PHIL 336 JOURNAL ENTRY

D U A L I S T T H E O R I E S O F M I N D A N D B O D Y

Interactionism and Substance Dualism

Mind–body dualism was a popular view until roughly the 1960s, though it is less and less so these days, at least with professional philosophers. They have for the most part thrown in their lot with those scientists who have adopted a materialistic or naturalistic worldview—nature is all there is.

Dualism is the antinaturalist claim that the mind and the body are two separate and very different things. The two sorts are the nonphysical and the physical. The nonphysical sort of thing, the mind or soul, is not part of nature. “The mind is a nonphysical thing” was our first proposition, and “The body is a physical thing” the next. The essence of dualism is the claim that both these propo­ sitions are true, and that the mind is not part of nature.

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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/19/2022 8:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1365616 ; Jonathan Westphal.; The Mind-Body Problem Account: s4264928.main.edsebook

Dualism is the anti­ naturalist claim that the mind and the body are two separate and very different things. The two sorts are the non- physical and the physical.

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In addition, one important form of dualism tells us that mind and body are distinct things that can exist indepen­ dently of one another. Such independently existing things have been called “substances” in the history of philosophy. A substance is an individual thing that can exist by itself, independently of other substances. Accordingly, substance dualism is the view that mind and body are distinct in the sense that they can exist independently of each other, or are substances.

Interactionist substance dualism is the view that these two substances or things exist and can interact causally. So, for example, when the body takes in too much beer, the mind becomes confused, and one’s mood may change. Here the interactionist substance dualist will say that the physical substance or thing called “the body” is interacting, or certainly seeming to, with the nonphysical substance or thing called “the mind.”

The body can exist without the mind, after burial. But what about the other way round? We can imagine the mind existing in the darkness after death, just as it exists in the darkness after bedtime. Just as vividly as we are aware of our mind in the darkness after lights­out, perhaps work­ ing on little mathematics problems, or perhaps saying its prayers, or thinking about this or that, so we can imagine activity of these sorts continuing and going on after we die. To some this is a comforting thought, to others un­ nerving and alien.

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There is also a thought experiment that we can per­ form that is suggestive of dualism. Imagine that I wake up, as usual, and open my eyes, or think I do. To my left I see my cup of coffee in a clean white mug, steaming a bit and smelling good. “Great,” I say to myself, “time for coffee.” I glance down the bed, and I am surprised, be­ cause it looks unrumpled and perfectly made, as it was the night before. Things begin to get even odder when I notice that where my feet should be sticking up under the covers, the cover is completely flat. The next odd thing I see is that my torso also does not make a lump under the covers. When my wife pulls back the cov­ ers and asks whether she can hand me the coffee, I be­ come most alarmed: I see no body at all where my body should be. Is this a nightmare? No, I am fully awake, but my body seems to have vanished in the night. It is not merely that it is invisible. It simply isn’t there. It has dis­ appeared. Perhaps it no longer exists. Have I turned into a pure consciousness? What philosophers call my mind or consciousness (though these most certainly are not the same thing), including my thoughts and visual and tactile sensations, and all the other sensations, of mo­ tion and action, is still there, unchanged. I still have the chronic feeling of pain in my back, where my back ought to be, but seem to be missing the back itself. What am I supposed to think? It seems natural to say that my body has gone, but that my mind is still there. I now see that

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my mind and my body are distinct, then, for my mind can exist without my body.

I can imagine all this; and, more importantly, it is all possible, in the sense that a story of waking up without a body does not seem to be a contradictory story. Free­ dom from contradiction, rather than imaginability, is the proper test of possibility. If there is no contradiction in the description of an event, then the event is possible. Sup­ pose that it is possible that I shall win the lottery. I can imagine that I shall win it, but that is not the important thing. The important thing is that I can describe myself winning tomorrow, going to the office of the lottery, pre­ senting my lottery ticket, picking up my winnings, and so on, and among the descriptions of all these happy events there is no contradiction. Imaginability may be an indica­ tion of describability, but it does not guarantee it, whereas describability—in the sense of description genuinely free from contradiction—does demonstrate possibility.

By this test we should conclude that it is possible that the mind and body should exist without one another. It is possible that I should wake up with my mind and con­ sciousness intact and my body gone. That possibility is the central claim of dualism. It is significant that the initial claim is not that they do exist without one another, since for the moment anyway they are somehow stuck together, but that they can. If they can exist independently, it does not follow that both do, or that they will not exist at the

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same time. We can imagine that mind and body can exist independently of one another, but that at death both of them get destroyed at once, though by two different sets of forces, one physical and one nonphysical, assuming we can make sense of the idea of nonphysical forces.

The main difficulty for interactionism is one that stumped Descartes. How can the mind and body interact, if one is physical and therefore spatial, and the other is non­ physical and therefore nonspatial? Of course, it is possible to deny that the mind is nonphysical, and I will discuss this important option in the next chapter. But for the moment we are considering the view that the mind is nonphysical and the body is physical, and that the two interact. The question is, how? How can mind and body interact if one is physical and the other is not, given that physical and non­ physical things cannot interact? This is the objection to in­ teractionist substance dualism made by Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi, and it is hard for interactionist substance dualism to meet it. Perhaps it is impossible.

