meaning. The culture that generated that language may have operated on completely different ontological cuts into reality.
However, to affirm that everything is mental is not a solution to the mind/body problem, as noticed before. We still need to account for what the ‘physical’ is from an internalist point of view. We think, believe, doubt and feel pain, hatred, love, fear. Beliefs, doubts, and pains are generally directed to what we believe are states of affairs, entities, facts of the world, something outside of us. But they are also about objects internal to us, like when we fear a tumor or wonder if we really have a good disposition towards other people.
The better way to cope with this problem is perhaps to abandon the mind/body distinction and adopt a private/public one, a more effective and epistemologically neutral distinction, indifferent to the physical/mental. Hundreds of us may be witnessing a spinning UFO in the sky, but the thoughts associated with this event would be independent for each individual. There remains a public essence of that event, constructed in linguistic form, which finds its justification in a general understanding, no matter how different the associations made by each individual may be.
In virtue of all the above considerations, one may wonder if it is better to hand the entire problem to psychology. That is, psychology understood as a large, comprehensive doctrine: from physics used to finding a place to the brain among the forces of the universe, to psychoanalysis, to evolutionary psychology, to AI and cognitive models.
We may hypothesize the possibility that one day physics will reveal that the animal spirits Descartes spoke about are similar to what today physicists call messenger particles; and the mental content constituents may be similar to quarks, forever prisoners of a larger entity. With the mind hidden in additional folded dimensions of reality, animal spirits, call them mentalsons, transfer mental content into a more accessible area of the brain, or transmute that content in such a way that, for instance, reasons become causes and put the body in motion.
But a TOE, a theory of everything as dreamt by scientists and philosophers, must inevitably acknowledge that the four forces of quantum mechanics are not enough to explain what happens in the universe. The mind (with the use of language, thus via communication) moves objects of this universe according to forces yet to be discovered, if they exist in some physical form. We are capable of moving other living beings, some human some animal, by uttering words, sentences that are commands, orders, requests or simply information that set other individuals to acting; all this happens through language. In physics the disparity between the angular momentum of some subatomic particles, like bosons and fermions, is mathematically solved by adding more dimensions to the four known ones, and supporters of Superstring view the violation of symmetry by two alleged different particles as two different projections of one entity. These words could just as well describe personal perspectives of one objective reality. I see things in three dimensional space that may exist in ten-dimensional space! The human mind may see a four-dimensional reality in n-thousands years.
Some people may possess the ability to enter other minds on the basis of an instinctive knowledge of the code needed to access other minds bypassing language;[4] more than one kind of mental messenger may exist. Telepathy and psychokinetic abilities must have stemmed from some real phenomena if so many serious people have investigated them,[5] just as multiple personalities are studied within psychiatry and constitute powerful mitigating evidence in many courts of law; parapsychology may hide important secrets of the structure of the mind. There are obscure mental phenomena that—once stripped of the iconography of cultural cosmetics, often of a religious kind, can emerge into consciousness from their latent status and are suggestive of interesting hypotheses about the nature of the brain, its unorthodox power, and the reality out there. Examples include people hearing voices and speaking to God, seeing ghosts, divining the future; let’s not prevent all these exotic disciplines to contribute to the problem, not prejudiced by a fanatic form of scientific blind belief. Let us dismiss them only when they are proven to be fruitless.
Less farfetched than the above science-fictional possibilities, neurogenetics may provide a better understanding of the genetic basis of the nervous system. We may find one day that our ability to learn, understand, and communicate with language, is structured on a brain representation of what happens at the level of cells with DNA. A more advanced version of the Gestalt theory may one day tell us that we have inherited our ability to speak a language prompted by the latent knowledge of our biology. In such a case the relation between mind and matter would be reversed. We did not explain biology by borrowing terminology from our agent language, but rather learned our primary language by knowing what biology is all about at the subconscious level.
Doesn’t the Big Bang theory resemble the proliferation of cells in the zygote? And both, the big bang and the developing zygote, don’t they resemble the birth of the universe in each of us, a progressive fragmentation of the indistinct flux as I have proposed it? It seems we are inclined, in different areas of knowledge, to posit common structures. And these structures in turn may exist or may not, as we describe them, but due to our limits we are forced to posit them.
