Mind-body problem roundup

For readers who might be interested, I thought it would be useful to gather together in one place links to various posts on the mind-body problem and other issues in the philosophy of mind.  Like much of what you’ll find on this blog, these posts develop and apply ideas and arguments stated more fully in my various books and articles.  Naturally, I address various issues in the philosophy of mind at length in my book Philosophy of Mind, of which you can find a detailed table of contents here.  (The cover illustration by Andrzej Klimowski you see to the left is from the first edition.)  You will find my most recent and detailed exposition of the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) approach to issues in the philosophy of mind in chapter 4 of Aquinas.  There is a lot of material on the mind-body problem to be found in The Last Superstition, especially in various sections of the last three chapters.  And there is also relevant material to be found in Locke, in the chapter I contributed to my edited volume The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, and in various academic articles.

Scientism roundup

In several recent posts we have dealt at least indirectly with scientism, the view that the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge.  Scientism is an illusion, a bizarre fantasy that makes of science something it can never be.  Seemingly the paradigm of rationality, it is in fact incoherent, incapable in principle of being defended in a way consistent with its own epistemological scruples.  It should go without saying that this in no way entails any criticism of science itself.  For a man to acknowledge that there are many beautiful women in the world does not entail that he doesn’t think his own wife or girlfriend is beautiful.  Similarly, to say that there are entirely rational and objective sources of knowledge other than science does not commit one to denying that science is a source of knowledge.  Those who cannot see this are doubly deluded – like a vain and paranoid wife or girlfriend who thinks all women are far less attractive than she is and regards any suggestion to the contrary as a denial of her own beauty.  Worse, like an already beautiful woman whose vanity leads her to destroy her beauty in the attempt to enhance it through plastic surgery, scientism threatens to distort and corrupt science precisely by exaggerating its significance.

Bühler? Bühler?

Psychologist Karl Bühler distinguished three main functions of language, to which his student, the philosopher Karl Popper, added a fourth.  Popper discusses this distinction in several places, most notably in The Self and Its Brain, and at greater length in Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: A Defense of Interaction.  I think it is very useful.  (I am no Popperian, but I find that Popper’s work is always interesting.  The Self and Its Brain – a gigantic volume co-written with John Eccles – is unjustly neglected by contemporary philosophers of mind, and a great book to dip into now and again when one is looking for something different from the same old same old.) 

The four functions are as follows:

Against “neurobabble”

Every written token of the English word “soup” is made up of marks which look at least vaguely like “s,” “o,” “u,” and “p.”  Of course, it doesn’t follow that the word “soup” is identical to any collection of such marks, or that its properties supervene on the material properties of such marks, or that it can be explained entirely in terms of the material properties of such marks.  Everyone who considers the matter knows this.

To borrow an example from psychologist Jerome Kagan, “as a viewer slowly approaches Claude Monet's painting of the Seine at dawn there comes a moment when the scene dissolves into tiny patches of color.”  But it doesn’t follow that its status and qualities as a painting reduce to, supervene upon, or can be explained entirely in terms of the material properties of the color patches.  Everyone who considers the matter knows this too.

Somehow, though, when neuroscientists discover some neural correlate of this or that mental event or process, a certain kind of materialist concludes that the mind’s identity with, or supervenience upon, or reducibility to, or complete explanation in terms of neural processes is all but a done deal, and that the reservations of non-materialists are just so much intellectually dishonest bad faith.  In a recent online op-ed piece for The New York Times, and in an apt phrase, philosopher of mind Tyler Burge criticizes this tendency as “neurobabble,” which produces only “the illusion of understanding.”  For it is as fallacious as any parallel argument about words or paintings would be.

God, man, and classical theism

In the discussion generated by my recent post on classical theism (both here and at What’s Wrong with the World), several people have raised the question of whether the seemingly remote and abstract God of classical theism can plausibly be thought to take any interest at all in human beings, and in particular whether he can plausibly be identified with the God of Christianity, who definitely has such an interest. The theistic personalist claims that the conceptions are incompatible, which is why he rejects classical theism. I want in this follow-up post to note some of the problems with this position.

1. As Aquinas says, the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments when the authority in question is a human one. But it is still an argument. And it is the strongest of arguments when the authority is divine. Consider, then, that many of the great classical theists referred to in my previous post – thinkers like Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas (to stick just with the A’s) – were also among the greatest of Christian theologians, and not only saw no difficulty in identifying the God of classical theism with the God of the Bible, but appealed to scriptural passages no less than to philosophical considerations in defending classical theism. Consider also that some of the key elements of the classical theist conception of God – such as God’s simplicity, immutability, and eternity – are considered irreformable, de fide doctrines of the Catholic Church, affirmed by the fourth Lateran council and the first Vatican council. For Catholics, who believe on independent grounds that the solemn doctrinal pronouncements of such councils are infallible, that suffices to show that classical theism is backed by divine authority. Non-Catholics will, naturally, take a different view, but if they take Christian tradition seriously they must at least regard the testimony of Church fathers, and of eminent theologians and ecclesiastical councils over the course of many centuries, as weighty evidence in favor of classical theism.

2. It is no good merely to point out that certain biblical passages seem to conflict with the conception of God affirmed by classical theism. For no one, not even theistic personalists, believes that all biblical descriptions of God are to be taken literally in the first place. For example, no one thinks that God literally has eyelids (Psalm 11), or nostrils (Ezekiel 18:18), or that he breathes (Job 4:9). These can’t be literal descriptions given that the organs and activities in question presuppose the having of a material body, which God cannot have since He is the creator of the material world. So, if the theistic personalist wants to insist on a literal reading of some passage that seems incompatible with classical theism, he needs to give us some account of why we should take that passage literally even though we shouldn’t take other ones literally. And he is going to have a hard time doing that. For notice that the reason why we don’t take the passages about eyelids, nostrils, etc. literally is that a literal reading would conflict with other things we know about God from the Bible, such as that He is the creator of the material world. But this same consistency criterion poses problems for some of the things the theistic personalist wants to affirm. For example, some theistic personalists hold that God is (contrary to what classical theism holds) capable of changing, on the basis of biblical passages which when taken literally would imply that God sometimes changes His mind. But other biblical passages (e.g. Malachi 3:6 and James 1:17) insist that God does not change. How do we reconcile them? The classical theist answers that we already know from following out the implications of God’s being the first cause of all things that He must be simple and thus unchanging, so that it is the passages that imply otherwise that must be given a metaphorical reading.

3. Of course, the theistic personalist may at this point decide to modify his understanding of God as creator rather than accept classical theism. For example, he might acknowledge that the classical theist is correct to say that if God has the sort of absolute metaphysical ultimacy classical theism attributes to Him, then He must be simple, immutable, and eternal, in which case biblical passages like those which seem to imply that God sometimes changes His mind could not be taken literally. But the theistic personalist might then respond by rejecting the idea that God is absolutely metaphysically ultimate in the way the classical theist claims He is, so as to preserve a literal reading of the passages in question. But there are two problems with this sort of move. First, it is doubtful that it can be reconciled with what has traditionally been understood to be Christian orthodoxy – though this would, of course, not necessarily trouble process theologians and other theological revisionists. But second, the move in question does nothing to show that the arguments of classical theists are wrong. After all, the classical theist typically claims that we can show through philosophical arguments that the God of classical theism exists. If this is correct, then if we also accept the biblical descriptions of God, it follows that the only right way to read them is in a way consistent with classical theism. And as I have said, that is, of course, exactly what the great Christian theologians of the past and the councils cited above did. The Christian classical theist holds that his approach is the only way to reconcile what we know of God from both reason and revelation. It won’t do, then, for the critic of classical theism to dig in his heels and insist on a literal reading of biblical passages that seem to support theistic personalism. He has to show that the philosophical arguments for classical theism are mistaken, and thus that the possibility of a literal reading is open to him in the first place.

4. It is in any event a serious mistake to think that classical theism is motivated by purely philosophical considerations (and “Greek” or “pagan” ones at that) while theistic personalism is more sensitive to specifically Christian and biblical concerns. Consider the central theistic personalist thesis that God is a person like we are, only without our bodily and other limitations. As Brian Davies points out in The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, one of the most remarkable things to note about this sort of claim is how foreign it is to what has historically been regarded as Christian orthodoxy:

The formula ‘God is a person’ is (given the history of theistic thinking and writing) a relatively recent one. I believe that its first occurrence in English comes in the report of a trial of someone called John Biddle (b. 1615), who in 1644 was brought before the magistrates of Gloucester, England, on a charge of heresy. His ‘heresy’ was claiming that God is a person. Biddle was explicitly defending Unitarian beliefs about God, already in evidence among Socinians outside England.

