No Such Thing as a Simple Substance, Except Kant's

In interpreting Kant we must be careful not to make the mistake that many so-called "charitable" interpreters do, and that is to make Kant into a realist, or a traditional empiricist. There certainly are passages in the Critique and other places which can easily be used to lend themselves to such an interpretation. But the principle of charity must not be abused in this way, and must remain steady in its treatment of Kant as a transcendental idealist.

Kant’s theory of the relation between subjective inner conscious states and the objects of the outer sense is one such topic vulnerable to attacks. It is discussed in the both the A and B editions of the Transcendental Deduction.

The overall project of the Deduction is to establish a proof for the necessary connection (and the rules that govern it) between appearances of the outer sense and the faculties of the mind in the inner sense. There needs to be action (wirkung) through synthesis in the mind before "appearances can belong to knowledge or even to our consciousness, and so to ourselves." This synthesis happens in the 'imagination', a faculty Kant describes as synthesizing the manifolds of the appearances it apprehends. These are all heavily laden terms. Each appearance has a manifold, which must be apprehended before it can be synthesized in the imagination.

This "employment" of empirical work happens in the following ways: recognition, reproduction, association, and apprehension. These fundamental concepts are the only means by which knowledge (erkenntnisse) is possible for us. We would otherwise be passively receptive conduit with no way to synthesize any of the material traveling through our (minds?). Zombies, perchance. The alternative is that we have some sort of apperception, which is a transcendental concept as opposed to an empirical concept.

The apperception is the unchanging and ultimate foundation for synthesizing the unity of experience. I say "foundation" because Kant says apperception "lies under" all our knowledge of experience. Thus we can be sure that there is no alternative to apperception if there is unity of experience. This foundation must be proved in order for there to be any unity.

Now, when Kant says in the A Deduction that these unifying concepts must be "objectively valid" he does not mean that the things in themselves (or even appearances) have to be objectively valid. It is not a judgment about what is really out there, true or false, yes or no, on the grid or off the grid. It is an argument, a proof as he would have it, about what is necessary to have within the mind, in order for any of these appearances to be set in the mind. These subjective processes, unifying concepts, rules of the mind, and the reality of objective faculties, must indeed be "objectively valid" for anything subjective to be possible for us. We can also interpret "objectively valid" more rigidly as "intersubjectively valid", because one way to view an objective truth is to say that it is ultimately intersubjective truth.

The "rules" of the mind are therefore intersubjectively valid, and Kant goes so far as to call these laws. This step-by-step argument is entirely a priori. The concepts are not derived from the objects of perception, not the nature of "self", and especially not from things in themselves. They are derived from the necessary conditions that precede all empirical knowledge of objects. And to put the final nail in the pyrrhonist’s coffin, these concepts must be unified subjectively in "one and the same apperception".

Let’s talk about apperception a bit more. Kant argues the unity of apperception is entirely synthetic in the A Deduction. That all our apprehended appearances must be unified in a "single self-consciousness" must be the "absolutely first synthetic principle of our thinking in general." If it is true that apperception must come first before any other synthetic building block, then this would seem to establish the "self" as a "simple substance". That is, a thing that is not numerically divisible over time.

However, in the Second Paralogism, Kant had attacked Descartes for using the same principle of the self to establish a dogmatic doctrine of the soul. (See this related entry.) You’ll recall that Kant argued this was an attempt to establish simplicity analytically, which if possible would be false, and if not possible than impossible. In the B Deduction Kant is arguing for the objective simplicity analytically.

This means Kant argues qua the B Deduction what will later be established as an impossible proof or a false proof. If Descartes was "equivocating", according to Kant, then Kant himself is not only doing the same but is undermining that which the completeness of the entire Critique of Pure Reason rests on, the most important proof of the Critique: the apperception itself.

Perhaps Kant is confused. But let’s interpret him charitably, as we promised. Kant needs to have apperception be simple and non-divisible in order for the Critique to be "complete" as he mentioned at the outset in the 1st and 2nd prefaces and the Introduction. If the transcendental apperception were not a single foundation that does not change, it would be a contingent happenstance that any knowledge would ever be possible for us. So there needs to be this foundation, and its objective validity needs to be established analytically.

This foundation, furthermore, is different from the subjective "inner sense". So if the “I that thinks” can be distinct from the “I that intuits itself”, and yet can be the same subject, why can’t this same simplicity hold for Descartes? All that would need to be done is add some categories, show how they’re necessary, give space and time with manifolds for every appearance, bundle this together and we have knowledge. It would seem that before we read Kant charitably here we should consider why we are not transitively reading into Descartes charitably as well. Kant claims equivocation where Descartes could have made a similar move, yet he does not tidy up Descartes. He distills his views on the self in chapter the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

The situation we are put in, as charitable readers, is one where our interlocutor has uncharitably interpreted his own interlocutor. And if the principle of charity extends beyond the text at hand, namely to Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, what we have is a philosophical stalemate.

The Disunity of Reason

If you deconstruct yourself entirely - your own reason entirely - you cannot perform, and you cannot reason. Even the idea that one can reason your way out of such a hold doesn't escape this judgment, since it uses reason to do so. The Kantian idea that only reason can use its own laws to judge itself doesn't succeed for very long, since "knowing thyself" has to use reason itself to do its own judging.

If someone makes a charge against me and I get to be the jury, the judge, the executioner, the lawyer, and the witness, and I get decide whether I'm guilty or not, then the entire project is biased. The idea the reason can be impartial about itself has no cogency. Why should it be the case, as Kant says, that reason can get us anywhere?

It's interesting that Kant said almost the same thing, actually, about the Critique of Pure Reason. He said philosophers and scientists will go on using logic, using natural science, using tools of human reason, etc., without ever examining the tools that is used to first understand them, and that is, reason. He said scholasticisms will fill up the libraries, and his impenetrable book will be laying somewhere in a corner proclaiming all of it to be false, and yet no one will understand it, and the indifferentists will never care about it, and human reason will go on just like it has always done. Just like Kant has done himself in the Critique of Pure Reason.

And just like the Greeks who thought they could explain everything in the world, without explaining the human mind and how it perceives anything, or without explaining human language and how it talks about anything, humans have gone on for centuries like naive little lab rats, sniffing and shuffling their way through life. As a Muser said, Kant seems to want to deny reality -- but not really.