Let anthropological and evolutionary psychology tell us where we got our religious ideas. One hypothesis worth testing is whether our God is a creation of our mind based upon a latent knowledge of our inner structure. It may be that God has been created in our image; the reverse of what is claimed by religious people may be true. The idea is supported by a psychological reading of the Bible’s Genesis and other institutionalized religious scriptures.[6] After all, we could learn so much from our inflated psychology that the problem of subjectivity versus objectivity could pale in the end as a capricious detail in the face of such a vast contribution to the knowledge of the mind.
It is not easy to select a priori what corpus of disciplines should be included in a study of the mind, too many areas of knowledge may contribute to it and perhaps an institutionalized discipline should be created within universities. Let me give an example of possible partial unification of two disciplines that could be included. Recent neurological studies on schizophrenia, using brain imaging techniques, have shown no characteristic change of brain layers regions or specific cells—unlike Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases, which do show alterations. Some skeptics, notably psychiatrists, who oppose neurobiological explanations, triumphantly state that this is enough to affirm that schizophrenia is not a brain disease; neither neurologists nor psychiatrists involved in the dispute hint at the fact that the tests may be inadequate at the present moment and further technological implementation may show differences and modifications.
Furthermore, the opposition is of a vacuous nature if one thinks of how some neurologists collect data. Nancy C. Andreasen in her book Brave New Brain (Oxford University Press, 2004) informs us that they have detected uniformity of answers by patients affected by schizophrenia, which is summarized by these four points: 1) ‘My thinking is confused’, 2) ‘My ideas don’t seem to connect quite right’, 3) ‘I have trouble filtering out important information’, 4) ‘I am bombarded with stimuli’. Now it is obvious that because she is using techniques that are peculiar to psychiatry and psychology, namely that of considering the agent’s communication of some interest, she is poaching in adverse terrain. The second point that can be made concerns a slight paradox emerging: if you believe the patient, then what she/he is saying cannot be trusted because it is the product of a confused mind; the problem is very close to the liar paradox. Of course, there may be potential defenses, such as schizophrenia is a discontinuous disease, or some regions of the brain may rise above others and do the thinking under perhaps stressful circumstances. But there is no hint or awareness of these problems and possible directions among scientists. A unification of these two disciplines could be an integrated part of the institutionalized area of studies that one may want to welcome one day, with the goal in mind that whatever can be gained by the study of the brain to the detriment of the notion of mind is a success. Other potential hybrid disciplines, with the same goal of understanding the human mind, may be anthropological neurogenetics or anthropological physics.
In Neurath’s words, we are like prisoners of our mind, “…sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom.” Whatever it will be the only thing we can be sure of is that if we are the byproduct of evolution,[7] if living matter comes from non-living matter, and if we can make correct hypotheses even about the beginning of the universe, then matter somehow has figured out its beginning and how it is structured. If all this is the case, we could paraphrase the entire range of knowledge with the Greek aphorism, ‘‘Know thy self”.
[1] The question whether identity concerns the whole entity or its properties is irrelevant to my point here.
[2] Two cognitive scientists write in The Way We Think (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002): “…what could be simpler than recognizing that a tree is a tree? Yet when we look at works in cognitive sciences, we find this recognition problem listed under ‘conceptual categorization’ already regarded as a higher order problem, behind the already difficult feat of ‘perceptual categorization’…Somehow, the combination of three billion years of evolution and several months of early training have resulted in the apprehension of unities in consciousness, but neuroscience does not know the details of that unification. How we apprehend one thing is one thing has become a central problem of cognitive neuroscience called ‘the binding problem’.” And when this problem is considered again in the book, the role of the mind becomes more and more essential to the solution of the problem of multiplicity.
[4] The only way we may ever really know what goes in another person's mind is by transferring the content of that mind to yours; the subjective can be only subjectively perceived. We find this idea in some science fiction literature.
