William James and Mind-Body Neutrality I

One traditional approach to the mind-body problem in philosophy is this: look for some neutral stuff. The interaction of an immaterial consciousness with a material body/brain would seem less mysterious were there some neutral stuff out of which both consciousness and physicality were themselves created.

The term "neutral" here means simply that the theorist at issue isn't trying to dissolve one half of the dichotomy into the other.

There are three broad types of neutralism, one of which is simply called "neutral monism." The other two that one can put into this category have different names and slightly different approaches: panpsychism, and double-aspect theory.

I will say a brief word now about how each of them relates to the philosopher who inspired the existence of this blog: William James. Tomorrow, I'll try to say something about how they are different.

Neutral Monism

William James is a and perhaps even the key figure in the development of neutral monism narrowly understood, though I'm not sure how seriously he wanted us to take it. The "New Realists," like Holt and Perry, took these ideas directly from James, and were entirely serious about them. The idea is that one can speak of the sight of a piece of paper as a fact (sight-per, let us call it). The sight-per considered in itself isn't anyone's sight in particular, and it isn't any particular piece of paper in particular. As a datum in a substratum it has not yet become part of any story.

For various purposes, the sight-per does become part of various stories. It may be the story of my life. In that case, it becomes MY visual datum, and evidence of the existence of an item sitting on top of MY desk., Or yours.

But you and I and the desk are all composed of this stuff, data like sight-per, and data like THAT are the desired neutral ground.

Panpsychism

Panpsychism is the view that a sort of psychically-understood matter is the neutral stuff. The piece of paper itself has a mind, or is a mind, as well as being a physical object. This conviction sometimes develops in stages -- a thinker may decide first that he cannot countenance a distinction between animals and plants, so that if the former are mindful the latter must be too. But then, as one philosopher (Lotze) put the point, there is a temptation to go further. Lotze wrote, "One cannot search for the mind arbitrarily in the plants, the darlings of our fantasy, and remain satisfied with the existence of dead matter in the rocks."

Lotze in writing that comment was criticizing Fechner for only making half that journey -- Fechner had assigned mind to the plants but not the rocks. Fechner later in effect conceded the Lotzean point by going the whole way into panpsychism,. James offered a sympathetic summary of Fechner's development in a chapter of his book A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE.

Those two sorts of neutralism are very different from one another. Neutral monism is from one point of view a ruthless application of Ockham's razor. Panpsychism rather jubilantly throws the razor away and grows a beard, then declares the beard a living and mindful creature.

Dual Aspect Theory

Dual-aspect neutralism is, in tone, somewhere in-between the other two neutralisms.

As a historical matter, we may go back to Spinoza or, if we do some back-testing, even to Parmenides. The key thought here is that there is only one Substance in the world, and that mind and matter are different aspects of that One, so that physics studies the psychology of God.

THIS, to William James, is anathema. It is the Block Universe, it is deterministic, it pre-figures Hegel's Absolute. James once shouted, "Damn the Absolute." He meant by Absolute THIS sort of conception of God. So it seems to me we have a Jamesians have a bit of a paradox on our hands, philosophical as well as exegetical. If we see these neutralisms as a spectrum, with dual aspect theory the mid-point on the spectrum, then we'll have to think of James as playing along with both ends, but as utterly averse to the middle. Why so? I hope to expound it a bit further tomorrow.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog