Philosophy E156: Philosophy of Mind

1. Philosophy E156: Philosophy of Mind Weeks 16: Mysterianism & Chomsky’s Approach to the Mind-Body Problem

2. Mysterianism • In his 1992 book Consciousness Reconsidered, Owen Flanagan introduced the term “mysterianism” (he actually called it “the new mysterianism”) to refer to the view that

3. The Explanatory-Gap View • What Flanagan called “mysterianism” is also known as “the explanatory-gap view” • Those who hold the explanatory-gap view acknowledge a gap between facts about the mental and facts about the physical -- so that, as Jackson claims, you can know all the latter without knowing certain of the former. • But on this view the gap is best explained in terms of us -- what our minds are suited to know -- rather than in terms of the world -- what sorts of things make it up. • This line of argument originated with Joe Levine and was later taken up by Colin McGinn.

4. Levine’s Version • Consider the example of pain. • Levine claims that much would be explained by learning that pain is C-fiber stimulation. (The phrase “C-fiber stimulation” refers to some hypothetical neural stimulation of the brain.) • “If we believe that part of the concept expressed by the term ‘pain’ is that of a state which plays a certain causal role in our interaction with the environment (e.g., it warns us of damage, it causes us to attempt to avoid situations we believe will result in it, etc.), [learning that pain is C-fiber stimulation] explains the mechanisms underlying the performance of these functions.” • It is much like learning that water is H20. If the concept expressed by the term “water” is the concept of something that plays the causal role water does, then to learn that is to learn the underlying physical mechanism for that causal role.

5. Difference Between Water and Pain • The difference between water and pain for Levine is that while the physical mechanism of being H20 is “fully explanatory” in the case of water, it is not in the case of pain, • This is because “there is more to our concept of pain than its causal role, there is its qualitative [phenomenal] character, how it feels; and what is left unexplained by the discovery of C-fiber firing is why pain should feel the way it does!”

6. Levine’s analysis of our understanding of the identity statement about pain:

7. Levine’s Analysis • On Levine’s account, the second premise is what is right about the causal-role or “functionalist” story, providing the physical mechanism underlying pain’s causal role. • It’s the first premise that is the problem. • For it seems possible that it is false; and we have no good account of this intuition, since the only sure thing available, the second premise, serves a different purpose. He writes: • “There seems to be nothing about C-fiber firing which makes it naturally ‘fit’ the phenomenal properties of pain.” The first premise “makes the way pain feels into merely a brute fact.”

8. Connection to Mary Argument • This is related to Jackson’s Mary argument • Its seeming possible that pain (for example) should satisfy a functionalist description doesn’t entail its seeming possible that pain should feel some way. • Someone convinced by Levine’s position might easily conclude that that fact is analogous to Jackson’s intuition that knowing that pain satisfies a functionalist description doesn’t entail knowing how pain feels. • In both cases, there is an “explanatory gap.”

9. McGinn’s Version • McGinn provides a different argument, one that resembles Descartes’s argument for dualism in some respects. • McGinn’s idea: the concept of a brain state is a spatial concept but the concept of a phenomenal state is not. • But because of this we cannot conceive of something’s being both a brain state and a phenomenal state except, at best, in a brute fashion. • The concept of a “psychophysical link” between mind and brain, however, is supposed to make the connection intelligible, not brute. • Thus, he concludes, no such concept exists. • But it does not follow that the mind is immaterial but only that we cannot have a concept of how that would be.

10. Comparison Between Levine & McGinn • McGinn’s conclusion resembles Levine’s. • According to Levine, nothing metaphysical can be concluded from this, since it’s only an epistemological point -- a fact about us rather than a fact about the World -- though it’s still of interest that there is this limitation to our knowledge. • McGinn’s conclusion is that it’s fully consistent with the evidence that there exists a naturalistic theory fully explaining the dependence of consciousness on brain states, but that this theory is beyond our limited human conceptual capacities to grasp. • Since we shouldn’t reject materialism unless we must, the best the anti-reductionist could do is to show that phenomenal properties are physical but “noumenal,” beyond any humanly possible psychophysical reduction.

11. Chomsky’s Rather Different Line of Argument • Themes in Chomsky’s rather different line of argument— • Mysteries in explaining “will & control” (free will and action) • Cognitive closure • Impossibility of formulating a “mind-body problem” • The “unification problem”

12. Chomsky on the Mind-Body Problem: Begins with the Sources of Action • In setting out his own diagnosis of the mind-body problem, Chomsky begins not with consciousness or qualia or phenomenal properties, as many philosophers have, but with something very different, the sources of action. • Chomsky begins with Descartes -- he draws not from Descartes’s statement of the problem in the Meditations but from a very different treatment in the Discourse on Method.

