Danger. 35 hundred words of philosophizing headed your way.
I’m going to discuss the relationship between two philosophical issues: the mind-body problem on the one hand, and the existence of a God (in a sense that we will try to limn out as we move along) on the other.
My point? We can understand the relationship between mind and body as quite analogous to the relationship between God and cosmos. Furthermore, this parallel applies to, and helps us understand, a wide range of views about what the mind is.
The mind-body problem, as I understand it, breaks down into at least three parts. First, is it feasible to describe human behavior fully in physicalist/mechanical terms? Second, if it is NOT feasible, and we add another element to the description of humanity which we call ‘mind’ -- how should we conceive of that second element? Third, if we do add this extra element, do we believe that mind and body interact? How are we to understand THAT?
These three inquiries, I submit, all have obvious parallels in discussions of a cosmos and its God. First, is it feasible to describe the cosmos fully in physicalist/mechanical terms? Second, if it is NOT feasible and we add another element to the description of the cosmos that we call the divine -- how shall we conceive of this divine? Third, if we do add this extra element, do we believe that divinity and physical cosmos interact? How are we to understand THAT?
Terms cry out for definition here.
I propose to use the word “physical” to mean that which is pulled by gravity and pulled or pushed by electro-magnetism. In a physics-only view all the pushing and pulling is aimless. It just is.
We can consider explanations for change to be “mechanical” if they stick to a similarly short and similarly aimless menu. Mechanical change consists of something pushing something else, waves propagating or interfering with each other, or just -- something rolling downhill.
A scrupulous reader might object that my definition of physical and mechanical is too narrow. A simpler and wider definition of physical might be “occupying space and enduring through time.” This would allow “mechanical” changes to include, well … all observable changes.
But I have to reject that proposed amendment. It is too wide for my purposes here. Indeed, the phenomena I call mind or mindful occupies space and endures through time. Such a broad definition would simply abolish by fiat the distinction I’m getting at. If we need to abolish that distinction, let us do so for reasons and not by arbitrary definitional fiat? Given my understanding of the terms, if there are objects or substances that occupy space and endure through time but that do NOT meet the standard of the italicized phrase three paragraphs up, then there are non-physical objects and substances. If not, there are not.
So, I believe we now have a workable understanding of the mind-body problem.
A bit more nomenclature. One of the key points at issue is known as the issue of the causal closure of physical events. Some philosophers will tell you that the physical realm is closed. A physical event can only be caused by another physical event and, to the extent that it is determinate at all, it is determined by other physical events. Even if there may be non-physical realities, they are literally ineffectual.
The closure principle renders mind, as usually conceived, either a non-entity or a mere spectator. Some of the views of the mind-body problem accept this closure, some deny it.
Here the analogy with theism is pretty obvious. The closure principle renders a God or gods, as usually conceived, either non-entities or mere spectators. Some theists may accept this. They may conceive of a God who planned the Big Bang and all of its consequences so perfectly that He left Himself nothing else to do, and so can just watch His work unfold. They can then say that in all of post-Bang time, closure holds.
For the most part, though, theism will deny physical closure for the cosmos at large. The theists will leave open the possibility of what the monotheists among them call miracles and/or what the polytheists call magic.
Mental Causation
As noted above, one of the big questions of mind-body philosophy is: how do the two interact? It is difficult to conceive of a view that has genuine interaction that does not violate closure, though some views seem to fudge that a bit. In a sense, one might say that, given certain reasonable sounding premises, any INTENTIONAL human action is a sort of miracle. If I say to myself “I’m going to pluck that apple, which looks delicious,” and I reach my arm upward, what exactly can we say about the extension of my arm?
“I extended the arm because I wanted to.” If there is any truth to that, it seems on its face that there are things or properties that we call “wants” and that they have an impact on the physical world. This seems on its face to be a violation of causal closure and most believers in some form of dualism would say “yes it is, so much the worse for closure.” (Hence the analogy to miracles.)
With our definitional prelude complete, let us jump into this. Here are the four approaches to the mind-body problem I wish to discuss: strict physicalism, substantive dualism, property dualism, and emergentist dualism. I list them only in the order of what I conceive to be expository convenience.
