Saturday, June 12, 2010

Chomsky on the mind-body problem

I am, to say the very least, not a fan of Noam Chomsky’s writings on politics and foreign policy. But his straightforwardly philosophical work is always interesting and important even when one disagrees with it. A case in point is his view of the traditional mind-body problem. The usual assumption is that we have a clear understanding of what matter is, and that the difficulty has to do with explaining how thoughts, sensations, and other mental phenomena relate to material processes in the nervous system. Are the former identical to or supervenient upon the latter? Various anti-materialist arguments purport to show that they cannot be either, which seems to entail some form of dualism. But in that case we face the interaction problem. In any event, the “body” side of the mind-body problem is usually taken to be unproblematic; it is mind that raises the puzzles, or so it is thought.

Chomsky rejects this assumption. In his view, “body” is as problematic as mind; so much so that we do not even have a clear idea of what the mind-body problem is. As he writes in Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures:

The mind-body problem can be posed sensibly only insofar as we have a definite conception of body. If we have no such definite and fixed conception, we cannot ask whether some phenomena fall beyond its range. The Cartesians offered a fairly definite conception of body in terms of their contact mechanics, which in many respects reflects commonsense understanding. Therefore they could sensibly formulate the mind-body problem… (p. 142)

[However] the Cartesian concept of body was refuted by seventeenth-century physics, particularly in the work of Isaac Newton, which laid the foundations for modern science. Newton demonstrated that the motions of the heavenly bodies could not be explained by the principles of Descartes’s contact mechanics, so that the Cartesian concept of body must be abandoned. (p. 143)

In other words, when we think of causation in the natural world as Descartes did – that is, as involving literal contact between two extended substances – then the way in which a thought or a sensation relate to a material object becomes mysterious. Certainly it cannot be right to think of a thought or sensation as making literal physical contact with the surface of the brain, or in any other way communicating motion in a “push-pull” way. But when we give up this crude model of causation, as Newton did, the source of the mystery disappears. At the same time, no systematic positive account of what matter as such is has ever really been put forward to replace Descartes’ conception. Hence, Chomsky continues:

There is no longer any definite conception of body. Rather, the material world is whatever we discover it to be, with whatever properties it must be assumed to have for the purposes of explanatory theory. Any intelligible theory that offers genuine explanations and that can be assimilated to the core notions of physics becomes part of the theory of the material world, part of our account of body. If we have such a theory in some domain, we seek to assimilate it to the core notions of physics, perhaps modifying these notions as we carry out this enterprise. (p. 144)

That is to say, we have in Chomsky’s view various worked-out, successful theories of different parts of the natural world, and we try to integrate these by assimilating them to “the core notions of physics,” but may end up altering those core notions if we need to in order to make the assimilation work. As a result, as Chomsky once put it to John Searle, “as soon as we come to understand anything, we call it ‘physical’” (quoted by Searle in The Rediscovery of the Mind, p. 25). But we have no conception of what is “physical” or “material” prior to and independently of this enterprise. And since the enterprise is not complete, “physical” and “material” have no fixed and determinate content; we simply apply them to whatever it is we happen at the moment to think we know how assimilate into the body of existing scientific theory. As a consequence:

The mind-body problem can therefore not even be formulated. The problem cannot be solved, because there is no clear way to state it. Unless someone proposes a definite concept of body, we cannot ask whether some phenomena exceed its bounds. (Language and Problems of Knowledge, p. 145)

Hence, while Chomsky is no dualist, neither does he embrace the standard alternatives: “There seems to be no coherent doctrine of materialism and metaphysical naturalism, no issue of eliminativism, no mind-body problem” (New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, p. 91). In short, if the problem has no clear content, neither do any of the solutions to it. Chomsky’s preferred approach, it seems, is just to carry on the task of developing and evaluating theories of various aspects of the mind and integrating them as one can into the existing body of scientific knowledge, letting the chips fall where they may vis-à-vis the definition of “physical” or “material.”