13. The “Moral Distinction” in Discourse on Method • In Discourse, Descartes argues that there is a “moral distinction” between mind and body that we observe when we observe the causes of behavior. • The behavior of machines, Descartes argued, is entirely determined by their environments and by the arrangements of their parts. • If a machine’s parts are arranged in a certain way and its environment takes a certain form, then the machine can do one and only one thing. What it does is inevitable. • But we humans, Descartes argues, are not machines, for this is not true of us.

14. “Descartes’s Problem” of “the Creative Aspect of Language Use’(Language and Problems of Knowledge (1988), p. 6)

15. Descartes’s Problem, the Mind-Body Problem, the Problem of Other Minds • “Descartes’s problem, the problem of how language is used in the normal creative fashion,” Chomsky writes, “… arose in the context of the mind-body problem or, more specifically, what was later called “the problem of other minds”….

16. Chomsky on Descartes’s Test for the Creative Use of Language(Language and Problems of Knowledge (1988), p. 6)

17. Chomsky’s Summary of Descartes’s Reasons • “More generally, … the problem is that a ‘machine’ is compelled to act in a certain way under fixed environmental conditions and with its parts arranged in a certain way, while a human under these circumstances is only ‘incited and inclined’ to behave in this fashion. The human may often, or even always, do what it is incited or inclined to do, but each of us knows from introspection that we have a choice in the matter over a large range. And we can determine by experiment that this is true of other humans as well. The difference between being compelled, and merely being incited and inclined, is a crucial one, the Cartesians concluded -- and quite accurately.”– Language and Problems of Knowledge, p. 139

18. “Free and Undetermined” • “Returning now to Descartes’s problem, notice that it still stands, unresolved by … developments in the natural sciences. We still have no way to come to terms with what appears to be a fact, even an obvious fact: Our actions are free and undetermined, in that we need not do what we are ‘incited and inclined’ to do; and if we do what we are incited and inclined to do, an element of free choice nevertheless enters. Despite much thought and often penetrating analysis, it seems to me that this problem still remarks unresolved, much in the way Descartes formulated it. Why should this be so?” Language and Problems of Knowledge, p. 147

19. “Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach” (excerpt)Noam Chomsky interviewed by John GliedmanOmni, 6:11, November 1983 • QUESTION: What about the problem of free will? If genes play a crucial role in structuring the mind's abilities, is free will an illusion? • CHOMSKY: Well, that's interesting. Here, I think, I would tend to agree with Descartes. Free will is simply an obvious aspect of human experience. I know – as much as I know that you're in front of me right now – that I can take my watch and throw it out the window if I feel like it. I also know that I'm not going to do that, because I want the watch. But I could do it if I felt like it. I just know this….

20. Continuation of Quotation • … Now, I don't think there's any scientific grasp, any hint of an idea, as to how to explain free will. Suppose somebody argues that free will is an illusion. Okay. This could be the case, but I don't believe that it's the case. It could be. You have to be open-minded about the possibility. But you're going to need a very powerful argument to convince me that something as evident as free will is an illusion. Nobody's offered such an argument or even pretended to offer such an argument. • So where does that leave us? We're faced with an overwhelmingly self-evident phenomenon that could be an illusion even though there's no reason to believe that it is an illusion. And we have a body of scientific knowledge that simply doesn't appear to connect with the problem of free will in any way.

21. What Is “the Problem of Free Will”? • Unclear what Chomsky takes “the problem of free will” to be • “We still have no way to come to terms with what appears to be a fact, even an obvious fact: Our actions are free and undetermined….” Language and Problems of Knowledge, p. 147 • “I don't think there's any scientific grasp, any hint of an idea, as to how to explain free will.” Omni interview • Is it a problem of how to reconcile determinism with the existence of free will? If so, then it is unclear why compatibilism won’t work • If it’s the question of whether free will exists (whether hard determinism is true), then why not discuss the evidence? • If it’s the “scientific question” of what free will is, then why think there is one? • Is it the scientific program of explaining or predicting action?

22. Problems and Mysteries • Chomsky introduces his well-known distinction between problems and mysteries at the beginning of a June 1974 article reprinted in Reflections on Language

23. “Admissible Hypotheses” (Reflections on Language, p. 156)

24. “A Theory of Problems and Mysteries for the Human Organism”

25. “A Theory of Problems and Mysteries for the Human Organism” (cont.)

26. William Lycan: Summary of Chomsky on “Will and Choice”

27. How Questions of “Will and Choice” Are Issues for Science but Evade It (“Reply to Lycan”)

28. Questions • “Why the animal does this or that”? Are we to suppose that animals have free “will and choice”? • “The problems that motivated the problem of other minds for the Cartesian remain unexplained … and in fact are not empirically investigated”? • “There is important recent work … but not into what is concealed by the phrase ‘at will’”? • Is the “problem of free will” (1) whether it exists, (2) if it is compatible with determinism, or (3) how action is caused? If (3), it is unclear how much of answering (3) addresses traditional issue

29. Why Not Conceptual Analysis? • Why not Hume’s answer in the Enquiry – “By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to determinations of the will”? • We can distinguish liberty of the person from liberty of the will • Hume’s view responds to, among other views, Descartes’s metaphysical-libertarian view in Meditation Four • Why isn’t there an analytic connection between freedom and acting on desire? Why is this a scientific question, except to determine the concept’s nature?

