The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind
Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of Philosophy
University of California
Riverside, CA
92521
eschwitz at domain:
ucr.edu
February 28, 2012
The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind
Abstract:
Crazyism
about X is the view that something that it would be crazy to believe must be
among the core truths about X. In this
essay, I argue that crazyism is true of the
metaphysics of mind. A position is
“crazy” in the intended sense if it is contrary to common sense and we are not epistemically compelled to believe it. Views crazy in the intended sense include
that there is no mind-independent material world, that the United States has a
stream of conscious experience distinct from the experiences of the individuals
composing it, that chimps or the intelligent-seeming aliens of science fiction
fantasy entirely lack conscious experience, that mental events are causally
inefficacious. This is by no means a
complete list. Well developed
metaphysical theories will inevitably violate common sense, I argue, because
common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. No coherent and detailed view could respect
it all. Common sense is thus impaired as
a ground of choice. Nor can scientific
evidence or abstract theoretical virtue compellingly favor any one moderately
specific metaphysical approach over all competitors. Something bizarre must be true about the
mind, but which bizarre propositions are the true ones, we are in no good position
to know.
The
Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind
Mysterians
about the mind – Colin McGinn (1989, 2004), Noam
Chomsky (2009) – say that we will probably never know how conscious experience
arises from the brain. But here’s one
thing we do generally know, according to them: Whatever the process involved,
it’s “natural”. No hand of God, no
immaterial souls required. But I wonder,
if we know as little as they say, why rule out deities and immaterial souls? If the soul seems a strange and unnatural
thing, alien to our science, well, our science is an impoverished tool for
penetrating the mysteries of the universe, they say. A turtle might find strange and unnatural a
container ship and might find almost ethereal a schedule of amortization. If we are but somewhat upgraded turtles, our
sense of unnaturalness is no rigorous index of reality.
In this essay I propose a more deeply
skeptical mysterianism about the mind than that of McGinn and Chomsky.
On my view, it is probably the case that something it would be crazy to
believe – something bizarre and undeserving of credence – is among the core
metaphysical truths about the mind. And
immaterial souls aren’t ruled out.
i.
Bizarre
views are a hazard of metaphysics. The
metaphysician starts, seemingly, with some highly plausible initial commitments
or commonsense intuitions – that there is a prime number between 2 and 5, that
I could have had eggs for breakfast, that squeezing the clay statue would
destroy the statue but not the lump of clay.
She thinks long and hard about what, exactly, these claims imply. In the end, she finds herself positing a
realm of abstract Platonic entities, or the real existence of an infinite
number of possible worlds, or a huge population of spatiotemporally coincident
things on her mantelpiece.[1] I believe that there is not a single broad-ranging
exploration of the fundamental issues of metaphysics that doesn’t, by the end,
entangle its author in seeming absurdities (sometimes advertised as “surprising
conclusions”). Rejection of these
absurdities then becomes the commonsense starting point of a new round of
metaphysics, by other philosophers, which in turn generates a complementary
bestiary of metaphysical strangeness.
Thus are philosophers happily employed.
I see three possible explanations of why
philosophical metaphysics is never thoroughly commonsensical:
First possible explanation. A thoroughly commonsensical metaphysics
wouldn’t sell. It would be too boring,
perhaps. Maybe a famous philosopher
can’t say only obvious things. Or maybe
it would lack a kind of elegant serviceability or theoretical panache. Or maybe it would conflict too sharply with
what we think we know from science. The
problem with this explanation is that there should be at least a small market
for a thoroughly commonsensical philosophy, even if that philosophy is gauche,
staid, and scientifically stale. Common
sense might not be quite as fun as Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence
(1883-1888/1967) or Leibniz’s windowless monads (1714/1989); it might not be as
elegantly useful as Lewis’s possible worlds (1986) or as scientifically current
as __________ [insert ever-changing example]; but a commonsensical metaphysics
ought to be attractive to at least a certain portion of philosophers. At least it ought to command attention as a
foil. It oughtn’t be so downmarket as to be entirely invisible.
Second possible explanation. Metaphysics is very difficult. A thoroughly commonsensical metaphysics is
out there to be discovered; we simply haven’t found it yet. If all goes well, someday someone will piece
it all together, top to bottom, with no serious violence to common sense
anywhere in the system. I fear this is
wishful thinking against the evidence.
In the next several sections I will discuss the case of the metaphysics
of mind in particular.
Third possible explanation. Common sense is incoherent in matters of
metaphysics. Contradictions thus
inevitably flow from it, and no coherent metaphysical system can respect it
all. Although ordinary common sense
serves us fairly well in practical maneuvers through the social and physical
world, common sense has proven an unreliable guide in cosmology and probability
theory and microphysics and neuroscience and macroeconomics and evolutionary
biology and structural engineering and medicine and topology. If, as it seems to, metaphysics more closely
resembles these endeavors than it resembles reaching practical judgments, we
might excusably doubt the dependability of common sense as a guide to
metaphysics.[2] Undependability doesn’t imply incoherence, of
course. But it seems a natural next step
in this case, and it would tidily explain the historical fact at hand.
On the first explanation, we could
easily enough invent a thoroughly commonsensical metaphysical system if we
wanted one, but we don’t want one. On
the second explanation, we do want one, or enough of us do, but we haven’t yet
managed to pull it off. On the third
explanation, we can’t have one. I hope
you’ll agree with me that the third has at least some prima facie merit. In sections iii-viii I will further explore the
role of common sense in the metaphysics of mind.
Common sense might be culturally
variable. So whose common sense do I
take to be at issue in this argument? I
suspect it doesn’t matter. All
metaphysical systems in the philosophical canon, I’m inclined to think,
conflict both with the common sense of their milieu and with current Western
common sense. Much of the human
worldview is stable over time, especially in Western societies since the early
modern period. Eternal recurrence,
windowless monads, and the real existence of an infinitude of possible worlds
were never part of any society’s common sense.
Some readers will disagree about the
existence of the phenomenon I aim to explain; they will think that there is a
thoroughly commonsensical metaphysics on the market. To some extent, I’m simply taking as a
premise that there is none, and I’m inviting you to agree based on your own
reading of historical and contemporary metaphysics. Maybe the premise will appeal better, though,
if I highlight its intended scope. It
concerns only broad-ranging explorations of fundamental metaphysical issues,
especially the issues where seeming absurdities congregate: mind and body,
causation, identity, the catalogue of entities that really exist. Some skating treatments and some deep
treatments of narrow issues might dodge the charge.
Who might count as a thoroughly
commonsensical metaphysician? Aristotle,
I’ve sometimes heard. Or Scottish
“common sense” philosopher Thomas Reid.
Or G.E. Moore, famous for his “Defence of
Common Sense” (1925). Or “ordinary
language” philosopher P.F. Strawson. But Aristotle didn’t envision himself as
developing a commonsensical view: In the introduction to the Metaphysics Aristotle says that the
conclusions of sophisticated inquiries such as his own will often seem “wonderful”
to the untutored and contrary to their initial opinions (4th c.
BCE/1928, 983a; θαυμαστόν:
wonderful in the sense of tending to cause wonder, or amazing); and Aristotle
generally conceives his project as in part to distinguish the true from the
false in common opinion. Moore, though
fierce in wielding common sense against his foes, seems unable to preserve all
commonsense commitments when he develops his positive views in detail, for
example in his waffling about “sense data” (1922, 1953, 1957). Strawson struggles
similarly, especially in his 1985 book, where he can find no satisfactory
commonsense account of mental causation.
Reid I will discuss briefly in section vi.
The argument of this section is an
empirical explanatory or “abductive” argument. The empirical fact to be explained is that
all existing metaphysical systems are bizarre in some of their major
features. An attractive possible
explanation of this fact, I submit, is that common sense is incoherent on
matters metaphysical, so that no self-consistent and detailed metaphysical
system can satisfy all commonsense constraints.
ii.