Kant's Permanent Revolutionary Strategy

When ancient astronomical conjectures had failed in predicting the movements of celestial bodies, a science based on the assumption that the bodies move around the spectator, Copernicus hypothesized that the spectator is revolving itself.

Kant claims his strategy in the Critique of Pure Reason is a Copernican strategy. His hypothesis is that hitherto to the Critique, all metaphysics assumes that the spectator’s knowledge conformed to what is real apart from the spectator. Kant calls these "objects". He says this is demonstrably false, since human reason has always defended itself cogently with contradictory knowledge about the objects.

Human reason is "brought to a stand", and what philosophers have done before is say we must merely "retrace our steps". But this does not "lead us in the direction in which we desire to go" according to the desires of natural reason. Natural reason wants to simply accumulate more and more knowledge about the objects themselves without examining knowledge of the perceiver.

What Kant suggests is the possibility that the spectator’s knowledge forces the objects to conform to the spectator. Or more succinctly, that objects conform to the human mind. Objects of human experience are not only “appearances” but also “mere representations”. The spectacles of human experience have, to use a phrase from Debord, “succeeded in totally colonizing” human reason.

It is not that objects are not themselves existent in themselves, but that they are not existent the way in which they appear to us. However, that distinction might easily give way to Berkeleyian idealism (to be is to perceive) if further pressure is applied. Kant denies this since his idealism only extends to properties of objects and not the existence of the objects. This position relies on a kind of Cartesian supposition that illusion presupposes reality that only a god can truly know.

At any rate, the change in the way of thinking ("Umänderung der Denkart") Kant calls for is likened to the change in the way of thinking that took place within Copernicus. The realism hitherto to Copernicus was that objects were exactly the way they appeared to him. Only under further examination the appearances change their appearance in the way they are understood by Copernicus.

This is not a shift from realism to idealism, but rather a shift from a primitive realism to a more sophisticated realism, from one appearance to another. (Maybe this is secretly Kant’s position.) The original Copernican strategy is ultimately still a transcendental realist position that is fundamentally anthropocentric. Kant’s change in the way of thinking is from transcendental realism to transcendental idealism, and therefore an attempt to attack all forms of anthropocentrism. But Kant's change in the way of thinking becomes anthropocentric too, since now the locus of human understanding is placed entirely inside the human mind itself, as if that were the center of the universe.

The Copernican analogy does not contain the basic elements of Kant’s own Umänderung der Denkart. It is understandable, however, that analogies are simply approximations of the subject at hand, and by virtue of not being identical, the Copernican Revolution cannot contain the exact same elements of the Kantian Revolution.

Copernicus did not ask whether knowledge about the stars were possible; he did not move the locus of understanding within himself, but only made alterations to his previous position. He moved the locus of earlier anthropocentrisms more closely to his relative position in the universe, thus amplifying the scope of his anthropocentrism. Copernicus is too naive to understand where his understanding is actually coming from, according to Kant. It is commonly thought that Copernicus' change in the way of thinking is a step away from anthropocentrism to heliocentrism, but I argue that it is only a better-fortified articulation of anthropocentrism a fortiori. If it is a step away from anything, it is a step away from his fellow dogmatists and colleagues (such as the priests, townsfolk and—all except the sailors—including philosophers) "mock-combated" over at the time of his discovery.

Copernicus doesn’t ask, "What kind of thing am I that I should understand what kind of thing is the star?" But rather, "What kind of thing is the earth such that I should understand what kind of thing is the star?"

It is based on predictions of objects rather than predictions of concepts. I use predict in the sense that it implies Copernicus’ empiricism while at the same time it proclaims to make use of dictums prior to any examining experience of the subject-constituted object.

The failures of discovering a "secure path" on which metaphysics can tread is what transitioned Kant into discussing similarities between Copernicus’ primary hypothesis and Kant’s own hypothesis. In Sebastian Gardner’s attempt to assist the student of Kant in deciding among competing interpretations, he says that both Kant and Copernicus represent a break from "common sense"—yet ultimately they have both replaced one common sense with another. The linguistic turn in the 20^th Century demonstrated the same sort of Copernican-Kuhnian betrayal of the revolution as it shifted from concepts to language. The Copernican strategy was not "brought to a stand" after the Critique. In fact, it kept going in a kind of Trostkyan permanent revolution.

How To Form the Right Concepts

Psychology is concerned with how the mind forms concepts. Philosophy is interested too, but more interested in forming the right concepts. To get a theory of mind right, a concept itself, one of the eliminative materialists, Stephen Stich, argues that one has to give an accurate description of the concept, or the body of tacit knowledge, that “underlies our quotidian practice.” Once we have that the challenge to folk psychology is underway.

In the psychological literature, the most widely known challenge to the assumptions of our traditional philosophical analysis (the Socratic folk psychology in which categorizations in the mind have one-to-one match-ups in the physical view) is the model provided by Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues. On this model, mental structures that underlie our judgments do not exploit tacitly known necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership, “or anything roughly equivalent,” Stich adds.

The Rosch model, with its emphasis on idealized descriptions about “prototypes” and their similarities to other categorizations, says that categorizations are made without meeting conditions that the commonsense view, exemplar theory, would predict. Categorizations are instead determined by “tacit similarity knowledge”.

Though this model does not talk about intentional states like beliefs and desires, it is one more example how the commonsense paradigm does not make concrete one-to-one match-ups with the world. Stich suggests that there is no underlying concept motivating categorization judgments, as the folk theory predicts. He argues that subjects construct “various different sorts, on the fly” in response to a situation where concept-formation generally happens. Hence there are no one-to-one match-ups, so the traditional Socratic method of proposing definitions and then searching for intuitive counter-examples will have to be dropped.

If our introspective accounts about whether a mental state has the property of qualia, or the propositional “that p”, are motivated by the sorts of prototypes of the Rosch model, as opposed to exemplars or tacit theories, or if the judgments we make result spontaneously as subatomic particles do in quantum theory, then the conditions that they intuitively fall under a target concept will also be dropped.

