In Book 10,
Chapter 10 of On the Trinity, St.
Augustine argues for the immateriality of the mind. You can find an older translation of the
work online, but I’ll quote the passages I want to discuss from the
McKenna translation as edited by Gareth Matthews. Here they are:
[E]very mind knows and is certain
concerning itself. For men have doubted
whether the power to live, to remember, to understand, to will, to think, to
know, and to judge is due to air, to fire, or to the brain, or to the blood,
or to atoms… or whether the combining or the orderly arrangement of the flesh
is capable of producing these effects; one has tried to maintain this opinion,
another that opinion.
On the other hand who would doubt
that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts,
he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he
doubts, he wishes to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows
that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he ought not to consent
rashly. Whoever then doubts about
anything else ought never to doubt about all of these; for if they were not, he
would be unable to doubt about anything at all…
[T]he mind knows itself, even when it seeks itself, as we have already shown. But we can in no way rightly say that anything is known while its substance [or: essence] is unknown. Wherefore, since the mind knows itself, it knows its own substance [or: essence]. But it is certain about itself, as is clearly shown from what we have already said. But it is by no means certain whether it is air, or fire, or a body, or anything of a body. It is, therefore, none of these things…
For the mind thinks of fire in the same way as it thinks of air or
any other bodily thing of which it thinks. But it can in no way happen that it should
think of that which itself is, in the same way as it thinks of that which it
itself is not. For all these, whether
fire, or air, or this or that body, or that part or it thinks of by means of an
imaginary phantasy, nor is it said to be all of these, but one or the other of
them. But if it were any one of them, it
would think of this one in a different manner from the rest. That is to say, it would not think of it by
means of an imaginary phantasy, as absent things or something of the same kind
are thought of which have been touched by the sense of the body, but it would
think of it by a kind of inward presence not feigned but real -- for there is
nothing more present to it than itself; just as it thinks that it lives, and
remembers, and understands, and wills.
And if it adds nothing from these thoughts to itself, so as to regard
itself as something of the kind, then whatever still remains to it of itself,
that alone is itself. (pp. 55-57)
Useful
discussions of these passages can be found in chapter 6 of Matthews’ book Augustine,
and, more recently, in Bruno Niederbacher’s essay “The human soul: Augustine’s
case for soul-body dualism” in the considerably revised 2014
second edition of The Cambridge Companion
to Augustine. (The bracketed
alternative translation of Augustine’s word for “substance” as “essence” is not
my addition, by the way, but is in the McKenna/Matthews translation. Matthews and Niederbacher both regard this
translation of substantia as equally
plausible or even more plausible in this particular context.)
In the first
two paragraphs quoted we have a version of what is sometimes called “the
Augustinian cogito,” insofar as Augustine prefigures (here and in Book XI,
Chapter 26 of The City of God)
Descartes’ famous Cogito, ergo sum. You cannot coherently doubt that you live,
remember, understand, will, think, know, and judge, since, Augustine argues,
the very act of doubting that one
does these things itself involves
doing them.
Of course,
you could doubt that you “live” in the
sense of having a metabolism, etc., insofar as you can wonder (as Descartes
did) whether you are really a spirit divorced from any body and are merely
hallucinating that you have one. But
what Augustine means here is that even in that case you couldn’t coherently
doubt that you “live” in the sense of existing as a disembodied, thinking thing.
Augustine
also notes that even if one is committed to some version of materialism
according to which our mental powers are to be attributed to the brain, to
atoms, to some particular kind of arrangement of the flesh, or what have you,
one could still at least coherently doubt
that this was the case in a way one cannot coherently doubt that one thinks,
wills, etc. In the remaining passages,
Augustine develops this contrast in a manner intended to show that the mind
cannot be material in these ways or any other way. Of course, this approach to arguing for the
mind’s immateriality also sounds very proto-Cartesian, though I think
Augustine’s arguments here are not exactly the same as any of Descartes’.
