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)]

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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.

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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

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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. Then we have Strawson's panpsychism in Chapter 3, along with his arguments supporting the importance of being aware of the VLM. And finally, we get to the conclusion, where I try to think through my stance on the whole shebang.

I go to all this trouble to set the scene because recently, during an interview for admission to a graduate program, I was asked who should care about my research, in particular, what part of academia should. In academic philosophy (in academic anything), it is all too easy to get lost in the jargon and the nuances and forget that what most of us work on (especially in the case of philosophers) are matters of interest to all human beings, and so I said: Everyone. Not just

7 academics, everyone who has a functioning brain should care8. Because I doubt there are people who have seen a rainbow and not thought about how they could perceive such vibrancy, or have stepped out in the rain to be overwhelmed by the smell of wet soil and not wondered why it brought back memories from twenty years ago—in general, struck by the kind of wonder that

Tagore talks about in his poem and stopped to think how it all could be, if only for an instant. Is knowing how we experience phenomenal qualities going to prevent another World War from happening? Probably not. But then anyone who asks these questions is looking for one thing and one thing only: to sate their curiosity, which I daresay is a goal well worth the effort.

8 I got mixed responses: impressed, puzzled, disappointed. And no, I did not get in. 8

Chapter 1: Russell and Neutral Monism

"Physics and perception are like two people on opposite sides of a brook which slowly widen as they walk: at first it is easy to jump across, but imperceptibly it grows more difficult,"

(137) writes Russell in The Analysis of Matter. While this may sound exactly like the VLM,

Russell does argue for the need to recognize and rectify the VLM. More importantly, he attempts to give an explanation for the apparent gulf between the physical and the mental9; he claims that any outward difference between the two is a "difference of arrangement" (148). A brief overview of what this means, of Russell's stance on the mind-body problem as inferred from these two texts and from Strawson's and Lockwood's interpretation of Russell's works forms the objective of this chapter. We begin with Russell’s formulation of the VLM and his claim about matter being inscrutable, then we discuss his solution to the mind-body problem which postulates that the ultimate bits of matter are events and not things, and finally, his defense of his theory of perception.

The Inscrutability of Matter10

Kant writes in the first Critique, "The difficulty presented by [the problem of explaining the community of the soul with the body] consists, as is well known, in the presumed difference in kind between the object of inner sense (the soul11) and the object of outer sense" (B427).

Although Russell was not the first philosopher to bring the VLM to light, he might have been

9 For Russell (as we saw in the introduction), the physical properties of an object are those that can be described mathematically, which mental properties are those that elude such capture. Russell was a materialist, so both of these, for him, are material. 10 Phrase “borrowed” from Lockwood (1989), who got it from Foster (1982). 11 I do not wish to pursue the similarities between mind as we conceive of it and Kant's soul here; for the purposes of this thesis, let's say they are equivalent. 9 among the first to do so in the wake of modern physics, and it shows. In the backdrop of 20th century advancements both in physics and in psychology, he writes about how matter is starting to be more and more elusive like the Cheshire Cat whereas the mind, as revealed by brain surgery, is starting to look "more and more as a trivial by-product of certain kinds of physiological circumstances" (Russell 1956, 135). He also comments (hilariously) on the two schools of practice this gives rise to, one that pursues materialism, and the other, purely psychological laws without any basis in physics: "The difference shows in the interpretation of dreams. If you have a nightmare, the one school will say that it is because you ate too much lobster salad, and the other that it is because you are unconsciously in love with your mother"

(Russell 1956, 136). All of this to say, the crux of his argument is that both mind and matter are illusions, that "from the standpoint of philosophy the distinction between physical and mental is superficial and unreal" (Russell 1927, 402). Further, he writes, "All that I know about matter is what I can infer by means of certain abstract postulates about the purely logical attributes of its space-time distribution" (Russell 1956, 144); in other words, structural realism holds, that is to say, in a sense, matter is inscrutable because we can never hope to know what it is intrinsically like. What sets Russell apart from the two philosophers we are yet to discuss is that he aims to explain why there is an apparent difference between perception and physics—why does a sound wave seem so different from my hearing a sound, for instance? And this brings us to our next section.

Neutral Monism

The VLM (or rather, realizing that the VLM needs to be acknowledged) leads Russell to neutral monism, the view that all of universe is composed of the same kind of stuff (there is only one kind, hence "monism") which are neither mental nor physical (hence "neutral"). For Russell,

10 this stuff is events, all of which are arranged in some order, sometimes in groups. Such ordering is usually symmetrical about a centre; to use Russell's own example, "the percepts of different people when they look at a penny may be ordered by their size and their shape" (Russell 1927,

258). Russell calls a percept "the epistemological basis of physics" and claims that it "must be a

"datum"—it must be something noticed" (Russell 1927, 257). He does not explain the idea of a percept any further, but it seems to me that one can think of a percept as the event of having a mental image. Percepts have different shapes and sizes12 depending on the position of the percipient in relation to the perceived object; for instance, the penny looks bigger to me the closer I am to it. Now, each of these occurrences or percepts have two "locations" in the space constituting percipients and the physical objects they perceive—that of the percipient and of the object. That is to say, my percept of the penny has two "locations" in this space, one from which there is a view of the world as seen from where I stand and the other from which there are views of the penny from different places13. According to Russell, the universe is made up of events, each of which has such twofold location (Russell 1927, 258).

The plausibility of the twofold location theory is not something we are going to think about for the purposes of this discussion; what matters here is how Russell explains "the prima facie difference between a percept and a physical process" by arguing that "this apparent gulf is due to comparison of events of different orders" (Russell 1956, 263). A sound wave, an event in

12 How do events have shapes and sizes? Most of the problems with percepts come from Russell not being explicit about what he means by a percept. Evidently, if one took percepts to mean just mental images (not the events of having the images), the shapes and sizes make sense, but then the notion of the second location of the percept, that of the physical object, becomes tricky. 13 These places are not the same as the locations of the percepts; the latter are locations within the space (as in a formal abstract space) constituting of percipients and physical objects, one that is known to us through experience versus the physical space, which one knows through doing physics (i.e. not through immediate acquaintance, only through inference). 11 the physical space (as opposed to the space of percipients and physical objects), is an event made up of smaller, correlated events and is thereby much more complex than an auditory percept. He then goes on to say that the gulf between percepts and physics seems to exist because while we know the mathematical properties (i.e. the structure) of the physical processes, we know nothing about their intrinsic natures, whereas in the case of percepts, we know their intrinsic character, that is to say we know what they are like by virtue of having them, but know nothing about their formalizable properties (Russell 1927, 264).

It is interesting to note why Russell's universe is made up of events and not things, as intuition would suggest. He writes, "Things are an unnecessary hypothesis" (Russell 1956, 149), that everything that is to be said of the world can be said by assuming only events existed—when you buy a loaf of bread and think that you have bought a thing, "what you have in fact bought is a series of occurrences linked together by certain causal laws" (Russell 1956, 150). If a piece of matter is a group of events connected by the laws of physics, a mind is a group of events connected by the laws of psychology; events by themselves do not have either a material or a mental flavour—"An event is not rendered either mental or material by any intrinsic quality, but only by its causal relations" (Russell 1956, 152). In fact, events can have both physical and psychological relations, in which case, they are both mental and physical at once (Russell 1956,

153).

