The Nature of the Mind IV: Problems for Materialism?

I. Summary and Background

So where are we with our understanding of the mind? We saw that Descartes had argued that the mind and body are two different kinds of substance (Cartesian dualism or substance dualism). His view was immediately attacked by those who saw that it was difficult, if not impossible, to explain how something essentially extended and non- thinking could causally interact (and be united with) something essentially non-extended but thinking. Nevertheless, it or some version of it became something like the standard view in philosophy. (Probably because it is simply a philosophically grounded account of what most people believe.) Gilbert Ryle, of course, critiqued this view, this myth (which would seem to be shared by anyone who thinks that he has an immortal soul that is independent of his body), arguing that the whole “problem” rests on a category mistake: it is wrong to think of the mind and body as kinds of things that exist on the same ontological level. This made way for the new orthodoxy: materialism (or physicalism). Here the view is that mental phenomena are in some sense physical, that they can be reduced to or explained by the physical or material nature of our bodies.

But there are still problems. For example, consider the following, in which Mn and Pn refer to mental states (or events) and physical states (or events):

M1 Æ M2 Æ M3 Æ M4

{What is the relation here ↕ ?}

P1 Æ P2 Æ P3 Æ P4 Causally Closed?

Even if we think that mental states are the same as physical states (but described differently), we can’t do a very good job talking about mental causation. That is, we can explain how P1 causes P2, but we can’t really understand how (a) M1 causes M2, nor can we really understand how (b) M1 could cause P2. (It would seem that we need an explanation of (b) because it’s just such a part of common-sense belief that my beliefs (mental states) cause me to do things, that is, cause my body to act.) One of the most important views of the 1970s and 1980s was called anomalous monism: monism because there is really supposed to be only one kind of thing; anomalous because the mind doesn’t behave (and cause things) according to any laws that we know (or can know?). But, of course, at its core is still something akin to a presumption of materialism.

II. Anti-Materialist and Anti-Reductionist Arguments

A. Nagel: “What’s It Like to Be a Bat?”

Nagel tries to undermine the pretensions of materialism by pointing to the unique nature of conscious experience. There is something special, he says, about the “subjective character of experience” that is not captured by a physicalistic or reductionistic explanation of the mind. (pp. 382b-383a) In other words, there are facts related to the conscious experience of particular organisms – what it’s like to be an x – that can’t be reduced to physical facts. Moreover, the physical facts are expressed within our own (human) conceptual scheme, which is too limited to express all possible facts about the mental. As Nagel says, “Reflection on what it is like to be 2

a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language.” (p. 385a) The facts of the conscious experience of an organism “embody a particular point of view.” (ibid) And insofar as this is the case, “it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism.” (p. 385b)

Ultimately, according to Nagel, the more one moves toward an “objective” (i.e. physicalistic, reductionistic) view of mental life, the further one moves away from the “real” nature of mental life. (It might be helpful to recall Berkeley, who argued that it is wrong to claim that sound is really motion; no, sound is really the way things sound to me.)

Nagel’s reflections are not intended to show that physicalism must be false. “It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true.” (p. 387a) That is, at present, we don’t have any idea how a physicalistic (materialistic) account of the mind could possibly explain what it’s like to have such-and-such conscious experiences.

B. Jackson: “What Mary Doesn’t Know”

In this piece, Jackson presents what has come to be known as the knowledge argument against physicalism. (Nagel’s argument is also a version of the knowledge argument.) He asks us to consider Mary, a gifted neuroscientist, who has been confined her entire life to a black-and-white room but who, nevertheless, learns “everything there is to know about the physical nature of the world.” A simple version of this argument could be put like this (compare this to Jackson’s version (p. 392a)):

(i) If physicalism is true, Mary knows all there is to know. (ii) When she is released from confinement, she learns something new: e.g. what it’s like to see red. (iii)Therefore, physicalism is false.

A more developed version of the argument is this:

(1) Mary has complete physical knowledge of color vision before her release. (2) Therefore, Mary knows all the physical facts about human color vision before her release. (3) There is some (kind of ) knowledge concerning facts about human color vision that Mary does not have before her release. (4) Therefore, there are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release. (5) Therefore, there are non-physical facts about human color vision

What do you think?

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III. The Materialist Response

According to Lewis, we need not be worried about the challenges of Nagel and Jackson. One can be a materialist and still account for phenomenal qualia. How? By recognizing that knowing what it’s like is “not the possession of knowledge at all… Rather, knowing what it’s like is the possession of abilities: abilities to recognize, abilities to imagine, abilities to predict one’s behavior by means of imaginative experiments.” (p. 394b)

Also, one can respond to the knowledge argument by saying that it is illegitimate to draw metaphysical conclusions of epistemic premises. That is, one shouldn’t make conclusions about the way the world is from what we can (or cannot) know.

IV. Conclusion

No matter how you slice it, the “mind-body problem” is still a very deep problem for us. Though the majority of academic philosophers are materialists of some sort, there is a general recognition that we do not have an account of consciousness that is anywhere near good enough.