Twist ending

In my recent Twilight Zone post, I mentioned that I intended to read Noël Carroll and Lester Hunt’s Philosophy in the Twilight Zone. I’ve since read some of it and there is indeed some interesting stuff there. Hunt himself provides a fine essay on Rod Serling’s career as a writer, and the story of that career teaches an important philosophical lesson.

Serling was an established television scriptwriter before The Twilight Zone came along, and was well-known for his interest in writing serious and “socially relevant” dramas. He had a series of frustrating experiences with the television censors of the 1950s, who were concerned above all with avoiding controversy that might put off sponsors. Their objections could often be quite silly. To take an example of Hunt’s:

[I]n the original, Playhouse 90 version of “Judgment at Nuremburg,” one of the sponsors, a consortium of gas companies, had every mention of “gassing” and “gas ovens” expunged, evidently for fear that the viewers would unconsciously associate their product with Nazi genocide. (p. 9)

As a consequence, scripts written to reflect and comment upon matters of current controversy were sometimes reduced to bland ineffectiveness by the time the censors got done with them. Serling’s “Noon on Doomsday,” which aired in 1956 for the United States Steel Hour, was inspired by the Emmett Till case. So as not to offend southern viewers, however, the setting of the story was changed to New England, and the victim was made into a nondescript European “foreigner” rather than a black man. Use of the word “lynch” was forbidden, and bottles of Coca Cola were removed from the set, apparently lest viewers associate the action with the state of Georgia, where the Coca Cola Company has its headquarters. The end result had so abstracted the story from the real world events that it lacked all punch. While racial strife certainly existed in American society in the 1950s, serious antagonism between native born Americans and European immigrants did not. Hence the drama, which aimed for “social relevance,” in fact came across as totally irrelevant.

As Hunt recounts, Serling later attempted to rewrite “Noon on Doomsday” as a stage play, and the result, interestingly enough, was a failure in the opposite direction. This time Serling stuck very closely to the actual facts of the Till case, but in such a way that the story lacked universal application, and would not convince anyone of the truth of Serling’s message other than those who already agreed with him. In particular, no one who was not already appalled by the Emmett Till case would have had his mind changed by a story which, more or less, merely dramatized the case.

When Serling finally moved on to do The Twilight Zone, he thought that he was leaving behind serious and “socially relevant” drama, or so he said at the time, anyway. As the series’ viewers know, that is by no means the case, and Serling no doubt realized this, at least eventually. For one of the advantages of the science-fiction and fantasy genres is that they allow for the “middle distance” approach that evaded Serling in the two versions of “Noon on Doomsday” just described. On the one hand, an otherworldly setting allows one to avoid too direct and ham-fisted a reference to contemporary persons and events, which might strip the story of timeless application and put off the very people one is trying to convince. On the other hand, one can at the same time put enough detail into such a setting that the application to current controversies is clear enough for those who know how to look.

The result is that with The Twilight Zone, Serling and his fellow writers were able consistently to produce material of lasting moral and philosophical interest. And Serling was also able thereby to accomplish what he set out to do as a writer – ironically, precisely by abandoning his goal of “seriousness” (or seemingly abandoning it, or pretending to abandon it, anyway, depending on how one interprets Serling’s words at the time). Few remember Serling’s television dramas of the early and mid 1950s. Everyone remembers The Twilight Zone.

Sometimes we get what we want precisely when we stop trying so hard to get it. Everyone knows that the last thing you want to do if you’ve got insomnia is to worry yourself over how you are going to get to sleep. Market economists never tire of reminding us that the best way to generate wealth for all is to let the market take its course, for the most part, anyway, rather than to interfere with it constantly so as to redistribute wealth or otherwise “correct” its outcomes. Rod Serling attained lasting fame and “relevance” precisely when he thought (or said he thought, in an interview with Mike Wallace) that he was (as Wallace put it) “giv[ing] up on writing anything important for television.” There’s a twist ending worthy of The Twilight Zone.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, submitted for your approval, another twist ending, courtesy of the opening sequence from Twilight Zone: The Movie:

Happy Consequentialism Day!