Let’s
call a position bizarre if it’s
contrary to common sense. And let’s say
that a position is contrary to common sense just in case a majority of people
without specialized training on the issue confidently, but perhaps implicitly,
believe it to be false. Claims about
common sense are empirically testable, but not always straightforwardly so. It might, for example, sometimes be difficult
to clarify the target claim – e.g., that there is a “Platonic realm” – without
either mangling the target view or altering the respondent’s attitude toward
it; and what is implicitly believed may be only tenuously connected to explicit
questionnaire responses. The best first-pass
measure of commonsensicality might be specialists’ own impressions about the
degree of conflict between positions in their field and non-specialists’
attitudes, as remembered from their training and reinforced in their teaching,
with contentious cases to be referred for more systematic empirical study.
To call a position bizarre is not
necessarily to repudiate it. General
relativity is bizarre. Various bizarre
things are true about the infinite. It’s
bizarre yet true that a black and white disk will look colored if spun at the
right speed. Common sense errs, and we
can be justified in thinking so. However,
we are not ordinarily justified in accepting bizarre views without compelling
evidence. In the matters it traverses,
common sense serves as an epistemic starting point that we reject only with
sufficient warrant. To accept a bizarre
view on thin grounds – for example, to think that the world was created five
minutes ago, or that you are constantly cycling through different immaterial
souls, or that the universe was sneezed out by the Great Green Arkleseizure (assuming you have no special warrant for
these views) – seems crazy. I stipulate,
then, the following technical definition of a crazy position: A position is crazy if it’s bizarre and we are not epistemically compelled to believe it.
One needn’t, of course, be clinically
insane to accept crazy views, and not all crazy views are as crazy as the three
just mentioned. Many philosophers and
some scientists embrace positions contrary to common sense and for which the
evidence is less than compelling. In
fact, to convert a position from crazy to merely bizarre might be the highest
form of academic success. Einstein,
Darwin, and Copernicus (or maybe Kepler) all managed
the conversion – and in the case at least of Copernicus common sense eventually
relented. Intellectual risk-takers
nurture the crazy and see what marvels bloom.
The culture of contemporary Anglophone academia, perhaps especially
philosophy, overproduces craziness like a plant produces seeds.
Crazyism
about a topic, then, is the view that something crazy must be among the core
truths about that topic. Crazyism can be justified when we have good reason to
believe that one among several bizarre views must be true but where the balance
of evidence leaves no individual view decisively supported over all the
others. We might find ourselves
rationally compelled to believe that either T1, T2, T3, or T4 must be true,
where each of the T’s is crazy.
Crazyism
might be justified in interpreting quantum mechanics. The “many worlds” and “many minds” interpretations,
for example, sharply conflict, it seems, with ordinary common sense.[3] And it also seems that the balance of
evidence does not compellingly favor either of these views over all
competitors. Thus, the views are crazy
in the sense defined. If the same holds
for all viable interpretations of
quantum mechanics, then crazyism would be warranted in
that domain.[4]
I will argue below that crazyism is warranted in the metaphysics of mind. I will argue any well developed materialist
metaphysics will be crazy, in the intended sense of the term. I will argue the same for any well developed
dualist metaphysics. And the same for
idealism (well developed or not). And
for positions that reject all three of these views or aim to reconcile or
compromise among them. But some
metaphysical theory of this sort must be true – that is, either some form of materialism, dualism, or idealism must be true or some sort of rejection or compromise
approach must be true. So something
crazy must be among the core truths in the metaphysics of mind.
iii.
Materialism
has enjoyed such a good vogue in Anglophone philosophy recently that it might
not seem to be crazy. And, indeed, it is
not part of my thesis that materialism is crazy. Rather, my thesis is that any well developed materialist metaphysics
will be crazy. Maybe materialism per se
is sufficiently vague and noncommittal as to provide no shock to common sense. However, I do think that working out the details of a materialist view will
inevitably force choices among major violations of common sense, and no one
conjunction of violations will merit belief over all rivals. This is an empirical conjecture about the
medium-term future. (A hundred years
from now, who knows?)
The materialist (or “physicalist”)
position is difficult to characterize precisely.[5] This might be a problem for the view – though
if so, I’m inclined to think that it’s just a manifestation of a more general
problem that I’ll discuss in section xii.
As a working approximation, let’s characterize materialism as the view
that everything in the universe is composed of, or reducible to, or most
fundamentally, material stuff, where “material stuff” means things like elements of the periodic
table and the various particles or waves or fields that interact with or
combine to form such elements, whatever those particles, waves, or fields might
be, as long as they are not themselves intrinsically mental. The two historically most important
competitor positions are idealism and substance dualism, both of which assert
the existence of an immaterial soul.
It’s a striking sociological fact about
materialism that, after a long history as a minority position, suddenly in the
1950s and 1960s a young generation of Anglophone philosophers of mind adopted
it as orthodoxy – Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Daniel Dennett, David Lewis,
J.J.C. Smart, Fred Dretske, Donald Davidson, John Searle[6], David
Armstrong, Sydney Shoemaker, and many others.
Maybe this sudden generational shift reflected progress, like the
progress of science. It’s also possible
that it was the broad swing of a pendulum.
We don’t yet have, I suspect, the historical distance to know.
iv.
Materialism
per se might be contrary to common
sense.
Materialism is almost certainly a
minority view in our current culture and historically across human cultures. People have a widespread, and maybe deep,
tendency to believe that they are more than just material stuff. I doubt most readers need convincing of this sociological
fact, but for completeness see this note.[7] Not all unpopular views violate common sense,
however, by my definition of “common sense” (in section ii): It depends how
confidently the opposing view is held.
In the case of materialism per se – that is, materialism abstractly
considered, prior to theoretical choices about how to develop it – I find it
difficult to gauge, without more systematic empirical evidence, how confident,
stable, and widespread its rejection is among non-specialists.
Certain apparent consequences of materialism per se might be robustly bizarre. This would explain anti-materialist
philosophers’ fondness of these consequences as an argumentative lever. Consider Leibniz’s mill:
Moreover,
we must confess that the perception, and
what depends on it, is inexplicable in
terms of mechanical reasons, that is, through shapes and motions. If we imagine that there is a machine whose
structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it
enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one
enters into a mill. Assuming that, when
inspecting its interior, we will only find parts that push one another, and we
will never find anything to explain a perception (1714/1989, p. 215 [§ 17],
emphasis in original).
When
the view is so vividly displayed, something in most people, I think, resists
the materialist’s reduction of experience to bumping matter. If you see nothing bizarre in Leibniz’s mill,
maybe science and philosophy have stolen a bit of your common sense. Other thought experiments work similarly. Consider “zombies”: It seems we can conceive
of entities physically and behaviorally identical to us but entirely lacking
conscious experience or “phenomenology”.[8] Conceivability may or may not imply
possibility; the thought experiment has power regardless. It draws the mind to think that materialism
leaves something out. Consider also
Frank Jackson’s (1986) “Mary”, the super-scientist confined to a black and
white room, who can seemingly learn all the physical facts about the world,
including about the physics and physiology of color perception, yet remain
ignorant of some experiential facts, such as what it’s like to see red. Such thought experiments seem to tap into a
folk psychological “explanatory gap” between physical properties or events and
the colorful phenomenology of conscious experience; people seem to seek
something immaterial to bridge the two.[9] Maybe, then, it’s part of common sense to
suppose that any materialist metaphysics will be incomplete.
v.
Regarding
materialism per se, I think it’s unclear exactly where the boundaries of common
sense lie. However, I believe that any well developed materialist metaphysics
of mind – that is, any plausible materialist metaphysics with specific
commitments about the necessary and sufficient conditions for possessing mental
states – will inevitably astound common sense.
If it seems otherwise in reading Putnam or Lewis or Smart, that’s
because materialist philosophers are often vague on the issues from which
bizarreness springs.
If materialism per se conflicts with
majority belief and presents a seeming explanatory gap, all the more so, it
seems likely, will specific materialist accounts of consciousness. Francis Crick (1994), for example, equates
human consciousness with synchronized 40-hertz oscillations in the subset of
neurons corresponding to an attended object.