What should we make of this? Chomsky is, I think, absolutely right to emphasize that the concept of matter is no less problematic than that of mind, and that this entails that “materialism” and “physicalism” are far less determinate in content than their adherents typically suppose. (This is something Bertrand Russell also emphasized, as do later philosophers of mind influenced by him, such as Grover Maxwell, Michael Lockwood, Galen Strawson, and David Chalmers.) At the same time, I think it is clear that the concept of the “physical” or the “material” is not in fact as elastic as Chomsky’s remarks might imply, either in the thinking of most scientists or in that of philosophical naturalists.

It is true that the positive content of the notion is fairly indeterminate, subject to fluctuation with every change in the physical sciences. But there is a core of negative content that is more or less fixed. That is to say, whatever matter turns out to be, there are certain features that modern philosophers, and scientists in their philosophical moments, tend to refuse ever to attribute to it.

For at least some of them, this would seem to include sensory qualities like color, odor, taste, sound, and the like as common sense understands them. For the mechanistic revolution Chomsky alludes to was not merely, and indeed not even essentially, committed to the idea that material causation involves literal contact. It was also and more lastingly committed to some variant or other of a “primary/secondary” quality distinction on which there is nothing in the material world that “resembles” our “ideas” of the sensory qualities mentioned (as Locke would put it). If we want to redefine the “red” of a fire engine in terms of how its surface reflects photons at certain wavelengths, we can say that the fire engine is red. But if by “red” we mean the way red “looks” to us when we perceive it, then nothing like that exists in the fire engine, which is (if we think of color in these commonsense terms) intrinsically “colorless.” And so on for sounds, tastes, and all the rest. Color, odor, taste, sound, and the like – again, as common sense understands them (rather than as redefined for purposes of physics) – are reinterpreted by mechanism as projections of the mind, existing only in consciousness. This is the origin of the “qualia problem,” and the puzzle now becomes how to relate these “qualia” or “phenomenal properties” to the intrinsically colorless, odorless, tasteless particles that make up the brain just as much as they do external material objects.

Now if one insists on denying these sensory qualities to matter, then it seems clear that we do have a clear enough conception of “body” to generate a mind-body problem. More than that, we have a conception that clearly implies that the mind (in which alone these qualities exist) cannot be something material or bodily – that, at any rate, is the lesson drawn by early modern thinkers like Cudworth and Malebranche, and by contemporary writers like Richard Swinburne, who take the “mechanistic” conception of matter itself to entail dualism. (I have discussed this issue before in several places, e.g. here, here, and in The Last Superstition.)

A naturalist could, however, decide to reincorporate the sensory qualities into the material world by conceiving of them as the intrinsic properties of matter, which “flesh out” the abstract mathematical structure described by physics. And this is precisely the move made by the writers influenced by Russell whom I mentioned above – Maxwell, Lockwood, Strawson, and Chalmers. To be sure, the resulting position is hardly “materialist” or “physicalist” as those terms are usually understood; some of these writers describe it instead as neutral monist, or panpsychist, or even as a variety of dualism. But they also tend to regard it as nevertheless consistent with a kind of naturalism, even if what is allowed to count as “natural” is thereby expanded considerably. (An exchange between Strawson and Chomsky can be found in Louise Antony and Norbert Hornstein, eds., Chomsky and His Critics.)

There is, however, another, more fundamental and indeed absolutely “non-negotiable” component of the mechanistic picture of the world inherited from the early modern philosophers, one well-known to regular readers of this blog: the rejection of Aristotelian formal and final causes. As I have argued in many places (such as in this recent post, as well as in The Last Superstition and Aquinas), this is the surviving and definitive element of the mechanistic revolution, and the one which naturalists seem to take, either explicitly or implicitly, to be crucial to their position. Whatever else the physical world may turn out to be like, and whatever alterations might be made to scientific practice, the mechanist, and the naturalist, are committed to the view that there is no such thing as goal-directedness or teleology intrinsic to the natural world, and that proper scientific procedure ought never to posit such immanent teleology. (See the quotes in the post just linked to for examples of philosophers who endorse this conception of science.)