In other words, Biddle’s ‘God is a person’ was intended as a rejection of the orthodox Christian claim that God is three persons in one substance (the doctrine of the Trinity). One can hardly take it to be a traditional Christian answer to the question ‘What is God?’ According to the doctrine of the Trinity, God is certainly not three persons in one person. And when orthodox exponents of the doctrine speak of Father, Son, and Spirit as ‘persons,’ they certainly do not take ‘person’ to mean what it seems to mean for [Richard] Swinburne and those who agree with him. They do not, for example, think of the persons of the Trinity as distinct centres of consciousness, or as three members of a kind. (pp. 59-60)

Davies goes on to emphasize that as used within the context of Trinitarian theology, “person” translates the Latin persona, which in turn was intended to translate the Greek theological terms prosopon and hypostasis – both of which have precise theological meanings and neither of which is intended to convey the idea of a “person” in the sense in which a human being is a person. Indeed, even apart from questions of orthodoxy, the idea that God is three Persons in one substance entails that God cannot “a person” in the way that we are, since for there to be two or more human persons is precisely for there to be two or more substances. (This is true regardless of which theory of personal identity one endorses, even a Lockean “continuity of consciousness” account. For even if two streams of consciousness, and thus two Lockean persons, existed in the same body, qua persons they would be only contingently associated with that body and thus not “in” that one material substance in the sense in which the three divine Persons are “in” one divine substance.)

In short, for the classical theist, theistic personalism is bad philosophy and bad theology.

5. As I emphasized in the earlier post, that does not mean that God is impersonal, since according to classical theism there is in God something analogous to what we call intellect and will in us, and other attributes too which presuppose intellect and will (such as justice, mercy, and love – where “love” is understood, not as a passion, but as the willing of another’s good). And this brings me to one final point, which is that even apart from biblical revelation, and on philosophical grounds alone, we have reason to conclude that the God of classical theism takes a special interest in man.

Consider that for at least some classical theists, philosophical arguments alone can tell us not only that there is a God, but also that human beings have immaterial and immortal souls. For Thomists, they tell us further that the soul is related to the body as form is to matter, so that though the soul survives the death of the body, the human person does not, and can come to life again only if soul and body are reunited; that the soul cannot arise out of the material processes that suffice for the generation of lower animals but must be specially created by God with each new human being; and that our natural end is God Himself, so that we cannot be happy apart from Him. Now, that there will indeed be a resurrection of the dead, as well as the details of the Christian account of salvation, are further facts that cannot be known apart from divine revelation. But what (many) classical theists regard as knowable through reason alone and apart from specifically Christian theology already suffices to show that God has a very special interest in man indeed – so much so that He specially creates each individual human soul for a natural end that involves knowing Him everlastingly, in a way that requires a further divine intervention in the form of a resurrection if it is perfectly going to be fulfilled. It can hardly be that surprising, then, that the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob turn out to be the same.

Classical theism

The difference between classical theism on the one hand and various modern and popular conceptions of God on the other has been a central theme of many previous posts – of, for example, several posts dealing with divine simplicity (e.g. here and here) and of my series of posts on the dispute between Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics and “Intelligent Design” theory. It will feature in several forthcoming posts as well. So I thought it would be useful to write up a post which spelled out the key points.

As I have indicated in earlier posts, the doctrine of divine simplicity is absolutely central to classical theism. To say that God is simple is to say that He is in no way composed of parts – neither material parts, nor metaphysical parts like form and matter, substance and accidents, or essence and existence. Divine simplicity is affirmed by such Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes. It is central to the theology of pagan thinkers like Plotinus. It is the de fide teaching of the Catholic Church, affirmed at the fourth Lateran council and the first Vatican council, and the denial of which amounts to heresy.

The doctrine of divine simplicity has a number of crucial implications, which are, accordingly, also essential to classical theism. It entails that God is immutable or changeless, and therefore that He is impassible – that is, that He cannot be affected by anything in the created order. It entails that he is eternal in the sense of being altogether outside of time and space. It entails that He does not “have” existence, or an essence, or His various attributes but rather is identical to His existence, His nature and His attributes: He is His existence which is His essence which is His power which is His knowledge which is His goodness. (I have discussed some of these points in greater detail in the posts on simplicity linked to above.)

Why is divine simplicity regarded by classical theists as so important? One reason is that in their view, nothing less than what is absolutely simple could possibly be divine, because nothing less than what is absolutely simple could have the metaphysical ultimacy that God is supposed to have. For anything which is in any way composed of parts would be metaphysically less fundamental than those parts themselves, and would depend on some external principle to account for the parts being combined in the way they are. In that case, either the external principle itself (or perhaps some yet further principle) would have to be simple, and thus ultimate, and thus the truly divine reality; or there is no simple or non-composite first principle, and thus no metaphysically ultimate reality, and thus nothing strictly divine. In short, to deny divine simplicity is, for the classical theist, implicitly to deny the existence of God.

Now the classical arguments for God as first cause or first principle of the world (by which I mean those developed within classical philosophy, whether Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, or Thomistic or otherwise Scholastic) are, when properly understood, precisely arguments to the effect that the world of composite things – of compounds of act and potency, form and matter, essence and existence, and so forth – could not possibly exist even in principle were there not something non-composite, something which just is Pure Actuality, Subsistent Being Itself, and absolute Unity. (We saw in an earlier post how this goes in Plotinus. David Braine, in his book The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, rightly emphasizes that it is the theme that underlies Aquinas’s cosmological arguments as well.) This seems to be what leads Brian Davies to suggest, in the third edition of his book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, that the core of classical theism is the notion of God as cause of the world. But it seems to me that this is not quite right. Anselm is, after all, a classical theist, and he conceives of God (in his best-known argument, anyway) primarily as That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived, rather than as cause of the world. So, it seems to me that what is more fundamental to classical theism is the notion of God as that which is absolutely metaphysically ultimate – a notion that encompasses both Anselm’s conception of God and the God-as-cause-of-the-world approach of Aquinas, Maimonides, and all the others, and which accounts for the centrality of divine simplicity to classical theism.

But how exactly does this differ from other conceptions of God? Don’t they also think of God as metaphysically ultimate? No they don’t, at least not in the absolute sense in which classical theism does, which is why I added that qualifier. For example, take Richard Dawkins’ conception of God. Dawkins is an atheist, of course, but he thinks that if God did exist, He would be an extremely complex albeit disembodied designing intelligence, comparable to a human designer but with far greater knowledge and power. Dawkins would no doubt be happy to concede that if this intelligence existed and was the cause of the world, it would be more ultimate than the world. But he also says that if such an intelligence existed we should regard it as just as much in need of explanation as the universe itself. And he is quite right about that, for such a metaphysically complex being would have to be regarded either as the effect of some higher and more simple cause, or as an inexplicable brute fact, in which case chucking out this “designer” and taking the universe itself as the ultimate brute fact could (as Dawkins argues) be regarded as a position more in line with Ockham’s razor. Where Dawkins goes wrong is in thinking that this conception of God has anything to do with the conception that prevailed historically within mainstream theology and philosophy.

But it is not only atheists who take such a view. Davies contrasts classical theism with what he calls “theistic personalism” and what the Christian apologist Norman Geisler calls “neo-theism.” The theistic personalist or neo-theist conceives of God essentially as a person comparable to human persons, only without the limitations we have. The idea is to begin with what we know about human beings and then to abstract away first the body, then our temporal limitations, then our epistemological and volitional confinement to knowing about and having control over only a particular point of space and time, then our moral defects, and to keep going until we arrive at the notion of a being who has power, knowledge, and goodness like ours but to an unlimited degree. Theistic personalism or neo-theism also rejects divine simplicity and its implications; indeed, this is the motivation for developing a conception of God by abstracting from our conception of human persons, for the theistic personalist objects to the notion of God as immutable, impassible, and eternal – finding it too cold and otherworldly, and incompatible with a literal reading of various biblical passages – and typically has philosophical objections to the notion of divine simplicity. Davies identifies Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne as theistic personalists. As I have suggested in earlier posts, the conception of God one arrives at via the reasoning of William Paley’s “design argument” or the arguments of “Intelligent Design” theorists is also essentially a theistic personalist conception. “Open theists” and process theologians are further examples of contemporary thinkers who reject classical theism and divine simplicity in favor of a more “personalist” conception of God (though they would, of course, differ from Plantinga, Swinburne, Paley, and ID theory on various other issues).

I have emphasized as well in earlier posts that divine conservation – the doctrine that the world could not exist even for an instant, even in principle, apart from the continuous sustaining action of God – is also central to classical theism. Just as the classical arguments for God as cause of the world are arguments for an absolutely simple first principle, so too are they (for the most part) arguments for God precisely as conserver or sustainer of the world. And just as divine simplicity is no less central to orthodox theology than it is to classical philosophy, so too is divine conservation. (Ludwig Ott’s well-known manual Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma classifies it too as a de fide doctrine of the Catholic Church.) For classical theism, to say that God creates the world is not merely, and indeed not primarily, to say that He got it going at some time in the past. It is more fundamentally to say the He keeps it going now, and at any moment at which it exists at all. As Aquinas says, to say that God makes the world is not like saying that a blacksmith made a horseshoe – where the horseshoe might persist even if the blacksmith died – but rather like saying that a musician makes music, where the music would stop if the musician stopped playing.