Thoughtless Philosophers

Russell's view on the (apparent) mind and matter distinction is that it arises because we treat both as things and not groups of events. When we consider them to be events, all problems

12 vanish14. We do not have enough knowledge about the physical world outside our heads to confirm either that it is different from or the same as the mental world. We only know the structure of physical events and "nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except when these are mental events that we directly experience" (Russell 1956, 153); this view is called R throughout the rest of this thesis. We will see more on this when we discuss Lockwood, but this chapter ends with Russell's reply to responses to his theory of perception (only partly because I think it is funny): In The Analysis of Matter, Russell writes, "what the physiologist sees when he looks at a brain is part of his own brain, not part of the brain he is examining" (383).

Counterintuitive as this is, it is in line with his theory: there are two spaces, that of physics and that of perception and the location of one's visual percept in the space of physics is his/her own brain. Russell writes in "Mind and Matter," "I horrified all the philosophers by saying that their thoughts were in their heads. With one voice they assured me that they had no thoughts in their head whatever, but politeness forbids me to accept this assurance" (152). Lockwood develops

Russell's view further15, which forms the subject matter of the next chapter.

14 He actually does believe his theory solves the mind-body problem; see Lockwood 1981 (157). 15 He also notes how Russell's psychologist remark was misread by many philosophers (See Lockwood 1981, 159). 13

Chapter 2: Lockwood and the Disclosure View

Many schools of thought feature the mind as something that has a marked influence on the way we perceive what we perceive and concrete ideas about such influence have found a place in western philosophy since at least the time of Kant. Our present concern is one such idea that proposes a novel way of thinking about consciousness as that which sheds light on some aspects of what Kant called the noumenal world. In his book "Mind, Brain and the Quantum",

Michael Lockwood puts forth what Foster calls an "ingenious proposal"16: what we call phenomenal qualities are what states of or events within our brains are intrinsically like, and it is only through our awareness (or consciousness; he seems to use these terms interchangeably) that we have an immediate17 access to these qualities. Awareness can thus be thought of "as a first approximation, […] a kind of a searchlight, sweeping around an inner landscape. (Literally inner: in the brain)" (163). This proposal he calls the disclosure view, owing to how awareness serves to disclose the intrinsic nature of brain states and events.

It is interesting to note that Lockwood does not present the VLM quite as forcefully as either Russell or Strawson, but it is clear he acknowledges the wrongful dismissal of matter as something we already know everything about; in the preface to his book, he writes that mind and matter are both “profoundly mysterious, philosophically speaking,” and that “what the mind- body problem calls for, almost certainly, is a mutual accommodation: one which involves conceptual adjustment on both sides of the mind-body divide” (x). The disclosure view as

16 Foster, 1991, p. 124 17 Immediate in what sense, we shall see in a bit. 14 formulated by Lockwood does seem to overcome some of the troubles faced by other views that aim to explain how our perception of phenomenal qualities works, but the way he defines awareness, or to be exact, the things he leaves unsaid about the character of awareness make one wonder if the disclosure view could ever be developed into something that would help explain the nature of our phenomenal experiences. Evaluating these merits and demerits of the disclosure view forms the objective of this chapter.

We begin by introducing the disclosure view, starting with its roots in structural realism, and then discuss some of the questions it raises, mainly about the nature of awareness and that of phenomenal qualities. Then we look at some of the arguments Lockwood makes in defense of the disclosure view, and wonder if the view follows from structural realism. Further, we analyse the disclosure view as a variant of the mind-brain identity theory, and then discuss an argument that Foster raises against the view, which leads us to a discussion of the grain problem, and finally, of the quantum mechanical framework which Lockwood offers as both a possible solution for the grain problem as well as a base for a coherent theory of how the disclosure view could help solve the hard problem of consciousness.

Introducing: The Disclosure View

Lockwood develops the disclosure view from Russell's later work on the mind-body problem, which itself is strongly based on the Russelian brand of structural realism, as we saw in the previous chapter. According to Lockwood, Russell's solution to the mind-body problem (R) takes the following form: If structural realism is true, then physical reality has two parts, the structure and the content, and human beings, through perception, have access only to the form or the structure, not to its contents. A neurologist can see the structure of someone’s brain cells, but not what these cells are intrinsically like, what it is like to be one of these cells. However, in 15 consciousness, we have direct access to some of these contents—Lockwood explains R thus:

"The qualities of which we are immediately aware, in consciousness, precisely are some at least of the intrinsic qualities of the states and processes that go to make up the material world – more specifically, states and processes within our own brains" (159). In the Kantian analogy I made earlier, these physical contents to which we do not have access through perception constitute the noumenal world.

Lockwood arrives at the disclosure view by way of modifying R in two major ways:

(i) He argues that the intrinsic attributes of brain states and processes that feature in

consciousness are nothing but the phenomenal qualities we all know and love: colour,

pain, smell – all those sensations of which we have characteristically subjective

experiences. That is, what it is like to be one’s brain state corresponding to say,

seeing a patch of the colour blue is exactly what it is like for him/her to see the colour

blue.

R, if combined with the traditional sense-datum view, according to which phenomenal qualities are not realized until and unless they are sensed by a percipient, begs the question of what the intrinsic nature of "physical states that are not associated with awareness" is like, a question which Russell allegedly does not respond to well enough (160). In order to circumvent this objection18, Lockwood eschews the sense-datum view:

18 And the challenges that Foster's view that phenomenal qualities are inherently self-revealing pose (See Lockwood, 161). 16

(ii) "On [the disclosure view], phenomenal qualities are neither realized by being sensed

nor sensed by being realized. They are just realized and sensed or not as the case may

be" (163).

What exactly then, is the disclosure view? In simple terms, the view states that what we call phenomenal qualities are nothing but the intrinsic qualities of states of or events within our brains, as revealed to us by "conscious activity of the appropriate kind" which Lockwood takes to be synonymous with awareness (162). Borrowing Foster's example19 of someone called Smith in pain, if X is the painful phenomenal quality that Smith experiences and Y is the stimulation of certain C-fibres in Smith's brain (which is thought to cause the sensation of pain), then in light of structural realism, Y can be thought of as having two parts: its structure, essentially, a spatio- temporal arrangement of the fundamental particles of matter (or, more macroscopically, what a neurologist would observe on a scan of Smith's brain), and its content. The disclosure view asserts that this latter part of Y, namely, its content, is nothing but X, which is revealed to Smith in his consciousness. Within the realm of candidates for the solution to the mind-problem, this view is a variant of the identity theory and is materialist without being reductionist. This is the bare bones of Lockwood's hypothesis; problems arise when, in the process of developing this notion, he leaves a lot unclear or unsaid, including the natures of awareness and of phenomenal qualities, which form the subjects of the next two sections.