If this is correct, then we once again have a conception of matter, albeit a negative one, which is determinate enough to generate a mind-body problem. If nothing in the material world inherently points beyond itself as to an end or final cause, then it is hard to see how that aspect of the mind philosophers call intentionality – the way that a thought “points to,” is “about,” or is “directed at” something beyond itself (such as the way your thought about the Eiffel tower is “about” or “directed at” the Eiffel tower) – can possibly be given a “naturalistic” explanation. As I have argued in several places (e.g. here) a dualism of intentional phenomena and material phenomena seems unavoidable given a mechanistic conception of nature, even if the Russellian naturalist can avoid a dualism of qualitative phenomena and material phenomena by expanding his conception of the “natural” (though even that is not a sure thing).

As Jerry Fodor puts it in Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind:

I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalog they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep. It’s hard to see, in face of this consideration, how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else. (p. 97)

Of course, Fodor’s “Reductionism” is not really the only option. One could combine Realism about intentionality with dualism instead; or with idealism; or with Aristotelian hylemorphism. But the last of these positions would indeed be ruled out if one agrees with Fodor about what the physicists’ ultimate catalog must look like, and the other two options would certainly be incompatible with at least most naturalists’ understanding of “naturalism.” In any event, the passage illustrates the point that contemporary philosophers do have a determinate enough conception of matter (albeit a negative one) to generate a mind-body problem: Fodor’s point is that given the conception of the physical to which he and like-minded philosophers are committed, intentionality becomes philosophically problematic. The passage illustrates also that the naturalist seems bound at the end of the day to deny the existence of intentionality given his conception of matter. For to say that “if aboutness is real, it must be really something else” is just a cute way of saying that aboutness is not real, and must be replaced in our ontology by some physicalistically “respectable” ersatz. As Searle has complained (e.g. in the book cited above), materialist “reductions” of this or that mental phenomenon never really succeed in “reducing” it at all, but either change the subject or implicitly deny the existence of the phenomenon. Reductionist versions of materialism are really just disguised forms of eliminative materialism.

That is a big topic, but suffice it for now to emphasize two points. First, while Chomsky is right to say that modern philosophers’ conception of “matter” or “the physical” is far less determinate than they often suppose, it is in fact determinate enough to generate a real mind-body problem. Second, the mechanistic assumptions underlying this determination of their conception of matter are, contrary to what they (and Chomsky himself, I imagine) typically suppose, not “scientific” at all, but purely philosophical – and (as my regular readers know) in my view deeply mistaken.

27 comments:

  1. And this is the sort of post I've been quietly hoping for for a while. Thank you. Stellar stuff.

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  2. Process thought can certainly inform this discussion.

    The elemental existent is the actualizing occasion or event, during which the now objectivized past events are taken as the 'physical pole' of such an occasion. Uin the 'mental pole' of the present occasion, the qualia of the past events are taken in as subjective experience where the reality of what exists already is evaluated for its future potential for novelty, culminating in a newly completed objective event that is available for consideration be another subjective experient.

    Objectivity and subjectivity are seen to be like the push-pull, or was-is, nature to process. There is no dualism of physical and mental.

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  3. Aristotle didn't assume he knew what he meant by body either: it's motion that's primary for him and indubitable, and he happily speaks for six books in his Physics about the physical world before he bothers to show that motion requires body. Even then, he feels like he has to prove that physics deals with extended bodies.

    This matters, I think: matter and form, for example, aren't posited to explain extended body, but mobile body, or body subject to change. Even if we concede all of Chomsky's arguments about having no coherent notion of body, we still have matter and form, and a whole pile of other things besides.

    I Chomsky really wants to shake up even Aristotle's ideas of physics, he'd have to deny the reality of motion. But that's been done.