When combined with the doctrine of divine simplicity, divine conservation entails a very different conception of God’s relationship to the world than is entailed by theistic personalism. Theistic personalism tends toward a conception of God as an especially penetrating observer of the world, who learns what is happening in it via epistemic powers that are far more advanced than ours. For classical theism, though, since God doesn’t change, neither does he “learn,” not even in an extremely effective way. His knowledge of the world is far more intimate than that. He knows it precisely by knowing Himself as the sustaining cause of the world, in the very act of causing it. He is not like a machinist who is the keenest possible observer of the operations of a machine he has built. He is, again, more like a musician who knows the music he is playing, not by observing it, but precisely in the act of playing it.

The theistic personalist also generally takes God’s miraculous activity to amount to a kind of “intervention” in a natural order that would otherwise operate without him, like that of a machinist who steps in to alter the workings of a machine he had earlier set in motion but which was, before the intervention, carrying on independently of him. For the classical theist, that is simply not the right way to think about miracles, since there is no such thing as the world otherwise carrying on apart from God, given that He is already the sustaining cause of the ordinary course of events itself. If we pursue the musician analogy a bit further, we can say that for the classical theist, the world’s regular operations are like the music a musician plays according to a score he has before his mind, and a miracle is like the musician’s momentary improvisation or departure from that score. It is not an intervention in a course of events that would otherwise have carried on without God, but rather the suspension of the normal ordering of a course of events that would not in any case have carried on without Him.

As Davies has emphasized (at length in his book The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil), theistic personalists and classical theists also differ radically in their understanding of what it means to characterize God as good. For the theistic personalist, since God is a person comparable to us, only without our limitations, His goodness amounts to a kind of superlative moral virtue. Like us, He has moral duties; unlike us, He fulfills them perfectly. But for the classical theist, this is nonsensical. Virtue and duty have to do with habits and actions that allow us to realize the ends set for us by nature and thereby to perfect ourselves. But God, being pure actuality, cannot intelligibly be said to have ends He needs to realize or imperfections He needs to remedy. Accordingly, He cannot intelligibly be said to be “virtuous” or to have “duties” He needs to fulfill.

To say that God is good is for the classical theist to say something very different, and something that it is, frankly, not easy to summarize for readers unfamiliar with certain key metaphysical doctrines characteristic of classical, and especially Scholastic, philosophy, such as the doctrine of the convertibility of the transcendentals, the notion of evil as privation, and the principle of proportionate causality (all of which are explained in my book Aquinas). Briefly, though, according to the first of these doctrines, being is “convertible” with goodness, so that whatever is pure actuality or Being Itself is necessarily also Goodness Itself. Furthermore, evil is a privation rather than a positive reality – the absence of good, as blindness is merely the absence of sight rather than a positive attribute. Whatever is pure actuality, and thus Goodness Itself, therefore cannot intelligibly be said to be evil or deficient in any way. Finally, since according to the principle of proportionate causality, whatever is in an effect must in some way be in its cause (“eminently” if not “formally”), God as the cause of all possible good must have all possible good within Him, eminently if not formally.

Obviously this raises all sorts of questions. For example: “Does this entail that God must be green, or smelly, or short, since greenness, smelliness, and shortness are to be found in the world He causes?!“ The answer is No, it doesn’t entail that, but as I have said, there is no brief way to spell out the metaphysical background necessary to answering such objections here, and I have in any event done so at length in Aquinas, to which the interested reader is referred. The point for now is just to indicate how different the classical theist’s conception of divine goodness is from that of the theistic personalist – and, for that matter, from the conception taken for granted by atheists who suggest that the existence of evil shows that God, if He exists, must in some way be morally deficient. While God is not a Platonic Form, for the classical theist, to suggest that God is in some way morally deficient nevertheless makes about as much sense as suggesting that Plato’s Form of the Good might be morally deficient. The suggestion is unintelligible both because characterizing the God of classical theism as either virtuous or vicious is unintelligible, and because characterizing Him as deficient in any way is unintelligible. An atheist could intelligibly deny that such a God exists at all (just as he could intelligibly deny the existence of Platonic Forms), but to suggest that the God of classical theism might be morally deficient merely shows that such an atheist does not understand the view he is criticizing (just as an opponent of Platonism who suggested that the Form of the Good might be unloving or vicious would only show thereby that he doesn’t understand what sort of thing a Form is supposed to be).

Now, for the Thomist, a proper understanding of these various aspects of classical theism requires a recognition that when we predicate goodness, knowledge, power, or what have you of God, we are using language in a way that is analogous to the use we make of it when applied to the created order. It cannot be emphasized too strongly, though, that this has nothing to do with “arguing from analogy” after the fashion of Paley’s design argument; indeed, it is diametrically opposed to Paley’s procedure. It has to do instead with Aquinas’s famous “doctrine of analogy,” which distinguishes three uses of language: Words can be used univocally, in exactly the same sense, as when we say that Fido’s bark is loud and that Rover’s bark is loud. They can be used equivocally, or in completely unrelated senses, as when we say that Fido’s bark is loud and that the tree’s bark is rough. Or they can be used analogously, as when we say that a certain meal was good, that a certain book is good, and that a certain man is good. “Good” is not being used in exactly the same sense in each case, but neither are the senses unrelated, as they are in the equivocal use of “bark.” Rather, there is in the goodness of a meal something analogous to the goodness of a book, and analogous to the goodness of a man, even if it is not exactly the same sort of thing that constitutes the goodness in each case.

For the Thomist, this is the key to understanding how it can be the case that God’s goodness is His power, which is His knowledge, which is His essence, which is His existence. Such a claim would be nonsensical if the terms in question were being used univocally, in exactly the same sense in which we use them when we attribute goodness, power, knowledge, etc. to ourselves (and as they are used in Paleyan “arguments from analogy”). But neither are the senses utterly equivocal. Rather, what we mean is that there is in God something analogous to what we call goodness in us, something analogous to what we call knowledge in us, and so forth; and in God, it is one and the same thing that is analogous to what are in us distinct attributes. From a Thomistic point of view, it is precisely because theistic personalists apply language to God and creatures univocally that they are led to deny divine simplicity and in general to arrive at an objectionably anthropomorphic conception of God. (It is only fair to note, however, that followers of Duns Scotus, who are classical theists, reject the claim that terms are applied to God and to creatures in analogous rather than univocal senses. For Thomists, the Scotist move away from analogy set the stage for the moderns’ move away from classical theism, but Scotists would deny this. But this is a large debate which cannot be settled here.)

In summary, then, classical theism is committed to a conception of God as that which is absolutely metaphysically ultimate – that is to say, as that which is ultimate in principle and not merely in fact – where this is taken to entail divine simplicity and thus divine immutability, impassibility, and eternity; to a doctrine of divine conservation on which the world is radically dependent on God for its existence at every instant; and (in the case of Thomists, anyway) to the doctrine that the terms we apply both to God and to the created order are to be understood in analogous rather than univocal senses. Its commitment to divine simplicity and to the implications of divine simplicity sets classical theism at odds with theistic personalism, “open theism,” deism, process theology, and other more anthropomorphic conceptions of God. Such rival views also sometimes reject the doctrine of divine conservation, though not in every case; and they also reject the doctrine of analogy, though some classical theists do so as well.

Since classical theism has, as I have noted, been the mainstream understanding of the divine nature through most of the history both of philosophical theology and of the main monotheistic religions, it follows that serious critics of theism ought to devote the bulk of their attention to understanding and rebutting the arguments of classical theists. That means that they ought to be focusing their attention on the arguments of classical writers like Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas, and Scotus, to name just some of them – and I don’t mean the out-of-context two-page snippets one finds in Introduction to Philosophy textbooks (nor quick summaries in blog posts like the one you’re reading now), but substantial chunks of their work, as well as the exegetical works of serious contemporary scholars who have written on these thinkers of the past. It means that they ought to familiarize themselves with the work of contemporary philosophers of religion who are working within the classical theist framework – writers like Barry Miller, David Braine, John Haldane, Brian Davies, David Conway, William Vallicella, David Oderberg, Christopher Martin, James Ross, and other writers in the Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, and Thomistic and other Scholastic traditions. (If they want to read my stuff too, I won’t complain.)

And yet very few contemporary atheists show much familiarity with this tradition. Indeed, few even seem to be aware that there is a difference between classical theism and the theistic personalism that underlies so much contemporary writing in theology and philosophy of religion. For example, the atheist philosopher Keith Parsons, who recently made a big show of his abandoning philosophy of religion as no longer worthy of his attention, devoted his main book on the subject (God and the Burden of Proof) to rebutting the arguments of just two theists – Plantinga and Swinburne, who are theistic personalists rather than classical theists, and thus simply unrepresentative of the mainstream tradition in Christian thought and philosophy of religion. (In saying so, I do not mean to show any disrespect to Plantinga and Swinburne. You don’t need me to tell you that they are very important philosophers indeed. They just aren’t classical theists.)