Perhaps you already observed it on Friday, since that was the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. But today, the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, is an equally fitting date. Certainly the image at left – the aftermath of Fat Man’s explosion over Nagasaki – is a fitting symbol for consequentialism. Perhaps consequentialist ethicists should consider putting it on the covers of their books, or wear little mushroom cloud pins when they meet up at philosophical conferences. For one thing, since the consequentialist case for the bombings – that they would save more lives than an invasion of Japan would – carried the day with the Truman administration (and with defenders of the bombings ever since), it may be the most consequential piece of consequentialist reasoning ever formulated. For another, the bombings give a pretty good idea of what a world consistently run on consequentialist principles might look like.

But don’t put the party hats on yet, because there’s one little hitch: Consequentialism is, as David Oderberg has put it, “downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine that should be avoided by all right-thinking people.” And the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, accordingly, as evil as consequentialism is. So, maybe Consequentialism Day is not a good idea after all, except perhaps as a reminder of the scale of evil that can be and has been done in the name of “good intentions” and “rationality.”

Jimmy Akin offers us a helpful reminder of why the bombings must be considered gravely immoral from the point of view of natural law theory and Catholic moral theology. It is only fair to acknowledge that many consequentialists would no doubt also condemn the bombings, arguing that better consequences would result overall and in the long run from respect for a rule that forbade such actions. Whatever. What matters is that any consequentialist must allow that it is at least in principle legitimate intentionally to kill the innocent for the sake of a “greater good.” And from the point of view of us reactionary, bigoted, unprogressive natural law theorists and Catholics, that is enough to make consequentialism a depraved doctrine. For it is never, never permissible to do what is intrinsically evil that good may come – not even if you’d feel much happier if you did it, not even if you’ve got some deeply ingrained tendency to want to do it, not even if it will shorten a war and save thousands of lives. Never.

As Akin makes clear, the point has nothing whatsoever to do with pacifism, with opposition to nuclear weapons per se, or with anti-Americanism. Indeed, most of the “sandal-wearing fruit juice drinkers” (to co-opt Orwell’s famous phrase) and “pasty-faced peace creeps” (to quote P. J. O’Rourke) who badmouth American foreign policy, and who seem to think no war is a just war, are wildly out of step with natural law theory on most other issues, and are generally wrong even about war and U.S. policy. But as they say, even a broken watch is right twice a day.

(See the Oderberg article linked to above for a brief popular overview of what is wrong with consequentialism. See Oderberg’s Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach for a more thorough and academic treatment. And see Oderberg’s Applied Ethics: A Non-Consequentialist Approach for a serious, natural law theory treatment of just war theory and other life and death moral issues.)

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.

Some thoughts on the Prop 8 decision

1. Judge Walker’s decision, he tells us, is based on the principle that the state ought not to “enforce ‘profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles’” or to “mandate [its] own moral code.” But that is, of course, precisely what Walker himself has done. His position rests on the question-begging assumption that “same-sex marriages” are no less true marriages than heterosexual ones are, and that the only remaining question is whether to allow them legally. But of course, whether “same-sex marriages” really can even in principle be “marriages” in the first place is part of what is at issue in the dispute. The traditional, natural law view is that marriage is heterosexual of metaphysical necessity. Rather than staying neutral between competing moral views, then, Walker has simply declared that the state should stop imposing one moral view – the one he doesn’t like – and should instead impose another, rival moral view – the one he does like.

What we’re seeing here is just one more application of the fraudulent principle of “liberal neutrality,” by which the conceit that liberal policy is neutral between the moral and metaphysical views competing within a pluralistic society provides a smokescreen for the imposition of a substantive liberal moral worldview, on all citizens, by force. (Of course, liberals typically qualify their position by saying that their conception of justice only claims to be neutral between “reasonable” competing moral and metaphysical views, but “reasonable” always ends up meaning something like “willing to submit to a liberal conception of justice.”)