30. The Appeal to Newton • Separately, Chomsky rejects the mind-body problem • However, it is not clear who the target is • Chomsky argues that we have no clear notion of “body” in the aftermath of the Newtonian revolution

31. How the Free Will Problem Arose for the Cartesians

32. Chomsky Parts Company with the Cartesians & Their Res Cogitans • The Cartesians accounted for this difference by positing a “second substance,” a soul made of soul-stuff over and about the physical stuff of the human body. • But here Chomsky parts company with the Cartesian. • His argument is that being able to draw the conclusion from the observed differences between machine behavior and human behavior that humans were partly made up of stuff different in kind from the stuff of human bodies requires a prior notion of what makes something a “body.” • But he argues that we don’t have such a prior notion.

33. Descartes’s Mechanistic Idea No Longer Available, Nothing Replaces It • Descartes’ idea was mechanistic -- that physical things occupied space and made things happen by touching, and in particular by pushing -- other physical things. • But we know from Isaac Newton’s discovery of “action at a distance” -- the way bodies effect each other gravitationally -- that the mechanistic account is incorrect.

34. Chomsky’s Conclusion • What does Chomsky conclude? • That “there is no clear and definite concept of body” (Language and Problems of Knowledge, p. 144) • The material world is “whatever we discover it to be” • But this invites the question: What is the mind-body problem taken to be, such that this is the result? • One might think that there is nothing in the new Newtonian picture that alters the Cartesian problem or undermines the Cartesian result • If a second substance is justifiable on the mechanistic picture, why not also on the Newtonian?

35. Newton Exorcises the Machine: How the Mind-Body Problem Disappeared (New Horizons, p. 84)

36. “No Real Progress to Speak Of”

37. What Is the Mind-Body Problem? • Again, the question: What is the mind-body problem, such that this is the result? • Chomsky’s point is that the mind-body problem is generated by thinking that we have a priori access to a ready-made, finished picture of the “physical” side of reality • This makes the mind-body problem metaphysical • Chomsky’s idea is that we do not have a priori access to a ready-made, finished picture of the “physical” side of reality

38. Three Alternative Ways of Motivating the “Body” Side of the Mind-Body Problem • McGinn-Strawson Way. – That the “physical” be defined in terms of the spatial. Both take spatial concepts to be essential to satisfactory explanation. For McGinn, this is a barrier, thus a source of cognitive closure. For Strawson, this is an opportunity for panpsychism. • The Subject-Object Way.– This is the basis of the Cartesian-esqe appeal to zombies and disembodiment. The basic idea is that subjectivity, prima facie, can be subtracted from anything objective because it is, prima facie, wholly different. This is the basis of the Locke & Hume quotes at the start of “The Mysteries of Nature.” • An alternative suggestion of my own. – That the “physical” be definable in terms of parts and wholes – or at least that the mind-body problem becomes problematical when it is – exploiting an original intuition behind mechanism and picked up by functionalism.

39. Parts & Wholes • Successful materialist explanations reveal how what we see around us is the result of underlying mechanisms. At least in the case of phenomenal states, any successful explanation would have to reveal how what we see around us is the result of underlying mechanisms -- in terms of the processes affecting parts of the World. It is hard to see how anything else could function as an explanation -- at least in the case of phenomenal qualities -- besides some account that would refer to aspects of the World more fundamental than the separate phenomenal qualities and would account for the existence of these qualities in terms of the ways they would emerge from the more fundamental aspects. • Immaterial states of the World would not have parts. Suppose they did. Then we could construct a Jackson-style Knowledge Argument that they would then have further immaterial properties distinct from the immaterial properties of their parts. Let Mary know not only every physical aspect of the brain but also every property of the parts. Still, there would be something she didn’t know: she would not know what it is like to see red, and for the same reasons as ever. Thus, she could not explain what it was like to see red in terms of parts, even though she knew all the parts.

40. Two Mind-Body Problems • So far we have focused on Descartes’s DiscourseFive mind-body problem – • Can a wholly physical body pass the two tests for intelligence of Part Five of Discourse on Method? • Chomsky seems at times to connect this problem with the separate mind-body problem suggested by Descartes’s Fourth Meditation— • What is the mind’s connection to the body if, as Descartes asserts in the Fourth Meditation, “the faculty of will consists alone in our having the power of choosing to do a thing or choosing not to do it (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or to shun it), or … consists alone in the fact that in order to affirm or deny, pursue or shun those things placed before us by the understanding, we act so that we are unconscious that any outside force constrains us in doing so”?