In other words, the “classical structure” of defining the things we talk about has less weight, as Stich says. He proposes that the traditional Socratic method will have to be superseded by a cognitive science approach instead. (In Kripke’s example of gold being some sort of yellow substance, but not fool’s gold, we are also reminded that the scientific approach of defining it in terms of its chemical composition with the atomic number 79 allowed us to speak of rigid designators, and this is analogous to the way that cognitive science should be able to talk about mental states.)

The Rosch model is not the only model in support of this thesis. There are various computational models in support, and several papers on the relationship between connectionism and eliminativism are in support of the mature approach. This pluralism might be thought to be evidence against the idea that one explanation of cognitive phenomena is needed.

But this is precisely Stich’s point. “For if different paradigms within cognitive science use different notions of representation, then there isn’t going to be a theory of mental representation of the sort we have been discussing. There will be lots of theories.” It will make little sense to ask which one is the right theory, since each theory exploits a different branch of cognitive science, but we can be sure that the traditional method is a stagnant, degenerating research program.

But it does look like what we see in cognitive science is the beginning of an argument for eliminativism, since cognitive theories and folk theories make incompatible claims, and the folk theories are not reducible to the phenomena cognitive science exploits.

Paul and Patricia Churchland have emphasized the mismatch between the sentential structure of propositional attitudes on the one hand, and the actual neurological structures of the brain on the other hand. Whereas the former involves discrete symbols and a combinatorial syntax, the latter involves action potentials, spiking frequencies and spreading activation. As the Churchlands have argued, it is hard to see where in the brain we are going to find anything that even remotely resembles the sentence-like structure that appears to be essential to beliefs and other propositional attitudes.

Stich has emphasized, on the other hand, that folk psychology individuates beliefs by virtue of their semantic properties, e.g., we taxonomize states like beliefs by virtue of what they are about. However, according to Stich, there are a host of reasons for rejecting a semantic taxonomy for scientific psychology.

Semantic taxonomies ignore causally salient aspects of cognitive states, involve a high degree of vagueness, and break down in the case of the mentally ill or the very young. In place of the semantic individuation method adopted by folk psychology, Stich argues for a syntactic taxonomy that is based upon the causally relevant syntactic or physical properties of a given cognitive state.

An Annotated Elimination of the Explanatory Gap

If you've seen the tirade of entries tagged under "consciousness studies" it's because I'm building a thesis about the primacy of folk theories in neuropsychology and philosophy of mind and why they should be eliminated.

To summarize, I've argued that there is an explanatory gap between folk theories and physics, but necessarily so because folk theories are false.

I argued that the folk theories that explain the reason why think qualia and propositional attitudes must exist are based on a misleading one-to-one hypothesis which infers that, if there is a prima facie case for mental states upon introspection, then subsequently there must be something in physics that can explain what we're introspecting about.

I argued that, not only are qualia and propositional attitudes like the falsified folk scientific theories of the past, like phlogiston and demons, but the ontological and phenomenological arguments for them are remarkably similar and share the same structure as the arguments for the existence of God.

Subsequently, these theories are at risk for elimination, and should be placed on program which will lead to their eventual phasing-out, while we search for theories that can replace them adequately.

There are various benefits of eliminating these problems. We get to reap all the benefits of turning the "hard problems" of consciousness, like the Mary Problem and the Zombies Problem, into mere pseudo-problems that do not need to be solved.

Consequently, physics is complete and does not need to rely on non-physical or quasi-physical properties and states to have explanatory power.

Lastly, we can quit being agnostic materialists and become eliminative materialists.

(There is still more work to be done, however, especially on the semantic thesis likening qualia's and propositional attitudes' intertheoretic irreducibility to folk-theoretic irreducibility.)

Share this entry:

One-to-One Connection Thesis

What it seems philosophy of mind is trying to do is create one-to-one match-ups between what exists according to commonsense and what our present physical and neuropsychological theories can say about the mind.

The folk philosophy of mind theory is supposed to work sort of like a function in mathematics: "For every input there is exactly and only one output."

Except in philosophy of mind we're not that certain there are one-to-one match-ups like that. So it's more like quantum indeterminacy, or should be.

Many philosophers still believe some sort of one-to-one rule applies to our concepts about the mind. That implicit thesis is defended by the majority of philosophy professors and academics in the consciousness studies.

We try to find a nice spot in our theory about the mind for all sorts of things we think must exist. Consciousness must exist, or an explanation of it must, so we have to be able to place that in our theory. That is given.

We also think beliefs and desires exist, so we must find a place for that too. That there is something called "first person experience" that must also have a counterpart in our theory as well. These are the things the folk thesis wants to salvage.

But identity theory (making those match-ups) has been called into question before. And we changed our theories because of it. Science use to think there was a fluid substance that held heat inside bodies, kind of like water in a sponge.

But we got rid of that when we decided heat was the rapid movement of trillions of jostling molecules that actually did the heating. We also thought, even further back, that demonic forces could possess people and turn them into witches. That, however, has been taken over by modern psychology, and they no longer explain mental conditions in demonic or Biblical terms.

In each case, something was eliminated. It seemed unlikely that we would arrive at a nice one-to-one match-up between the concepts of folk psychology and the concepts of theoretical neuropsychology.

That intertheoretic match-up is required if we think all the commonsense things can be reduced to neuropsychological things. But some things are just not reducible. You can't reduce the heat substance to the theory that says the heat substance doesn't exist. You have to eliminate that idea of the heat substance.

As I see it, the one-to-one match-ups will not be found in the philosophy of mind either, and our commonsense psychological framework will not have an intertheoretic reduction, because our commonsense psychological framework is a false and misleading conception of the causes of human behavior and the nature of cognitive reality.

for every domain there is exactly and only one URL (not true):

Transcendental Signifiers, Gods and Qualia

Here's a summary of an old debate in philosophy between Saint Anselm and a little-known monk named Gaunilo, which dates back to the Eleventh Century Anno Domini.