That “liberal neutrality” is a fraud is blindingly obvious to everyone except (some) liberals themselves. (I say “some” because it is very hard to believe that many liberals are not perfectly well aware that the “neutrality” of their position is phony, but maintain the pretense of neutrality for cynical political reasons.) In any event, I have argued for its fraudulence in a number of places, most fully in my paper “Self-Ownership, Libertarianism, and Impartiality” (the arguments of which are aimed immediately at some libertarians’ application of the “neutrality” idea, but apply to liberalism generally).

All of this would be bad enough if the policy in question were a result of a popular vote, but Walker has essentially imposed his will on the people of California by sheer judicial fiat. Pope Benedict XVI has famously spoken of a “dictatorship of relativism.” But I think that that is not quite right. Most liberals are not the least bit relativistic about their own convictions. A more accurate epithet would have been “dictatorship of liberalism,” and in Judge Walker that dictatorship has taken on concrete form.

2. As with other issues, what will decide the “same-sex marriage” controversy in the long run are the attitudes that prevail in society at large, not this or that judicial decision, ballot measure, or piece of legislation. If a solid majority of citizens continue to oppose “same-sex marriage,” then it can be stopped and liberal advances can be turned back. If not, then conservative efforts will inevitably fail in the long run. So, if they are to have a chance of succeeding, conservatives must work to shore up popular opposition to the idea of “same-sex marriage.”

Social-scientific and pragmatic arguments have much intellectual value and some practical value in this connection. But where moral and social questions are concerned such arguments are never going to carry the day in a society whose moral and social trajectory is as firmly liberal as ours is. The advocates of “same-sex marriage” are motivated by a moralistic fervor, and their position rests (whether all of them realize this or not) on controversial metaphysical assumptions about human nature and the nature of value. If they are effectively to be rebutted, they must be met with equal and opposite moral and metaphysical force.

Unfortunately, too few conservatives are very effective in this regard. With some of them, this is because they more or less share the moral and metaphysical premises in question; their “conservatism” amounts to little more than a milder form of liberalism. With others, it is because an obsession with short-term electoral strategy and the nuts and bolts of policy has made them lose sight of the deeper questions of principle that were the focus of earlier generations of conservatives, and which ultimately give point to political strategizing and policy design. This is a general problem with contemporary conservatism that I have explored in detail in my essay “The Metaphysics of Conservatism.”

3. What this entails in the case at hand is that in order to challenge the legitimacy of “same-sex marriage,” conservatives have to be willing to challenge the moral legitimacy of homosexual behavior itself. To concede even for the sake of argument that such behavior is morally unobjectionable is effectively to concede the whole issue. Conservative moralists have always upheld the norm that sexual behavior and marriage ought to go together – both because sex naturally results in children and children need the stability of marriage, and because sexual passions are inherently unruly and need to be channeled in the socially constructive way marriage provides. To allow that sexual behavior need not be heterosexual is implicitly to allow that marriage too need not be heterosexual. Pragmatic social-scientific arguments about the possible negative long-range social effects of allowing “same-sex marriage” can only seem anticlimactic in the face of such a concession – heartless nitpicking at best, and the rationalization of prejudice at worst.

Moreover, challenging the moral legitimacy of homosexual behavior requires a moral theory grounded in a classical essentialist metaphysics, one in which what is good for us is determined by a fixed human nature or essence and in particular by the natural ends of our various faculties. As my regular readers know, the specific version of classical essentialism I favor is the one associated with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, but one needn’t share that specific view for the purpose at hand; a broadly Platonic metaphysics would do, as would a non-Thomistic brand of Aristotelianism. (Divine command theory is, I think, not a plausible alternative, because it either takes God’s commands, and thus morality, to be arbitrary – not a plausible approach to ethics, in my view – or it holds that what God commands us to do is what it is good for us to do given our nature – in which case it isn’t really an alternative to a classical essentialist approach, but rather a supplement to it. See chapter 5 of my Aquinas for more on this issue.)