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  4. Wow, you are awesome! Going into such great detail and length into his work provides me with a better understanding of other points of view.

    I'm not aware of Noam Chomsky's work, but will look into for further study.

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  5. Neither matter nor form can say anything about motion, as neither has the requisite units of time (motion = displacement per interval).

    Occasions, or events, are time durational by definition.

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  6. When I was a linguistic student (1964-72), Chomsky was my hero. I was a linguistic student at the tail-end of structuralism and behaviourism. Chomsky gave me the right to consider language and thought as actually meaning something.

    To be sure, philosophically it is not clear that he had any right to that position, but he properly rejected the barrenness of what went before. What was fascinating to me was that he had been the student of the arch-structuralist Zellig Harris, and took the term 'transformation' from Harris - but did something very different with it.

    jj

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  7. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  8. reaction process initiated

    Is that guy Aquinas?, himself, being So polemical?

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  9. It would seem to me that it would be useful to describe the bright white line that does separate 'objective' and 'subjective' reality (which maps onto positive and secondary qualities per Locke) as science presently understands them. It also seems to me pretty obvious that the bright white line in this case is that 'objective' reality is that which can be 'reduced' (I'm not sure if that is the best word to use) to a set of measurements, i.e. things that can be substituted for x and y in y=f(x). Obviously, the sweetness of sugar, the melodiousness of Mozart, the redness of the apple, and the wetness of water cannot be converted into a measurement set, i.e. a bunch of numbers that can be used as values for variables in a mathmatical function, so they're 'secondary' qualites, 'subjective' reality, or qualia, I suppose.

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  10. Ed, one quick question (as always, if you're willing.)

    You say:

    "If we want to redefine the “red” of a fire engine in terms of how its surface reflects photons at certain wavelengths, we can say that the fire engine is red. But if by “red” we mean the way red “looks” to us when we perceive it, then nothing like that exists in the fire engine, which is (if we think of color in these commonsense terms) intrinsically “colorless.” And so on for sounds, tastes, and all the rest."

    Would the italicized portion be (even if a loose, non-rigorous example) the 'Aristotilean' view of things?

    What about saying that eyes of given structure X see light at wavelengths Y as "red"? Still Aristotilean? (Assuming the prior example was.)

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  11. *It would seem to me that it would be useful to describe the bright white line that does separate 'objective' and 'subjective' reality *

    This is what keeps philosophy going: refusal to answer the question in the commonsense understanding that objectivity is publicly observable, and subjectivity is private to the individual.

    It is the perennial 'problem' of the many and the one. Substance philosophies, such as materialism and even A-T, cannot address it, process philosophies do so much more coherently.

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  12. I once taught my 18-month old grandson the meaning of 'red' by walking through Sears and simply pointing to the dozens of different red items of clothing, display, flooring, and lighting, with 'red' the mantra.
    After touring the store and letting him point to red things, he picked up three more colors from a single example each.

    I bring this up because there is not a single physical or spectral property that all those colored things have in common.
    The only way a computer can duplicate such a feat is via digital cameras that explicitly duplicate the colorimetric formulae describing our color-vision performance. Doesn't this sound like a terribly indirect property? It has no more physical significance than any of an infinite set of possible arbitrary spectral formula. What the formulae do have is the ability to recognize object colors under a wide variety of illuminants, but there are several different ways color vision is done in nature, ours being but one, merely the one tailored to have its finest color discrimination for flesh tones and fruit.

    Any 'body' that can do that will not be in the same class as lumps of rock, the paradigm of 'matter'. The problem for materialism is all of biology, not just our brains.

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  13. How does matter and form account for change? I guess I mean where is time in this picture of hylomorphism?

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  14. How does matter and form account for change? I guess I mean where is time in this picture of hylomorphism?

    Not sure what answers you will get here, but the best definition of time and change I ever heard is 'time is so everything doesn't happen at once'.