In general, though at least some contemporary atheist philosophers may be said to have a solid enough grasp of the arguments of writers like Plantinga and Swinburne, their grasp of the mainstream classical theistic tradition tends to be at best only slightly better than that of vulgar pop atheist writers like Richard Dawkins (who, as I demonstrate both in Aquinas and, more polemically, in The Last Superstition, hasn’t the faintest clue about what writers like Aquinas really said). And if one hasn’t grappled seriously with the arguments of the great classical theists, then one simply cannot claim to have dealt a serious blow to theism as such. Not even close.

Pop culture and the lure of Platonism

Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus... people so lofty they sound as if they shit marble!

Mozart (Tom Hulce) in Amadeus

I can remember spending many happy times observing the arrivals and departures of college boys with monocles, walking sticks, capes. They always livened up receptions and dinners, to say nothing of seminars and street demonstrations… I cannot actually report having spotted a young squire wearing a powdered wig, but doubtless there will come a day.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on the early days of the conservative movement, in The Conservative Crack-Up

The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.

G. K. Chesterton

Several readers of my recent post on Thelonious Monk, both here and at What’s Wrong with the World, expressed a dislike of jazz, a couple of them on conservative philosophical grounds. One of them cited Richard Weaver’s critique of jazz in Ideas Have Consequences, a classic of modern conservatism.

It’s no secret that I sympathize with the main theme of Weaver’s book, viz. that the nominalism of William of Ockham set the stage for the characteristic philosophical, moral, theological, and political errors of modernity. (This is also a major theme of The Last Superstition.) But, needless to say, I differ with Weaver at least in part on the matter of modern popular culture, and the issue is by no means as trivial as it might seem. Weaver and I agree that it was a catastrophe to abandon realism about universals, to deny that things – including, most importantly, human beings – have essences which define an objective standard of goodness for them. But realism comes in different forms, and the different forms have different moral, theological, cultural, and political implications.

For the Platonic realist, the essences of things are transcendent, existing in a “third realm” beyond both the material world and any mind. For the Aristotelian realist, essences are immanent, existing as constituents of the things themselves. For instance, the Form of Tree, for Plato, exists utterly apart from any particular tree, while for Aristotle a tree’s form (no caps needed, thank you very much) is a metaphysical component of the tree itself, not something external to it. Where they agree is in holding that the form or essence of the tree is something objective and repeatable, that this tree, that tree, and the other tree share the same nature, and that that nature determines what is good for trees as a matter of objective fact – such as that a tree that sinks its roots deep into the soil so as to give it stability and take in nutrients is to that extent a good tree, and that a tree which due to genetic defect or injury is unable to sink its roots very deep is to that extent bad and defective qua tree.

The differences between Platonism and Aristotelianism make a very real difference, though. Given the transcendence of the realm of the Forms, the Platonist is bound to regard the material world not only as second-rate but even as positively contemptible, and the body and its passions as a prison from which the soul needs to escape if it is to attain true wisdom and happiness. There is no such implication in Aristotelian realism. On the contrary, the Aristotelian regards the material world as good, and man as an essentially embodied being for whom the goods of the body, while less noble than those of the intellect, are nevertheless real goods worthy of pursuit in moderation.

I would not want to say that Weaver is a Platonist without qualification, but there is certainly more than a whiff of Platonism in his critique of jazz and of the popular culture of which it is a part. He tells us that jazz is a mark of modern civilization’s “barbarism,” “disintegration,” and “primitivism.” Why? His reasons seem to boil down to four: First, jazz evinces “a rage to divest itself of anything that suggests structure or confinement” and an eschewal of “form or ritual”; second, its celebration of the soloist’s virtuosity is a mark of “egotism” or “individualization”; third, its appeal lies in “titillation” and its themes are often “sexual or farcical,” appealing to the “lower” rather than “higher centers,” so that it fails to raise us to “our metaphysical dream”; fourth, it is “the music of equality.” Obviously, what he says about jazz applies also to other elements of modern pop culture.

Let’s consider Weaver’s concerns in order. First, it is, of course, by now a commonplace that to accuse jazz of formlessness or lack of structure is the height of superficiality. From swing to bop to modal jazz to fusion to acid jazz, it does not take much listening to discern the order underlying even the freest improvisation. Even free jazz has structure, though as I indicated in my previous post, it is so abstract that it can (in my view, anyway) only ever be of purely intellectual rather than aesthetic interest. It is hard not to see in Weaver’s criticism the Platonist’s impatience with the messiness and complexity of the real world, a desire for all form or order to be simple and evident enough to be accessible from the armchair. As the Aristotelian realizes, however (and has constantly to remind his critics, many of whom seem to think that all essentialists are armchair essentialists), to know the essences of things we actually have to get our hands dirty and investigate them empirically, in all their rich detail. If the structure of jazz is complex and unobvious, it is in that respect only mimicking the world of our experience.

Second, if like the Neo-Platonists one regards our very individuality as a kind of fallenness, remediable only by the dissolving of all duality in mystical union with The One, then I suppose the jazz fan’s admiration for virtuoso musicianship might seem to evince a morally objectionable “egotism.” But if, as the Aristotelian holds, our bodies are essential to us, then so too is the individuality that follows upon embodiment; and in that case, admiration of individual skill or achievement is not in any obvious way per se morally problematic.

Third, though I would deny that the pleasures of jazz lack any intellectual component, it cannot be denied that much of its appeal is bodily and sensual. But this too is per se objectionable only if one regards the body and the senses themselves as per se objectionable. For Plato, “each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body” (as the Phaedo famously puts it) which is deeply problematic if the aim is to free the soul from the body. But such harrowing metaphors at least require serious qualification if we are essentially embodied, as the Aristotelian says we are.

That the “nailing” metaphor might have some application even on an Aristotelian view is of course due to the fact that since intellect and will are the highest parts of our nature, the goods of the intellect and will are the highest goods we can attain, and we can lose sight of them if we are too focused on the goods of the body and the senses. But as I have said, the latter are still genuine goods; and since the intellectual and moral endowments of human beings are not equal, these lesser goods are bound to have greater significance in the life of the average man than they are in the lives of philosophers and saints.

Now a Platonist, aware of how few men are capable even in principle of living up to the severity of his otherworldly moral vision, might well object to the “sense of equality” Weaver perceives in jazz; that the appeal of such music is broad might seem to make it ipso facto corrupt. But the Aristotelian, while certainly an elitist of sorts, need not object to the idea of lower but still genuinely beautiful forms of art and music, any more than he objects to the idea that the goods of the body and the senses are, though lower goods, still genuine goods. Just as a mixed regime with monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements is for the Aristotelian preferable to the utopianism of Plato’s Republic, so too is a kind of mixed aesthetic polity bound to be the natural condition of human cultures.

Though anyone with conservative instincts is bound to recoil at the excesses of modern popular culture, then, it is possible to overreact. At the very least, it is arguable that a conservative could take a more nuanced and charitable approach to modern popular culture than Weaver does. And I would argue that such an approach is actually more conservative than Weaver’s is, because it is more realistic, more sensitive to the complexity and variety of the actual human world. As I have acknowledged before, Platonism is a noble doctrine and it can be a useful corrective to the shallow materialism and hedonism that dominate modern life. But it is also prone to unconservative excesses of its own – to utopianism and puritanism, and to either fanaticism or quietism as their sequel. It stands in need of correction itself.

Within Christianity, the Augustinian tradition partially accomplished this to the extent that it sought to reconcile Platonism with the earthiness of the Old Testament. But the Platonic-Augustinian tradition itself required correction, and this was accomplished only with the revival of Aristotelianism and the fusion, within Thomism, of the best of both worlds. In its cultural and moral implications no less than in its philosophical and theological achievements, the Aristotelico-Thomistic tradition synthesizes what is good in earlier systems and purges what is bad, and has also the resources to incorporate the best of the new.

There can in any event be no question that the mainstream Christian tradition acknowledges that the pleasures of the body and the senses have their place. For that tradition, asceticism is a nobler form of life not because the pleasures of food, drink, sex and the like are bad, but precisely because they are good. The ascetic sacrifices what is natural and good for the sake of a higher, supernatural good; and for the vast majority of human beings, even approximating such an ideal is possible only through grace, not via our natural moral capacities, precisely because it is what is naturally good for us that is being forsaken.

In light of all this, there is no reason to condemn some form of popular culture merely because it deals with this-worldly themes rather than raising us to “our metaphysical dream,” as Weaver puts it. This is not to deny for a moment that much of contemporary popular culture really is evil and corrupting. Nor is it to deny that even the best in popular culture is inferior to high culture, and that it ought never to intrude into sacred contexts. (As a lover of the Tridentine form of the Roman rite, I am stridently opposed to the use of jazz, rock, or folk music in the Mass. If I were somehow elected pope, this would be my first official act.) Nor is it to deny that even the best in popular culture can, like all the good things of this world, become a snare if we allow them to distract us from the higher and nobler things. Conservatives can definitely take too optimistic a view of pop culture – I think Brian Anderson does so in South Park Conservatives, to take one prominent example. But they can take too pessimistic a view as well, and see only bad where there is in fact much good. Weaver does so, as does Roger Scruton in some of his moods, though he seems to have mellowed a bit. (I say this as someone who admires Anderson, Weaver, and Scruton.)