Approach one: Physicalism
The physicalist approach to the mind-body problem is straightforward. Physicalism maintains that it is not only feasible, but simply accurate, to understand human behavior in physical and mechanical terms, that we do not need to add mind, or any non-physical properties, to such an account. And that accordingly there is no issue of interaction to be solved. A physicalist can affirm the closure of physical events without hesitation or hedge.
As examples of physicalists, we can name B.F. Skinner, Patricia Churchland, and Paul Churchland. Skinner’s characteristic move was to redefine terms regarding mentality so that they referred in fact to observable physical behavior. My desire for the butter at the end of the table is a physical fact: I say ‘butter please’ or something analogous. That verbal behavior simple IS the want. Where does this lead? You end up writing what you think is a utopian novel, and the rest of the world sees it as a horrible dystopian nightmare.
Physicalisms of all sorts run into difficulties. Any plausible statement of physicalism is generally set out in terms that are themselves infused with mentalist significance. Above, I just spoke of “understanding” human behavior, “adding ideas,” giving an “account,” and solving or not needing to solve, an issue. All of these words seem as if they speak to something happening in an interior theater. Physicalists always seem to be saying that in their interior theatre they have reached the conclusion that there are no interior theatres.
William Hasker has reviewed an early paper by Paul Churchland to test such an impression. He finds Churchill saying, for example: “There are three principal ways in which any perceptual belief may fail of theoretical neutrality.” That sentence presumes that there are people who have certain propositional attitudes (“beliefs”). The point is that the beliefs fail to have a certain property Churchland demands that they have. It is not that there are no beliefs! Yet if there are beliefs … there is subjectivity in the world. We have to account for it. We can not simply wish it away because it would make our world simpler.
In the words of Lynne Rudder Baker, it seems valuable, indeed indispensable, to presume that “language can be meaningful only if it is possible that someone mean something.” If physicalists want their employments of language to be taken as meaningful, they must acknowledge that someone, some person, can mean something. Yet that would seem to require something mental.
I submit we are right to reject physicalism as to ourselves, or eliminativism as to mind. Where do we go from there?
Approach two: Property Dualism
Property dualism is the view that mental properties are non-physical properties, even if there are no non-physical substances. That is, there are no non-physical things, but some of the things we do encounter -- including myself and you, dear reader -- have non-physical (mental) properties. Perhaps these properties -- I will hereafter all them “mental properties” without further ado -- have causal consequences, perhaps they do not. The philosophers who take this view differ with one another on the issue of closure, and some of them seem to equivocate.
Something (X) is a ‘property’ of something else (Y) if X is part of a true description of Y. In grammatical terms, we can think of X as the adjective and Y as the noun. When we speak of throwing a red ball we are attributing to the ball the attribute of redness.
Property dualism is consistent with substantive monism. We may say that a person is only one subject, while we maintain that the person has mindish properties (subjective awareness) as well as and distinct from physical properties (being more than six feet tall). We might well say “The tall and aware person threw the red ball.”
We have attached two properties to the one subject of the sentence (and only one property to the object). A property dualist maintains, in different ways and for different reasons, that the two properties of that subject are, importantly, metaphysically, distinct. Being tall is a different sort of property from being aware -- different enough to justify the categorizations as physical and mental respectively.
Searle was getting at a property dualism when he outlined what he called “biological naturalism” about the mind. Calling it “biological” means that consciousness is not the product of an algorithm, but it isn’t a ghost stuck in a machine either: it is a property of certain evolved biological beings.
There is a lot more that might be said about property dualism and in its favor.
But there are objections. I’ll offer just one. This is one that fits into our comparison to the issue of theism.
Property dualism tends to give us a bundle of mental properties -- the receipt of various sensory perceptions, the attribution of such received messages to the external world (what Searle calls “intentionality”), the desire to move one’s body in a particular way (what the rest of us call “intentions”), and a bundle of beliefs from the concrete to the abstract. These are all facts -- properties if you like -- that have a feeling to them. It is LIKE something for any one of these things to be true of you.