Anselm: God is that which no greater can be conceived.
Gaunilo: Meaning what, exactly?
Anselm: God is perfect.
Gaunilo: So I cannot conceive of anything greater than God?
Anselm: Correct. Otherwise He would not be perfect.
Gaunilo: So if God is perfect, God exists, right?
Anselm: Correct. Otherwise He would not be perfect.
Gaunilo: Why?
Anselm: Because perfection is greater than imperfection.
Gaunilo: So perfection is necessarily existent, while imperfection is not necessarily existent.
Anselm: Yes because if something existed it would be greater than if it did not exist.
Gaunilo: So because God is perfect by definition, by definition he must also exist?
Anselm: Correct.
Gaunilo: Aren't you defining God into existence?
Anselm: No.
Gaunilo: But I can define things into existence, using that method.
Anselm: How so?
Gaunilo: Imagine a tropical island which no greater can be conceived.
Anselm: Okay, a perfect tropical island.
Gaunilo: The perfect topical island necessarily exists, but the imperfect ones may not necessarily exist, because an existing tropical island is always greater than a non-existing tropical island.
Anselm: But that's silly, where's the perfect tropical island supposed to be?
Gaunilo: My point exactly - I built its existence into the definition.
Anselm: Why should I accept your definition?
Gaunilo: Why should I accept yours?
Anselm: I'm not going to accept a fool's argument. Only a fool denies what he knows in his heart to be true.

The question: What's the difference between a perfect tropical island that exists and a perfect tropical island that doesn't exist? is relevant to more applications than theology. Today we have the debate about qualia and physics, which is very similar. The only difference between the islands is, in the end, the existence of the islands themselves.

Kant re-articulated Gaunilo's point in The Critique of Pure Reason when he wrote that existence was the realm in which we call object into question, it's not part of the question itself. The possible world calculus cannot help us with actual and non-actual if we say something is greater if it is in existence versus non-existence.

Think about the way qualia is debated, analogously.

We can ask: What is the difference between knowing all the truths of physics and perceiving all the truths of physics?

The difference, in the end, is rather trivial. (In fact the difference is the différance.)

If we know all the truths, we know what perceiving them is going to be like as well. It depends on how pervasive we take knowledge to be. We have to think about it this way because knowledge of truth in this debate is reduced to an anthropomorphized version of empiricism. When we're talking about knowledge of the truths of physics, it should be in the pervasive sense. It's not empirical knowledge, as physics is normally taken to knowledge about, it's the what-it's-really-like in the ontological sense kind of knowledge.

If there is a difference between knowledge of physics and the perception of physics, then physicalism is false. If there is something peculiar about the way we perceive the truths of physics that is different from physics itself, then the world is made of more substance than physics alone. Which means the ontology of physics cannot explain everything.

That is why the qualia debate is very important. It is not a debate about the mind alone. Contemporary philosophy has merely reduced it to a question about that for simplicity. It means that, if there is more to ontology than physics, physics could never be complete as an explanation.

How is this debate like the debate between Gaunilo and Anselm? I have come up with a rather short list (but still growing! submit more if you'd like).

The easy similarities:

• Both entail an ontology which is not completed by physics alone.
• Both are ontological arguments for the existence of a particular thing.
• Both are a priori arguments for the existence of a particular thing.
• Both God and qualia are defined into existence through analytic terms.
• Only the fool "denies what he knows to be true in his heart" upon introspection, in both cases.
  

The more difficult similarities:

• Each defines the object by referring to a transcendental signifier, something that has no reference in the structure of language, which can be defined by other reference points.
• 'Absent qualia' and 'absent gods', if you will, are said to exist in some possible worlds, but they are seen as imperfect if absent. Hence we assume there are worlds where they are present.
• It is argued that knowledge of physics will not obtain knowledge of qualia nor knowledge of God.
• If it is possible that worlds exist in which absent qualia and absent gods are truths, physicalism is said to be false.
  
• If qualia or gods are possible, physics is not complete.

Some might point out that contemporary physicalists accept the notion of qualia, while maintaining that physics is complete. This is the same mistake a soft-Gaunilo might make with with respect to God. Allowing that God is possible means that physics is an incomplete explanation for all possible worlds. If the analoticity of our language transcends signification, we ought not allow them possibility. It would be like allowing the perfect tropical island possibility.

Contemporary physicalists who accept qualia argue that qualia can be reduced to physics. They argue that when speak about "qualia" we are signifying something that is actually physical. However, they have allowed that there are explanatory gaps in physics, and introduced all sorts of problems using reductive methods to explain why qualia are ultimately physical. No one argues, on the other hand, that God can be reduced to physics. Or that when theologians say "God" they are really referring to something physical.

Another school of thought, known as eliminative materialism, argues that the sign 'qualia' signifies nothing at all. Instead of reducing something that does not exist to facts about the world, eliminativists eliminate the signifier altogether. Why allow that the sign signifies anything at all?

A contemporary philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, Alvin Plantinga, has since taken up the old debate in Anselms's defense. He argues that Kant and Gaunilo were wrong, and that if it is possible that God exists, then physicalism is false, and it is therefore rational to believe in God's existence. For the dualist, physicalism as a possibly false explanation is weighed against immaterialism as a possibly true explanation, and in every debate there are those who unknowingly allow the dualist more possibilities than is necessary to give.

Gaunilo, by the way, was not burned at the stake for replying to Anselm's treatise. And eliminative materialists are not denied tenure for their own treatises either.

This season, share what Eliminative Materialism has done for you:

"Knowing How" and "Knowing That"

The "knowing how" and "knowing that" distinction is supposed to buttress the argument made by Frank Jackson and the like who want to say that knowledge cannot be reduced to physical facts. This plays a large role in the Mary's Room problem which I've mentioned earlier.

Consider this counter-example, however. If I knew that all I needed to do to make something bold in my favorite online forum was to add [b] and [/b] syntaxes around the word I wanted to make bold, "knowing how" to do that seems like a rather trivial distinction.

Perhaps that's not a very good example, because I already know how to type. In the original Mary problem, however, Jackson says that Mary knows everything about her subject. She has studied the physics of light, and how its particles interact with the eye. She presumably knows everything about it. But not "how" it would feel when it hits her own eye.

The further away from learning simple skills we get, it seems there is greater the potential is to attribute something almost supernatural to them. If I know everything that there is to know about riding bikes, and have thought about all the physics of balancing myself and pushing pedals, then presumably I know how to ride a bike. The "hows" ultimately become "thats" if we are imaginative enough with how sophisticated the "thats" can get. Remember, Mary knows everything physical fact about light. If there's something she doesn't know after all that, physicalism is false.