The Nature of Awareness

19 Foster 1991, p. 123 17

It is curious how little Lockwood talks about the process of awareness when proposing a mechanism that depends heavily on it to work. He classifies it as a conscious activity (162), but does not elaborate on the specifics of how this activity is carried out. How is this activity different from the brain events whose inherent nature it is supposed to disclose, according to the disclosure view? Note that in asking so, we assume awareness to also be, or be the resultant of some event that happens in the brain; a materialist view like the disclosure view allows for no other alternative, unless we were to think that some other organ than the brain can also be a seat of consciousness. If so, i.e. if awareness were a brain event, then according to structural realism, like all physical structures, it should also have two parts: the structure and the content. Further, through perception, we would have access only to its structure and not to its contents. What of this structure and content? Can we say for sure that the form would be similar to that of the C- fibre stimulation we saw in the first section—a spatio-temporal arrangement of particles? What about the content? What is awareness inherently like? What would reveal its contents to us? Can we ever hope something would?

Lockwood does not leave the puzzle completely unaddressed. As we saw earlier, he talks about awareness being a kind of a sweeping searchlight in the brain, as a first approximation

(163). But then he goes on to say, "This is only a first approximation; for there is no reason to suppose that the intrinsic character of a brain state is, in general, unaffected by our becoming aware of it–especially if one believes that awareness is itself realized as neural activity of some kind" (163). Here, he acknowledges that the intrinsic character of brain states can change during the process of one’s being aware of something, if awareness itself is a neural activity, but does not wonder about the structure and intrinsic contents of awareness itself. If it is structured just like other brain activities, that is to say, as a collection of particles, then the question arises: what

18 makes this structure so special as to lend awareness enough power to reveal other contents?

Lockwood could argue that it is not the form, but the content that facilitates awareness’ disclosure of the contents of other neural items.

Then the question would be, what makes the contents of awareness so special? There are two ways in which Lockwood could respond to this, and they depend on whether or not he argues in favour of the possibility that we can have access to these contents, by some means or other. If he says we can have access, then he would have to explain how. This would bring us to one of our earlier questions—what reveals the contents of the structure that reveals the contents of other structures? He could argue these contents (those of awareness) are self-revealing, but then according to modification (ii) he made to R in the previous section, these contents cannot be phenomenal qualities. Which would then raise the question of what else they could be. As we shall see in the next section, Lockwood does seem to argue that the contents of all physical structures are phenomenal qualities.

If, on the other hand, he claims that we cannot hope to have access to the contents of awareness, then he would no longer have to answer questions about what they are, because he could simply say we are doomed to never know for sure, we can only speculate. And he does seem to take such a position; he writes, "We cannot be said to have a transparent conception of awareness" (169). In fact, he uses this argument to further state that if it is true, then there is nothing wrong in saying awareness is some kind of a physical process in the brain, albeit a

"mysterious" one (169). To me this just sounds like he is sweeping the questions about the nature of awareness under the rug, as it were. As we shall see, the explanatory power of the disclosure view hinges on this mysteriousness, and the more one questions this, the less promising the view becomes.

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The Nature of Phenomenal Qualities

Though not to the same extent as he does with awareness, Lockwood also leaves things unsaid about phenomenal qualities. This much we do know about them from his book:

(i) They are what states of or events within the brain are inherently like (162).

(ii) We have an immediate access to them via awareness (162). He does not elaborate on

the usage of the term immediate, but from his comparison of the disclosure view with

naive realism (we will see this in the next section), it seems to mean a direct,

unmediated access.

(iii) They exist even when there is nothing to sense them, in the same manner as how they

appear when they are presented in awareness (162).

(iv) They are also what "the unsensed portion of the physical world is like in itself, quite

generally" (164).

What we do not know is, if the contents of all things physical are generally phenomenal qualities (as they seem to be, if (iv) is true), then why does awareness only disclose those that are contents of brain states? Lockwood could say that those that constitute brain states are a different kind of phenomenal qualities as compared to those that are the contents of non-brain-state structures, and this difference is somehow compatible with the process of awareness, which results in their being revealed by awareness. Or he could say that it is just the quirky nature of awareness to only disclose brain state contents. Either way, there is some mystery involved and

Lockwood seems to choose the latter, in line with what we saw earlier. As we shall see when we get to his quantum mechanical framework, he chalks up almost all of the unexplained parts in the formulation of the disclosure view to the nature of awareness, which itself is deemed to be

20 shrouded in mystery, and one is left to wonder if the view has enough merits to be allowed to have its most basic component be unknowable.

In Defense of the Disclosure View

Despite the unexplained parts, the disclosure view has a couple of features that make it look attractive as a theory that could potentially explain our phenomenal experiences. To begin with, it is not dualism. But also, it seems to circumvent many challenges that other theories face.

For instance, Lockwood claims that the disclosure view can be thought of as a kind of naive realism (162); if the standard naive realism pushes for the existence of physical objects independent of our perception of these objects, and claims that the way these objects are presented in our perception is exactly the same as what they are like, even when there is nothing to perceive them, then the disclosure view does the same with phenomenal qualities replacing physical objects and sensing replacing perception (as can be seen from (i)-(iv) in the previous section). The result is, it does not run into the same problems as naive realism does. We do not have the space to look at all of them, but as an example, take the argument against naive realism which contends that since the range of perception varies across species (for instance, rattlesnakes can see colours in the infrared range, something human eyes cannot do), there are not enough grounds for one to say that it is human perception that reveals the world as it really is. This does not pose a challenge to the disclosure view because it does not claim anything about our access to the contents of the physical world external to our brains; our awareness reveals the contents of our brain states, and the rattlesnake’s awareness reveals the contents of its brain states, which just do not happen to be the same as ours. Note that the advantage the disclosure view has over standard naive realism exists only so long as the truth of the claim that awareness only discloses brain state contents holds. As we saw in the previous section, there are no grounds to make such

21 a claim without ascribing the phenomenon to the mysterious nature of consciousness, and hence, the disclosure view commands this advantage only as long as we accept this mysteriousness.

Having seen how the disclosure view characterizes awareness and phenomenal qualities in the previous sections, we are in a position to evaluate an argument Lockwood offers in defense of the view, using the Freudian conscious/subconscious distinction of mental states20

(165). What Lockwood calls the “traditional view” (166) is the view that phenomenal qualities are inseparable from our being aware of them, a notion to which the disclosure view does not subscribe. By definition, the subconscious counterpart of a conscious state must cause and explain behaviour in the same way as the conscious state does (165). If that is so, someone who is a proponent of the traditional view—unless s/he is an epiphenomenalist, i.e. someone who rejects the causal powers of conscious states—would have to conclude that subconscious states do not have phenomenal qualities. This does not seem to be the case in real life; as Lockwood notes in an example, experienced drivers who can drive while not being entirely conscious of what they are doing seem to be able to respond to the phenomenal character of bends on a road and steer their vehicles accordingly just as well as someone who is continually aware of his/her driving. One could argue that these drivers are still partly conscious and it is the conscious part that is responsible for their responses, but Lockwood deems such an argument “empirically mistaken”; he states there is no reason why this should be the case (166). This example does not seem to be very convincing to me, but that the disclosure view separates phenomenal qualities

20 Freud’s actual distinctions were the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious, but Lockwood uses the term subconscious “as a collective term for those states and processes of which we are not currently aware, regardless of whether we are capable, by a simple act of will, of rendering ourselves aware of them” (165). 22 and our being aware of them does seem to be a novel feature that could have the potential to help explain phenomenal experiences that the traditional view cannot.