I hasten to add that this is nothing peculiar to traditional sexual morality, though. No morality whatsoever is defensible apart from a classical essentialist metaphysics. If there are no ends set for us by our nature, then there can in principle be no objective, non-arbitrary way of determining what it is good for us to do, and thus what we ought to do. Hence in the final analysis, and in the main if not in all details, traditional sexual morality and morality full stop stand or fall together. Though liberal advocates of “same-sex marriage” are fervently moralistic, they have no rational basis whatsoever for their moralism. Their position rests ultimately either on an appeal to something like Rawlsian “considered intuitions about justice” – academese for “groundless and parochial liberal prejudices my friends and I all have in common” – or on a neo-Hobbesian contractarianism, which is not really a moral position at all, but a non-aggression pact between the members of whichever group of “rationally self-interested individuals” can collectively convince the mob (or at least the judicial bureaucracy) to implement policies favorable to their interests. (See The Last Superstition for the full story on this, and on the justification of traditional sexual morality.)

For reasons already stated, though, too few conservatives with influence in politics or journalism are willing or able to make the moral or metaphysical case required. They are either too beholden themselves to the moral and metaphysical assumptions of liberalism, or too narrowly focused on questions of immediate political feasibility. Deference to the attitudes of their “socially liberal” “conservative” colleagues, of potential voters, and of their liberal fellow journalists, intellectuals, and politicians prevents even those conservatives who truly believe that “same-sex marriage” is wrong because homosexual behavior itself is wrong from ever voicing this opinion. Hence their emphasis on exclusively pragmatic social-scientific arguments, on respect for the will of the voters, etc. – arguments which cannot succeed in the long run.

4. There may be limits in practice, but there are no limits in principle, to what liberals might come to endorse, and be willing to impose on all by judicial fiat, in the name of “justice.” No doubt most liberals do not at present advocate infanticide, mandatory euthanasia, “group marriage,” incest, bestiality, mandatory vegetarianism, mandatory organ harvesting, and the like, but there is nothing whatsoever in the “logic” of liberal arguments for abortion, “same-sex marriage,” euthanasia, “animal rights” etc. to rule such things out. Indeed, there is nothing to rule out even more bizarre and as yet unimagined practices than these. The only barriers in practice are the “intuitions” liberals currently happen to have, but those intuitions are always subject to revision, and the trajectory of the revisions is invariably in a “liberationist” direction. If something seems beyond the pale now, just wait a decade or three.

The reason, again, is that if man has no essence and no natural end – that is to say, if we reject classical essentialist metaphysics and the natural law system of morality that derives from it, as the founders of liberal modernity did – then there can be no objective, non-arbitrary way of determining what is good for us. And the flip side of this is that there is no existing moral conviction, no matter how widespread, ancient, and venerable, that might not be dismissed as an arbitrary prejudice, something to be freed from rather than deferred to and shored up.

This is not a slippery slope argument. The point is not that liberalism will lead someday to something truly nasty. It has already done so; indeed, it is itself truly nasty. As Alasdair MacIntyre put it in After Virtue, our choice is between Aristotle and Nietzsche, between submitting ourselves to the natural order or instead to the will to power of self-appointed “revaluators of all values.” In the person of Judge Walker, Nietzsche has spoken.

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.

While you’re web surfing…

Tuomas Tahko reviews Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics.

There’s high culture and then there’s pop culture, and every conservative knows which is better, right? Not so fast. Brandon Watson of Siris fame offers us some useful reminders here and here.

At Prosblogion, Trent Dougherty hails the revival of Aristotelian philosophy.

Cardinal Ratzinger on the Mass after Vatican II: A reminder from Ite ad Thomam.

Austin Ruse at The Catholic Thing wonders whether Christopher Hitchens will convert. I won’t hold my breath. (HT: Bill Vallicella)

Some sexy talk from James Chastek over at Just Thomism.