To me the "knowing how" part will always collapse into the "knowing that" part. Because if you knew everything that there was to know about how to do something, even without experiencing how it's done, you presumably already know how it's done.

Eliminating Mary's Room

I thought I should post more on 'the knowledge argument' which I alluded to in an earlier entry. This is Frank Jackson's popular argument, know as 'the knowledge argument' or 'Mary's Room', which can be found in his essay "Epiphenomenal Qualia" and "What Mary Didn't Know". Or read about it on Wikipedia. Assuming you're familiar, I'll delve into my criticism from an eliminativist perspective.

First, the argument equivocates on "knows." If we say Mary (really) does know everything about this, then Mary really does know everything about the waveforms of color, and everything about the way color is experienced in the mind. Anything Mary would learn upon leaving the room would be extremely trivial. It would be like a software developer who had written a quick program, and once it runs, it runs exactly the way the developer designed it to. The experience of the program running is a trivial piece of information, since everything that is experienced was already known by the developer.

Second, if this form of argument were a good one, it would prove too much. Suppose for a moment that dualism were at issue here, and consider the claim that there exists a non-physical substance--call it "ectoplasm"--whose hidden constitution and nomic intricacies are what ground the familiar mental phenomena. However much a color-blind ectoplasmologist comes to know about the ectpoplasmic process involved in the experience of color, there will still remain something that he does not know, namely, what it is like to see colors. But why should that ectoplasmic fact be left out? Consequently it begs the question, and we should have eliminated the non-physical ectoplasm from our question from the beginning. It leads us into temptation.

Third, if we say that the mind/brain uses more media of representation than the medium of sentences, and a discursive representation of x within the sentential medium--even an exhaustive representation--will never constitute a representation of x within some more primitive, pre-linguistic medium, as may be found in our sensory cortex. But accordingly, there need not be two distinct things known here: brain states on the one hand and sensory qualia on the other. There are only two distinct ways of knowing (or systems of representing) the very same thing: brain states. Which can be known in total if one knows everything there is to know about them. That statement sounds non-plussed and trivial, but only because it is just as trivial as what Mary would know when she see colors.

Share this:

An Obvious Advantage of Eliminativism

As one of my professors said, if I’m a reductionist about qualia, then there is a lot of really hard problems to solve – I have to close the explanatory gap, explain how the physical interacts with qualia, and so on. But, if I’m an eliminativist about qualia, (meaning it's eliminated from the ontology) many of the 'hard problems' disappear. In which case there is an explanatory gap, but that fits perfectly with my eliminativism because there’s an explanatory gap regarding miracles too. And if we are eliminativists about miracles, that escapes our ontology and we do not need to explain how they work.

The reason people do not argue this way is because eliminativism about qualia is supposed to be extremely implausible and counter-intuitive. But, if we can get past this initial plausibility, we might be able to reap the benefit of turning various “problems” and especially the "hard problem" about qualia into simple pseudo-problems which do not require solutions. For example, how does the physical give rise to qualia? It doesn’t; there aren’t any qualia.

Share this entry:

Biting More Bullets for Physicalism

This is an update on the Biting the Bullet for Physicalism entry I wrote in September. I was recently moving entries from another blog to this one. But none of the comments were lost. Adfero Affero said on the original post that,

Qualia, the redness of red, can't be approximations. Whatever the redness of red is, it must be an exactitude because colours are precise differentiators. Red is always distinguished from blue, whatever the redness of red or the blueness of blue are. Though various shades of red might be difficult to distinguish from each other, this can be explained by saying the mixtures of wavelengths of light in the various shades of colour can fool the brain into mistaking one colour for another.

Color does not exist on its own. It has its physical analogues in particular wavelengths in the visible spectrum. So colour (the redness of red) whatever it is must be analogical. To stretch it even further, we might say that the redness of red is a spatio-temporal metaphor. Or even further, that each colour is a fixed story the brain tells itself about a particular wavelength of light. So when you can't tell one colour from another, the story being told is too similar, hence mistakes are made in telling one from the other. Though of course the eye and the brain are processing wavelengths of light which appear to be colours, which are distinguishable one from another, though we don't know what colour is except that it represents wavelengths of light.

A flock of birds is not an approximation, though flock is a category word which does not specify how many birds or what they are up to, merely that it is all birds. The flock you see at any one moment contains a countable number of birds, doing a theoretically measurable number of things, for exact periods of time. Approximation only comes in because we can't be bothered to find a way of understanding everything that is going on in a flock at a given moment.

I'm a little confused as to what the point about the color spectrum is getting at. Or whether it's a question. But epiphenomenalists and dualists do invoke the inverted qualia (and the inverted color spectrum) to argue that qualia are non-physical. They say we can imagine a scenario in which there are differences in experience but which have no physical or causal properties. So qualia change, but physics (and everything reducible to it) does not.

But if you hold to the view that physics is complete, then there is a physical answer. If there is a spectrum inversion, then there is a physical difference. If qualia are physical, then there cannot be a situation in which quale experiences in two identical observers do not have identical experiences.

There is a knowledge argument made in response to this, which says that you would never know if they were not identical--since they would say the same things about their experiences. But that doesn't matter much because what concerns us is possibility, not behavior. It would not be possible for those experiences to be different. It would be like saying a "married bachelor" is possible.

share this entry:

At Risk Ontology

There have been ontological theories in the past that had been so radically surpassed by the explanatory powers of greater theoretical systems that they had been completely eliminated from the picture. For example, the idea that phlogiston was released during combustion, which created the appearance of "fire" or "rust". Wikipedia in fact has an entire category page full of obsolete scientific theories like this. Generally speaking, there are many scientific theories that we would expect to be at risk of elimination today. But specifically, there are theories I have in mind. These theories--folk theories, strictly speaking--are about the nature of first-person experience and many think they should be entirely eliminated from the philosophical and scientific vocabulary. These are, namely, the propositional attitudes theory and the qualia theory. It's the idea that there really are these things: beliefs, desires, consciousness--that are not reducible to the language of materialism or physicalism.

I like that these should be referred to as "at risk". This is supposed to be similar to the crime prevention program for youth that goes by the title "At Risk Youth". The idea is that some youth that show signs of potential criminal tendencies and/or recidivism and will be put on this program and observed carefully for several months or years. This is an intense period of scrutiny, to see whether the youth will pass the test or not.