We now switch gears a little and take a brief look at how the disclosure view arises out of structural realism.

What Follows from Structural Realism?

Given that the truth of structural realism is implicitly assumed in the disclosure view, it is natural to wonder if the latter follows from structural realism. Let us begin by assuming that structural realism is indeed true. Then we know that through our perception, we can only ever hope to know the structures of things that physical reality is composed of, from brain states to barbershops. Now, the disclosure view states that we get to know the contents of brain states through awareness. What then of barbershops? What of other physical objects that are not states of or events within the brain? What are their contents? (We briefly touched upon this particular issue in section about phenomenal qualities) Do we have access to these contents? Note that the claim that we can access the contents of our brain states through awareness is not something novel introduced by the disclosure view, but is rather what it borrowed from R. So let us hold R responsible for explaining the discrepancy between brain states and other physical structures as far as revelation of their contents through consciousness goes. We saw earlier how Lockwood claims that R falls short when Russell is vague about explaining what the intrinsic nature of

"physical states that are not associated with awareness" (160) is like, and he ascribes this to the shortcomings of the sense-datum view. To recap, Lockwood tries to avoid this problem by doing away with the sense-datum view and claiming that unlike in the sense-datum view, phenomenal qualities do notƒ depend on their being sensed to be realized in the disclosure view. Given this supposed solution, would the disclosure view really be exempt from having to explain what the 23 intrinsic attributes of non-brain-state physical structures are like, as Lockwood claims it would be? Yes, if he claims that the disclosure view only works for brain states (as he does; we saw this in the section on phenomenal qualities). However, that would still leave the question open, which would indicate the need for another theory that follows from structural realism, one that pertains to non-brain-state structures and together with the disclosure view helps explain what the whole of physical reality is intrinsically like. All sorts of questions about the differences between the two theories would then follow.

Whether or not the disclosure view follows from structural realism is something that has also been explored by Foster. He writes, "The structuralist theory on its own does not seem to provide much in the way of support [for the disclosure view]" — why would the fact that physical content is inaccessible to perception lead to that claim that "it coincides, wholly or partially, with what is introspectively revealed to the subject?" (Foster, 124) Foster seems to have missed the point that the disclosure view does not directly arise out of structural realism; it is a modification of R, which has its roots in structural realism. Foster's question here then should be directed at R.

Regardless, it is still a valid question: we do not know what physical contents are like; so what? How does the fact that we know them via our consciousness follow? Foster notes that

Lockwood "could argue that it is only in introspection that one can so much as form a positive conception of what the fundamental content of a physical item might be like" (124). But as he observes, this argument could make some case for pushing the identity between intrinsic physical content and qualities that feature in human experience, but there are no grounds for establishing relations between the latter and neural items. Which brings us to the status of the disclosure view

24 as a kind of an identity theory, something that incidentally leads to another discrepancy that demands explanation from R.

Disclosure View and the Problem of Multiple Realizability

Being a kind of an identity theory, where the identity holds between phenomenal qualities and neural activities, the disclosure view is also obligated to respond to the challenges that the standard (type) identity theory faces. But before we get into that, it might be helpful to revisit the key difference between the identity theory and the disclosure view. Smith is in pain again.

According to the identity theory then, X=Y (= here reads as "nothing but"; X is nothing but Y), however, according to the disclosure view, if Y=(a,b) where a is Y's structure and b is its content, then Smith being in pain can be represented as X=b. Now, onto the arguments against the identity theory. In particular, let us take the case of the multiple realizability argument, which goes like this: Species with different brain chemistries experience the same types of mental states as fear and pain. If that is so, then how can we say X=Y where X is phenomenal pain and Y is C- fibre stimulation if some other animal who experiences pain as a result of say, K-fibre stimulation in its brain exists? Obviously, it is completely valid within the domain of the disclosure view to have different brain chemistries lead to the experience of the same phenomenal quality (this is because unlike the identity theory, the disclosure view is not reductionist), but if K-fibre stimulation is Z(c,d) where c ≠ a, then X=d implies that b and d at least have to be in the same phenomenal category, if not identical. In other words, the animal who experiences pain on K-fibre stimulation has neural structures that have the same or the same kind of content as our C-fibres do. We can then ask of the nature of physical content in general and about phenomenal qualities in particular: how can the same (or the same kind of) quality be the content of different physical structures? On the face of it, there is no harm in different forms 25 having the same (or same kind of) content, but say Smith happens to sense the colour blue while he is experiencing pain. If one were to argue that the neural correlate for this event is different from C-fibre stimulation, then in this case, different forms do have different kinds of contents.

The question then would be how different structures have to be to have different kinds of contents. How does structure relate to content? Here, it seems to me that R, and in turn, structural realism should answer these questions, and since a deeper discussion of structural realism is out of the scope of this paper, I am not going to pursue these any further.

So much for general physical structure and content; Foster notes a discrepancy between the particular structures of brain events and their proposed contents i.e. phenomenal qualities, which we discuss in the next section.

The Grain Problem

We now come to the major argument Foster raises against the disclosure view: if the structure of the physical world is as it is revealed by science, then physical structures cannot have phenomenal qualities as contents. In his own words, "The pegs of human experience are not appropriately shaped to fit the holes defined by the structural theories of science" (126). Foster maintains that science goes out of its depth when it tries to explain the intrinsic nature of particles and physical space (beyond their shape/size and geometry, respectively) and asks, in the case of Smith's pain, how Y's being a pain would explain the inherent nature of these particles and physical space (126). The crux of the problem, for Foster, lies in the fact that Y's (or using the notations from the previous sections, a's) complexity as revealed to us by science does not seem to be reflected in how we experience X (126). He anticipates one of two responses from

Lockwood:

26

(i) That b can be attributed to the properties and the relative positions of the particles that

a is composed of, or

(ii) That b causally emerges from the contents of a’s particulate components (128).

Regarding (i), Foster argues he cannot see how it can be "coherently developed" and regarding

(ii) he writes, "It is not that there is any difficulty as such in the notion of an emergent physical property […] the trouble in the present case is that our initial conception of the pain-quality does not represent it as physical"—if b is emergent from a, then it is logically independent of a, which would provide us no grounds to think of b as physical, and certainly not to think of it as a quality of Y (128).