(Now, who do you think will get the most hits from this post? No need to thank me, James…)

The Twilight Zone

Most of the “pop culture and philosophy” books that have flooded the Borders and Barnes and Noble shelves in recent years seem to me to be pretty schlocky. Their purported justification is that they introduce philosophy to people who wouldn’t otherwise read it. But since the “philosophical significance” of the subject matter is usually vastly overstated (30 Rock? Jimmy Buffett? The Atkins Diet?!) and the philosophy dumbed down, it is questionable whether they really do much good on this score.

Still, there are pop culture topics that are worthy of philosophical consideration. As our pal Bill Vallicella has noted, The Twilight Zone is one of them. Naturally, a volume on that subject has appeared, and while I have not yet read Philosophy in the Twilight Zone, it looks interesting and I plan to do so. In any event, anyone who has watched the show can think of examples of episodes which raise serious philosophical questions.

In “The Man in the Bottle,” a genie grants a down-on-their-luck couple four wishes. This turns out, of course, to be less of a blessing than they assume it will be. Watching this episode as a youngster spawned one of the first philosophical thoughts I can recall ever having: Why couldn’t the couple wish for ten or twenty more wishes, as the husband suggests doing at one point? The genie just says that “wishing for more wishes is not permitted,” but this limitation seems arbitrary. It also seems easy to get around, for why couldn’t the husband just respond: “OK, then in that case I wish you hadn’t imposed that arbitrary rule!” And if the genie then said that that was also something that couldn’t be wished for, why couldn’t the husband reply that his wish in that case is that that rule had never been imposed?

The indeterminacy illustrated by this example – the difficulty of “nailing down” the content of a certain rule or statement so that what one wants it to rule out really is ruled out – is in fact part of the larger theme of the episode. Every wish the couple makes – for money, for power – turns out to have unforeseen unhappy implications, and there seems to be no way to add detail to the description of the content of the wish to make absolutely certain that no further iteration of the same basic problems can crop up. Readers of Wittgenstein, Hayek, or Kripke will appreciate the difficulty. There is also moral and political significance to the problem the episode raises. We are often prone to think of personal and social problems in terms of what would happen if only we could “press a button.” In fact this is a very foolish way to think, because human life and human problems are typically far too complicated to boil down to a single factor, the alteration of which would solve everything.

In “A Most Unusual Camera,” a gang of petty criminals acquires a camera that takes pictures of events that have not yet occurred. It turns out that the knowledge of future events that they acquire by means of the camera is one of the factors that lead to the realization of said events. Obvious fodder for those interested in time travel paradoxes and questions about determinism and free will. In “It’s a Good Life,” omnipotent 6-year old Anthony Fremont terrorizes a small town. He is clearly selfish, callous, and willful, and causes unimaginable suffering to those around him. But he is only 6, and arguably lacking in understanding both of the moral law and of the consequences of his actions. So, does he have sufficient moral responsibility for it to be morally permissible to kill him so as to save the town from the horrors he inflicts upon it? Discuss. In “A Kind of a Stopwatch,” a man acquires a watch that can stop time. I’ve used it in the classroom for years to illustrate the question that initiates the Aristotelian argument from motion: Why is the world dynamic rather than static? Why does it undergo change rather than being “frozen in place,” as the episode’s characters are when the stopwatch is pressed?

You get the idea. Of course, The Twilight Zone has other, non-philosophical charms. Perhaps there is some deep epistemological issue raised by the famous “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”; but the reason it is so many people’s favorite episode is simply that it gives a good scare. (It made it at least a little harder for my 5-year old daughter to get on the plane to London with her mother last week!)

And then there is the excuse it gives me to link to a classic Manhattan Transfer video. Enjoy:

Manhattan Transfer- TWILIGHT ZONE theme 1979 from Coleccionista80 on Vimeo.

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.