    It's funny, but profound as well. If you look at Aristotle's words on time, I think you will find the humorous definition far more insightful.

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  15. As I understand hyleomorphism, change occurs in some thing because it is formed in such a way as to so change.

    In other words, change happens because 'that's just the way it is.'

    Not a very good explanation.

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  16. Just Thinking:

    Presumably a quantum vacuum collapse that generates the whole cosmos randomly and without a cause is a better explanation for "change"? Change in hylomorphism is a function of the contingent finitude of essence as participated in by matter. A pencil is never a "quintessential" pencil (i.e., at the exclusion of other materially different pencils) because the finite essence of "what it is to be a pencil" is inadequate to informing matter perfectly. Matter is always catching up to form, so to speak, and this plenitude of variability is change. Temporality and extension are just functions of the global-cosmic variability in spacetime.

    Best,

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  17. Why are we still wasting our time on Chomsky? I thought he went out in the 1970s.

    One might as well write treatises on le Pétomane.

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  18. Very good posts, ff and codge. This is the stuff I grapple with in my metaphysically-bent mentality.

    Trying to assimilate what you two said: change is the flux of some matter that is somehow lead in a particular situation to prop-up, or fill-in, a particular form. Such inFORMation goes all the way down (and up too, I guess), and information is only a value for intellect. (On this, one could support panpsychism.)

    Three dimensions of extension and one for time are the result of material flux engaged in sustaining a stable pattern (dynamic permanence), and this form is not eternal/perfect like Plato’s, but a weaker knock-off.

    I am intrigued by all this and will follow thru the links. I see the Ross link leads to Ed’s blog of last March where panpsychism was discussed a bit.

    I am a little amused in considering I was not too far off the mark when saying that “hyleomorphism, change occurs in some thing because it is formed in such a way as to so change. In other words, change happens because 'that's just the way it is.”, since it is not too far from "things persist AS what they are on account of WHAT THEY ARE”!

    Good stuff – I will read the Ross paper that is Chap 6 of his book.

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  19. Hi Ed,

    You say Strawson and Chalmers (both panpsychists) are among the most interesting philosophers of mind writing today. I find Strawson's writings with regards to ultimate responsibility very interesting. What is your view and how does it fit in with an A-T outlook?

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  20. Considering dualism in its basic conception and experience, i.e. the idea that we are mind and body and the actual experience of being a mind in a body, let us suppose, if only for the sake of argument, that the mind is our exclusive reality: no body, no brain, no physical reference of life whatsoever. If the mere attempt of such mental exercise seems rather impossible, to say the least, the beauty of dualism or the mind-body problem is the fact that we just don't seem to make complete sense out of these elements being together (we are either recycling our theories already or going around in circles as ever). But, history and Philosophy aside, the scenario I'm suggesting comes down to this simple analogy: the mind is to the body what the Internet is to computers connected to one another. So, the idea of the mind as our exclusive reality is the idea of living without the spacetime experience of the (hardware) body due to the exclusive experience of the spacetimeless (Internet) mind.

    Now, since we are assuming that the spacetimeless mind is our exclusive reality, an interruption of this reality would be in order to explain the spacetime experience of the body (we, as computers, being disconnected from the Internet). So, within the context of this analogy, an explanation for dualism could be that of a biological problem. That is, the idea that at some point a biological problem caused the emergence of the spacetime body and interrupted the spacetimeless mind as our exclusive reality.

    This simple exercise has immediate and logical implications that I find relevant to mention. One is the idea that the change from the mind to dualism is to change from a life where the experience of the subject (the self, individuality) is logically impossible, to a life where the subject is undeniable on account of the experience of the body. In other words, being the Internet or the mind is being something incapable of claiming individuality (existence, really) simply because it is in itself irreducible to any of the elements or individuals that are causing it.

    Another logical implication in this analogy is the radical change from a plurality of individuals absolutely united or identified in the experience of a single, spacetimeless being (the mind, the Internet), to a spacetime plurality of individuals with the experience of being strangers to each other.