There have been some contemporary attempts to make dualism work, but on the whole they have been a bit disappointing. E. J. Lowe, for example, argues for what he regards as a new picture of psychophysical dualist interac­ tionism.1 He notes that the structure of the causal chains of events is a branching structure, but since the chains get intertwined the structure as a whole has no ends. So men­ tal events cannot interact or indeed fail to interact with

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the tips and initiate causal action, since there are no tips! When I make to lift my arm, the tree structure as a whole is activated, or some significant part of, but it is as a result not of this but of the desire or wish or intention to move my arm that my arm moves. The activation of the neuro­ physiological causal tree explains the exact way in which the movement of my arm occurs, say, jerkily or smoothly, but it does not explain that it occurs in the first place. The tree “mediates” the relationship between mind and action. But mediation is a causal relationship. It remains true that what explains the fact that I raise my hand is the decision to raise it. So there is a direct action of the mental on the physical that still needs explaining. Lowe claims that my mind communicates not with the tips of the tree of causal events in the brain, since there are none, but with the whole tree, and explains the existence of the whole tree­ structure of neurophysiological events. But the problem is just the same. How does the mind activate the whole tree? If interacting with the tips of the tree is impossible, so is interacting with the tree as a whole.

Another odd feature of this account is that the inten­ tion and the activation of the tree of events take place at the same time, the one responsible for the how of the movement, and the other responsible for the fact of it. This seems fishy.

Moreover, Lowe’s version of dualist interactionism also does not eliminate the charming “pairing problem”

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that arises for dualism.2 My mind issues the wish for my arm to rise, and the wish instructs my tree­structure of events to begin. Suppose you are standing next to me. How is it that my mind doesn’t go into the wrong tree struc­ ture—yours—and not mine? Or how come it doesn’t go into both, like a radio broadcast? If mind and body are genuinely distinct, then how is my mind paired with my brain and your mind with yours? Why does my arm rise and not yours?

Property Dualism

There is an answer to the pairing problem, but it means abandoning substance dualism. For dualists who are daunted by the problems facing substance dualism, an­ other kind of dualism may seem to afford some relief. It is called property dualism.

The property dualist sees clearly the difficulties of two interacting but distinct substances, and proposes instead a dualism not of substances or things but of their proper- ties. There is only one substance, says the property dualist, but it has two sorts of properties, physical and nonphysi­ cal. In one version of property dualism—the physical­ ist version—the mind is physical. It is the relevant part of the brain for causal interaction. But it has two sorts of properties.

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Consider the fact that a piece of art such as a painting is physical, but it can be said to have nonphysical proper­ ties. Though it is made of paint and wood and canvas, the painting can be said to be: accurate; a bit of a caricature; witty; slightly derivative though stylistically effective; and a bit dark. These are aesthetic properties, not physical ones. But there are not two things or substances, a can­ vas and a work of art. If someone attacks a painting with a knife, as people sometimes do, then it might lose some or all of its aesthetic properties. And we cannot say that the higher­level properties of being witty or being a bit dark are identical with the paint and wood and canvas, though they are dependent on them.

Mental properties, such as having a thought, are grounded in the physical brain or mind, says the physicalist property dualist, but they are not themselves reducible to physical properties. If my brain is damaged, my capacity for thought can be impaired. But according to the property dualist, it does not follow that mental properties, such as my having a thought, are physical.

Now the property dualist is in a position to respond to the pairing problem that attacks substance dualism. Why do my mental activities, if detached from my body, not cause things to happen in your body? How do my mental activities reach the correct destination? Why is this mind connected with this body and not some other?

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The property dualist denies that the mind and the body are distinct, since the mind is a physical thing. Mind and body can then interact nicely. Though physical and nonphysical substances cannot interact, the mind is not nonphysical; it is physical. But it does have nonphysical properties. These properties, however, do not themselves have effects on the body.

Everything seems to be in order. But there is a large fly in this ointment. Although it may be true that abstract triangles and aesthetic properties do not have actual ef­ fects, in the case of the mind, mental properties, such as thoughts and feelings, most certainly do initiate effects. Intent, premeditation, or mens rea, the “guilty mind” which is presumably something mental (since “mens” is just the Latin word for mind, and from which the English “mind” and “mental” are derived), is an element that is necessary to demonstrate certain classes of crimes, most notably murder. The evil intentions in the mind are taken to be the properties of the guilty mind that result in the unlawful deed. And the physicalist property dualist has no way to account for these.