Blogging note

In case anyone is wondering, the recent paucity of blog posts (or at least of substantial ones) owes to the fact that I have been on jury duty for nearly two weeks. On top of that, my wife is away for a week with two of the kids while I am watching the other three (or rather, scrambling to get others to watch them while I am at the courthouse). So, little time for blogging, much less getting any work done. Things should be back to normal by next week.

Pick-up lines from the philosophers

Thales:

“Can I buy you a drink of water?”

Parmenides:

[singing] “Don’t go changing, to try and please me. I love you just the way you are.”

Cratylus:

[Says nothing. Waves his finger flirtatiously.]

Pyrrho:

“Are those real?”

Plato:

“I couldn’t help noticing that you participate in the Form of the Hot.”

Aristotle:

“You bring out the social animal in me.”

Descartes:

“Pinch me, honey, ‘cause I think I must be dreaming.”

Berkeley:

“I can’t get you out of my mind.”

Kant:

“Wow, great phenomena. What are the noumena like?”

Schopenhauer:

“I’m willing. How about you?”

Nietzsche:

“Why settle for the last man when you can have the superman?”

Nagel:

“So, what is it like to be a babe?”

Lewis:

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a possible world like this?”

Churchland:

“I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Feser:

“Potency and act divide being in such a way that whatever is, is either a pure act, or else coalesces necessarily from potency and act as from its first and intrinsic principles. I say more about this in my books Aquinas and The Last Superstition.”

James F. Ross (1931 – 2010)

I regret to inform my readers that philosopher James F. Ross has died. Here is the announcement from the University of Pennsylvania website, and here is an obituary posted by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Ross was one of the most important thinkers within the group of contemporary analytic philosophers who advocate a revival of Aristotelian, Thomistic, and Scholastic ideas and arguments. He was the author of several books: most recently, of Thought and World: The Hidden Necessities, and also of Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Philosophical Theology, and Portraying Analogy (some of which can be read here via Google books). He also published many important articles, including “Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” “The Fate of the Analysts: Aristotle’s Revenge,” and “The Crash of Modal Metaphysics.” Here is his brief article on “Analogy” from The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. And here is Ross’s webpage, with links to some other work of his available online. RIP.

On “intuitions”

As my recent post on Jackson’s knowledge argument indicated, contemporary philosophers are often going on about “intuitions.” Sometimes (as with Jackson) the point is to suggest that some argument one wants to rebut rests on nothing more than a disputable intuition. But intuitions are also often appealed to in a positive fashion, as a way to support some claim or other in metaphysics or ethics. Hence we have John Rawls’s well-known appeal to what our “considered intuitions” about justice have to tell us. Hence we have Daniel Dennett’s method in philosophy of mind of appealing to what he calls “intuition pumps” – thought experiments designed to draw out and fortify certain intuitions in defense of a certain line of argument. (By the way, “intuition pumps” are not only the latest thing in philosophical methodology. It seems they are also the latest thing in women’s footwear. Who knew?)

Now, the term “intuition” has a respectable traditional use in philosophy, to connote the mind’s direct grasp of abstract objects or fundamental a priori truths. But that is not the sort of thing that those who appeal to “intuition pumps” or “considered intuitions” in ethics have in mind. As Alan Lacey notes in an entry on intuition in the Ted Honderich edited volume The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, “recently… the term ‘intuition’ has been used for pre-philosophical thoughts or feelings, e.g. on morality, which emerge in thought experiments and are then used philosophically.”

This is most regrettable. It gives the impression that ethics and metaphysics are ultimately subjective, which is – certainly from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view (which is my point of view) – not at all the case. That is not to say that intuitions in the sense in question have no place at all in philosophy, but their role should be at most heuristic, a pointer to something objective, which alone can serve as a legitimate premise in a philosophical argument and after the discovery of which the “intuitions” can be put to one side.