Lockwood agrees with Foster on emergentism's harmlessness, and the overall ineffectiveness of (ii) when considering what is scientifically plausible21. He writes on the grain problem22, i.e. the problem concerning the reconciliation of the phenomenal quality of b with the structural complexity of a, "The challenge posed by the grain problem is the challenge of showing how mere selectivity, as applied to the physical reality of the brain can yield the form and qualitative content of phenomenal qualities" (283). The grain problem is at heart, something that can be traced to the gap between the subjective and the objective, because if the structural complexity of a is explored by science, then it is not contingent upon the perspective of any one observer, whereas the phenomenal quality of b is entirely dependent on individual observer’s point of view. Because something is subjectively true only if it is true with respect to a particular point of view, Lockwood posits that "the only way of reconciling subjectivity and objectivity is

21 Lockwood, 1993, p. 281 22 A concept that goes back to Wilfrid Sellars. 27 by incorporating points of view within one's objective inventory of the world" (284, 285). This, he claims, is a feat that can be achieved by quantum mechanics.

The Quantum Relative State Approach

Lockwood states that quantum mechanics provides a way for us to think of the world as

"a sum of perspectives" (Lockwood 1981, 177), and attempts to develop a coherent argument for how that might help shed light on the grain problem. Before we get to his argument though, it might be useful to get the basic terminology down. The states of a quantum mechanical system, in the standard formalism, are represented as vectors23 in an abstract mathematical space called the Hilbert space. What we inquire of (or measure in) such a system is called an observable. For example, the position of the system is an observable. Observables are, in turn, represented by operators in the Hilbert space, those that take vectors as inputs and produce vectors as outputs.

Now, there exist certain vectors in the Hilbert space, called the eigenvectors, which, if acted upon by a corresponding operator, undergo change, if any, only in their magnitudes. These changes in magnitudes themselves are called the eigenvalues of the respective eigenvectors.

Eigenvalues are the answers the system gives us to the questions we ask of it in the form of observables24. For instance, let us say we want to measure the position of some system. Position here, would then be represented by an operator called the position operator. Let a position eigenvector be acted on by this operator, and say the latter outputs a vector thrice the former; then 3 is the eigenvalue of the vector, or, the position that we wanted to know. A pair of

23 Vectors as in quantities, each of which has some magnitude and a direction. 24 Hilbert spaces are complex spaces, and hence these eigenvalues could theoretically be complex numbers. However, physically, eigenvalues are all real and we only concern ourselves with operators called Hermitian operators which are guaranteed to always return real eigenvalues. 28 observables, both members of which are associated with the same system are said to commute if an observer can make precise measurements of both at the same time. Lockwood extends this definition to a set of more than two observables, and calls it a compatible set (191) if the observables share at least one common set of eigenvectors that are mutually perpendicular and form a basis25 for the corresponding Hilbert space (called the eigenbasis; this allows for simultaneous measurement). And finally, an operator is called maximal or degenerate, if each of its distinct eigenvector corresponds to a distinct eigenvalue.

Lockwood's argument then takes the following form: The universe is quantum mechanical through and through; regardless of whether or not we are dealing with microscopic systems. This is permissible, because nothing in the formulation of quantum mechanics prevents it from being applicable to the macro world. As such, if one were to think of the whole universe as a quantum mechanical system, then it can be divided in many different ways into subsystems, some of which even correspond to the brain activities that are featured in consciousness. None of these subsystems in general can have individual, determinate states. This has to do with the fact that while the Hilbert space for the universal system would be a tensor product26 of the Hilbert spaces for the subsystems, the state vector corresponding to any given state of the universal system can only be a combination or superposition of products of state vectors of the subsystems. This means that the subsystems cannot, in general, have definite quantum states.

25 In the standard sense of basis vectors as those whose linear combinations can produce all the other vectors in the given vector space. 26 An operation that takes vectors spaces as input and produces vector spaces. 29

Now, if one were to choose one of the possible states of one of these subsystems, s/he could assign a definite state to any other subsystem relative to the state of the first subsystem27.

For a sentient being then, the first subsystem can be thought of as always being the one that corresponds to the brain activities that underlie consciousness, and the chosen state would be the corresponding conscious state. Lockwood calls this state that which is "designated by consciousness" (214). The important feature of this chosen state is that it is the common eigenvector of a set of preferred degenerate, compatible observables in the brain. The preference of these observables over the others is ascribed to a choice made by consciousness (we shall examine this argument in detail in a bit). With the first subsystem in place then, the being can think of any other subsystem in the universe as having a definite state relative to his/her/its own brain—this would be what we normally call the state of a system as we perceive it. For instance,

I am looking at my roommate's cactus, Larry, sitting on our window sill right now. The basic things I note about Larry are that he is stationary, green and thorny. This I call Larry's state right now. According to Lockwood's position then, this is not Larry's absolute state; such a state cannot exist, instead, what I perceive is Larry's state relative to a certain brain state of mine that underlies my consciousness at this moment, one which has a set of preferred observables.

Now, where do phenomenal qualities figure in all of this? According to Lockwood, these are the eigenvalues of the preferred observables in the brain system. Or, the green I see on Larry is because my consciousness somehow imposed a set of observables on my brain system, one member of which returned the colour green when measured (this measurement figures as a result

27 This is called the relative state formulation of quantum mechanics, a view that goes back to Hugh Everett III. Lockwood suspects his position is the same as Everett's although he notes that he is not sure to what extent it coincides with Everett's view (229). 30 of my brain system being correlated with Larry's system). As per our earlier discussion then, the contents of the brain system should coincide with the eigenvalues of the preferred observables of the system.

Lockwood accounts for the seemingly objective nature of external reality by assuming that if one's conscious state is correlated with the state of an object, which in turn is correlated with the conscious state of a second observer, then the judgments made about the object by the second observer would be congruent with those made by the first observer about the same object.

That is to say, if someone else with an equally healthy brain system (I guess what would change on a physically damaged brain system would be the preferred set of observables) were to look at

Larry right now, s/he would also see that he is not moving, and is green and thorny. This is all very clever28, but, as Lockwood notes, this relative state approach too leads to the preferred basis problem, which, again without other details, can be thought to be the same as vagueness regarding consciousness imposing a set of preferred observables that we saw before. Lockwood argues that this problem does not challenge the relative state approach any more than it does the standard collapse theory of quantum mechanics, and that "something that is an embarrassment to physics [can] be construed as a mere creature of the mind" (235), thereby attributing the preference for a set of observables to the nature of consciousness, and say that this is just how consciousness works; it somehow chooses a set of observables. It seems to me however, that if one is a materialist who believes that the brain, which is made up of matter, is the seat of consciousness, and that physics is the science that explains matter (regardless of whether or not it has achieved a complete explanation yet), then at some point s/he is obliged to give an

28 Clever because despite its problems, it is a reasonable explanation that accounts for objectivity. 31 explanation, couched in physics, as to what consciousness is like, and if at all it prefers a set of observables, why that is so.

Here too then, Lockwood ascribes a mysteriousness to the way awareness works.