[7] If our mind is the byproduct of evolution and we face inherent constraints on what we understand and embrace in our conceptual sphere, we are always thinking from inside, unable to envision alternatives. Alternatives may be lurking in the back of our biological potentiality and one day they may reveal themselves through fresh neural connections. But if it is common sense to accept the idea that a different, more advanced mind can be conceived only by a different more advanced mind located in the future development of our brain, it is somehow less farfetched that we understand how certain animal minds work. A chimpanzee’s mind is a predecessor of ours and we should be able to make hypotheses about their minds and, in a kind of feedback, explain how a chimpanzee’s mind evolved into ours. Some of these ideas are speculated on within the mental activity I have called the ‘ante litteram’ content of the mind. Not very philosophically oriented scientists attribute to animal minds the capacity to count and distinguish the one from the many, the primordial matrix that one day will evolve into the mental structure that underlies the ontology as we conceive it; in my view only a linguistic mind can fully appreciate and become aware of the unity and the multiplicity, the singular and the plural, which contain in pectore the notion of object. In a primordial mind objects are ghosts, flashes, disembodied, ephemeral, shadowy or evanescent forms, hitting and decaying after the time of their appearance and leaving no trace of object in the memory. Sameness at this level is constructed by instincts and not by any awareness of objective existence.
[1] I use the term ‘mind’ in the sense of the operational field of consciousness, throughout this script. It is therefore a subjective notion referring to persons. If machines may simulate mental operations, that are rational, logical, or show intelligence to the point that we may say they are minds in some form, but disconnected from a consciousness, my notion does not cover them.
[2] Even in science we may experience cycles and returns. The old atomists, Democritus and Leucippus and their followers, believed that atoms in the ultimate analysis differ in form, and therefore geometry was the foundation of their doctrine. Modern physics seems to claim geometry as the basis of relativity, and geometry plays an important role in string theories that try to unify relativity and quantum mechanics. Is the human mind forced into what some philosophers have called “The Eternal Return”?
[3] Some physicists say that this is enough to show that reality is mental. To mention one problem that bewilders me, I feel that the non-locality of subatomic particles (i.e., the correlation between particles that may be divided by astronomical distances) shows something even more interesting. For suppose that what we all believe as reality exists. Science has reached levels of investigation alien to our folk perception. We do not even have a language to express such bizarre phenomena. This is the final blow to any logical atomism. If reality exists and the mind does as well, they are not connected by any parity of structure. It may seem there is an isomorphism only at a very elementary level of perception.
[4] Mendel, who without knowing anything about genes, laid the basis for genetics. His experiments were unaware of the information structure hidden in the cell, his terms were ‘factor’ and ‘trait’, but his assertions were true and are still true today in spite of his lack of knowledge of DNA.
[5] Some scholars take the Indeterminacy of Translation (from now on in this note IOT) to be a particular case of Underdetermination of Theories (UOT in this note). It was Chomsky in the 60’s to first point out that Quine was simply applying UOT to language, of which language is a particular case. Quine in “Equivalent systems of the world” defended the claim that in fact IOT and UOT are two different theories, the former being a fact clearly established by Quine about language and the latter an empirical thesis in need of clear existing cases to support it. I share Quine’s claim that IOT is indisputable and different from UOT. The careful reader must have realized by now that most of IOT is the essence of my criticism of general identity. In the same article, Quine showed that Holism is still a different problem from the other two hinted at in this note.
[6] Mathematics is indispensable to natural science: many are therefore convinced that it is also an explanation of reality. In order to understand the problem, one must first understand what an explanation is. But let me introduce an example of the relevance of mathematics to science. Subatomic particles enjoy a property called ‘intrinsic spin’. Just like macro objects can rotate around an axis, so do sub-particles. But the difference is dramatic. With a macro object, angular momentum can assume any value from a continuous range. By contrast, the angular momentum of the subatomic spin is quantized, i.e., it comes in discrete packets called quanta that are integer multiples of ½ (multiplied by the Planck constant divided by 2π).
Now it happens that particles endowed with an even number of spin units behave differently from those with an odd number, which makes the numeric difference look like the mathematical expression of a physical property. Particles are classified according to this difference as bosons or fermions, and only fermions are subject to the Pauli principle that states that no two identical particles can occupy the same quantum state. Now one objection to the explanatory role of mathematics in natural science is that it does not touch upon causes that are the cornerstone of physical science so far: math is silent with respect to why bosons and fermions behave differently, as it was silent with respect to the force of Newton’s gravitation. In the words of Morrison 2000,4 “Of course, the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction explains why the planets move in the way they do, but there is no explanation of how this gravitational force acts on bodies (how it is transported), nor is there any account of its causal properties”. I consider causation a metaphysical notion and as such a contribution of the mind to understanding. So the above objection is not mine.