But none of those things that are true of you simply are you. The “you” is the bundle of mental things, not a Mind. In this respect, property dualism resembles certain polytheisms, and the self or the self’s mind is the whole of a pantheon.
This is the objection. We don’t seem to ourselves to be a pantheon. Descartes invoked the word “cogito,” not “cogitamus.” I think not we think. I seem to myself to be a single person, and a single mind, changing but remaining the same. As Richard Swinburne has written, “I am the common subject of the experience of hearing the first half of your sentence and the experience of hearing the second half of your sentence.” Can we take a rational view of the mind-body relationship that doesn’t turn the former into a loose bundle?
Approach three: Substance dualism
Descartes of course was very uninterested in thinking of the mind as a bundle of distinct properties. Indeed, the singleness of the mind is one of its clear-and-distinct characteristics for him. “For in reality,” he writes, “when I consider the mind … I can not distinguish any parts, but I recognize and conceive very clearly that I am a thing which is unitary and entire.”
Those words, from Descartes’ Meditations, leave me with little doubt that substance dualism in the Cartesian manner corresponds to traditional monotheism as to the cosmos.
There is one mind per body, the mind is notable for its internal unity, and it interacts with the body. Likewise, in the views of the most influential monotheisms, there is one God, one physical cosmos, and the two interact.
Any interaction of mind (so conceived) and body by definition contravenes the law of the physical closure of cause and effect. By itself, that is not a big deal. We can do without that law if we have reason to abandon it.
A bigger problem, though, is the law of conservation of energy. Doing without THAT would seem a massive reversion of the progress of science and of human knowledge in recent centuries. It is a huge price to pay for some intuitive plausibility.
If my mind, considered as an intangible substance, orders up a motion of my arm: doesn’t this have to re-direct electrical energy? Doesn’t it have to expend energy in order to make the redirection work? That is more than just a failure of closure of the physical causal system.It is an introduction of what ought to be a measurable quantity of energy INTO that system. From nowhere? From a supernatural realm? And where are the actual measurements backing this up?
The broad problem of the mysteriousness of mind/body interaction might be addressed in a number of ways. For the most part, though, they sound like fairy tales (ah! It could be the pineal gland!) rather than efforts at empirical psychology, a fact-based study of mind.
If we try to have our mind and body as separate substances without interaction we get into more exotic fairy tales, like Leibniz’s monadology or Malebranche’s occasionalism. This pulls us further away from anything one might consider empirical psychology.
Any plausible account of mind-body interaction will have to avoid any exchange of energy between the two.
This is perhaps a good time to mention that in exploring the underlying analogy here, between the mind/body relationship on the one hand and the God/cosmos relationship on the other, we necessarily abandon the “omnis”. The mind is notably NOT omnipotent in relation to the body. Although I am in most respects a healthy person, I have to admit that I can not without pain raise my left arm to reach a high shelf or pluck an apple from a tree branch. My arthritic left shoulder rebels like Satan if my mind tries to order up such an action. I am hardly unusual in this. If we understand the mind-body relationship in (what I will cal for lack of a better term) a common-sense manner, the mind and its intentions are powerful, within healthy bodies, but are never omnipotent. You can consider the other omnis for yourself and likely reach an analogous conclusion.
The abandonment of the omnis is, in my humble view, a feature of this analogy in this context. It is not a bug.
Another point that arises naturally here: survival after death. If you believe that “you” will survive after your bodily death, you need some sort of carrier of that continued existence. Personally, I don’t see “compatibility with post-mortem survival” as either a feature or a bug of this branch of our subject. That may become clear in my ending.
Approach four:: Emergent evolution
To review: we can’t really take an eliminativist view of the mind because it is impossible even to outline such a view without explicitly or implicitly affirming mind stuff. We found some attractions in the minimalist property-oriented view of what the mind stuff is, but it led to us thinking of ourselves as bundles, which is counter-intuitive and awkward. We are wary of substance dualism because we need interaction and don’t see how, with a good empirical conscience, we can get it.
Now, having passed the 2600 word mark, I should perhaps say something about my own take on these twinned relationships.