Matthews
plausibly suggests that, whether Augustine intended it or not, there are two
distinct arguments to be found in the last two paragraphs quoted above. Let’s consider them in order. In the third paragraph the argument seems to
me plausibly reconstructed in the following way (which, I should note, is not
necessarily the way Matthews or Niederbacher would reconstruct it):
1. The mind
knows itself with certainty.
2. But a
thing is known only when its essence is known.
3. So the
mind knows its own essence with certainty.
4. But the
mind is not certain that it is the brain, or atoms, or an arrangement of flesh,
or anything else that is material.
5. So it is
not part of the essence of the mind to be the brain, or atoms, or an
arrangement of flesh, or anything else that is material.
What should
we think of this argument? I’m not
certain, though some objections that might at first glance seem strong are not
in fact decisive. Matthews notes that
functionalists claim that the mind could be realized in the brain but also in
other material systems, such as a sufficiently complex computer. Hence “a mind might know its own essence
without knowing what matter it is realized in” (Matthews, Augustine, p. 46). The
point, I gather, is that while the mind can doubt that it is realized in this particular kind of matter or that kind, this may merely reflect the
fact that it is realizable in multiple sorts of matter, and does not entail
that it could exist apart from any matter
at all.
However,
even apart from the deficiencies of functionalist theories of mind, this does
not seem to me to be a good objection (though in fairness to Matthews I should
emphasize that he considers this as an objection which might be raised against
his own reconstruction of the argument, which is not exactly the same as mine).
Augustine’s point is not that there is
something special about the particular
examples he cites -- the brain, atoms, configurations of flesh, etc. --
that makes it possible for the mind to doubt that it is any of them. His point is precisely that what is true of
them is going to be true of anything material. The mind, he could point out in response to
our imagined functionalist, can doubt that it needs to be “realized” in anything material in the first place. Even the functionalist would agree that it is
at least possible coherently to doubt
this, and that is all Augustine needs for the argument to go through (assuming
it is otherwise unproblematic).
A
functionalist may respond that it is also possible to doubt that the mind is
realized in any postulated immaterial
substrate. But as I have pointed out
when addressing parallel objections to Cartesian dualism (here
and here),
this sort of objection just completely misses the dualist’s point. In Descartes’ case, he is not (contrary to
the stock caricature) postulating a ghostly kind of stuff (“ectoplasm” or
whatever) in which thought merely contingently inheres, so that one might
coherently suppose it possible in principle for the one to exist apart from the
other. For Descartes, the res cogitans is not merely a substrate
which underlies thought, but just is thought. There is no conceptual space between them by
which the functionalist might pry them apart.
Augustine, it seems, is saying something similar. In knowing with certainty that it thinks,
wills, understands, etc., the mind knows its essence, not merely activity contingently related to that essence
which might in principle exist apart from it.
Matthews
also notes that a critic may object to the claim that a thing is known only
when its essence is known. He cites
Aristotle’s example of thunder, which one could know is a noise in the clouds
even if he does not know the essence of thunder. Or we might note that someone could obviously
know that water is the liquid which fills lakes and oceans and falls from the
sky as rain even if he does not know that water is H2O.
This is a
stronger objection, but in reply it could be noted that premise 2 may not
actually be essential to the argument.
Augustine need not claim of everything
that when it is known, its essence is known.
Perhaps he could simply argue that this is true of the mind, specifically. For as Niederbacher emphasizes in his
discussion of this argument, Augustine takes the mind to have a special
immediate access to itself that it does not have to other things. (Hence Niederbacher calls the argument under
discussion “the cognitive access argument.”)
In the preceding chapter, Augustine had written that “when it is said to
the mind: ‘Know thyself,’ it knows itself at the very instant in which it
understands the word ‘thyself’; and it knows itself for no other reason than
that it is present to itself” (On the
Trinity, Book 10, Chapter 9, p. 54).