My problem is that some philosophers, who appeal to the indispensability principle of mathematics, derive from it the conclusion that whenever math is present and working we ought to commit to the ontology of the theory formulated in mathematical terms. This is arbitrary: take quantum mechanics that posits the existence of quartz that remains forever confined within the nucleus. If they cannot be pulled out, from a philosophical point of view, they cannot be granted the status of existence. Here is why: how do they come to recognize the existence of quartz? By bombarding the nucleus with electrons. The scattering of these electrons reveal the presence of three massive compact bodies. But the case is similar to a wall which is perforable by projectiles except for three or more points that are reinforced with some resistant material. They belong to the wall and are not entities. Quantum theory for more than one reason is an ontologically repugnant theory. It works but it cannot be offered as a model of scientific theory.
However there is another point that can be made in relation to physics: string theory requires more dimensions than the known four and different string theories, described by different geometries, are considered as possible candidates. But different space time dimension realities result in systems that are mathematically equivalent and this is proved by physicists. Thus it follows that the discrepancies among these mathematical descriptions are only apparent, they describe the same reality, if any! The lesson we derive is that mathematical descriptions are insufficient to account for real differences.
One more example of why mathematics seems to follow a path that may be different from reality as we understand it: take a musician who decides to improvise a piece. At the end of her performance I present her with a mathematization of her piece and the next sequence predicted by math. She says, “No, this is certainly not what I had in mind,” and goes back to the piano and adds a new segment to his creation. I do the same work and go back to her with the new mathematical prediction provided by the algorithm I have constructed, and we can go on with no limits to my encompassing her work in a mathematical schema and she violating the schema. But the point can be made more generally independently of mathematics. Remember Mendel’s work on pees mentioned in a previous note. His laws were never couched in terms of genes, but rather in terms of factors and traits. The same laws are expressed in terms of genetics today: they quantify over different ontologies and yet the truth of Mendel’s laws hold and are equivalent to their more modern genetics formulation. The use of mathematics as a tool to better explain these facts would not be a factor in favor of either one of the theories.
One last consideration about math and reality. Math does not tell you what a One is; but when you have established that a portion of reality is one, if it has measurable properties, it is the business of math to measure them. Math will also explore and fix intrinsic properties of an object within a chosen portion of reality in relation to other Ones, or objects. If you decide that mass is a property of objects for example, turn to math to measure that property. If you believe that mass and acceleration are somehow connected, let Math explore the connection in terms of measurable variations and so on. The properties of mathematical entities bear no resemblance to the properties of the objects of the ontology of the theory for which they work as a tool. The number ‘one’ may well refer to the zygote, that in turn is formed by two alleles (the sperm and the egg) and the one of the primordial cell will generate a progressive number of cells (2, 4, 8 and so on) that is completely alien to arithmetic’s if by that we mean an intrinsic potential of numbers to multiply in this fashion.
[7] Aristotle saw in his notion of formal causation the solution to the paradox of the ship of Theseus: the ship was still the same because the material cause was recessive with respect to the formal cause, the project that created the ship, the function of the ship. But if we allow Aristotle’s solution then two objects with the exact same function are the same one object; no numerical identity is contained in his analysis.
[9] We are carbon-based creatures and we share something like 98% of genes with chimpanzee, yet this high degree of similarity does not constitute enough evidence to classify monkeys and humans in the same category; we suspect that our brain is an evolutionary step ahead of that of chimpanzee, from which we are distinguished by our recursive ability present in language and mathematics, our blending ability (a new field in cognitive sciences)—of which perception is only perhaps the starting point—the ability to construe imagined realities out of abstract concepts and fragments of perceptive realities (which, I have claimed, are the real world in which we live), and the symbolic systems we use to represent to ourselves and others this internal reality.
[10] To believe the contrary is an indirect way to support Intelligent Design in a logical atomism framework.
[12] Remember that the fathers of the identity theory had in mind Ockham’s razor and our result is a multiplication of entities!
[13] The stimulus contains irrelevant information to the notion of rabbit, which is a mental extrapolation.
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