Nicholas Humphrey (1992, 2011) equates consciousness in general with
reentrant feedback loops in an animal’s sensory system. Such views are not just tepidly
unintuitive. Crick and Humphrey both
repeatedly emphasize that non-specialists vigorously resist their views. Common sense fights them hard. Common sense fights them hard not because of
the details, I suspect, but rather because the details vividly reveal the
bizarreness of the general project.
Another reason to anticipate sharp
conflicts between common sense and well developed forms of materialism is that,
as I mentioned in section i, common sense has tended
to fare poorly beyond practical contexts.
A dismal induction suggests that common sense will be grossly wrong
about some major aspect of the metaphysics of mind too – especially if we
consider implications beyond the usual run of daily life, implications for pathological
and science fiction and deep-sea cases.
Philosophers friendly to materialism should be eager, like Crick and
Humphrey, to abandon poorly founded aspects of common sense.[10]
Early returns in the experimental study
of folk attributions of mental states to corporations, robots, and peculiar
entities suggest that folk psychology is not a paradise of rigorously
principled materialism.[11] Materialists have reason to suspect serious
flaws in the folk psychological materials from which commonsense judgments must
ultimately be constructed. For example,
Brian Fiala, Adam Arico,
and Shaun Nichols (forthcoming) argue for a dual-process explanation of the
folk psychology of consciousness attribution.
They postulate a “low road” cognitive process that attributes
consciousness to entities with eyes, non-inertial motion trajectories, and
apparently contingent interaction, and they postulate a “high road” cognitive
process grounded in deliberate reasoning, including consciously endorsed
theories. Suppose this dual-process
model is broadly correct. One might
doubt that either the low-road or the
high-road process will map nicely onto any plausible well developed materialist
metaphysics. Even if one process does by
happy circumstance map well, the other process – or still some third cognitive
mechanism, maybe one grounded more directly in social and emotional processes –
might well still prove powerful enough to generate conclusions contrary to the
first and yet felt to have the force of common sense.
I will now illustrate by discussing two
specific issues on which I suspect well developed materialist views will be
forced into bizarreness.
First
illustration of the likely bizarreness of materialism: Mad pain, Martian pain,
and beer can pain. Who
in the universe can feel pain? To judge
from the literature, there are currently four viable materialist answers:
beings with brains like our own, beings that react to the world in patterns
similar to our own, some hybrid view, or some further-mysterious-property
view. To evoke a further mysterious
property is not to have a well developed view in the sense I intend, so let’s
set such gestures aside. The remaining
three views all appear to have bizarre consequences. To insist on brains, that is, on similarity to
our own interior biophysical configuration, seems terribly chauvinistic if we
hope to have the whole universe in view and not just our little section of it:
Couldn’t a being – an octopus or a space alien? – feel pain despite stark
interior differences from us?[12] Suppose space aliens arrive tomorrow. They decode English from our television
broadcasts and converse fluently with us, behaving much as we do – including
withdrawing, screaming, writhing, protesting, avoiding, and revenging when
damaged with sharp objects. They write
novels and medical treatises about their agonies, and there’s no reason to
doubt their sincerity. They look and act
much like us, but inside, they operate by hydraulics, or lasers, or maybe even
via the interaction of a billion writhing bugs.
I venture that it would seem bizarre to most people – a weird
philosopher’s quibble – to insist that to really be experiencing pain they must
also have brains like our own. One can
imagine the outraged charges of speciesism if a human
were to insist that only we genuinely have conscious experiences and the aliens
(perhaps now integrated into schools and marriages) are mere machines all dark
inside.
As I’ve described the case, these aliens
are functionally similar to us,
similar in having pain states that play human-like causal roles in their mental
economies. Thus functionalism beckons: Maybe
the beings in the universe who experience pain are just the beings in the
universe who have states that play the causal role of pain, however those
states are physically constituted. But
such functionalism also has bizarre consequences, as highlighted by Ned Block
(1978/1991) and John Searle (1980, 1984, 1992).
If mentality is all about causal role, then weird assemblies of beer
cans and wire, powered by windmills and controlling a marionette, could
presumably have conscious experience if arranged the right way; and systems
composed of rulebooks, slips of paper, and monolingual English speakers could
understand Chinese. Such systems could
presumably, at least in principle, produce arbitrarily complex functional
patterns of behavior, outwardly indistinguishable (except in speed) from the
behavior of commonsensically conscious beings like
dogs or babies or even adult humans. Genuine
mentality might even be possible for economic systems manipulated by wealthy
hobbyists, if the fifth derivative of the balance of payments can be made to
play the right abstractly defined causal role.
Similarly bizarre are some consequences on the flip side: If pain is all
about causal role, then no one could feel pain without possessing some state
that is playing the normal causal role of pain.
But it seems simple common sense that one person might enter an
experiential state under one set of conditions and might tend to react to it in
one way, while another person, or the same person later, might tend to enter
the same type of experiential state under very different conditions and have
very different reactions. Madness,
pathology, disability, drugs, brain stimulation, personality quirks, and maybe
radical Sartrean freedom, can amply scramble, it seems,
the actual and counterfactual causes and effects of any experiential
state. So while the brain-oriented view
seems to be neural chauvinism, insisting that pain is all about causal role appears
to be functional chauvinism.
Maybe both views are too simple. Maybe we can thread the needle by
hybridizing: Beings who experience pain are beings in states with one of a
variety of possible biological or physical configurations – just those
biological or physical configurations that normally
play the causal role of pain, even if things sometimes aren’t quite normal. The word “normally” here can be understood in
various ways. Maybe what matters is that
the being possesses some type of physical or biological configuration that plays
the required causal role in the right population (e.g., Lewis 1980). Or maybe what matters is that the
configuration played that role, or was selected to play that role, in the
developmental or evolutionary history of the organism (e.g., Dretske 1995; Tye 1995, 2009).
Either way, you’re in pain because you’re in the physical state that
normally plays the causal role of pain for you or for your group, regardless of
whether that state happens to be playing exactly that role for you right this
instant.
What’s central to all such appeals to
normality is that pains no longer “supervene” locally: Whether you’re in pain
now depends on how your current biophysical configuration is seated in the
broader universe. It depends on who else
is in your group or on events in the past.
If normality turns upon the past, then you and I might be
molecule-for-molecule identical with each other now, screaming and writhing
equally, equally cursing our maker, but because of differences in personal or
evolutionary history, you’re in pain and I’m not. This would seem to be action at a historical
distance. If pain depends, instead, on
what is currently normal for your species or group, that could change with
selective genocide or with a speciation event beyond your ken. Strange forms of anesthesia! While local nonsupervenience
is plausible for relational properties – whether I have an uncle, whether I’m
thinking of coffee cup A or qualitatively identical coffee cup B – it is
bizarre for pain.
The issue appears to present a trilemma for the materialist: Either accept neural
chauvinism (no Martian pain), accept flat-footed functionalism (beer can pain
and no mad pain), or deny local supervenience
(anesthesia by speciation or genocide). Maybe
some materialist view can evade all three horns; they don’t seem logically
exhaustive. But if so, I don’t see the
view out there yet. It is, I think, a
reasonable guess that no plausible, well developed materialist view can
simultaneously respect all our commonsense judgments about this cluster of
issues.[13]
Second
illustration of the likely bizarreness of materialism: The consciousness of the
United States.
It would be bizarre to suppose that the United States has a stream of
conscious experience distinct from the conscious experiences of the people who
compose it. I hope you’ll agree.[14] (By “the United States” here, I mean the
large, vague-boundaried group of people who are
compatriots, sometimes acting in a coordinated manner.) Yet it’s unclear by what materialist standard
the United States lacks consciousness. Nations,
it would seem, represent and self-represent.
They respond (semi-)intelligently and self-protectively, in a
coordinated way, to opportunities and threats.
They gather, store, and manipulate information. They show skillful attunement to
environmental inputs in warring and spying on each other. Their subparts (people and subgroups of
people) are massively informationally interconnected
and mutually dependent, including in incredibly fancy self-regulating feedback
loops. These are the kinds of capacities
and structures that materialists typically regard as the heart of mentality.[15] Nations do all these things via the behavior
of their subparts, of course; but on materialist views individual people also
do what they do via the behavior of their subparts. A planet-sized alien who squints might see
individual Americans as so many buzzing pieces of a somewhat diffuse body
consuming bananas and automobiles, invading Iraq, exuding waste.