I propose we put scientific theories that are at risk of obsolescence on a similar program--that we should we should scrutinize the theory for an extended period of time to see if it shows signs of failing or degeneration. While the At Risk Youth program aims at eventually rehabilitating an adolescent, however, the At Risk Ontology program would aim at eventually phasing out the theory once a suitable candidate research program with greater explanatory power can be found.

With At Risk Youth we run the risk of fulfilling our own prophecies about the adolescent. However with the theories I mentioned above, they are already extremely problematic in the philosophic community. If not indubitably at risk, they are at least temporarily suspended in the mid-air of scientific practice and dithering nervously over the papers of the philosophic community. No one knows just what to say about them anymore, other than to shuffle them over to the science department for straightening out.

But before the philosophic community does that, they have to tidy some things up a bit. And that would ostensibly require Occamizing all the unkempt bits and pieces of the last forty years of subjective analysis on the nature of the mind.

share this entry:

No -- Agnostic Materialism Is Every Position

I realized a mistake I made in the last entry and I have come up with a better position. I dismissed Strawson's "agnostic materialism" and with full confidence in the progress of physics I said that science would be capable of "sealing the causal closure debate." But I now see a different sense in which Strawson's agnosticism makes better sense. Agnostic materialism is in fact entirely indicative of our present age. I felt that his position was redundant, since, of course, it seemed so obvious since we are inundated by it everywhere. We do not know what in the future science will say matter turns out to be. But we are materialists in our forthright posture, for no reason other than to have a forthright posture: "to make a hypothesis" as the textbooks say. So why hyphenate our position with the doxastically vague term "agnostic"? It would make sense, moreover, that we should hyphenate all of our positions with agnostic. Do we really advance with such finality? If not, then we are agnostics about every finalism.

The very achievements of modern physics have made us skeptical (toward what?) Skeptical towards skepticism. Just as previous generations had become comfortable with the orderly and mathematically framed world bequeathed by Newton and his contemporaries, well, along came the new physics and turned the old physics on its head. What more stable principle of logic than the impossibility of something not being itself? What more stable intuition than the belief that the future will be like the past? And then physicists give us the pairing of little matter/anti-matter items whose states are simply indeterminable to boot. The net-effect of these revolutionary and unsettling discoveries has been to all but eliminate the expression "but surely you are kidding!"

We are far less confident in our skepticism than were our ancestors of the previous several centuries. Nostalgists yearn for that "healthy skepticism" once again, but that is a failed idea. There is nothing healthy about clinging to centrisms, the foundations of which are left unquestioned (for, that is the so-called "healthy" part, that we should salvage at least some of the Enlightenment project.) We are as healthy as ever when we realize there are no indubitable reference points. As Lyotard wrote in The Postmodern Condition, even the story we tell ourselves about the progress of science to deliver mankind from veils of ignorance has failed to foster the confidence that we really know what we're talking about when we try to explain what matter is made out of.

Agnostic Materialism Is a Non-Position

Radical versions of physicalism fail at the level of our intuitions. I don't mean to suggest by this that our intuitions are the last word on what can be accepted as true or false, but we do rely on our intuitions where neither the force of logic or the evidence of sense supports one account at the expense of all other accounts of complex phenomena.

"Thoughts are not like things, and feelings have no shape."

This is sufficient for most people, even keeping an open mind, to regard the physicalist agenda as excessively optimistic, if not grandiose. That such assessments might be premature, has been suggested by more than one philosopher. Galen Strawson in Mental Reality argues that the real problem with physicalism is that we simply do not know enough about matter itself. He calls himself an agnostic materialist and he puts his position this way:

"According to agnostic materialism, the idea that the mind-body problem is particularly perplexing flows from our unjustified and relatively modern faith that we have an adequate grasp of the fundamental nature of matter, as some crucial general level of understanding, even if we are still uncertain about many details."

Galen Strawson remains committed to monism, to monistic physicalism, nonetheless. But he must remain neutral, or as he would have it, agnostic, as to just what the physics of it all might in the future turn out to be. I regard this as a modest position to take, one that, at some level, I suspect all conjectures about the nature matter, accept. It adds nothing to the debate, however, except that small clause about how science at this point cannot explain everything.

Although the age of Newton (not to mention achievements in the ancient world) have supplied us with detailed descriptions of the physical world at the macro-level, it is important to keep in mind that at the micro-level, at the level of particles, the science of physics is a fairly young subject. It is not only young, but by historic standards entirely surprising. I'm not sure how physicists prior to 1900 would have reacted to the fact that, for example, the neutral B meson goes from its particle to its anti-particle state at a rate of some three trillion times each second. They never faced such a challenge, in part because the measurement of such events, occurring at such a rate, was simply impossible. And what might they have said about there being six flavors of quarks, not to mention a strange quark, into the bargain.

In all, then, the expectation that physics will provide an increasingly detailed and perhaps evermore surprising account of the material world is sound and sensible. Agnostic materialism I argue is a non-position. While sound and sensible, it is just as problematic as all forms of agnosticism are. Except for the materialism, it is not a position about the ontology of the universe. It is merely an epistemological posture one takes with regard to things one cannot ultimately know all the things there is to know about it.

It would also seem sensible to conclude even at this early date that if consciousness proves to be something finally and ultimately physical, it will surely not be at the macro-level of chunks of brain tissue, but at the level of sub-particles. Accordingly, if the physicalist is to press on with attempts to ground consciousness in physics, there is good reason to believe that quantum physics will ultimately seal the causal closure debate.

Conceivability of Non-Phenomenal Consciousness

The problem of consciousness comes to be a problem due to certain core assumptions that we are inclined to make. Namely, we are inclined to presume that all physical events have physical causes. We are inclined to say that physics is complete. We say there is causal closure in the physical realm.

Yet we have this concept of qualia which explains in non-transparent terms what it's like to have experiences. Qualia is what it's like to be a first-person, or to have that point of view. Everything that has a first-person point of view has qualia. And if it doesn't, while appearing to, it is called a zombie. (That was a very behaviorist way of explaining that.) In other words, zombies are said to at least have psychological consciousness, while at the same time having no phenomenal consciousness. The phenomenal is the first person point of view. So, there is no way of experiencing "what it's like to be a zombie" since there is nothing to experience when being a zombie.