The idea might be that absence of certainty is possible only where our access
to a thing is not immediate. For
example, we can be less than certain about the things we see because our access
to them is mediated by light, the optic nerve, stages of neural processing, etc.,
and this opens the door to the possibility of illusion and hallucination. But the certainty that the “Augustinian
cogito” shows that the mind has vis-à-vis itself implies that its access to
itself is not mediated.
So, it may
be that, given Augustine’s view about the mind’s immediate access to itself, it
is steps 3 - 5 that are the really essential ones in the “cognitive access
argument,” and the problematic premise 2 can drop out as inessential. The basic idea would be that given the mind’s
immediate access to itself, it has a certainty about its essence that it does
not have about whether it is the brain, atoms, etc., so that nothing of the
latter, material sort can be part of its essence.
But this
brings us close to the thrust of the argument of the last passage from Chapter
10 quoted above, which Matthews judges to be not only a distinct argument but a
stronger one. In this passage, Augustine
says of “fire, or air, or this or that body” that we think of them “by means of
an imaginary phantasy,” or mental image.
But Matthews suggests that whether we always make use of mental images, specifically, when we think of
material things is not really essential to Augustine’s point. What is essential is rather the claim that we
always make use of mental representations
of some sort or other. Thus the mind’s cognitive access to material
things is always mediated in a way Augustine thinks its cognitive access to itself
is not.
Thus we have
what I take to be a plausible reconstruction of the overall thrust of the
reasoning of the last passage from chapter 10 quoted above:
1. The mind
knows itself directly, without the mediation of a mental image or any other
representation.
2. But the
mind knows material things only via the mediation of a mental image or some
other representation.
3. So, the
mind is not a material thing.
In defense
of premise 1, Augustine would, again, presumably say that if we were to deny
it, then we would be faced with the possibility of skepticism about the mind’s
own existence. Yet the “Augustinian
cogito” shows that such skepticism is impossible. So we must affirm premise 1.
In defense
of premise 2, we could note that, apart from eliminative
materialists, materialists themselves
tend to affirm that all thought takes place by means of mental representations of
some sort (whether “sentences in the head,” distributed representations, or
whatever). Hence they cannot consistently
reject premise 2. Augustine and
materialists of the sort in question are essentially in agreement that in
general, thought involves mental representations. The difference is just that Augustine thinks
the “Augustinian cogito” shows that there is an exception in the special case
of the mind’s knowledge of itself.
As Matthews notes,
a critic might still object to premise 1 on Freudian grounds. It might be claimed that in the case of unconscious mental states, the mind
knows itself (insofar as it discovers that it has a repressed desire of some
sort, say) but that it does not do so directly
(since the desire is unconscious). But
as Matthews also notes, this wouldn’t really be a strong objection. Much of the talk about “unconscious” mental
states seems to me pretty loose. John
Searle argues that to attribute a so-called “unconscious mental state” to
someone is really just to attribute to him a neural state with the capacity or
disposition to cause a conscious mental
state. This seems to me essentially
correct. What is strictly mental is the conscious state caused by the neural
state, so that we don’t really have a counterexample to the claim that the mind
always knows itself directly.
Given
Augustine’s emphasis on the mind’s direct and certain knowledge of itself, the
arguments we’ve been examining have, as I have said, a clearly proto-Cartesian
flavor about them. It is worth noting,
though, that whatever one thinks of it, Augustine’s reasoning is not the same
as that of Cartesian “conceivability arguments” (which I have discussed
critically here
and here). There is no attempt to read off, from what we
can conceive, conclusions about mind-independent reality, after the fashion of
rationalist metaphysics. The introspective
approach to the study of the mind that Augustine shares with Descartes has no essential connection with Cartesian/Leibnizian
rationalism.
@Greg:
ReplyDelete"You are confused."
That is all that needs to be said, and even that much isn't strictly necessary.
Again, Don Jindra is a troll whom Ed has asked not to post on this blog. Ed also has a standing order not to respond to trolls.