Even if the United States still lacks a
little something needed for consciousness, it seems we ought at least
hypothetically to be able to change that thing, and so generate a stream of
experience. We presumably needn’t go
nearly as far as Block does in his famous “Chinese nation” example (1978/1991)
– an example in which the country of China implements the exact functional
structure of someone’s mind for an hour – unless we suppose, bizarrely, that
consciousness is only possible among beings with almost exactly our psychology
at the finest level of functional detail.
If we are willing to attribute consciousness to relatively
unsophisticated beings (frogs? fish?), well, it seems that the United States
can, and does sometimes, act with as much coordination and intelligence, if on
a larger scale. Arguably, the United
States is vastly more functionally sophisticated than such organisms, or even
than individual human beings, considering the layers upon layers of
bureaucratic military and civilian organization and the subsumption
of individual human intelligences within the goals and outputs of those
organizations.
The most plausible materialistic attempt
I’ve seen to confine consciousness within the skull while respecting the
broadly functionalist spirit of most materialism is Andy Clark’s (2009) and Chris
Eliasmith’s (2009) suggestion that consciousness
requires the functional achievements possible through high bandwidth neural
synchrony. However, it’s hard to see why
speed per se should matter. Couldn’t
conscious intelligence be slow-paced, especially in large entities? And it’s hard to see why synchrony should
matter either, as long as the functional tasks necessary for intelligent
responsiveness are successfully executed.
Alternatively, one might insist that
specific details of biological implementation are essential to consciousness in
any possible being – for example, specific states of a unified cortex with
axons and dendrites and ion channels and all that – and that broadly mammal-like
or human-like functional sophistication alone won’t do. However, as I argued regarding pain, it seems
bizarrely chauvinistic to regard consciousness as only possible in beings with
internal physical states very similar to our own, regardless of outwardly
measurable behavioral similarity. Or is
there some specific type of behavior that all conscious animals exhibit but
that the United States, perhaps slightly reconfigured, could not exhibit, and
that is a necessary condition of consciousness?
It’s hard to see what that behavior could be. Is the United States simply not enough of an
“entity” in the relevant sense? Well,
why not? What if we all held hands?
In his classic early statement of
functionalism, Putnam (1965) simply rules out, on no principled grounds, that a
collection of conscious organisms could be conscious. He didn’t want his theory to result in swarms
of bees having collective conscious experience, he says. But why not?
Maybe bee swarms are dumber and represent less than do individual bees –
arguably committees collectively act and collectively represent less than do
their members as individuals – but that would seem to be a contingent,
empirical question about bees. To rule
out swarm consciousness a priori, regardless of swarm behavior and swarm
structure, seems mere prejudice against beings of radically different morphology. Shouldn’t a well developed materialist view eventually
jettison unprincipled folk morphological prejudices? We resist, perhaps, attributing consciousness
to noncompact beings and to beings whose internal mechanisms
we can see – but most materialist theories appear to imply, and probably part
of common sense also implies, that such differences aren’t metaphysically
important. The materialist should
probably expect that some entities to which it would seem bizarre to attribute
conscious experience do in fact have conscious experience. If materialism is true, and if the kinds of
broadly functional capacities that most materialists regard as central to
conscious mentality are indeed central, it may be difficult to dodge the
conclusion that the United States has its own stream of conscious experience,
in addition to the experiences of its individual members.[16]
That’s the kind of bizarreness I’m
talking about. These two examples
illustrate it, but if one or both examples fail, I hope that the general point
is still plausible on broad, inductive grounds. The more we learn about cosmology,
microphysics, mathematics, and other such foundational matters, both cosmic and
a priori, the grosser the violations of common sense seem to become. The materialist should expect no lesser weirdness
from the metaphysics of mind.
vi.
One
alternative to materialism is dualism, the view that people are not wholly
material entities but rather possess immaterial souls in addition to their
material bodies.[17] (By “dualism”, unqualified, I mean substance dualism, which posits an
immaterial soul. “Property dualism” I
will discuss briefly below.) Although
dualism has merits as a first pass at a commonsense metaphysics of mind, from
the 17th century to the present, the greatest philosophers of the
Western world have universally found themselves forced into bizarre views when
attempting to articulate the metaphysics of immateriality. I regard this history as significant
empirical evidence that a well developed metaphysics of substance dualism will
unavoidably be bizarre.
Attempts at commonsense dualism founder,
it seems, on at least two broad issues: the causal powers of the immaterial
mind and the class of beings with immaterial minds.
The causal powers issue can be posed as
a dilemma: Does the immaterial soul have the causal power to affect material
entities like the brain? If yes, then
material entities like neurons must be regularly and systematically influenced
by immaterial events. A neuron must be
caused to fire not just because of the chemical, electrical, and other physical
influences on it but also because of immaterial happenings in spiritual
substances. And that forces a subsidiary
choice. Maybe events in the immaterial
realm transfer some physical or quasi-physical push that makes the neuron
behave other than it would without that immaterial push. But that seems contrary to both ordinary
ideas and mainstream scientific ideas about the sorts of events that can alter
the behavior of small, material, mechanistic-seeming things like the subparts
of neurons. Alternatively, maybe the
immaterial somehow causally operates on the material despite the fact that
material events would transpire in exactly the same way absent that
influence. And that seems at least as strange
a view. Suppose, then, the other horn of
the dilemma: The immaterial soul has no causal influence on material
events. If immaterial souls do anything,
they engage in rational reflection. On a
no-influence view, such rational reflection could not causally influence the
movements of the body. You can’t make a
rational decision that has any effect on the physical world. This again seems bizarre by the standards of
ordinary common sense. I’ve rolled quickly
here over some complex issues, but I hope that the informed reader will find
that it rings true to say that dualists have perennially faced trouble
accommodating the full range of commonsense opinion on mental-physical
causation, for approximately the reasons outlined.[18]
The scope of mentality issue can be expressed
as a quadrilemma. Horn 1: Only human beings have immaterial
souls. Only we have afterlives; only we
have religious salvation. There’s a
religious cleanliness to the idea. But
if the soul is the locus of conscious experience, then this view has the result
that dogs are mere machines, with no consciousness, no pains, no sense
experiences; there’s nothing it’s like to be a dog, any more than there’s
something it’s like to be a toy robot.
And that seems bizarre. Horn 2:
Everybody and everything is in: humans, dogs, frogs, worms, viruses, carbon
chains, lone hydrogen ions in outer space – we’re all conscious! That view seems bizarre too. Horn 3: There a line in the sand. There’s a sharp demarcation somewhere between
beings with conscious experiences and those with no conscious experiences. But that seems weird, too: Across the
spectrum of animals there’s a smooth gradation of psychological
capacities. Given this smooth gradation,
how could there be a sharp line between the ensouled
and unensouled creatures? What, toads in, frogs out? Grasshoppers in, crickets out? If the immaterial soul is the locus of
conscious experience, it ought to do some work; there ought to be big
psychological differences between creatures with and without souls. But the only remotely plausible place it
seems, to draw a sharp line is between human beings and all the rest – but that
puts us back on Horn 1. Horn 4: Maybe we
don’t have to draw a sharp line. Maybe
having a soul is not an on-or-off thing.
Maybe there’s a smooth gradation of ensoulment,
so that some animals – frogs? – kind-of-have immaterial souls. But that’s weird too. What would it mean, to kind of have or
halfway have an immaterial soul? Isn’t
an immaterial soul the kind of thing you either have or don’t have? Immateriality doesn’t seem like one of these
vague properties, like being red or being tall, of which there are gradations
and in-between cases.[19]
I don’t intend the arguments of the past
two paragraphs as a priori metaphysical arguments against dualism. Rather, they constitute a proposed diagnosis
of an empirically observed phenomenon: the failure of Descartes, Malebranche,
Spinoza, Leibniz, Bayle, Berkeley, Reid, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, et al., up
to and including recent substance dualists like Popper and Eccles (1977) and Foster
(1991) to develop non-bizarre views of the metaphysics of immateriality. Some of these thinkers are better described
as idealists or compromise/rejection theorists than substance dualists, but the
mire of issues they faced was the same, and my explanation of their attraction
to bizarre metaphysics is the same: Common sense opinion about immateriality is
a jumble.