Lockwood's quantum mechanical solution thus does seem to account for objectivity and propose an attractive way to reconcile the objective and the subjective, but formulated the way he has, it does not seem to take us very close to solving the hard problem of consciousness. At this point, I must admit that Lockwood never did claim to have develop a solution to the hard problem in one go; it is however, clear that he did intend these ideas to form a skeletal guide for a future solution—I just do not see how he could develop what he has now further to get to such a solution until he has a clearer idea about how awareness is supposed to do what it does according to the disclosure view.

The Verdict

I tend to agree with Foster; the disclosure view is indeed ingenious, but I too fail to see how it can be developed into a coherent theory that can completely explain our phenomenal experiences, let alone one that could potentially solve the hard problem. We saw that it seems to not face the same problems as standard naive realism, but only as long as we accept the mysterious nature of awareness. The quantum mechanical framework also seems to provide a novel way of thinking about objectivity by way of its relative state approach. However, when it comes to explaining how the very process of awareness disclosing phenomenal qualities works, the disclosure view falls short.

At the heart of Lockwood’s formulation of the view is a tendency to blame every unexplainable bit on the nature of awareness. We can never know what awareness is like, we can only know what it does. We can also never know why or how it does what it does. All of this 32 seems very convenient, and I do not think there are enough grounds to assign such powers as those that lend the capacity to reveal the inherent natures of brain structures to something whose nature of which we are forever destined to be ignorant. Lockwood asks about our access to the nature of awareness, "Can one see the eye with which one see?" (169)—if no one can see the eye with which one sees, then how do we even know we use eyes to see?

Does this necessarily mean that we should give up on materialism? Are we doomed to accept the alternative Foster offers, that of idealism? Strawson does not think so.

33

Chapter 3: Strawson and Panpsychism

Given his coinage of the term the "Very Large Mistake," it should be no surprise that among the three philosophers discussed in this project, Strawson makes this point the most explicit: philosophers take the mind-body problem to be profoundly problematic only because

"they think they know a lot about the nature of the physical," when there is no good reason to do so (Strawson 2008, 54). He bases his view on the fundamentality of experience; this chapter sketches out his arguments towards this end as well as his conclusions as inferred from his essays in Real Materialism and Other Essays. We start with Strawson’s modification of R, then look at his discussion of the repugnance intuition (a mistake similar to the VLM) and finally his thoughts on why panpsychism is the way to go.

Structural Realism

I think it is safe to say that Strawson too assumes a kind of a structure/content distinction in the physical world akin to Russell, although he expresses doubt about such a distinction holding "all the way down," to the most fundamental units of matter, whatever they are (28). We will come back to questions of the validity of this distinction in the next chapter, but another note

Strawson makes on the matter (no pun intended) is that he is not sure the distinction is clear

(from Russell’s formulation). I find Strawson's attempt to interpret Russell helpful in trying to make the distinction clearer; he writes that what Russell had in mind was most likely "a distinction between how X is structurally disposed and what X is apart from (over and above) its structural disposition" (28). Further, one can get a vague idea of what Strawson may be referring to by “intrinsic nature” (or “qualitative character”) from his claim, "Every non-relational property of a thing contributes to its qualitative character" (21, footnote 10): It is a collection of properties of the thing in question, properties that are independent of other objects and their

34 properties.

Strawson's view then is different from Russell's (and here by Russell's view, I mean R, which also encompasses the structure/content distinction) in two ways:

i For Strawson, the description of the structure of a physical object is already a description

of a feature of the object's intrinsic nature. He claims that "this disagreement is merely

terminological" (29), but I am not sure I agree. Regardless, we are not going to pursue

this further in our discussion.

ii The major difference according to Strawson is that he thinks R is wrong insofar as it

claims that we have access to the intrinsic nature of the physical world only when they

are mental events. Strawson argues that we may also have some idea of the intrinsic

natures of parts of the physical universe that are not mental, that "our ordinary conception

of space may get something fundamental right about the nature of reality as it is in itself"

(29). How does this work? Strawson's argument goes like this: Hold out your hands, the

spatial extension in between them is very real, very physical and is something of which

you have an immediate, fundamental knowledge, above and beyond the structural

properties of space as described by physics29 (29-32). I do not buy this argument30, and it

is not pertinent to our discussion; all that matters is that Strawson's conception of space is

relevant to the discussion of the repugnance intuition in the next section.

Before we get to that, it is worth noting that as far as access to intrinsic natures goes,

29 Two points of interest here: a) Strawson mentions that from a personal communication, he knows Lockwood agrees with Russell in that we have no knowledge of the intrinsic nature of space (31) and b) Strawson writes, "my sense of the vulnerability of this claim has increased since I wrote this paper in 1997" (32). 30 Simply because I feel no fundamental knowledge pouring in when I hold my hands out, but then again, I am spatially challenged, so your mileage may vary. 35

Strawson only makes an exception for space; everything else in the physical world that are not mental events have contents inaccessible to us. He writes, "Although I like to think that concepts of space and time carry non-structural content, I do not think this can be true of any of these other concepts considered independently of their relations to concepts of space and time" (34).

The Repugnance Intuition

As mentioned earlier, Strawson bases his view on the fundamentality of experience. By

"experience" and "experiential," he means "the qualitative character that experiences have for those who have them as they have them, where this qualitative character is considered wholly independently of everything else" (20, 21). That is to say, by "experiential phenomena," he is referring to nothing but phenomenal qualities. To get some related terminology down: he uses materialism and physicalism interchangeably to refer to the view that "every real concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical" (19), where "concrete" refers to something that is

"spatiotemporally (or at least temporally) located" (53). Within the realm of concrete phenomena

(which are all physical by way of materialism), there is the distinction between the mental and the non-mental31. Now, mental is not the same as experiential, because even though all experiential phenomena are mental, the converse need not always be true (22). Given all this, this is Strawson's base claim: if you are a "realistic materialist," then you cannot deny that experiential phenomena are real and concrete, "for nothing in this life is more certain" (21). He writes, "Full recognition of the reality of experience is the obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic version of physicalism" (53). One could of course argue against this claim (you

31 NOT between the mental and the physical, as is often formulated; for a materialist, every concrete phenomenon, even the mental ones, are physical (Strawson 22). 36 could, for instance, side with Elon Musk and argue that we only exist as characters in some advanced civilization's virtual reality simulation and therefore have experiences that are unreal), but I do not see any harm in accepting it. For a realistic materialist then all experiential phenomena are physical, and Strawson agrees that experience is "really just neurons firing" (56).

By this however, he does not mean that all of experience can be explained in terms of current physics or neurophysiology or their non-revolutionary extensions [emphasis mine]; rather, his point is that "there is a lot more to neurons than physics and neurophysiology record (or can record)” (56). This is another argument that we will come back to in the next chapter; given

Strawson's notion of experience I would now like to think through an argument involving its opposite, i.e. non-experiential phenomena and the divide between the two.