    And the last implication to mention is related to the idea of a biological problem interrupting our spacetimeless reality due to the emergence of the spacetime body. Basically, if somehow this idea were to be right, every element of our lives, such as individuality, language, religion, philosophy, science, art, violence, war, and an endless etcetera, would be a symptom of our biological problems, for these problems would be providing the (spacetime) information to conceive the world as we know it. In short, the world we are building would be the logical world for us to build while experiencing dualism.

    (An excerpt of a text I'm working on and posting here: http://universal-communism.blogspot.mx/)

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  21. I am, to say the very least, not a fan of Noam Chomsky’s writings on politics and foreign policy"

    That is indeed your problem!

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    1. Why is that claim necessary, whether at the outset or anywhere at all in this text? It has nothing to do with the content being discussed, and is a personal statement of opinion. It made me approach the remainder (essentially, the whole piece) with caution and skepticism.

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    2. Simple: bc if you, like the author, disagree with Chomsky’s political stance, he’s asking you to set them aside, as he does, and consider Chomsky’s stance on the mbp. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

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  22. Anonymous Vasari said...
    Why are we still wasting our time on Chomsky? I thought he went out in the 1970s."

    No, no, that's YOU !

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  23. "I am, to say the very least, not a fan of Noam Chomsky’s writings on politics and foreign policy."
    I wonder if you could expose what about Chomsky foreign policy you are not fan....
    I am curious, as it seems was an important statement that you need to calrify in a post totally unrelated with his political views.
    Ernesto.restrepo40@gmail.com

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  24. Although the primary/secondary property distinction is anticipated by figures such as Galileo, no one disputes that the radical, ontological divide between "Mind" and "Body" or "Matter" did not exist prior to Descartes, who argued that an extended, mechanical substance could be conceptually distinguished ("clearly and distinctly") from a non-extended and non-mechanical thinking substance . Had this been definitely been proven to be the case, it would certainly justify all of the subsequent efforts by Materialists, Idealists, and Dualists to repair the mysterious Cartesian rift, in terms of either mental ideas or material bodies, or some fusion or equation of the two - ala Spinoza, and later, James and Russell. (Descartes own deduction that the pineal gland was the ontological linchpin did not catch on.)
    If it is accepted that an ontological divide has been indubitably established, then purely mental or sensory entities - i.e. "Qualia" ( considered secondary or otherwise ) may be easily contrasted with purely material and mechanical entities. But, as Chomsky points out, Newton refuted mechanism, and the Cartesian 'billiard ball' paradigm has long since been displaced by the incredibly fruitful "field" model, which informs both quantum physics and Relativity theory, over and above their continuing theoretical irreconcilability at the (spatiotemporally continuous) macro and (energetically quantized) micro levels .
    Your notion of "negative content" is ingenious, but does not stand much scrutiny. If the mechanical theory is false, then so is any theory of non-mechanical mental properties (i.e. whatever is left out of the mechanist paradigm) expressly formulated in the belief that the mechanical theory is true. That such ideas continue to bewitch some thinkers is obviously the case ( I name no names,) but your curious claim that physicists will always resist assigning Qualia physical status presupposes an a priori and unchanging Cartesian paradigm of science! If the utility of the distinction has long since dissolved, what is there to resist?
    The no doubt mind-boggling discoveries of the future , will certainly transcend the theoretical horizons of contemporary scientists - just as quantum tunneling and cosmic inflation would have confounded Descartes and Newton - but they will still be termed "physical" for just the reason Chomsky says: they will be based on good evidence that practically advances our knowledge of Nature. Chomsky's transcendentally obvious point is far more profound , in the context of the philosophy of science, than Arthur C. Clarke's endlessly cited 'law' that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," so we might do well to understand it!
    And whatever one may think about Chomsky's linguistics or politics, read Chomsky among the Philosophers, and watch the river wash away the horseshit .

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