You might feel that there exists a well
developed substance dualist metaphysics that violates common sense in no major
respect. I can’t treat every philosopher
on a case-by-case basis, but let me briefly mention two: Reid, who enjoys some
reputation as a commonsense philosopher, and Descartes, whose interactionist substance dualism has perhaps the best initial
intuitive appeal.
Reid’s explicit and philosophically
motivated commitment to common sense often leads him to refrain from advancing
detailed metaphysical views – which is of course no harm to my thesis. However, in accord with my thesis, on those
occasions where Reid does develop views on the metaphysics of dualism, he
appears unable to sustain his commitment to common sense. On the scope of mentality, Reid is either
silent or slides far down toward the panpsychist end:
He attributes immaterial souls to vegetables (esp. in 1774-1778/1995, 3.X), but
it’s unclear whether Reid thinks such immateriality is sufficient for mentality
(leading to a view of mentality as radically abundant) or not (in which case
Reid did not develop a criterion for non-human mentality and so his view is not
“well developed” in the relevant sense).
On causal powers, Reid holds material events to be causally
epiphenomenal: Only immaterial beings have genuine causal power. Physical objects cannot produce motion or
change, or even to cohere into shapes, without the regular intervention of
immaterial beings (1774-1778/1995; 1788/2010).
Reid recognizes that this view conflicts with the commonsense opinions
of ordinary people – though he says this mistake of the “vulgar” does them no
harm (see 1788/2010, IV.3). Despite his
commitment to common sense, Reid explicitly acknowledges that on some issues
human understanding is weak and common sense errs (see also 1785/2002, I.1).
Descartes, too, can’t quite keep
friendly to common sense regarding causal powers and animal souls. He advocates an interactionist
dualist approach to causal powers on which activities of the soul can influence
the brain. This view is, perhaps,
somewhat less jarring to common sense than some of the other options. But interactionist
dualism does, as noted above, suggest a rather odd and seemingly unscientific view
of the behavior of neurons, which is perhaps part of why so many of Descartes’s dualist successors rejected interactionism. It also, perhaps, requires some contortions
to explain how the rational, non-embodied processes of the immaterial soul can
be hijacked by drugs and alcohol.[20] On the distribution of immaterial souls,
Descartes occupies the extreme opposite pole from the panpsychist:
Only human beings have minds. Non-human
animals, despite their evident similarity to human beings in physiology and in
much of their behavior, have no more thought or sensory experience than does a
cleverly made automaton (1649/1991). That
Descartes’s opponents could imagine Descartes, in
Leiden, flinging a cat out a window as he asserts that animals are mere
machines, is testament to the sharp division between Descartes’s
and the common person’s view about the consciousness of cats. The defenestration of the cat is, or is
intended to be, the very picture of metaphysical craziness.[21] Descartes’s interactionist dualism, on inspection, is no great monument
of common sense.
I conclude that we have good grounds to believe
that any well developed dualist metaphysics of mind will conflict sharply with
common sense on some central issues.
vii.
The
third historically important position is idealism, the view that there is no
material world at all but only a world of minds or spirits, in interaction with
each other or with God, or wholly solipsistic.
In the Western tradition, Berkeley (1710-1713/1965), Fichte
(1794/1795/1970), and maybe Hegel (1807/1977) are important advocates of this
view; some non-Western and mystical thinkers also appear to embrace idealism.[22] As Berkeley acknowledges, idealism is not the
ordinary view of non-philosophers: “It is indeed an opinion strangely
prevailing amongst men that houses, mountains, rivers, and, in a word, all
sensible objects have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being
perceived by the understanding” (PHK §4).
No one, it seems, is born an idealist.
They are convinced, against common sense, by metaphysical arguments or
by an unusual religious or meditative experience. Idealism also inherits the bizarre choices
about causation and the scope of ensoulment that
trouble dualist views: If a tree falls, is this somehow one idea causing
another, in however many or few minds happen to observe it? Do non-human animals exist only as ideas in
our minds or do they have minds of their own; and if the latter, how do we
avoid the slippery slope to panpsychism?
The bizarrenesses
of materialism and dualism may not be immediately evident, manifesting only when
details are developed and implications clarified. Idealism, in contrast, is bizarre on its
face.
viii.
There
might be an alternative to classical materialism, substance dualism, or
idealism; or there might be a compromise position. Maybe Kant’s transcendental idealism
(1781/1787/1998) is such an alternative or compromise, or maybe some sort of Russellian (1921, 1927) or Chalmersian
(1996) neutral monism or property dualism is.
However, I think we could hardly accuse Kant, Russell, or Chalmers of
articulating a commonsense view of the metaphysics of mind, even if there are
aspects of their views that accord better with common sense than do some of the
competitor views. Chalmers, for example,
offers no good commonsense answer to the problems of immaterial causation and
the scope of immateriality, tentatively favoring epiphenomenalism and panpsychism: All information processing systems, even
thermostats, have conscious experience or at least “proto-consciousness”, but
such immaterial properties play no causal role in their physical behavior. The attractions of Kant, Russell, and Chalmers
lie, if anywhere, in their elegance and rigor rather than their
commonsensicality.
Alternatively, maybe there’s no
metaphysical fact of the matter here. Maybe
the issue is so ill-conceived that debate about it is hopelessly misbegotten (Carnap 1928/1967, 1932/1959; maybe Searle 1992, 2004[23]). Or maybe asking metaphysical questions of
this sort takes us too far beyond the proper bounds of language use to be
meaningful.[24] But this type of view, too, seems
bizarre. The whole famous mind-body
dispute is over nothing real, or nothing it makes sense to try to talk
about? There is no fact of the matter
about whether something in you goes beyond the merely physical or
material? We can’t legitimately ask
whether some immaterial part of you might transcend the grave? It’s one thing to allow that facts about
transcendent existence might be unknowable – an agnostic view probably within
the bounds of common sense options – and it’s one thing to express the view, as
some materialists do, that dualists speak gibberish when they invoke the
immaterial soul; but it’s quite another thing, a much more radical and
unintuitive thing, to say that there is no legitimate sensible interpretation
of the dualist-materialist(-idealist) debate, not even sense enough to allow
the materialist coherently to express her rejection of the dualist’s
transcendent hopes.
ix.
I
am making an empirical claim about the history of philosophy and offering a
psychological explanation for this putative empirical fact. The empirical claim is that all existing well
developed accounts of the metaphysics of mind are bizarre. The psychological explanation is that common sense
is incoherent with respect to the metaphysics of mind. Common sense, and indeed I think simple
logic, requires that one of four options be true: materialism, dualism,
idealism, or a compromise/rejection view.
And yet common sense conflicts with each option, either on its face or
implicitly as revealed when metaphysical choices are made and implications
pursued. If common sense is indeed
incoherent in the metaphysics of mind, then the empirical claim can be modally generalized:
It is not possible to develop a metaphysics of mind that is both coherent and
non-bizarre by the standards of current common sense, if that view involves
specific commitments on tricky issues like fundamental ontology, mind-body
causation, and the scope of mentality.
Call this thesis universal
bizarreness.
Crazyism
requires conjoining universal bizarreness with a second thesis, universal dubiety, to which I will now
turn. The universal dubiety thesis is
just the thesis that none of the bizarre options compels belief.
What is it for a position to be dubious,
or – equivalently, as I intend – for it to fail to compel belief? In previous drafts, I’ve sketched it
differently, but epistemic psychology of dubiety and belief compulsion is a
distractingly thorny affair. Instead of
trying to hone it to a fine point, let me suggest that the arguments below are
robust across conceptualizations of dubiety.
If the arguments work, they jointly (and perhaps severally) deliver the
conclusion that materialism is a dubious metaphysical position, and so also are
dualism, idealism, and compromise/rejection views, for most ways of
conceptualizing dubiety.