41. Summary of Chomsky’s Answer: Part One • We have an everyday, non-scientific conception of “body,” the basis of the mechanistic picture of reality • It is based on innate concepts (or innate resources) • The innate concepts (or resources) underlying our everyday, non-scientific conception of “body” do not give us insight into reality • Newton “left us with the conclusion that common-sense intuition – the ‘folk physics’ that was the basis for the mechanical philosophy – cannot be expected to survive the transition to rational inquiry into the nature of things” (New Horizons, p. 84)

42. Summary of Chomsky’s Answer: Part Two • Only science gives us insight into reality, and thus only science gives us insight into “body” • On the other hand, science is “open-ended” about “body” (currently so, presumably; not in principle so) • The mechanistic picture was wrong in two ways: • (1) Metaphysical – that reality has this form • (2) Epistemological – that there is an a priori, ready-made, finished picture of the “physical” side of reality • The effect of Newton was to show that our concepts underwrote a seemingly finished picture of reality that turned out to be wrong

43. Summary of Chomsky’s Answer: Part Three • It is not clear that there is much in the way of commensurability between the innately given picture of reality and the true picture • One might capture the distinction with the Kantian terms phenomenon and noumenon (Ding an sich, thing-in-itself), although in this context these would seem to be more epistemological notions than metaphysical and Chomsky does not use them.

44. Summary of Chomsky’s Answer: Methodological Naturalism • “Let us … understand the term ‘naturalism’ without metaphysical connotations: a ‘naturalistic approach’ to the mind investigates mental aspects of the world as we do any others, seeking to construct intelligible explanatory theories, with the hope of eventual integration with the ‘core’ natural sciences [what he elsewhere calls ‘the unification problem’].” – New Horizons, p. 76

45. Distinguishing Methodological Naturalism from Methodological Dualism • “… Such ‘methodological naturalism’ can be counterposed to what might be called ‘methodological dualism,’ the view that we must abandon scientific rationality when we study humans ‘above the neck’ (metaphorically speaking), becoming mystics in this unique domain, imposing arbitrary stipiulations and a priori demands of a sort that would never be contemplated in the sciences, or in other ways departing from the normal canons of inquiry.” --New Horizons, p. 76

46. Does Chomsky Think That There Is No Mind-Body Problem? • He speaks of the dissolution of the problem, since there is no scientific notion of “body” • But at the same time, he recognizes a “unification problem”: “One [aspect] has to do with the hardware-software relation (to adopt the metaphor): How do the computational procedures of the mind relate to cells and their organization, or whatever is the proper way to understand the functioning of the brain at this level?” • “Language and Thought: Descartes and Some Reflections on Venerable Themes”

47. The Unification Problem • “Let us turn to the first unification problem: finding the ‘physical basis’ for computational systems of the mind, to borrow the conventional (but as noted, highly misleading) terminology?” • Unification problems in the sciences, he says, have been solved in a variety of ways: chemistry with physics; biology with biochemistry. • “In the case of the mental aspects of the world, we have no idea how unification might proceed. Some believe it will be by means of the intermediate level of neurophysiology, perhaps neural nets. Perhaps so, perhaps not. Perhaps the contemporary brain sciences do not yet have the right way of looking at the brain and its function, so that unification in terms of contemporary understanding is impossible. If so, that should not come as a great surprise. The history of science provides many such examples.”—”Language and Thought …”

48. The Difference? • What is the difference between the supposedly not-coherent “mind-body problem” and this “unification problem” involving mental aspects of the world? • Is it that the mind-body problem is “metaphysical” while the unification problem is “scientific”? • If so, in what sense is the mind-body problem “metaphysical”?

49. Metaphysical Naturalism as a Demand for Unification? • “Shall we understand metaphysical naturalism to be the demand for unity of nature? If so, it could be taken as a guiding idea, but not as a dogma…. Suppose dark matter turns out to be crucially different from the 10 per cent of the world about which there are some ideas. The possibility cannot be discounted in principle; stranger things have been accepted in modern science. Nor can it be excluded in the case of theories of mind. Though there is no reason to entertain the hypothesis, some version of Cartesianism (with a far richer concept of body) could in principle turn out to be true, consistent with a naturalistic stance.” New Horizons, p. 85

50. The Sources of Action • As I suggested at the outset, in setting out his own diagnosis of the mind-body problem Chomsky begins not with consciousness or qualia or phenomenal properties but with something very different, the sources of action. • Chomsky begins with Descartes -- he draws Descartes’s statement of the problem from Descartes’s treatment in Part Five of the Discourse on Method and, secondarily, from Descartes’s Fourth Meditation.