As I have argued before, while conservatism should not be populist, neither should it be snobbish. The conservative or Christian who insists on Weaver’s Platonic hard line cannot fail to come across like one of the oddballs in Tyrrell’s anecdote quoted above, or the bores targeted by Mozart in the line from Amadeus – eccentric, cranky, nostalgic, uptight, unappealing, inhumane, ineffective, and irrelevant. More to the point, he is just wrong, refusing as he does to see man as he truly is, as nature made him, as God made him.

Conceiving and hallucinating

The “conceivability argument” for dualism holds that (1) it is conceivable that I might exist apart from by body, and therefore that (2) it is metaphysically possible for me to exist apart from my body, so that (3) I am not identical to my body. I put forward a detailed and sympathetic exposition of this argument in chapter 2 of Philosophy of Mind – for it is more interesting and defensible than some philosophers give it credit for – but I do not in fact endorse it. It is essentially a variation on Descartes’ “clear and distinct perception” argument for dualism, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, what’s true in that argument isn’t new and what’s new isn’t true. (As an Aristotelico-Thomist I reject the rationalist assumptions inherent in Descartes’ version, and the Kripke-style modal assumptions inherent in modern versions. But demonstrating the mind’s immateriality does not require committing oneself to these assumptions.)

But as I say, the argument is more defensible than it is often given credit for. Take the thought experiment I discussed in Philosophy of Mind, W. D. Hart’s “seeing without a body” example. (Hart develops this example in his book The Engines of the Soul and in his article “Dualism” in Samuel Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Follow the links and you can read the relevant sections online via Google books.) Hart asks you to imagine that you wake up one morning, look in the bathroom mirror, and see staring back at you two empty eye sockets where your eyeballs used to be. This is no doubt physically impossible, but it does seem that we can at least conceive of having such an experience. There is no apparent contradiction or incoherence in the idea. Seeing without eyeballs is thus arguably metaphysically possible even if it is not physically possible.

Hart then asks us to extend the thought experiment in various ways. For example (and as I suggested extending it in the book) you might imagine that instead of seeing two empty eye sockets staring back at you, what you see in the mirror is the stump of your neck where your head used to be – a headless body, arms raised in horror. Seeing without a head, and thus without a brain, seems perfectly conceivable, then, and therefore (by the reasoning of the conceivability argument) at least metaphysically possible even if not physically possible. And if that is conceivable, so too is it conceivable to have the experience of seeing without arms, legs, torso, or any body at all; in which case (the argument claims) it is metaphysically possible to see without a body. But since seeing is a kind of mental state, it is therefore metaphysically possible to have a mind without a body.

Now, to evaluate the conceivability argument, we have to determine (a) whether what seems to be conceivable in this case really is conceivable, (b) whether conceivability really does entail metaphysical possibility, and (c) whether the metaphysical possibility of A existing without B really does entail that A and B are non-identical. I commend Hart’s discussion of these various issues (and also my discussion in Philosophy of Mind) to the interested reader. What I want to focus on here is just (a), and in particular on one possible challenge to (a).

A friend of mine sometimes reads this blog at work. (“I’m that bored,” he explains.) He’s been reading Philosophy of Mind, and when I saw him the other day he asked vis-à-vis the Hart example: “What does that prove? Isn’t it just obvious that I would be hallucinating?” That’s a fair question. We might put the objection this way: For the conceivability argument to work, we have to be able to show that (among other things) it really is conceivable to see without a body. But Hart’s example shows at most only that it is conceivable that we might have an experience that seems like the experience of seeing without a body. And that’s not good enough, because such an experience might be hallucinatory. “Seems like” does not entail “really is.” Therefore, “We can conceive of it seeming like such-and-such is the case” does not entail “We can conceive of such-and-such really being the case.”

But I think the objection fails. The reason is that hallucination seems parasitic on veridical experience in a way that ensures that if we can conceive of hallucinating something, it follows that we can conceive of really experiencing it. Consider that it isn’t just impossible to conceive of seeing a round square. It is also impossible to conceive of hallucinating a round square. And this is so, surely, precisely because it is impossible to conceive of seeing one. Hallucinating (or visually hallucinating, anyway) is just a kind of defective seeing. So, what’s impossible for seeing in general is impossible for hallucinations in particular. But then, if it were impossible for us to see without a body, it would also be impossible for us to hallucinate seeing without a body. So, since the Hart example at least shows (by the objector’s own admission) that the latter is possible, that suffices to show that the former is possible as well.

Or so it seems to me. The conceivability argument may or may not fail on other grounds, but I think that at least to this extent it is on solid ground.

Fodor’s trinity

What is the mind-body problem? In an article summarizing his work, which he wrote for Samuel Guttenplan’s A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Jerry Fodor answers as follows:

[S]ome of the most pervasive properties of minds seem so mysterious as to raise the Kantian-sounding question how a materialistic psychology is even possible. Lots of mental states are conscious, lots of mental states are intentional, and lots of mental processes are rational, and the question does rather suggest itself how anything that is material could be any of these.

For Fodor, then, there are really three mind-body problems: the problem of consciousness, the problem of intentionality, and the problem of rationality. Why are the phenomena in question problematic?

Let’s look at each briefly. (The following characterizations are mine, not Fodor’s.) When light strikes your retinas, a complex series of neural processes is initiated which may result in one of a range of possible behaviors – taking steps to avoid an obstacle, sorting red apples from green ones, or saying “It’s sunny outside.” When light strikes an “electric eye” or photodetector of some sort, electrical processes are initiated which also may result in one among a range of possible behaviors – the setting off on an alarm, for example, or, if the device is associated with a robot, perhaps behavior similar to the sort you might exhibit, such as avoiding an obstacle, sorting objects, or declaring (through a speech synthesizer) that it is sunny. Now, in the case of the electric eye and its associated robot, what we can observe going on in the system is presumably all there is. The system has no “inner life” or conscious visual experience associated with the electrical activity and behavior. But we do have conscious awareness; we do have an “inner life.” There is “something it is like” for us to see things, whereas there is nothing it is like for the robot to “see” something. Or as contemporary philosophers like to say, we have qualia while the robot appears not to. So, what accounts for this difference? It does not seem plausible to hold that it can be accounted for merely in terms of the greater complexity of the human brain, because the difference between conscious systems and unconscious ones seems clearly to be a difference in quality and not merely of quantity. This is the problem of consciousness.

Then there is the problem of intentionality, which concerns, not just intentions, but meaning in general. (The technical term “intentionality” derives from the Latin intendere, which means “to point at” or “to aim at,” as a word or thought points to or aims at the thing that it means.) Suppose we say that within the robot of our example there is a symbolic representation that means that it is sunny outside. Though the representation has this meaning, it has it only because the designers of the robot programmed the system so that it would be able to detect weather conditions and the like. The electrical processes and physical parts of the system would have had no meaning at all otherwise. By contrast, the thoughts of the designers themselves have meaning without anyone having to impart it to them. As John Searle has put it, the robot’s symbolic representations – like words, sentences, and symbols in general – have only derived intentionality, while human thought has original or intrinsic intentionality. What can account for the difference, especially if we assume that human beings are no less material than robots? That, in a nutshell, is the problem of intentionality.

Consider also that we are able not only to have individual meaningful thought episodes, but also to infer to further thoughts, to go from one thought to another in a rational way. This is not merely a matter of one thought causing another; a lunatic might be caused to conclude that mobsters are trying to kill him every time he judges that it is sunny outside, but such a thought process would not be rational. Rather, we are able to go from one thought to another in accordance with the laws of logic. Now, it might seem that the robot of our example, and computers generally, can do the same thing insofar as we can program them to carry out mathematical operations and the like. But of course, we have had to program them to do this. We have had to assign a certain interpretation to the otherwise meaningless symbolic representations we have decided to count as the “premises” and “conclusion” of a given inference the machine is to carry out, and we have had to design its internal processes in such a way that there is an isomorphism between them and the patterns of reasoning studied by logicians. But no one has to assign meaning to our mental processes in order for them to count as logical. So, what accounts for the difference? How are we able to go from one thought to another in accordance, not just with physical causal laws, but in accordance with the laws of logic? That is the problem of rationality.

Most contemporary philosophers of mind would, I think, agree with Fodor that this trinity of issues constitutes the mind-body problem, and I think they would also more or less agree with my statement of the problems. They do not necessarily agree about how difficult the problems are. Of the three, the problem of rationality seems to get the least attention from contemporary philosophers. Fodor himself thinks that this problem is the one contemporary philosophers have most plausibly been able to solve in a way that vindicates materialism, and that they have done so (contrary to what my statement of the problem suggests) precisely by thinking of rational thought processes as computational processes over formal symbols encoded in the brain. Most other contemporary philosophers of mind seem to agree with Fodor about this much, though there are prominent dissenters, such as Searle, Dreyfus, and defenders of the anti-materialist “argument from reason.” The greatest of the ancient and medieval philosophers would have sided with the dissenters; for Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, et al., rationality was the aspect of human nature that could not possibly involve a material organ. (We will come back to this point.)