“But as an A-T philosopher, don’t you think metaphysics and ethics should be in harmony with common sense?” Yes I do, but that does not mean that saying “It just seems commonsensical to me” is how an A-T philosopher thinks metaphysical or ethical claims should be defended. That gets the significance of common sense and intuition all wrong. The A-T philosopher doesn’t say “Such-and-such metaphysical and ethical claims seem intuitive and commonsensical; therefore they must be correct.” Rather, he says: “Such-and-such metaphysical and ethical claims are correct, and can be shown to be so on entirely objective rational grounds; and it is because they are correct that nature has made us in such a way that we tend to regard them as intuitive and commonsensical.”

So, in metaphysics, common sense regards skepticism about the external world as absurd, and the A-T philosopher agrees with common sense. But it is not that its commonsense status shows that realism about the external world is true; rather, the fact that realism about the external world is true is what accounts for its commonsense status. In ethics, common sense regards the direct, intentional killing of an innocent human being as gravely immoral, and the A-T philosopher agrees with common sense. But it is not that its commonsense status shows that such killing is immoral; rather, the fact that it is gravely immoral accounts for our intuitive sense that it is. And so forth. Nature has formed our feelings and intuitions so that they provide us with a rough and ready practical guide to what is true and good. But their intuitive status is a consequence of their being true and good, not the ground of their being true and good.

Moreover, feelings and intuitions are indeed at best only a rough guide, and a very general one. They do not give us much guidance vis-à-vis complex moral situations or difficult metaphysical questions, and they are not infallible even in simple cases. Even the feelings and intuitions nature has put into us are subject to distortion, through habituated vice, social conditioning, and perhaps even genetically influenced psychological deformity. And some feelings and intuitions that seem natural to us are in fact culturally relative. An obvious example would be the way in which foods which are considered by people of some cultures to be unbelievably disgusting and thus “obviously” not meant to be eaten, seem unremarkable or even delightful to people of other cultures.

In the moral sphere, people’s feelings and intuitions about various specific life and death issues – vigilantism, torture in “time bomb” scenarios, “mercy killing,” and so forth – can vary considerably. That is irrelevant from an A-T point of view, since natural law theory – the approach to ethics favored by A-T philosophers -- doesn’t appeal to “intuitions” to settle such questions. We can also all think of a number of sexual practices that at least many people find disgusting, but only some of which are contrary to the natural law. Others, though they may not be to some people’s taste, are (within marriage, anyway) of themselves morally unobjectionable. (I won’t elaborate, and I doubt that I need to.) Contrary to a standard caricature, natural law theory does not regard (some or even most) people’s sense of what is “icky” or “nasty” to be an infallible guide to sexual morality, any more than it is an infallible guide to what sorts of foods we should eat. What is good for us is defined by the ends which nature has set for our various capacities. Our feelings and intuitions can facilitate the realization of those ends but they do not define the ends. Rather, the ends determine the reliability of the feelings and intuitions.

So, to put “intuitions” at the foundations of philosophical inquiry is to put the cart before the horse. Or, to switch metaphors, no serious philosopher – certainly no A-T philosopher – should be caught dead wearing intuition pumps.

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.

Oderberg on ethics

Two recent pieces on ethics from David Oderberg: “The Doctrine of Double Effect,” from T. O'Connor and C. Sandis, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Action; and a popular lecture, “Why I am not a Consequentialist.” (Warning: PDF files)

Back from Prague

And exhausted. But Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic was a very interesting conference, and evidence that serious old-fashioned metaphysics is very much alive. Keynote speakers were Michael Loux, Peter van Inwagen, E. J. Lowe, Edmund Runggaldier, Uwe Meixner, David Oderberg, Robert Pasnau, and myself. (Another keynote speaker, Gyula Klima, had to cancel at the last minute, but his paper was read in his absence.) There were other interesting presentations as well. (Here is a shot of me with Robert Pasnau. I am not asleep in the photo, by the way, but merely looking down at a handout! But I’ve been asleep much of today…)

Regular blogging to resume this week.

Blogging note

Little or no blogging this week, as I’ll be in Prague for a conference on Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. I’ll be presenting a paper there on “Existential inertia.”