They do, that is, unless one insists on
a high bar for dubiety (a low bar for compulsion). If, for example, it were sufficient for a position
to be “compelled” and “non-dubious” that a well-informed person could
rationally regard that position as slightly more likely to be true than false –
then one of the four broad metaphysical perspectives might fail to be “dubious”.
I wouldn’t insist, for example, that everyone must invest exactly 25% of
their subjective credence in each of materialism, dualism, idealism, and
compromise/rejection. Maybe it would be
warranted to regard one of these positions as more likely to be true than some
of the others – even perhaps a bit more likely than the other three positions
combined. But I would insist that for
the philosophical community as a whole and for most of the people I imagine reading
this essay, it wouldn’t be epistemic good judgment, for the reasons I am about
to describe, to invest a lot of confidence in any one of these four positions. And I would also suggest that there exists a somewhat
finer slicing of the options – with, say, three substantially different
variants of each of the four main classes of position – such that no one moderately
finely sliced position warrants community acceptance as more likely to be true
than false.
Let me be clear, too, that I make no claims about the distant future,
but only the near to medium term – the foreseeable future
or the
next few decades. Boldly extrapolating
lines of technological progress, in a hundred years things might look very
different. Maybe “the
singularity” will have arrived (Kurzweil
2005), and our vastly cognitively superior descendants will laugh
good-naturedly at our monkey-mindedness, impressed that beings barely able to
pass the Wason Selection Task (Wason and
Johnson-Laird 1972) could have generated as much scholarship as we did. Or maybe we will have invented high-bandwidth
aerial neural transducers that enable dozens or thousands or millions of brains
to interact as intimately as your right and left hemispheres now interact (Churchland 1981).
Common sense and our epistemic situation might change radically. About the 22nd century, I hazard
no guesses.
x.
An Argument from
Authority and Maybe Peers.
Let’s assume that you, reader, are not
among the world’s leading metaphysicians of mind. And let’s assume that you’re drawn toward
some particular metaphysics of mind other than David Chalmers’s
property dualism. It seems likely that
David Chalmers, who is one of the
world’s leading metaphysicians of mind, and who is by all accounts highly
intelligent and well read, could run argumentative rings around you, including
pointing out relevant considerations of which you are now unaware. Any unbiased referee would call a knockout in
the first or second round. Given that
fact, how confident should you be in your opinion? Or suppose you’re drawn toward something like
the Chalmers view after all. Likely
David Lewis could have run rings around you, defending his version of
materialism. Last spring, I described
various metaphysical options to my then eleven-year-old son (yet another
David). Davy immediately adopted one
position against all others, and he refused to be budged by my
counterarguments. It seems a kind of
epistemic failing – although also, in a different way, a kind of intellectual
virtue that will serve him well in his education – for Davy to be confident in
his view. He barely even understood the
issues, much less had a deep appreciation of the arguments. If you or I stand confidently against the
giants, armed only with our weaker comprehensions, are we so different from
Davy? Some of us might happen to have
the right view, maybe even because we are sensitive, as others of us are not,
to the real considerations that decisively favor it; but in some epistemically important sense that’s just luck.
Suppose that’s a fair assessment of the
epistemic situation in your own case in particular. What should you do about it? Read enough philosophy to become one of the
world’s leading metaphysicians? Even if
that were practical, it wouldn’t settle what your attitude should be right now,
which is the question. Should you
simply, then, bow to expert opinion, as one might bow to the expert opinion of
a chemist about the electronegativity of
fluorine? That doesn’t seem right
either. For one thing, there is no
consensus expert opinion to bow to. For
another, on an issue as central to one’s worldview as mind and body (especially
because of its connection to religious belief), and as subject to preconception
and bias even among experts, it may be wise not to cede one’s intellectual
autonomy. I recommend this instead:
Acknowledge dubiety. If you favor
materialism, favor it fearfully. If you
favor one particular form of materialism, spread your confidence distribution
broadly enough that your credence in that view does not exceed your estimation
of the likelihood of all other competing positions combined. For those of us who are not among the world’s
leading metaphysicians of mind, I submit that this is the sweet spot between
autonomous self-confidence and appropriate intellectual humility.
If I’m fortunate, some readers will be
among the world’s leading metaphysicians of mind. To you, this argument does not apply. However, there might be a parallel argument
cast in terms of disagreement among epistemic peers.[25]
Probably, on empirical grounds, we ought
to regard each of the four broad metaphysical options as rather dubious, and we
ought to regard more specific positions within those four broad options as
substantially more dubious. By “we” I
mean the philosophical community as a whole and most of the notional readership
of this essay. For us, implacable,
long-term disagreement among the best-informed experts, with no one option
accepted by a majority of experts and no foreseeable hope of resolution, is
good reason to accept the universal dubiety thesis.
The present argument might seem to
generalize to most of philosophy. I’m
inclined to think it does generalize, but not as much one might think. In areas of progress and discovery (logic,
historical interpretation, evaluation of the consequences of specific
argumentative moves, empirically driven inquiries, newly opened issues) the
peers version, at least, breaks down: One might have good grounds for thinking
oneself early to the discovery. And
perhaps non-experts, too, can avail themselves of those same grounds. The argument will also fail to generalize to
issues on which pluralism is warranted – cases in which multiple conflicting
approaches can have approximately equal merit, such as perhaps in the
articulation of visions of the good life or in goal-relative pragmatic
recommendations for the adoption of particular conceptual structures. What’s left, perhaps, are only the grand,
timeless, factual disputes that continually defy us and on which expert opinion
is highly divergent. Such disputes are
few.
Is this argument objectionably
authoritarian or defeatist? I hope
not. I am not saying: You’re not
entitled to an opinion where the experts (or your peers) disagree. One may still have a favored view. I hope you do. One might even “accept” that view, in the pragmatic
sense of treating the view as a basis for action and further reflection.[26] I advise not deference or despair but rather
autonomy thoroughly salted with a sense of one’s limitations. The failures of millennia of philosophical
ambition, and the discord among thousands of currently-living PhD’s, should
humble us all.
xi.
A No-Method Argument.
There is no conscious-ometer. Nor should
we expect one soon. There is also no
material-world-ometer. The lack of these devices problematizes
the metaphysics of mind.
Samuel Johnson kicked a stone. Thus, he said, he refuted Berkeley’s idealism
(Boswell 1791/1980, p. 333). Johnson’s
proof convinces no one with an inkling of sympathy for Berkeley, nor should it. Yet it’s hard to see what empirical test
could be more to the point. Carnap (1928/1967, p. 333-334) imagines an idealist and a
non-idealist both measuring a mountain; there is no experiment on which they
will disagree. No multiplicity of
gauges, neuroimaging equipment, or particle
accelerators could give stronger empirical proof against idealism than
Johnson’s kick. Similarly, Smart, in his
influential defense of materialism, admits that no empirical test could
distinguish materialism from epiphenomenalist substance dualism (1959, p.
155-156); there is no epiphenomenal-substance-ometer.
Why, then, should we be
materialists? Smart appeals to Occam’s
razor: Materialism is simpler. But
simplicity is a complex business.[27] Arguably, Berkeley’s idealism is simpler than
either dualism or materialism and solipsism is simpler yet. And anyhow, simplicity is at best one
theoretical virtue among several, to be balanced in the mix. Abstract theoretical virtues like simplicity
will, I suggest, attach only indecisively, non-compellingly, to the genuine
metaphysical contenders. I’m not sure
how to argue for this other than to invite you sympathetically to feel the
abstract beauties of some of the contending views other than your favorite.
If we’re willing to commit to
materialism, we might still hope at least for a conscious-ometer
that we could press against a human or animal head to decide among, say,
relatively conservative vs. moderate vs. liberal materialistic views of the
abundance or sparseness of consciousness in the world. But even this is too much to hope for, I
think, in the near to medium term. Is a
frog conscious? That is, does a frog
have a stream of phenomenal experience?