Contemporary philosophers, by contrast, are obsessed with the problem of consciousness, and in particular with “qualia” – something you do not see the ancients and medievals worrying about at all, certainly not as something that pointed to any immaterial aspect of human nature. Fodor, like many other contemporary philosophers of mind, regards this as “the hard problem” for materialism. The problem of intentionality also gets a lot of attention from contemporary philosophers. My sense is that in general they tend to find it more challenging than the problem of rationality but not as challenging as the problem of consciousness. My own view is that, at least as contemporary philosophers tend to understand the problem, it is in fact as great or even greater a difficulty for materialism than the problem of consciousness is. The ancients and medievals would, I think, have agreed, though they would have regarded the problem as pointing to an immaterial aspect of human nature only to the extent that it overlaps with the problem of rationality.

The reason for all this is that the problems of consciousness and intentionality, as they are understood by modern philosophers anyway, are not (as they are often assumed to be) “perennial” problems of philosophy, but rather an artifact of certain historically contingent metaphysical assumptions early modern philosophers like Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Co. put at the center of Western thought. In particular, they are an artifact of the “mechanistic” revolution I have discussed and criticized so frequently on this blog and in my books The Last Superstition and Aquinas.

I have explained how this is so at length, both in those books and in previous posts, but here is a brief summary. On the older, Aristotelian-Scholastic understanding of the natural world that the early modern thinkers overthrew, qualities like color, sound, odor, taste, heat and cold were taken to exist in the material world more or less in just the way common sense supposes that they do. The moderns, reviving the view of the ancient atomists, denied this: For them, the natural world is made up of intrinsically colorless, odorless, soundless, tasteless particles in motion, and the qualities in question exist only in the mind of the observer. For purposes of physics, we can in their view redefine heat and cold in terms of molecular motion, or red and green in terms of the different surface reflectance properties of physical objects, but heat, cold, red and green as common sense understands them exist only in consciousness. But since the brain is on this view made up of inherently colorless, odorless, tasteless particles no less than any other physical object, this seems inevitably to entail that consciousness is not a feature of the brain – which is, of course, exactly what Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, and other early modern thinkers concluded insofar as they embraced dualism. Therein lies the origin of what contemporary writers call the “qualia problem” or the problem of consciousness.

The older, Aristotelian-Scholastic view also held that a kind of meaning, teleology, or goal-directedness is built into the structure of the material world from top to bottom. This includes not just the usual examples – the functions of bodily organs – but basic causal relations as well. For the Scholastics, if some cause A predictably generates some specific effect or range of effects B, this can only be because A inherently “points to” or “aims at” B. Generating B, specifically – rather than C, or D, or no effect at all – is what Aristotelians would call the “final cause” of A. Causing B is what A will naturally tend to do unless impeded. Now the early moderns eliminated final causality from their picture of the natural world; this was and has remained the core of a “mechanistic” conception of nature. For them there is no teleology built into nature, no purposiveness or goal-directedness. There are brute, meaningless cause and effect patterns, but no reason inherent in nature why a cause should have just the effects it does have. One result of this was to open the way to the puzzles about causation raised by David Hume. More relevant to our interests here, though, is that it made intentionality particularly problematic. If nothing in the material world inherently “points to” or “aims at” anything else – if matter is comprised of nothing more than inherently purposeless, meaningless particles in motion – then, since the brain is made up of these particles no less than any other material object is, it seems to follow that the intentionality of our thoughts, that by virtue of which they inherently “point to,” “aim at,” or mean something beyond themselves, cannot be any sort of material property of the brain. Thus is generated the problem of intentionality.

So, Fodor’s trinity of “mind-body problems” very much reflects a modern set of assumptions about the nature of the physical world. It also reflects a presumption of materialism insofar as Fodor, like so many other contemporary philosophers, writes as if the question to ask were “How do we explain these phenomena in material terms?” Of course, a modern dualist would say that these phenomena cannot be explained in material terms, so that the right question to ask is “Given that these phenomena are not material, how are they related to material phenomena? For example, do they interact causally with them, and if so, how?” You might say that what the mind-body problem is is in part determined by how one thinks it should be solved. (“But how does positing immaterial mind-stuff explain things any better?” A common materialist retort, but not a good one, for reasons I have explained here and here.)

Notice also that Fodor says nothing about the “body” side of the mind-body problem – as if matter were unproblematic and only mind posed any philosophical difficulties. As I have noted recently, a number of prominent contemporary philosophers have emphasized that this is by no means the case. And from an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view, the moderns’ standard assumptions about matter are perhaps even more problematic than their assumptions about mind. “Qualia” can seem necessarily immaterial only if we assume that matter is as the ancient atomists and their modern successors assume it to be; the “qualia problem,” which many modern materialists regard as such a challenge to their position (as Democritus himself did) is a problem that their own favored conception of matter created. The same is true of the problem of intentionality, at least if that is taken essentially to involve the problem of how something material can “point to” or be “directed at” something else. From an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view, since matter is not as the atomists take it to be, and immanent final causality or teleology pervades the material world from top to bottom anyway, there is no special difficulty in regarding qualia and (at least many instances of) intentionality as in some significant sense “natural” or even “material” phenomena.

Things are very different, though, where intentional phenomena having a conceptual structure are concerned, as well as where reasoning is concerned. Here is where the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition locates an immaterial element to human nature. The reason, in a nutshell, is that the objects of our thoughts are universal rather than particular, and determinate or exact rather than indeterminate or ambiguous; that the thoughts themselves inherit this universality and determinacy; and that nothing material can possibly be universal and determinate in this way. This is, of course, a very large topic deserving a discussion of its own. I have explored it in more detail in earlier posts (e.g. here and here) as well as in chapter 4 of Aquinas and chapter 7 of Philosophy of Mind. (The most thorough recent defense of the line of thought in question is probably the one offered in the late James Ross’s article “Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”)

The “dualism” that results is very different from the Cartesian variety, though. For the mind (or more precisely, the intellect) is not a substance on the Aristotelian-Scholastic view, but rather a power of the soul, and the soul in turn is not a substance either (or at least not a complete substance) but rather the substantial form of the living human body. Neither is the body a substance. It is rather only soul and body together which make a complete substance, where soul and body are just one instance among innumerable others of the hylemorphic form/matter relationship that exists in every material substance. Accordingly, there is no “interaction problem” of the sort that faces the Cartesian. Such a problem arises when we think of the mind as an “immaterial substance” (or as a collection of “immaterial properties”) which must somehow interact with a (mechanistically-defined) material substance via what Aristotelians would call efficient causation. But from an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view, that is simply a category mistake, or rather a collection of category mistakes. Intellect is rather one of a myriad of powers the soul imparts to the human animal of which it is the substantial form. Thus it is formal causation which relates soul (and therefore mind) to body, not efficient causation. (I have discussed this issue in more detail here, here, and here.)

All of this is bound to sound very odd to the average contemporary philosopher. It will not sound odd, though, to those familiar with the rich conceptual apparatus of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, a system of thought of which most contemporary philosophers of mind are ignorant, or at best know only through the caricatures peddled by early modern philosophers. Working one’s way out of the metaphysical assumptions moderns typically bring to bear on these issues is very difficult and takes time; the temptation is always to try to translate the thought of a Plato, an Aristotle, or an Aquinas into categories contemporary philosophers are familiar with, when what we ought to be doing is recognizing that it is precisely those categories the ancients and medievals would challenge. Thus are Plato the “proto-Cartesian,” Aristotle the “functionalist,” and other ahistorical Frankenstein monsters created. (I had not sufficiently freed myself of such modern assumptions when I wrote Philosophy of Mind, in which there is still too much Cartesianism. Chapter 4 of Aquinas provides a corrective, and a more detailed treatment of how thoroughly wrong contemporary philosophers of mind get the conceptual lay of the land, from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view.)

So, from an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view, the materialist’s “problem” of explaining the three purported kinds of mental phenomena in material terms (where “matter” is understood mechanistically) and the Cartesian’s “problem” of explaining mind-body interaction are pseudo-problems. In short, while for Fodor and other contemporary philosophers of mind there are three mind-body problems, for the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosopher, there is no mind-body problem at all.