Zombies are juxtaposed with physically-identical entities that are like the zombie in every way except that they have phenomenal consciousness. That poses an apparent problem. The mere conceivability of zombies is said to make zombies possible. And if zombies are possible, then that means there is something else, non-physical stuff, which separates zombies from non-zombies.

But this view is wrong on several accounts. I'm not going to explain what follows in detail here. I am only going to offer some of my ideas that I want to come back to later. I'm gathering a list of reasons as to why that view is false.

1. Proper concepts -- like the "married bachelor" (a contradiction) one can still be asked a loaded question and imagine some scenario where bachelors -- who call themselves that -- live in a bachelor pad and do bachelor activities and are somehow, however ambiguously, married. This is because the concepts are not properly defined. There would be no such thing as a married bachelor. This is a language problem.
2. Behaviorism -- on a behavioral account, which is not the best hypothesis to use (not never, but most of the time) if it acts like it has phenomenal consciousness, then it has phenomenal consciousness. We don't have first person access to the zombie mind, so there's no way to tell regardless.
3. Explanatory gap -- there is in general a gap between explaining how the mind causes the body to work. If that same gap exists even in bodies that have phenomenal consciousness, it is expected to exist (or not exist?) in bodies that do not have it.
4. Humean non-casuality -- one could deny that causation is itself physical. "Cause" and "effect" are not physical things. They are concepts. The idea that two physically-identical entities would cause different styles of consciousness does not pose a problem if there is no underlying causal problem.
   
5. The conceivability/possibility distinction is one that was fabricated in the Kripke framework. It does not entail the possibility of non-phenomenal consciousness in our own possible world. (That's a weak objection because they're still possible in other worlds.)
6. Eliminativism -- why accept that qualia is a good explanation for first-person mental states? If one takes the view that qualia is a philosopher's distinction, and that what is really going on are neural networks and c-fibers firing, then qualia is just a fancy word for neural patterns and networks. It would be easy to then deny that the possibility of non-phenomenal consciousness exists, because that state is brought about by strict neural laws.
7. Emergentism -- there are different levels of consciousness. Low-level processes, when in the right order, will give rise to higher-level processes. If a zombie is physically identical to something else that has phenomenal consciousness, then all the processing levels would be the same, including the processes that give rise to phenomenal consciousness. So in a zombie, some of that criteria would not have been met, and thus they are not physically identical.
   

Mental Causation

What: could be more obvious than to say that the things we think about cause the things we choose to do?

Perplexity: how could a non-physical body ever interact with a physical body?

Hence: For every actual particular (object, event or process) x, there is some physical particular y such that x = y.

Biting the Bullet for Physicalism

Physiology has convinced most scientists and philosophers that there doesn't seem to be any forces that are apart from the basic forces of nuclear, electromagnetic forces, gravitational forces. There doesn't seem to be any effects anywhere that couldn't be explained by those processes.

However, it's not cut and dry: it's still in principle possible that lurking in the interstices of our brain there are some special mental forces that no one has noticed yet. But there does seem to be any empirical or epistemological evidence for that, and there is an awful lot against it.

So how could the mind be physical?

If all physical effects have physical causes, then nothing that isn't itself physical can have a physical effect. Look at the mind for instance. We have a choice here. Either you say it has physical effects, as it seems (my mental choices seem to be responsible for my arms moving around) in which case you have to say that the mind is physical. Or, you could bite the bullet and say that the mind cannot be physical, and therefore it doesn't really have physical effects. And that's the epiphenomenalist view. People who are persuaded that the mind can't be physical, quite often, have to adopt this. They accept the conscious mind as kind of an epiphenomena: it floats above the brain, the brain does all the causing, and the mind is just a kind of pictorial accompaniment--it doesn't do any real pushing itself. It observes what is going on but plays no real part in the causal proceedings.

There are still problems with the strictly physicalist view. The hardest thing to be a physicalist about is what Thomas Nagel got everyone talking about, the qualia point of view. People don't have much trouble with the idea that bodies are just physical, and even some aspects of the mind it isn't so hard to understand how it is physical. But when it comes to the conscious mind, that everything is physical is much harder to comprehend.

Biting the bullet for physicalism, at this point, then, must be difficult to comprehend in light of conscious experiences. However, working under the principle that this can all be explained in physical terms, then the conscious experiences must be physical effects. But are they? Can they in principle be located? Or is there something truly dualist about the conscious experience. What does epiphenomenalism have to offer? Nothing by way of explanation. Epiphenomenalism simply opens the door to more dualistic-like explanations. It doesn't take a position on whether the conscious effect must be something completely different from physical substance. It seems to say that it simply isn't something physical, which is to be a dualist about the situation.

Therefore, epiphenomenalism collapses into dualism completely, and there is no denying it. Epiphenomenalism is simply a new way of expressing the old problems that the dualists raise, and it should therefore be no surprise, and nothing to be moved by, as if it were some new sort of argument.

Nagel, Kripke and Jackson

The order in which I have ranked Nagel, Kripke and Jackson is in no way due to the order in which I have read them, although it would appear so. I rank their arguments against physicalism in just that order, from weakest to strongest. First, Nagel’s paper explicitly says that it is not an argument against physicalism. It is merely an opening up of dialogue about the possible completeness of physics, and in it Nagel argues there will always be a certain subjective realm about which science is unable to talk about exhaustively. The subjective/objective distinction, while carrying with it the possibility of radical Pyrrhonistic skepticism, is usually interpreted to be a fairly mild explanation of why physicalism as a project of 'scientism' is inadequate and cannot know inner subjective experiences. Yet it is “hard to see any objection to physicalism here,” as Jackson says, since it does not explain why physicalism would need to know exactly what-it-is-like for a foreign body to have subjectivity, or qualia. Hence Nagel’s argument, while provocative and persuasive, is the least offensive to physicalism.