I believe in emergent evolution. The phrase was invented by C. Lloyd Morgan in 1922 in Gifford Lectures which later took book form, to stand for ideas that one could trace back a bit further. (Morgan gives a shout-out to Henri Bergson and a lot of credit to John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic.) Emergent evolution provides the ideas that, for me, describe both of the two key relationships on which I have focused in this humble essay. Other important emergentists include: Samuel Alexander, Henry Nelson Wieman, Robert Reid, and William Hasker.
The underlying idea is that various systems become more complicated over time. After reaching a certain degree of complexity, they may develop new features: features that are not just quantitatively distinct frio what came before, but that add a new qualitative layer to it.
Morgan starts his first Gifford lecture with a simple example from chemistry. “When carbon having certain properties combines with sulphur having certain other properties there is formed, not a mere mixture but a new compound, some of the properties of which are quite different from those of either component.” Depending on the temperature at the site of the combination, they may form carbon disulfide with double covalent bonds.
The particular characteristics of CS2 could not have been predicted in advance of doing the experiment. Still, once one has done it, one knows how to do it again, thereby proving that one has learned something about how the world works. And, in the broadest terms, the world works by a combination of things-getting-more-complex on the one hand and by the novelties that emerge out of the complications on the other. The Big Leaps are from Space to Matter, from Matter to Life, from Life to Mind, and next, perhaps, to who-knows-what development that may arise from the complexities of mind.
To quote Samuel Alexander, “God is the whole universe engaged in process towards the emergence of this new quality, and religion is the sentiment in us that we are drawn towards him, and caught in the movement of the world to a higher level of existence.”
Let us look to the mind-body issue with these thoughts rolling about.
What emerges from emergence?
John Searle, whose contributions to the mind-body literature I’ve mentioned in another context above, has been very dismissive of the idea of emergence. “The naive idea here” he says, “is that consciousness gets squirted out by the behavior of neurons in the brain, but once it has been squirted out, then it has a life of its own.” [My italics.]
Emergentists, even among those named above, do not speak as one. So I, as one, do not speak for “us,” but only for myself. And I’ll admit I enjoyed the gratuitously amusing verb choice Searle squirts out.
Note that Searle speaks of a life “of” its own, not “on” its own. The emergence of mind (and personal identity, or ‘soul’ if you like) from life suggests a mind-body relationship of continued dependence, which doesn’t do much for ideas of survival-after-death. The emergent doesn’t get a life ON its own. Life needs supportive matter, and consciousness needs supportive lives.
Note also that Searle’s brief dismissive wave also addresses the issue of mereology. In philosophy “mereology” is the study of parts and whole. When I bring a six-pack of soda into a check-out lane for “six items or less,” am I cheating? Some mereologists would say each soda count as one and the collection of sodas count as one so I have seven items. This is why philosophers make bad grocery clerks.
Anyway: there is a mereological question about the emergence of mind. Did mind as a single fact emerge from the ecosystem considered as a single fact? Or does a particular mind emerge from and remain associated with a single body? Searle has the individual neurons “squirting” mind. Maybe it is the planet earth, via its ecosystem, that squirts mind. The whole six pack is just one item for the sake of the check-out lane.
“I think therefore a world supportive of thought exists.”
“But what about this particular human being who is typing these words?” If we accept emergence with this particular mereology we can regard any individual thinking organism as but one window through whom the light of consciousness, the light generated by ecosystem, breaks.
At this point I suspect I will be misunderstood. People may say, “ah, Faille is trying to deify the Earth in a fashionable-wicca sort of way, and bring together both halves of his analogy.” No, I’m not. I’m happy to keep the two half separate. I’m trying to self-ify the Earth considered not as rocks and magma but as an ecosystem. As to deity, I identified my own God in the Alexander quote above. God is the ever-constant process of change, and always the promise, the Hope, of the emergence of a new quality. In our situation, the new quality is the next one beyond mind, not now indefinable but valuable as the story of successive emergence is a story of the creation of value.
As for the three questions in my headline: Joyceans will want to consider Molly Bloom’s answer.
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