Popper’s World 3

The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism, a long exchange between philosopher Karl Popper and neuroscientist John Eccles, is among the most significant 20th century defenses of mind-body dualism. I do not agree with every aspect of their approach, but the book is filled with interesting things and deserves more attention than it has received in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Popper famously distinguished between three “worlds” or levels of reality. (Though whether “levels” of reality is the right gloss on Popper’s theory is not clear. “Kinds”? “Aspects”?) World 1 is the world of physical entities and states – tables, chairs, rocks, trees, fundamental particles and forces, human bodies and behavior, and so forth. World 2 is the world of thoughts, sensations, and mental phenomena in general. World 3 is the world of scientific and philosophical theories, arguments, stories, social institutions, works of art and the like. World 3 differs from World 1 in that the entities comprising it are abstract; for example, though a theory or argument might be embodied in a particular book (a World 1 object) it does not depend for its reality on the existence of that book, or on any book or World 1 object at all. We could still consider the Pythagorean theorem, know it to be true, prove it, etc. even if every geometry textbook that had ever existed were destroyed. World 3 differs from World 2 in being objective or public, whereas World 2 is subjective or private. Your thoughts and experiences are directly knowable only to you, but World 3 objects are equally accessible to everyone.

The objectivity or “autonomy” of such World 3 objects as theories and arguments is especially evident in Popper’s view from the fact that they have logical relations – and in particular, unforeseen implications and unnoticed inconsistencies – that may not be noticed until well after we first consider them, but which were evidently there all the time waiting to be discovered. Naturally, he takes mathematics to illustrate the point vividly, but it is in his view no less evident from empirical scientific theories. The clearest mark of the reality of all three worlds is in Popper’s judgment the fact that World 3 has a causal influence on World 1, and does so only via World 2. For example, the scientific theories which entailed the possibility of nuclear weapons have had an obvious impact on the material world – they have resulted in various nuclear tests, in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so forth – but only because scientists carried out the mental activity of working out the implications of the theories and applying them.

Popper’s World 3 is often compared to Plato’s realm of the Forms, and Popper himself acknowledges that there are similarities. But he also emphasizes the significant differences between his view and Plato’s, not the least of which is that he takes World 3, despite its objectivity or autonomy, to be something “man-made,” its objects in the strict sense being what the human mind “abstracts” from their World 1 embodiment. Though Popper does not take note of the fact or develop the theme in much detail, this is clearly reminiscent of an Aristotelian or “moderate realist” approach to the traditional problem of universals, as distinct from the “extreme realism” of Platonism. (See here and here for a useful short account of the traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic approach to the issue and its significance.)

In other ways too Popper’s views as expressed in The Self and Its Brain overlap to some extent with Aristotelian ones. The emphasis on abstract thought – and thus on what is unique to human beings – as what is of greatest interest in the debate over dualism is very much in line with the classical Platonic-Aristotelian-Scholastic approach to this subject, which is quite different from the contemporary obsession with “qualia” and the like. There is also Popper’s acknowledgement of the reality of “downward causation” in physical systems and his consequent rejection of physicalistic reductionism even where non-mental phenomena are concerned. And there is his affirmation of the existence of objective “propensities” in nature, which (possibly) hints at something like the Aristotelian notion of potencies. (Though these last two themes take us beyond the World 3 thesis itself.)

On the other hand, there are some decidedly un-Aristotelian themes in Popper as well. There is, for instance, his denial of substance in favor of a “process” conception of the material world; and there is his rejection of essentialism, which he seems to assume is inherently Platonistic and committed to an a priori or “armchair” methodology. (This is a serious misunderstanding, and a very common one, which we Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) types find it rather tiresome constantly to have to rebut. See Oderberg’s Real Essentialism for the most thorough rebuttal, and pp. 30-38 for a reply to Popper specifically.)

All the same, any Aristotelian must admire the non-ideological character of Popper’s approach to the mind-body problem. Unlike so many contemporary philosophers of mind, he does not fatuously pretend that a presumption in favor of materialism has somehow been established by modern science, or that dualism rests on “intuitions” or the like. He does not present the problem situation as if it were a matter of determining whether we ought to wedge the evidence of our ordinary experience into the Procrustean bed of naturalism or instead to lop it off entirely – as if these were the only alternatives worth taking seriously. Nor does he have any theological ax to grind; he deliberately avoids getting into the question of the soul’s immortality (and even expresses the view that he would prefer not to be immortal). He merely observes that reality clearly comprises at least the three sorts of thing in question and that any serious solution to the mind-body problem will simply have to accommodate this plain fact. As The Self and Its Brain shows, Popper is also much better informed about the actual history of the mind-body problem than contemporary naturalists tend to be. (As my series of posts on Paul Churchland indicated, many naturalists seem unfamiliar with anything other than the crudest caricatures of what non-naturalist philosophers of mind have actually said.)

In short, at least where the mind-body problem is concerned, Popper does not attack straw men and he respects Butler’s famous dictum that “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” (I put to one side for present purposes Popper’s views in political philosophy and philosophy of science, contexts in which he is more open to criticism on these grounds.) He thereby stands acquitted of a charge John Searle raised in The Rediscovery of the Mind against his fellow contemporary philosophers of mind:

[W]e let our research methods dictate the subject matter, rather than the converse. Like the drunk who loses his car keys in the dark bushes but looks for them under the streetlight, "because the light is better here,” we try to find out how humans might resemble our computational models rather than trying to figure out how the conscious human mind actually works…

[W]e ought to stop saying things that are obviously false. The serious acceptance of this maxim might revolutionize the study of the mind. (p. 247)

Like Searle, Popper is in my estimation better as a critic than as a positive theorist. (I discussed an important anti-materialist argument of his in an earlier post.) Still, from an A-T point of view even his positive theorizing is closer to the mark than that of most other contemporary dualists.

When Frank jilted Mary

We had reason recently to allude to Frank Jackson’s famous “knowledge argument” against physicalism. You’ll recall that the argument goes like this: Physicalism claims that if you know all the physical facts that there are to know about people, then you know all the facts there are to know about them, period; for human beings are (says the physicalist) entirely physical. But now consider Mary, a master neuroscientist of the future. Mary has lived her entire life in a black and white room, and has never had any experiences of colors. Still, having studied all the relevant neuroscientific literature, she knows everything there is to know about the physics and physiology of color perception. Hence she knows, for example, everything there is to know about what goes on in someone’s brain when he sees a red object, everything there is to know about the surface reflectance properties of red objects, and so forth. Now imagine that she leaves her black and white room and sees a red object herself for the first time. Does she learn something new? Surely she does – she learns what it’s like to see red. But then, physicalism is false. For though Mary knew all the physical facts about human perceptual experience before she left the room, she didn’t know all the facts, since she learned something when she left the room. Hence there are facts about human nature, and in particular facts about conscious experience, that escape the physicalist story – namely facts about “qualia,” the subjective features of a conscious experience in virtue of which there is “something it is like” to have that experience.

Jackson first presented this argument is his 1982 paper “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” and repeated it in 1986 in “What Mary Didn’t Know.” (There were several precursors to the argument, such as Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”, and similar but independently developed ideas, such as Howard Robinson’s deaf scientist example in his 1982 book Matter and Sense.) The argument has generated an enormous literature. Some of it is collected in the Ludlow, Nagasawa, and Stoljar edited volume There’s Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. You will find there also some later essays by Jackson in which he expresses second thoughts about the argument; for by the late 1990s he had recanted and embraced physicalism.

Why? For no good reason, in my view; nor in the view of Jackson’s fellow “knowledge argument” proponent Howard Robinson, whose (characteristically excellent) essay “Why Frank Should Not Have Jilted Mary” offers a penetrating critique of Jackson’s current views. (You can read part of Robinson’s article here, though the anthology in which it appeared – Edmond Wright’s The Case for Qualia – is well worth the purchase price.)

As Stoljar and Nagasawa note in their introduction to There’s Something About Mary, “the argument, [the later Jackson] said, contained no obvious fallacy, and yet its conclusion – that physicalism is false – must be mistaken” (p. 23). Again, why? We might distinguish two components of Jackson’s current position. First, there is Jackson’s justification for claiming that something or other must be wrong with the knowledge argument, even if it seems to be perfectly cogent; and second, there is his strategy for explaining away the apparent cogency of the argument by suggesting where a fallacy is most likely to be found in it. The second component involves appeal to a “representationalist” theory of consciousness, and interested readers will find in Robinson’s essay a useful discussion of the problems with Jackson’s application of this theory. (For my money the main problems are two: First, representationalism is, at the end of the day, merely a riff on functionalism, and thus cannot serve to rebut the knowledge argument any more than – by Jackson’s own lights pre-recantation – older versions of functionalism could. Second, the key notion of “representation” itself cannot be accounted for in physicalist terms, so that even a successful representationalist analysis of consciousness could not vindicate physicalism.)

But it is the first component of Jackson’s current position – and some remarks of Robinson’s that are relevant to it – that I want to focus on here. In his 2002 essay “Mind and Illusion” (available in the Ludlow, Nagasawa, and Stoljar volume), Jackson tells us that:

Much of the contemporary debate in the philosophy of mind is concerned with the clash between certain strongly held intuitions and what science tells us about the mind and its relation to the world. What science tells us about the mind points strongly towards some version or other of physicalism. The intuitions, in one way or another, suggest that there is something seriously incomplete about any purely physical story about the mind.

For our purposes, we can be vague about the detail and think broadly of physicalism as the view that the mind is a purely physical part of a purely physical world. Exactly how to delineate the physical will not be crucial: anything of a kind that plays a central role in physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and the like, along with the a priori associated functional and relational properties, count, as far as we are concerned.

