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On Mind, Matter and Materialism: Three Philosophers and the Very Large Mistake

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On Mind, Matter and Materialism: Three Philosophers and the Very Large Mistake On Mind, Matter and Materialism: Three Philosophers and the Very Large Mistake Senior Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Undergraduate Program in Philosophy Professor Jerry Samet, Advisor In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts by Niranjana Warrier May 2017 Copyright by Niranjana Warrier Committee members: Name: Professor Jerry Samet Signature: _____________________________ Name: Professor Palle Yourgrau Signature: _____________________________ My Heart Sings My heart sings at the wonder of my place in the world of life and light at the feel in my pulse of the rhythm of creation cadenced by the swing of endless time. I feel the tenderness of the grass in my forest walk, the wayside flowers startle me. That the gifts of the infinite are strewn in the dust wakens my song in wonder. I have seen, have heard, have lived in the depth of the known have felt The truth that exceeds all knowledge which fills my heart with wonder and I sing. Rabindranath Tagore [in: Rabindranath Tagore by Sisirkumar Ghose (2007)] 1 Acknowledgements I wish to express my most sincere gratitude to Professor Jerry Samet for being an incredibly patient and supportive advisor. I would also like to thank Professor Palle Yourgrau for his help with this thesis, but also for introducing me to academic philosophy in the first place (it is still unclear if this move was prudent as far the well-being of the universe is concerned, but we are all pretending it was a good decision on his part, for now). It is always great when you have a professor you can run to with random problems that come up in your thesis; many thanks to Professor Jennifer Marušić for helping me out with the discussion on naïve realism. Thanks also to Alka Ajit for the virtual hugs and the emergency Winnie-the-Pooh quotes. And finally, to Achan and Amma, to whom I dedicate this thesis: thank you for letting my heart sing. 2 Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1: Russell and Neutral Monism ......................................................................................... 9 Chapter 2: Lockwood and the Disclosure View ........................................................................... 14 Chapter 3: Strawson and Panpsychism ......................................................................................... 34 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 42 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 47 3 Introduction "It would be possible to describe absolutely everything scientifically, but it would make no sense. It would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variant of wave pressure." -Albert Einstein1 A while ago, I was fortunate2 enough to listen to the keynote lecture in a conference for physics majors begin with the speaker—a highly reputed astrophysicist—exclaiming to the audience, "We are physicists, the smartest people on earth - we know this," which the audience responded to with a roaring applause. She then went on to justify this claim by saying that because physics is the science that describes how the whole universe works and because such fundamentality calls for incredibly technical knowledge, anyone smart enough to do physics must be smarter than the rest of the human population. The soundness of this argument aside, what got me thinking was how easy it was for the physicist to assume the efficacy of her craft in actually carrying out the task it sets out to do. Physics does aim to give a formal description of our universe, but very few physicists, at least very few in this day and age, seem to be bothered to ask the two follow-up questions: (a) Does it really? and (b) Can it? Many, if pressed, can momentarily answer (a) with a "No, not all aspects of the universe" but when it comes to (b), the answer, although given without much hesitation, seems to have an almost arrogant undertone: Of course it can! Why? Because it's physics, not biology3. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a physicist in possession of a phenomenon seemingly unexplainable in the language of 1 As quoted by Ronald William Clark in Einstein: The Life and Times (1984). 2 Fortunate because this was the event that got me to start questioning my childhood dreams of becoming an astrophysicist when I grow up. 3 As much as I'm against The Physicist's Arrogance, I'm inclined to think there might be something to this response. 4 physics must be in want of a good mathematical technique. And this is a completely fine position to take. In fact, my own views on what physics can and cannot explain align with those of any other student of physics4. What I hesitate to do is to accept the statements about the abilities of physics on blind faith. In this particular project, I would like to think about how much physics can tell us about the nature of our minds: there is something that is like to see a blue butterfly, something that is like to experience excruciating pain - how much of this is physically describable? Colour, pain, smell and such are called phenomenal qualities and are the crux of what is called the hard problem of consciousness5, the question of how we can explain our phenomenal experiences. Encompassing the hard problem is the larger mind-body problem, which asks about the relationship between the mental and the physical (what counts as mental and physical varies depending on whom you ask; for now, let us say what I mean is what your intuition would tell you when you hear these terms). Many theories have been proposed as solutions to the mind-body problem, some of which are: Dualism: The view that the physical properties (size, shape, motion etc.) of a sentient being is fundamentally different from its mental properties (phenomenal experiences, memory etc.). One major proponent of this view was Descartes, and Cartesian dualists are among us even today (although I do not quite get why). Idealism: states that the world as we see it does not exist independently of our minds. John Foster, an idealist we shall see again later in Chapter 2, formulates idealism thus: the physical world is “mental through and through" (Foster 1991, 130). 4 Although I’m not sure if all new physics calls for is more math – but this should not be a concern for our present endeavour. 5 Term coined by David Chalmers (see Chalmers 1995). 5 All of the following are variants of materialism, the view that there is only one kind of substance in the world—matter—and that all mental phenomena are either material or result from material interactions. Mind-Brain Identity Theory: Just as the name suggests, this is the view that mental events are nothing but material events. The most common example used to exemplify this is pain in human beings, which, according to the identity theory, is nothing but the simulation of certain nerve fibres called the C-fibres in the human brain. Neutral Monism: The view that there is only one kind of fundamental units of matter, and that they are neither mental nor physical (they are still material because they are units of matter). Panpsychism: claims that there is only one kind of fundamental units of matter, but they at least have a mental character. There are a lot more6, but they do not feature in this thesis. At the heart of our discussions is what Galen Strawson dubs the "Very Large Mistake7" (henceforth called the VLM): based on what science tells us about the nature of matter, there are no grounds for us to claim that it is fundamentally different from all things mental, but many philosophers make the mistake of thinking there is a gulf between the two. The VLM has been ignored in a lot of the philosophy of mind literature, and my goal here is to argue that it should be taken seriously and that the views that do not acknowledge the VLM (dualism, for instance) are not worth talking about for the purposes of thinking through the mind-body problem. Towards this end, we will discuss three different views on the matter, all of which start with Bertrand Russell's structural realism, take 6 See Kim (2010) for a comprehensive review and Chalmers (2002) for the original sources. 7 Strawson (2008, 54), but he makes a bigger deal about the term in an opinion piece published in the New York Times in May 2016 titled “Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter.” 6 into account the VLM and arrive at three different conclusions. In Chapter 1, we go through Russell's view on the mind-body problem (called R in this thesis), which starts with the assumption that everything in the physical world has a structure and some content (also called the intrinsic nature or quality): the former is what mathematics provides as a description of the object or phenomenon in question, the latter is what it is like to be that object or phenomenon. Based on this, we have structural realism, which is the view that we can only ever hope to know the formal structure of the physical world, never its intrinsic nature. Russell, as we shall see, puts forth neutral monism (though not as a solution to the mind- body problem because given the VLM, the problem is not problematic in the same way as it is without taking the VLM into account—we will get to this in due time). In Chapter 2, we discuss Michael Lockwood, and his modification of R, which he calls the disclosure view (DV), which is a kind of an identity theory that involves a quantum relative state approach to explain phenomenal experiences. All the quantum mechanical tools required to develop this view are introduced in the chapter.
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