Is there something it’s like to be a frog? If two theorists of consciousness disagree
about this matter, no output from an fMRI machine is
likely to resolve their disagreement – not unless they share much more in
common than generally is shared by conservatives and liberals about the
abundance of consciousness. Nor can a
frog report its experience or lack of experience in any straightforward way. Similarly intractible,
I think, is the dispute about how richly detailed human experience is – about
whether, for example, people have constant tactile experience of their feet in
their shoes.[28] If such disputes are intractable, we have no
firm grounds of choice between approaches to consciousness that are relatively
liberal (perhaps even as liberal as panpsychism) and
approaches that are relatively conservative (perhaps even as conservative as
restricting consciousness to adult human beings in their more self-aware
moments). Nor, I think, do we have good
grounds to deny that liberal and conservative views constitute very different
metaphysical pictures. Maybe some
disputes among materialists are merely terminological (certain forms of
functionalism vs. certain forms of identity theory?). Not the abundance dispute, though; at least
not always. Either there’s something
it’s like to be a frog, or there isn’t, or somewhere in-between, or the
question is somehow broken. These are
substantially different positions, each with some ineliminable
plausibility and no broadly acceptable means of empirical test.
Thus I suggest: Major metaphysical
issues of mind are resistant enough to empirical resolution that none compel
belief on empirical grounds, and none, at a moderate grain of specificity, warrant
a degree of credence exceeding that of all competitors; and this situation is unlikely
to change in the foreseeable future. Neither
do these issues permit resolution by appeal to common sense (which will rebel
against all and is probably a poor guide anyway), by appeal to broad, abstract
theoretical considerations, or by appeal to the consensus judgment of
well-trained philosophical experts. I
assume there are no logical self-contradictions in any of these views, at least
insofar as they are well developed real contenders.
Is there some other means of settling
the matter that I’m overlooking?
xii.
An Argument from
Cosmological Crazyism.
If a broad-reaching cosmological crazyism is true, then crazyism
in the metaphysics of mind is a natural consequence. If we don’t know how the universe works, we
don’t know how the mind fits within it.
I can’t defend cosmological crazyism in detail here, but a few remarks can highlight
its plausibility. Consider the
bizarreness of quantum theory and the lack of consensus about its
interpretation, including the fact that some interpretations treat mentality as
fundamental (such as the many minds view and some versions of the Copenhagen
interpretation[29]). Consider the bizarreness of relativity theory,
perhaps especially the relativistic concept of distance, and the apparent
willingness of at least a small portion of the physics community in 2011 to
contemplate its overthrow given a single report of apparently faster-than-light
neutrinos.[30] Consider, too, the apparent conflict between
relativity theory and quantum theory.[31] Consider that many cosmologies now posit
either a creator who set the physical constants or initial conditions at the
time of the Big Bang so as to support the eventual occurrence of life, or a
vastly unlikely chance setting of those variables, or some sort of dependence
of the universe upon our observation of it, or the real existence of a vast
number of universes (or aeons of this universe) with
different physical constants.[32] The last of these four views – broadly, multiverse theory – seems to be a recent favorite. Prima facie, multiverse
theory is both dubious and bizarre. Here’s
one among the bizarrenesses: If the number of
universes is infinite, or if there is even a single infinite universe of the right
sort, then every event of finite probability will occur an infinite number of
times (given certain background assumptions about cosmic diversity). The spontaneous congealment, from relatively
disorganized matter, of a molecule-for-molecule twin of any living person is
often held to have a very tiny but finite probability.[33] You would, then, be one among an infinite
number of actually existing molecule-for-molecule twins of yourself, of diverse
origin. (Shades of Nietzsche’s eternal
return?) Quantum cosmology has also been
interpreted as suggesting the backward causation of the history of the universe
by our current acts of scientific observation (e.g., Hawking and Mlodinow 2010, p. 140).
Shall we look, then, to religion for
non-bizarre cosmologies? That seems an
unlikely source. Creation stories,
accounts of the afterlife – especially in the hands of those who would attempt
to work out the full ontological implications – seem only a source of further
bizarreness.
Another difficulty is this: If consciousness
can be created within artificial networks manipulated by external users – for
example in computer programs run by children for entertainment – and if the
beings inside those networks can be kept ignorant of their nature, then there
could be beings in the universe who are vastly deluded in fundamental matters
of metaphysics. Such beings, perhaps,
might think they live in a wide world of people like them when in fact they
have three-hour lives, isolated from all but their creator and whatever other beings
are instantiated in the same artificial environment. There is, I think, a non-negligible
possibility that we (I? you?) are such
beings.[34] Suppose in the year 2200 a new computer game
is released, Sims 2012, and it’s a huge hit.
A hundred million children buy it.
Each instance of Sims 2012, when run, creates a hundred thousand
actually conscious simulated people, each of whom thinks she is living in the
early 21st century and has an appropriate range of apparent memories
and apparent sensory experiences. In
reality, these people serve mainly to provide entertaining reactions when, to
their surprise, Godzilla tromps through.
Possibly, if the economics of technology plays out right, there are many
more such simulated beings in the universe than there are non-simulated
beings. The details don’t matter too
much, whether the outside agents are children or historians or scientists,
Earthly beings or gods or aliens running an Earth fiction. Might we be Sims of broadly this sort? To think that we are in fact Sims is, of
course, crazy. But is the possibility too crazy to figure in a disjunction of
live cosmological options? Is it more
than one order of magnitude crazier than multiverse
theory or the typical well developed religious cosmology? There are no commonsense cosmologies left.
Further support for cosmological dubiety
comes from our (apparently) miniscule cosmological perspective. If mainstream scientific cosmology is
correct, we have seen only a very small, perhaps an infinitesimal, part of reality. We are like fleas on the back of a dog,
watching a hair grow and saying, “Ah, so that’s how the universe works!”
There seems to me to be sufficient
cosmological uncertainty to cast into doubt any metaphysics of mind with
cosmological commitments. And all well
developed metaphysical accounts of the mind will have cosmological commitments,
if only in the choice between materialism, dualism, idealism, or a
compromise/rejection view. For example,
if it might be the case that an immaterial entity fashioned the physical
constants, then we cannot justifiably rest assured that materialism is
true. If there might really exist
universes (not just “possible worlds” but actual universes) so radically
different from our own that cognition transpires without the existence of
anything we would rightly call material, then materialism is at best a
provincial contingency. If we are
created within a simulation by outside agents, our experience of objects as
necessarily laid out in space and time might be a feature of our programming
environment that doesn’t reflect the fundamental structure of the universe
(Kant meets cyberpunk).
Scientific cosmology is deeply and
pervasively bizarre; it is highly conjectural in its conclusions; it has proven
unstable over the decades; and experts persistently disagree on fundamental
points. Nor is it even uniformly
materialist. If materialism draws its
motivation from being securely and straightforwardly the best scientific
account of the fundamental nature of things, materialists ought to think twice. I focus on materialism, since it is the
dominant view in contemporary metaphysics of mind, but similar considerations
cast doubt on dualism, idealism, and compromise/rejection views.
xiii.
Certain
fundamental questions about the metaphysics of mind can’t be settled by
science, in its current state, or by abstract reasoning. To address these questions we must turn to
common sense. If we then have good
reason to think that common sense, too, is no reliable guide, we are
unmoored. Without common sense as a
constraint, the possibilities open up, bizarre and beautiful in their different
ways; and once open they refuse to shut.
This is crazyism.
Does it follow that you don’t know that
you are on Earth, reading philosophy?
Does crazyism collapse into radical
skepticism? No, or at least not
straightforwardly. Earth might actually
be SimEarth or nothing but a constellation of ideas
in the mind of God – its fundamental nature might be very different than you
are inclined to suppose – but even in such transparently bizarre metaphysical
or cosmological stories, Earth exists.[35] In even more stories, the computer screen or
piece of paper you are looking at exists.