It's difficult to resist the temptation to respond to blatant idiocies and I don't always successfully resist it myself. But in order to be considerate of our host and fellow guests, we do have to try.
Good point. I will attempt to resist.
ReplyDelete@Scott
ReplyDeleteThe difference between them isn't just a matter of how many sides we expect to count if we zoom in on a mental image…
I claimed it was the main difference not the only difference. Like all shapes you could attempt to determine additional qualities specific to that shape which would also be differences.
…and even if it were, imagination alone still wouldn't suffice to explain our ability to count in the first place.
You lost me. Counting in arithmetic progression is a learned ability of following certain rules; prior to such learning humans can only distinguish geometric progressions of doubling. Of course we can utilize learned abilities in our imagination, why would I think otherwise?
@Step2:
ReplyDelete"Like all shapes you could attempt to determine additional qualities specific to that shape which would also be differences."
I expect so, but I don't think they'd be fully explicable in terms of imagination as opposed to conception.
"Counting in arithmetic progression is a learned ability of following certain rules[.]"
Well, okay, but to say that we have that ability still presumes that we already have the ability to deal with abstractions, doesn't it? It doesn't explain where that ability comes from.
Greg,
ReplyDelete"You have assumed that, if humans think formally, then their 86 billion neurons think formally, unlike any other physical thing. His argument, simply, does not ride on that."
You betcha I assume that. OTOH, Ross's argument rides on making the reverse assumption (86 billion neurons cannot think formally).
"(1) would be used in that case to infer that clusters of neurons and brains do not think formally. Since (2) says nothing about formal thinking, (1) is not used 'to create premise (2).'"
First you say it's used, then you say it's not. Very interesting.
"There is a reason that, when you proudly proclaimed in Oerter's combox that Ross's argument begs the question, no one patted you on the back."
Maybe the same reason nobody jumped in on your side in that same discussion? Besides, I doubt either of us are in these discussions for a pat on the back. If that was important to me I'd frequent sites more friendly to my views, which certainly isn't here. :)
I'll ignore everything else and call it quits for now. But I'll leave you with this tidbit:
(1) Man speaks.
(2) No physical matter speaks.
Therefore man is not physical matter.
It takes no jumping through hoops to see this is false. Now apply those same reasons to Ross's proof and maybe you'll understand why Ross has no effect on me.
We know what your issue with the argument is. It's just that, we have yet to see a reason why the quaddition argument can't extend to 86 billion neurons. And as explained before, swapping things out of an argument to make a new (false) argument doesn't necessarily prove that there is something wrong with the original.
ReplyDelete(1) Man speaks.
ReplyDelete(2) No physical matter speaks.
Therefore man is not physical matter.
Coda:
(1) Man speaks [via his coordinated use of different parts of his physical body (such as the lungs, throat, tongue and lips)].
(2) No physical matter speaks.
Therefore man is not physical matter [alone, and it is not the man's physical body itself which speaks, but the man himself who speaks (via (his coordinated use of different parts of) his physical body)].
Does anyone else hear that buzzing sound?
ReplyDelete@Scott,
ReplyDeleteConcepts are deceptively easy to describe but determining what they are is a can of worms.
A passage from Helen Keller might prove helpful: "My fingers cannot, of course, get the impression of a large whole at a glance; but I feel the parts, and my mind puts them together. I move around my house, touching object after object in order, before I can form an idea of the entire house. In other people's houses I can touch only what is shown me-the chief objects of interest, carvings on the wall, or a curious architectural feature, exhibited like a family album. Therefore a house with which I am not familiar has for me, at first, no general effect or
harmony of detail. It is not a complete conception, but a collection of object-impressions, which, as they come to me, are disconnected and isolated. But my mind is full of associations, sensations, theories, and with
them it constructs the house. The silent worker is imagination which
decrees reality out of chaos."
Step2,
ReplyDeleteThat actually is a really good quotation; thanks for posting it.
It might be mentioned, however, that an important sentence has been left out, and that that omission renders the quotation incomplete.