Strawson argues that some anti-dualists, in the midst passionately refuting dualism, make the very mistake Descartes did: they claim that the experiential and the physical are fundamentally different, and try to find ways to reduce experiential terms into non-experiential terms. "In the normal case, reductive identification of X with Y is not denial of the existence of

X […] In the case of experience, however, to say that it exists but is really just something whose nature can be fully specified in wholly non-experiential functional terms is to deny its existence," writes Strawson (54, footnote 6). Reducing "water" to "H2O" is not denying the existence of water. Reducing "heat" to "molecular motion" is not denying the existence of heat. Then why should reducing experience to non-experiential terms deny the existence of experience? What makes it a non-normal reduction? Strawson does not explicitly explain this, but before thinking about necessity and rigid designators and all that jazz, the clue is in how I introduced the non- experiential in the previous paragraph, as the opposite (or negation) of the experiential (as

37 opposed to say molecular motion, which is not a negation of heat)32. If, by experiential, I mean the qualitative character of my experiences, then its opposite cannot be anything that is based on

(or in any way related to) experience, and therefore saying that the experiential can be reduced to the the non-experiential would be to say that there is no such thing as experience That said, for

Strawson, there are phenomena that are non-experiential33 (i.e. he is not an idealist), and there is a divide between the experiential and the non-experiential because "the only way [the divide] can fail to exist is for there to be nothing non-experiential in nature" (65). Given the fundamentality of experience, Strawson then talks about the Very Large Mistake, about the philosophers whose thought repertoires include the VLM, among them Sir Arthur Eddington, whom he quotes: "It seems rather silly to prefer to attach [thought (=experience)] to something of a so-called

'concrete' nature inconsistent with thought, and then to wonder where the thought comes from"

(59).

Another philosopher whom Strawson points to is Foster, who, in The Case for Idealism, gives "forceful presentations of the repugnance intuition" (Strawson 32, footnote 61). The repugnance intuition is "the old, powerful-seeming Cartesian intuition that there is a 'deep repugnance' or incompatibility between the nature of conscious experience and the nature of spatial extension" (Strawson, 32). Remember, according to Strawson, we do have some access to the intrinsic nature of spatial extension, and that of experience, which we do simply by way of having the corresponding experiences, and therefore the repugnance intuition is merely an illusion (in a sense, it is similar to the VLM with experience replacing the mind and physical

32 Took me a while to realize this. 33 See Strawson pg. 48 for an argument backing this claim, although Strawson does admit one cannot place a lot of confidence in the assumptions made. 38 space replacing matter). The thesis Foster sets out to defend is that "whatever the nature of ultimate physical reality, its physical description is topic-neutral – a description which, beyond a specification of formal structure and nomological organization, conceals the intrinsic nature of both physical space and its fundamental occupants" (Foster 88), and it is interesting to note that it leads him to idealism, which, as we saw in the introduction, states that the universe is mental through and through.

Panpsychism

By contrast, Strawson's premises lead him to panpsychism, the view that everything has a mental feature, that is to say, as compared to neutral monism, the fundamental units of matter for a panpsychist are not neutral; they at least have a mental component, and if panpsychists are materialists (which they are), then these units are physical. It is interesting to note how Strawson rules out the following views in favour of panpsychism (note that if you are a materialist (which

Strawson is), dualism and idealism are already out):

Neutral Monism: Experience is the only thing we know with certainty that exists (according to

Strawson's view, that is) and we have immediate knowledge of its intrinsic nature. If that is so, then experience "cannot be supposed to be merely an appearance of something that is in itself quite unlike experience," and since all experiential phenomena are mental phenomena, the ultimate units of reality must, at the very least, have a mental character, i.e. they cannot be neutral (49, footnote 123). That said, he does say, “There is, in some fundamental sense, only one kind of stuff in the universe” (56). He does not provide any explicit support for this monist claim, just that it "seems to [him] as compelling as it is remarkable" (51). Following our discussion of the VLM, I would say we also do not know enough about the nature of matter to be confident that there is only one kind. Why Strawson thinks otherwise, I have no idea.

39

Emergentism: Within the philosophy of mind, the form of emergentism that is in line with materialism is the view that the mind emerges out of the brain, just like how (to use Strawson's example) fluidity arises out of the physical, non-experiential properties of the molecules which constitute the fluid in question. It is not that fluidity is a property of these individual molecules, it is just that certain specific configurations of these molecules gives rise to the property of fluidity.

It would seem that if Y is emergent from X, Y must be totally dependent on X—there is no fluidity without fluid molecules (61, 62). The kind of emergentism that Strawson refutes is that which claims that experiential phenomena emerge from non-experiential phenomena. Here is how the argument goes: emergence, by its very nature, cannot be "brute," i.e. if Y is emergent from X, it cannot be completely unrelated to X; there must be something about the nature of X which is sufficient for the existence of Y. Given this, if experiential phenomena were to emerge from non-experiential phenomena, there must be something experiential or at least experiential- like in the nature of the non-experiential. But this is not the case for obvious reasons (see the experiential/non-experiential reduction discussion in the previous section), and therefore, experiential phenomena cannot emerge from non-experiential phenomena. Again, I wonder if we cannot use the same logic as we did in the case of neutral monism and ask if we know enough about the experiential/non-experiential divide to make this claim. Note that Strawson does not claim experience is a non-emergent phenomena all together, just that it cannot wholly emerge from purely non-experiential phenomena (70). Sure, I agree that there cannot be anything experiential about the non-experiential, but could there be something experiential-like about the non-experiential and something non-experiential-like in experience? Could there be a halfway point where they meet?

Micropsychism: Not unlike panpsychism, micropsychism is a view which holds that the

40 fundamental units of matter or "ultimates" as Strawson calls them, are intrinsically experiential— just not all of them (71). Some of them are, some of them are not, and it is not clear which ones are and which ones are not or if there is a rule that dictates which ones should be and which ones should not. Strawson rules micropsychism out by saying, "I would bet a lot against there being such radical heterogeneity at the very bottom of things" (71). Again, I think this is assuming a lot about "the very bottom of things," parts of the universe we do not know a lot about, if we are to take the VLM seriously.

Following his discussion of the VLM, Strawson argues that the hard problem is "not sufficiently well defined for us to say that it is hard" (46). Much like Russell, he too seems to think that once we have acknowledged the VLM and accepted panpsychism, the hard problem really is not all that hard. That is not to say that panpsychism has already explained everything that needs explanation; for instance, Strawson agrees that "we will need to address the objection34 to the idea that many subjects of experience can somehow constitute a single ‘larger’ subject of experience” (72). Not unlike our physicists' view on the capabilities of physics however, Strawson seems to have faith in the prospects of panpsychism, but I wonder if his reasons to rule out all the other options are not prone to the same mistake as the VLM, particularly the part of it which assumes that we know anything at all about matter to make a lot of claims about it.