Most contemporary philosophers, when given a choice between going with science and going with intuitions, go with science. Although I once dissented from the majority, I have capitulated and now see the interesting issue as being where the arguments from the intuitions against physicalism – the arguments that seem so compelling – go wrong. (p. 421)

This is a remarkable passage – remarkable for the breathtaking rhetorical sleight of hand it embodies. I do not mean to imply that Jackson is being insincere or intentionally manipulative of his readers; I am sure he is not. But – with all due respect to a philosopher whose work I have long admired, and still admire – that is only because he has evidently now “drunk the Kool-Aid” of physicalism so deeply that he is perhaps incapable of seeing how thoroughly tendentious and question-begging is his characterization of the philosophical situation.

Consider the way Jackson frames the issue here – as a debate between “science” and “intuition.” If that really were what the debate is about, how could any rational person fail to understand why Jackson has come to endorse physicalism? Indeed, how, in that case, could any rational person fail to join him in that endorsement? But in fact that is not what the debate is about; certainly Jackson has given us no reason to think it is. Jackson’s younger self certainly didn’t appeal to “intuition.” There is no such appeal in the formulation of the knowledge argument I presented above, and there is no such appeal in Jackson’s presentation in the two articles in which he first put forward the argument. Indeed, in “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Jackson explicitly says that it is “unfair” to suggest that a qualia-based objection to physicalism must rest on an unargued intuition, explicitly distances himself from the “modal argument” against physicalism precisely because he takes it to rest on a disputable intuition, and explicitly favors the knowledge argument precisely because he there takes it to embody something more firm than an appeal to disputable intuitions!

Consider too that both sides can play the game Jackson is playing in the passage under consideration. The anti-physicalist could say:

We know from the very nature of “the physical” as that tends to be understood in contemporary philosophy that there can in principle be no physicalistic explanation of conscious experience. Arguments like the knowledge argument illustrate this point. And yet many contemporary philosophers have a strongly held intuition that a scientific view of the world requires a commitment to physicalism. Still, other contemporary philosophers, when given a choice between going with solid philosophical arguments and going with disputable intuitions, go with the solid philosophical arguments. Accordingly, they reject physicalism as a misinterpretation of science.

Is this as plausible as Jackson’s way of framing the issue? I maintain that it is far more plausible. And this brings us to the other problem with the passage from Jackson under consideration. Jackson casually assures us that “what science tells us about the mind points strongly towards some version or other of physicalism.” Physicalists say this all the time, of course. But it isn’t true, and Jackson certainly gives us no reason whatsoever to think that it is true. In fact, modern science points solidly away from physicalism, and the reason has precisely to do with the very issue Jackson thinks is “not crucial,” viz. “exactly how to delineate the physical.” For as I have noted in many places – most recently in a post on Chomsky – notions like “matter” and “the physical,” though they have (as Chomsky has rightly emphasized) at best a very elusive positive content in most modern thinking on the mind-body problem, nevertheless have also a very clear negative content. As I stated in the Chomsky post:

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.

This lesson, I submit, is precisely what Jackson’s original knowledge argument illustrates. It shows in a new way what early modern philosophers like Descartes, Cudworth, Malebranche, and Locke, and contemporary thinkers like Nagel and Swinburne, already knew and pointed out many times over the centuries – that given the (mechanistic) understanding of “the physical” that all modern philosophers (whether they be Cartesians, idealists, or materialists) tend to take for granted, a “physicalistic” explanation of consciousness is in principle impossible. It is the moderns’ very conception of matter, rather than some “disputable intuition,” that opens the way to dualism. And insofar as modern science has committed itself to this conception of matter, it follows that modern science itself points to dualism and away from physicalism. I hasten to add, though, that this commitment is not really a “scientific” commitment at all, but a purely philosophical one.

And a mistaken one too, from the point of view of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers like myself. This brings me to some important remarks from Robinson’s essay. Robinson says:

The dialectical situation in which the knowledge argument is usually taken to be located is the following: it is accepted that physicalism gives an adequate account of non-conscious reality, which constitutes almost 100 percent of the universe, but struggles to accommodate certain features of mental life, namely the “what it’s like” or qualia of certain conscious states. These latter constitute “the hard problem” for physicalism. The fact that they also constitute such a tiny part of the world is presented as a reason for thinking that they cannot plausibly be held to refute a unified physicalist account.

I think that this constitutes a radical misunderstanding of the dialectical situation. What the argument really brings out is that only experience of the appropriate kind can reveal the qualitative, as opposed to purely formal and structural, features of the world. The kind of thing that Mary did not know, generalized from color vision to all the other sensible qualities, is essential to any contentful conception of the world, and physicalism without it would lack any empirical content. (p. 240)

There are two themes here that I want briefly to develop. The first is the entirely illusory character of the widespread assumption that “everything else has been given a physicalistic explanation,” so that the mind cannot plausibly be regarded as immune to such explanation. In fact, the reason it seems that “everything else has been given a physicalistic explanation” is precisely the reason that the mind cannot be “explained” in the same way. For “everything else” has been “explained” in a physicalistic manner precisely by carving off the aspects of mind-independent reality that do not fit the physicalistic model and relocating them in the mind, treating them as mere projections. Again, color, odor, sound, taste, heat, cold, and the like, as common sense understands them, were “explained” only by denying that these qualities really exist in the external physical world at all in the first place. Instead, color, odor, sound, and the rest were for purposes of physics redefined in physicalistically “respectable” terms – color in terms of surface reflectance, sound in terms of compression waves, and so on. Color, sound, etc. as common sense understands them were then reinterpreted as existing only in our conscious experience of the material world, rather than in the material world itself. In short, they are not truly “explained” at all, but just swept under the rug of the mind. (As I have argued before, the problem intentionality poses for physicalism has a similar origin.)

The early moderns generally recognized that this entails a kind of dualism – that it is simply incoherent to suppose that one can get rid of the sensory qualities so reinterpreted by further relocation and redefinition, any more than one can get rid of literal dirt that one has swept under a rug by further application of the “sweep it under the rug” strategy. Contemporary writers like Thomas Nagel see this too – see that it is precisely the physicalist’s own understanding of what “reductive explanation” involves that precludes in principle a “reductive explanation” of conscious experience itself. But contemporary physicalists, forgetful of the history of their discipline, cluelessly draw precisely the opposite conclusion: “Come on, we’ve gotten rid of all the other dirt in the room by sweeping it under the rug; so why wouldn’t we be able to deal with the dirt under the rug in the same way?”

The second theme from Robinson I want to call attention to is his suggestion that “only experience of the appropriate kind can reveal the qualitative, as opposed to purely formal and structural, features of the world.” What he is getting at is this. When the natural world is denuded of the qualitative features common sense takes it to have – color, odor, taste, sound, and the like, as we experience them in everyday life – what we are left with is an entirely abstract structure, the sort of thing physics expresses in the language of mathematics. But it is simply incoherent to regard the mind-independent world as nothing but an abstract structure; there must be something which has the structure. Moreover, to deny the existence of the qualitative features themselves – as some eliminative materialists have suggested doing as a way of “solving,” by brute force, the problem qualia pose for physicalism – would in effect be to cut off the scientific redefinition of nature from any empirical support at all. We would be denying, in the name of science, the very existence of the conscious experience from which scientific inquiry proceeds (a paradox that was not lost on the ancient Greek atomist Democritus, as I noted in an earlier post).

Bertrand Russell, E. A. Burtt, and other early twentieth-century thinkers were well aware of these problems. Russell’s solution was to suggest that the sensory qualities which the moderns had redefined as mere projections of the mind have to be put back into the natural world after all. Accordingly, something like what philosophers now call “qualia” were, for Russell, the intrinsic features of the external physical world – that which “fleshes out” or makes concrete the otherwise abstract structure described by physics. Contemporary philosophers like Michael Lockwood, David Chalmers, and Galen Strawson have followed Russell’s lead, and Robinson’s position seems to bear a family resemblance to theirs. The trouble is that, given the “mental” character modern philosophers tend to attribute to the sensory qualities, this Russellian approach seems to lead to a kind of idealism or panpsychism, on which the natural world is mental through and through (though Russell and Lockwood, at least, try to resist this consequence). This is, I think, a less mad view than physicalism is, but it is mad all the same.

From an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, the mistake was opting for a mechanistic-cum-quantitative conception of nature in the first place, and philosophers of mind have been on the wrong track ever since Descartes, Hobbes, and Co. The value of the knowledge argument is that it shows, as Robinson puts it, that “classical physicalism is broken-backed from the start” (p. 243). But Cartesian dualism, property dualism, idealism, panpsychism, etc. are at best only less bad than physicalism. The correct remedy is a full-blown return to Aristotelian-Thomistic hylemorphism, on which alone the quantitative picture of the world presented to us by modern science can properly be understood – as an important part of the correct story about the natural world, but never the whole story.