Nothing I have said implies, I think, that it’s unreasonable to
distribute most of your credence to Earth-involving stories over Earth-denying
ones. And then, maybe, if Earth does
exist, and if your belief that it does has arisen in the right manner or has
the right kind of support, you will qualify as knowing that fact.[36]
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[2]
Critiques of the role of common sense or philosophical intuition as a guide to
metaphysics and philosophy of mind can be found in, for example, Churchland 1981; Stich 1983; Gopnik
and Schwitzgebel 1998; Kornblith 1998; Dennett 2005; Ladyman and Ross 2007; and Weinberg, Gonnerman,
Buckner, and Alexander 2010. Hume
1740/1978 and Kant 1781/1787/1998 are also interesting on this issue, of
course. Even metaphilosophical
views that treat metaphysics largely as a matter of building a rigorous
structure out of our commonsense judgments often envision conflicts within
common sense so that the entirety of common sense cannot be preserved: e.g.,
Ayer 1967; Kriegel 2011.
[3] DeWitt,
for example, writes:
I still recall vividly the shock I
experienced on first encountering this multiworld
concept. The idea of 10100+ slightly imperfect copies of oneself all
constantly splitting into further copies, which ultimately become
unrecognizable, is not easy to reconcile with common sense (1970, p. 33).
[4] Recent
reviews of the difficulties in settling among various bizarre interpretations
include Penrose 2004; Wallace 2008.
[5] See, e.g., Hempel 1980; Chomsky 1995; Montero 1999; Stoljar 2010.
[6] Although
Searle rejects the dualism-materialism distinction, I believe he is materialist
in the vague sense of the previous paragraph.
See, e.g., Searle 1995, pp. 6-7.
[7] In the
General Social Survey of Americans in
2010 (http://www3.norc.org/GSS+Website; accessed September 16, 2011), 72% of
respondents reported believing in life after death and 17% reported
disbelieving; also, 75% reported believing in God, 11% reported belief in an
impersonal “Higher Power”, and only 3% reported atheism. We can probably safely assume that most
contemporary American theists are not materialists (though some may be: Baker
1995; Murphy 2006). Some other
industrialized Western nations are more secular than the U.S., but even in
those societies religiosity is widespread (Zuckerman 2007), and religiosity or
belief in entities not tolerated by materialism might even be something like a
cultural universal (Brown 1991; McCauley 2000; Boyer 2001). Paul Bloom (2004) has argued on developmental
and cross-cultural grounds that it is innately natural to human beings to think
of mental life as the product of an immaterial soul, even if some of us reject
dualism on an “airy intellectual level” (see also Richert and Harris 2006;
Hodge 2008; Slingerland and Chudek
2011). In David Bourget’s and David
Chalmers’ 2009 PhilPapers survey of faculty in
leading Anglophone philosophy departments, 62% of respondents reported
accepting atheism and another 11% reported “leaning toward” it. Yet even in this remarkably secular group,
only 35% reported accepting and 22% reported leaning toward physicalism
(http://philpapers.org/surveys; accessed September 19, 2011).
[10] See,
e.g., Churchland 1981; Stich 1983; Metzinger 2003; Dennett 2005; Mandik and Weisberg
2008.
[11] Gray,
Gray, and Wegner 2007; Knobe and Prinz 2008; Huebner, Bruno, and Sarkissian 2010; Sytsma and Machery 2010; Buckwalter and
Phelan 2011.
[12] This
thought is central to early functionalist arguments against identity theory
materialism, e.g., Putnam 1965; Fodor 1974.
For discussion and criticism see Bechtel and Munsdale
1999; Shapiro and Polger forthcoming.
[13] See
also Adams and Dietrich 2004. See Hill
2009 for a rather different argument that the folk metaphysics of pain is
incoherent.
[14] Admittedly,
the willingness of English-language speakers to ascribe mental states of
various sorts to corporate entities is empirically complex. See Knobe and Prinz 2008; Sytsma and Machery
2009; Arico 2010; Huebner, Bruno, and Sarkissian 2010.
[15] E.g., Fodor
1987, 1990; Dennett 1987, 1991; Churchland 1984/1988;
Dretske 1988, 1995; Lycan 1996; Tononi 2004; Carruthers 2005; Rosenthal 2005; Hill 2009; Humphrey
2011. Even materialists who emphasize
the identity of mental states and brain states will normally see functional or
causal structures of this sort as what it is that makes brain states the kinds
of states that are conscious while the internal states of, say, a toaster are
not: e.g., Armstrong 1968; Bechtel and Mundale
1999. Searle (1984, 1992) seems to be an
exception to the tendency described here, though I find his positive position
on the biological causes of consciousness too indeterminate in its commitments
to fully evaluate on the present issue.
[16] See
also Strawson 1959, p. 113-115; Combs and Krippner 2008; Huebner 2011. On group intentionality without (necessarily)
group consciousness see Gilbert 1989; Austen Clark 1994; Rovane
1998; Bratman 1999; Wilson 2004; Tuomela
2007; Searle 2010; List and Pettit 2011; Huebner forthcoming.
[17] “Immaterial
soul” is intended here in a fairly broad but traditional sense. By this criterion, some metaphysical systems
that call themselves substance dualist, notably Lowe’s (2008), do not
qualify. Despite Lowe’s choice of label
his system is very different from traditional substance dualist approaches and
for current purposes is probably better conceived as a compromise position.
[19] The
same quadrilemma arises if immateriality is regarded
as essential to life, as on the types of vitalist
theories that were discarded in the early 20th century and on
immaterialist views of the “vegetative soul”.
Nor does that move resolve the core question about mentality. As Pierre Bayle nicely articulates, even
accepting something like a sharp-boundaried
immaterialist vitalism about life doesn’t ameliorate
this complex of issues regarding the “rational soul”, or mindedness, or
conscious experience (1697/1702/1965, “Rorarius”; see
also Des Chene 2006).
[20] See
especially La Mettrie (1748/1994). The power of these two examples is that drugs
and alcohol appear to affect the reasoning process itself and not only the
passions and bodily movements, contra Descartes’s
picture of how bodily influences can oppose the immaterial processes of reason
(1649/1985, esp. §47).
[22] See
especially the Indian Advaita Vedanta and Yogacara traditions – though these traditions present some
of the same interpretative challenges as Hegel, probably involving strands
better interpreted as a type of compromise or rejection view. See Deutsch 1969/1973; Deutsch and van Buitenen, eds., 1971; Collins 1998; Lusthaus
2002; Trivedi 2005.
[23] However,
despite Searle’s self-description I would classify Searle as broadly speaking a
materialist (see note ****).
[24] This
might seem a broadly Wittgensteinian position, but
it’s probably not Wittgenstein’s own position; see esp. 1945-1949/1958, p. 178,
and 1947/1980, vol. 1, §265.
[28] For
example, Dennett 1991 vs. Searle 1992. I
suspect that most readers will find the medium-term irresolvability
of this latter dispute to be less plausible prima facie than in the
between-species case. I defend my
pessimism about this issue at length in Schwitzgebel 2011.
[30] Neutrino
result reported in OPERA collaboration 2011.
For some scientific community reaction see Brumfiel
2011; Matson 2011.
[31] Or at
least the locality restriction central to relativity theory. See Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen 1935; Bell 1964; Maudlin 1994/2002.
[32] The is
the “fine-tuning” issue. See Barrow,
Morris, Freeland, and Harper, eds., 2008; Hawking and Mlodinow
2010; Penrose 2010; Stenger 2011.
[33] For discussion:
Bousso and Freivogel 2007;
Page 2008; Carroll 2010; De Simone, Guth, Linde, Noorbala, Salem, and Vilenkin 2010. Such
people, or brains, or people-plus-sections-of-environment, have been dubbed
“Boltzmann babies” or “Boltzmann brains” after the 19th century
physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, who argued that in a universe of sufficient size
any arbitrary low-entropy event – including presumably the congealment of a
person – could be expected to occur by chance (e.g., Boltzmann 1897).
[36] For
helpful comments on drafts or conversation on these topics during the course of
writing thanks to Ned Block, Kurt Boughan, Peter Carruthers, Becko Copenhaver, Dan Dennett, Fred Dretske,
Chris Hill, Linus Huang, Bryce Huebner, Jenann Ismael, Barry Loewer, Bill Lycan, Pete Mandik, Jozef
Muller, Alan Tapper, Splintered Mind readers, ****, and audiences at University
of Cincinnati, ****.