Saul Kripke’s paper is a bit more of a challenge, yet due to the nature of the argument, which is based on whether the reader shares the conviction of the author or not, it is difficult to see that it delivers a decisive blow to physicalism. Jackson seems to make an empirical claim that if at least one person is unconvinced of the modal argument then it is doubtful. The modal argument, stripped of the creativity and imagination, says in one way or another that no amount of physical information about another person will tell you if they are conscious at all. But why should we think that’s true? The modal strategy says that if supervenience is not necessary, then physicalism is necessarily false. This is an acceptable strategy, yet by begging our intuitions to accept the anti-supervenience argument, it argues that supervenience fails in a number of imaginary cases. Zombies, for example, are said logically possibilities. But this isn’t a strong argument against the claim that everything that is physically identical is “mentally” identical by definition. Or everything that is physically identical must give rise to the same aesthetic qualities. The argument has no other substance than this one claim, provided by numerous examples. While I share Kripke’s notion prima facie, I doubt its validity not on the basis of Kripke’s unmet burden to shake my counter-intuitions into conformity, but based on the idea that it is not logically possible for zombies, et al, to exist. That is, the first premise in the argument in syllogistic form.

Frank Jackson’s argument is the most challenging, particularly since it is the most debatable. Nagel and Kripke are less debatable since either one shares the intuition or one doesn’t. Yet as I understand Mary’s Problem in particular, she is either lacking in relevant knowledge, or has not made the proper use of it. Assume, as Frank Jackson setup the problem, Mary really does know everything about the physics of light and the optics of color, etc. In that case she must know how the deep structures of the brain respond to information from the peripheral sense organs, such that these brain mechanisms give rise to -- qualia! If Jackson were to argue that Mary still doesn’t know how brain mechanisms give rise to qualia, it is based on his own subjective view that Frank Jackson does not know how brain mechanisms give rise to qualia. His argument seems to presuppose that Mary would know this, except he pulls this ground out from under us in arguing that she in fact doesn’t know what-it-is-like for qualia to be experienced in, for example, myself. Yet physicalism doesn’t need to provide an account of this for it to be true.

While I believe Jackson ’s Mary Problem is the most debatable, it is also the least valid, and hence not the stronger argument. While I tend to share Nagel’s convictions, I don’t believe Bat Problem even poses a considerable challenge to physicalism. Thus Jackson ’s argument remains the ‘least weak’, while Kripke’s is not actually an argument.

Mary says what it's like to be a bat...

If you are not familiar with Thomas Nagel's paper What It's Like To Be a Bat, what I'm going to say may not make sense.

Frank Jackson is right in saying that Nagel speaks as if the problem he is raising is one of "extrapolating from knowledge of one experience to another, of imagining what an unfamiliar experience would be like on the basis of familiar ones." In terms of Hume’s example, from knowledge of some shades of blue we can work out what it would be like to see other shades of blue. Nagel argues that the trouble with bats (or Martians, squirrels, etc) is that they are too unlike us. But it is hard to see an objection to Physicalism here. Physicalism makes no special claims about the imaginative or extrapolative powers of human beings, and it is hard to see why it need do so.

Jackson's own Knowledge Argument makes no assumptions on this point either. If Physicalism is true, enough physical information about Fred, or the bat, or the Martian, would deter any need to extrapolate or to perform special feats of imagination or understanding in order to know all about his special color experience. The information would already be in our possession. Jackson says this information is not in the possession of the physicalist scientist, even if he or she knows everything there is to know about the physics of everything. "That was the nub of the argument," Jackson says.

But I think the Knowing How/Knowing That distinction breaks this argument apart. I am not sure who originally formulated this distinction, however. (It was probably in the 80s when all the Anglo-American analytic professors congregated in their philosophy department hallways to argue about Nagel, Kripke and Jackson et al.) The distinction is between knowing how it is that light interacts upon the faculty of vision and knowing how this is experienced to the mind whose vision is doing the perceiving. This is, in fact, the distinction Nagel makes, except with much more alleviating clarity and less mysterianism. Mary, the omniscient scientist with respect to physical properties, knows how it is that physical properties work to produce experiences of light and color upon my perceptive abilities. But she does not know how it is that the experience should feel to me.

Does this mean physicalism is false? Hardly. Everything that has happened in my mind is still a series of physical events, even the experience itself is explained in physical terms. But the particular way in which that should feel to me, or what-it-is-like to experience it, is not readily available to Mary the Scientist. Just as it is inconceivable to us that we would know everything Mary knows about physics, so it is inconceivable that Mary would know the experiences themselves, extrapolated from my inner experience. She knows everything, granted, about my physical happenings. But she does not experience what I am experiencing when I see red colors.

For dualists to say that she must also have the experiences I am having, in effect, if she knows everything about the physics of my mind, misunderstands the scope and reason of physicalism.

Mind-Blowing Mind Dualisms!

A bit of epiphenomenalism this morning:

The modal argument (stripped of the creativity and imagination about all possible modalities) says that no amount of physical information about another person will tell you if they are conscious at all. But why should we think that’s true? The claim is not an argument, but a claim, an intuition. This is important. If anyone had shared the intuitions and doubts them now or doubted them later, this is evidence the intuition is doubtful, or least evidence for concern. Modal logic and the Modal Argument for Dualism receives a lot attention and praise for being imaginative, yet at its beating heart, this is how fragile the modal argument is.

A common modal strategy says that if supervenience is not necessary, then physicalism is necessarily false. This is an acceptable strategy, yet dualists like Kripke--who originally advanced the modal argument for dualism--argued that in Naming and Necessity by begging our intuitions to accept the anti-supervenience argument. Zombies, for example, are said logically possible. That is, they’re just like us physically, but have no inner and conscious experiences. That certainly sounds possible. But this isn’t a strong argument against the claim that everything that is physically identical is mentally identical by definition. Or everything that is physically identical must give rise to the same aesthetic experiences in the same person. It’s an intuition that they are possible scenarios.

“That seems possible,” provides no other analysis, however. Daniel Dennet rightly says that these kinds of arguments are intuition-pumping, in that they simply ask us to reflect upon our own intuitions to see if this claim is true or false. If we share the intuition, then the claim will seem true to us. And if we do not share the intuition, the claim will seem false.

Still, if zombies are possible, then physicalism is false, since on the physicalist account, nothing like a zombie should exist, or more precisely, possibly exist. So the correct line of argument for the physicalist is to show that zombies are not, in fact, possible. However, these claims are to be based on the arguments put forth by physicalists themselves, which are much more technical and rely on advances in neuroscience, not based on an intuition that it is possible that a counter-scenario may exist.