34 Objection initially raised by philosopher and psychologist William James. 41

Conclusion

One major assumption on which we have based our discussions so far is the distinction between the structure and the content of the constituents of the physical world. This distinction is in no way a recent addition to western philosophy; Aristotle, for instance famously wrote in

Physics about how every object was a combination of matter and form35. Why buy this? One can see why Russell thought there is such a distinction: even after we formalize most observable natural phenomena36, there are still those that seem to elude precise mathematical formalization—experience of colour, for instance. The natural conclusion then would be that all properties of a phenomenon that can be formally defined constitute its structure, while the gap, the mathematically elusive stuff (which we "know" exists from our experience of phenomenal qualities) constitute a different class of properties—the intrinsic nature or content of the phenomenon in question. But one could easily argue against this; one could say, for instance, that any perceived distinction is because our mathematics is not advanced enough for us to be able define the latter class of properties.

Russell writes, "The only legitimate attitude about the physical world seems to be one of complete agnosticism as regards all but its mathematical properties" (Russell 1927, 271). This is also arguable. That is to say, even given the distinction, one could ask why we should accept that the best we can hope to know is the structure of the physical world, i.e. structural realism.

Further, given structural realism, one could ask why buy R (as we saw in the chapter on

Lockwood)? All of this to say that the major assumptions made in these discussions are

35 Aristotle's form and matter are not exactly the same as Russell's structure and content, but the distinctions are still similar. 36 Here phenomena also include physical objects. 42 debatable at best. That said, there might be some force to the formalizability of structures argument: in support of Russell, Strawson writes, "It seems that if there is structure, there must be something structured," (28, footnote 40) which sounds reasonable—given that there is structure of course37. Strawson also argues, "A concrete phenomenon must be more than its purely formal or structural properties, because these, considered just as such, have a purely abstract mathematical representation, and are, concretely, nothing—nothing at all" (35). Sure, there must be something that breathes fire into the equations, but why should that something be more than formal properties? As we saw in Chapter 3, Strawson does agree that the distinction between structure and content is not incredibly clear, and I ask: if so, how can we be confident the distinction exists? All of that said, I am willing to accept its existence, if for nothing else, for its role in making the VLM clear. I am, however, not as eager to accept structural realism or R. It seems to me that our ignorance of certain aspects of the world need not necessarily mean that we can never know these things. Not yet, anyway.

Which brings us to the one powerful argument these assumptions lead us to—the Very

Large Mistake argument. Here, I completely agree with Strawson, Lockwood and Russell (and

Eddington and Kant and all the others) that we really do not have enough knowledge about matter to make any claims about its being different from (or the same as) the mental. Intuitively, the way we perceive physical objects and our own mental activity, it is easy to see why we would think there is an unbridgeable gap between the two, but that is in no way an indication that we know enough about either to confirm the existence of this gap. It is this very ignorance that

37 Strawson continues in the same footnote, "only extreme positivistic irresponsibility, or failure to 'realize what an abstract affair form [or structure] really is' can make this seem impossible," and I am not entirely sure what harm would come my way for being an extremely positivistic irresponsible person. 43 explains why there are so many views on the mind-body problem, and it is my view that the reasonable ones can be arrived at only if you accept the VLM—not acknowledging the VLM is how you become a dualist, and nobody wants that.

To review what we have been discussing so far, we thought through three views on the mind-body problem, all of which are variants of materialism, and share the common base of the distinction between structure and content as well as an acknowledgement of the VLM. Russell's universe is made up of events, Lockwood's of matter that is not mental and Strawson's of matter that also has a mental character. I am sympathetic to materialism, and hence once I accept the

VLM, my only option would be to accept that mind and matter cannot be made of (or arise out of or be dependent on, however they work) completely irreconcilable kind of stuff. Anyone who is in the same place as I am could then either be an R-ist (?), an identity theorist or a panpsychist38.

Even with all these different options, given the VLM, it seems reasonable to argue that the hard problem of consciousness needs to be reformulated, as Strawson suggests (46). Alongside the question of how we have phenomenal experiences, we should probably also ask why it is that the hard problem intuitively seems hard. As we saw earlier, Russell made an attempt to do so, although I do not think it was successful.

Does the VLM necessarily mean that matter is inscrutable? Of course not, the VLM merely points out our ignorance about the nature of matter. But is matter inscrutable? I like to think it is not. That is not to say that I even have a partially-formed vaguely logical argument against the inscrutability of matter, just that I do not think we are doomed to never have access to the content of matter. In a way then, I agree with Lockwood—not with his disclosure view, just

38 Not to say these are the only options, just that these are the ones discussed in this thesis. 44 that there must be something of the sort that can explain the apparent gap that leads to the VLM.

Penrose seems to think quantum gravity can solve all of our problems39. And bear with my

Physicists' Arrogance when I say I too—like most physicists—think that ultimately, it will be physics that will shed light on the apparent gap, simply because that is what physics does; it is the science of matter, and it has the capacity to do so40. To recap our three philosophers' positions on the status of physics in relation to the mind-body problem, Russell thinks physics can and does explain all structural properties of the physical world, nothing more, nothing less;

Lockwood thinks physics (some development in quantum mechanics, to be a bit more precise) can illuminate the nature of matter and bridge the apparent gap between the material and the mental; Strawson thinks no non-revolutionary version of physics can hope to explain matter in its entirety—here, it is unclear what would count as revolutionary physics, whether quantum mechanics would even play a role, and I think it is a question worth asking: given physics can solve the mystery of matter, and that current physics has not got very far in doing so, in what direction should physics develop?

I started this project as a materialist, with a small hope that I would find one –ism that I can pledge my allegiance to once and for all and carry on with my life. I am sorry to report that that did not happen. I am still a materialist, but the biggest lesson I learned from all these discussions is the VLM, and it seems to me that once you acknowledge it, all the views that do so as well seem plausible in one way or another. When ignorance is what keeps you from taking a stance, what do you do? Sit around and wait for more information? Russell would tell me "The

39 Penrose, 1994 40 Again, not simply because it is not biology, but because it has been successful in figuring out a fair amount of phenomena in the past and there is no reason to believe it cannot keep doing just that. 45 philosopher must be content to await the progress of science" (Russell 1927, 393), but I think it is as much the duty of a philosopher as that of a physicist to wonder how best to revolutionize physics to make it powerful enough to explain all natural phenomena that need explanation. Of course, as it develops, physics might become less and less like the physics we know today; as

Heisenberg writes in Physics and Philosophy, "Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown, we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word, 'understanding'" (172). At this point, I would like to point towards the Einstein quote in the introduction—perhaps while thinking about whether or not physics (not precluding a revolutionized version) can explain all natural phenomena, we should also think about whether there is any point to it. I have to disagree with Einstein; such enquiries are not entirely without meaning—figuring out how to physically explain phenomena would shed light on how we know and perceive the world around us. No one ever missed out on the beauty of one of Beethoven's symphonies because s/he knew it was just sound waves, and I am willing to bet that even if physics concluded that our world is the most boring collection of phenomena that could ever have been, we would still be courageous enough to love it in all its tainted glory.

46

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