Just prior to the last sentence of the quotation, Keller wrote, "The process reminds me of the building of Solomon's temple, where was neither saw, nor hammer, nor any tool heard while the stones were being laid one upon another."
With the quotation now complete, we may note that Keller explicitly acknowledges the existence of a process, or at least postulates the existence of one, and that she goes on to say it is the imagination which is the "silent worker" in that process (as quoted above: "The silent worker is imagination which decrees reality out of chaos").
That is fine, I think, as far as it goes. But I also think it doesn't go far enough. She goes up from sensations to imagination, and then stops, at least in regard to the quotation, without going higher. But imagination is not the highest level to which attention may be called. And just as it can be said that the imagination is the 'silent worker' in the process (of building, construction or fashioning something out of "associations, sensations, theories"), so too, if we go up another level, can it be said that the intellect is the 'silent worker' in the imagination. [1]
Of the intellect as 'silent worker' in the imagination, Dr. Feser writes in his Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide:
"[T]hough the intellect is distinct from sensation and imagination, it depends upon them for its raw materials. In explaining what this involves, Aquinas, following Aristotle, draws a distinction between agent intellect (or 'active intellect') and possible intellect (or 'passive intellect'). Sensation involves perceptions of individual things, which give rise to the images or phantasms of the imagination and memory. The visual perception of a cat, for example, is later recalled in the mental image you have of what the cat looked like, and your imagination is also able to produce images of cats you have never seen by rearranging the elements of your mental images of things you have seen. But all such images or phantasm are, as we have said, particular or individual, just as the original perceptions and the things were; and as such they are not 'intelligible,' that is to say, they are not the sort of thing the intellect [my emphasis] can grasp. But 'the active intellect ... causes the phantasms received from the senses to be actually intelligible, by a process of abstraction' (ST
1.84.6). In other words, it [the intellect] strips away all particularizing or individual features of a phantasm so as to produce a truly universal concept of 'intelligible species,' leaving you (for instance) with the idea not just of this or that particular cat, but of 'catness' in general, of that which is common to all cats. The abstract concept is then stored in the possible intellect (ST 1.85.1)."
(cont)
Now, there are at least two obvious differences between Keller's prose and Dr. Feser's prose. One of the two differences may lead one to ask, "What the heck is the point of all that minutiae?" [2] The other difference has to do with the fact that Keller is frying one fish, and Dr. Feser is frying another fish. And since he is frying that particular fish [3], he goes on to say:
ReplyDelete"This account of the origin of our concepts is intended by Aristotle and Aquinas to serve as a middle position between two erroneous extremes: the materialism of ancient thinkers like Democritus, which in its over emphasis on the sensory origin of our concepts tended to identify intellect with sensation; and the hyper-intellectualism of Plato, who, though he correctly distinguished the intellect from the senses, tended too radically to divorce the former from the latter, and to cut off the intellect from the material world altogether (ST 1.84.6)."
- - - - -
[1] Though I'm not a mind reader, I think this may be, more or less, in the vicinity of what Scott was getting at when he wrote, "[B]ut I don't think they'd be fully explicable in terms of imagination as opposed to conception."
[2] No doubt Dr. Feser would respond, and rightly so, "Minutiae? Why the heck are you calling that 'minutiae'? I haven't even started yet!"
[3] What "that particular fish" might be, is left to your imagination.
@Glenn
ReplyDeleteThanks for fact checking the quote. I copied the quote from a secondary source and didn't have any reason to suspect it was modified. However I don't think the omission changes the overall point.
I disagree with restricting the imagination to rearrangements of particular elements. I would instead say the imagination is the frame in which the intellect navigates.
I've been wondering for awhile, do materialists have arguments for their positions in philosophy of mind? I'm not asking to be flippant. Rather, whenever I've asked friends interested in philosophy of mind, they have either scoffed at the suggestion they need arguments, or made a vague appeal to ignorance and insisted dualism adds nothing to the dialogue.
ReplyDelete