Parallelism

There is another dualist possibility, however: parallelism. On this view, mind and body are distinct, but they do not

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interact. We can accept dualism, including the proposition that the mind and body can exist independently of one an­ other, along with the proposition that one is physical and the other is nonphysical, and at the same time reject the proposition that they interact. One good reason we can give is that “Physical and nonphysical things cannot inter­ act,” and we have seen exactly why this is such an appeal­ ing proposition, starting with the arguments offered by Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi. We simply deduce “Mind and body cannot interact” from “Physical and nonphysical things cannot interact,” given the further premises that the mind is a nonphysical thing and that the body is a phys­ ical thing. We arrive at:

(1) The mind is a nonphysical thing. (2) The body is a physical thing. (4) Physical and nonphysical things cannot interact.

As solutions go, this one is as logically appealing and as successful as any other. From (1), (2), and (4), it certainly does follow that mind and body cannot interact, and hence that they do not interact. But how then are we to account for the appearance that they do interact? It strains belief to suppose that they do not, one might think, because the fact of mind–body interaction is so common and famil­ iar as to be undeniable. There is the effect of alcohol on mental state, for example, not to mention drugs of various

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sorts. There is the effect of the mind on the body, most obviously of cases of intentional action, but also in cases, say, of a mental state such as blind rage leading to unhappy physical consequences. Psychiatry and psychology are full of examples of interactions, in both directions.

What does parallelism have to say to all this? It is per­ haps surprising, but these examples represent no threat whatsoever to the parallelist view. The parallelist can simply assert that though there is no interaction between mind and body, there is a correlation between what hap­ pens in the body and what happens in the mind wherever we thought there was an interaction. The drinking of beer is followed by the fogginess of the mind, or correlated with it. And this is a well­established empirical fact that is neutral with respect to interactionism and parallelism. What we must not do, says the parallelist, is to imagine the body emptying beer into the mind, or, what is equally absurd, getting the neurons to fire into the mind, or in some literal sense sending physical messages directly into the mind, so that we have the ridiculous picture of electri­ cal signals going off in the mind as well as in the body. We have no way at all of picturing such an event, as the mind is nonphysical and the signals are physical. We would then be imagining something that does not have a posi­ tion in space (the mind) containing objects that do have positions in space (signals from the neurons). As A.  J. Ayer has observed,

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The physiologist’s story is complete in itself. The characters that figure in it are nerve cells, electrical impulses, and so forth. It has no place for an entirely different cast, of sensations, thoughts, feelings, and the other personae of the mental play. … Nor are there such temporal gaps in the procession of nervous impulses as would leave room for mental characters to intervene. In short, the two stories [mental and physical] will not mix. It is like trying to play Hamlet, not without the Prince of Denmark, but with Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Each is an interpretation of certain phenomena and they are connected by the fact that, in certain conditions, when one of them is true, the other is true also.3

The impossibility of physical and nonphysical things interacting, asserted in proposition (4) of the initial tetrad, does not prevent the correlation of the events within the physical body and the nonphysical mind. What the paral­ lelist objects to is the idea that the electrical impulses or neural activity do in any literal sense sidle right up along­ side the mind, and, from their close proximity, interact. There can be no literal proximity to the mind, if “literal proximity” is spatial contiguity.

In the history of the mind–body problem, parallelism arose partly as a result of a vivid awareness of the reasons for which Descartes’s interactionist dualism could not

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work. The dualism made the interaction impossible, and behold: the mind–body problem was born. The parallelists were committed to dualism. So what was left? Mind and body could not interact, just because dualism was true, they thought. But mind and body do seem to operate in tan­ dem—synchronized, as it were. When the desire for cof­ fee enters the mind, it is then that the body, or part of it, reaches out and picks up the cup of coffee. Then the mind says to itself, “Enough. No more,” and the body stops pour­ ing the coffee into its throat, and puts the cup down. But why does it do it then, at exactly that moment? How has the mind made it come to pass that the body stops pouring coffee down its throat?

Causal interaction, said the parallelists, just is syn­ chronization. The most celebrated and extraordinary met­ aphor for this idea to appear in the post­Cartesian wave of parallelism in seventeenth­ and eighteenth­century France was the image of two clocks beating and striking in synchrony, satisfying the very French desire for order and harmony that existed at that time. The parallelists invite us to imagine two synchronized clocks, keeping perfect time together. When one strikes three o’clock, say, so does the other. If we were to imagine a slight time lag between them, it might seem tempting to think that the clock that strikes first makes the second clock strike. That would be a false inference, a fallacy that actually has a name: post hoc ergo propter hoc, or after this therefore because of this.

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Leibniz was the most celebrated of the parallelists in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He may have been struck by a well­publicized phenomenon observed by his teacher Huygens (himself a pupil of Descartes), who was the inventor of the pendulum clock. Huygens had been ill in bed, and while lying there had noticed that the pen­ dulums of two clocks mounted in one case always ended up synchronized, though in opposite directions (“antisyn­ chronized”) irrespective of their starting points, displaying what he called an “odd kind of sympathy.” The clocks were somehow regulating one another, but just how remained a mystery until 2002. In that year a team of scientists from Georgia Institute of Technology were able to explain the phenomenon with a sophisticated mathematical and physical model based on small vibrations in the case that interfere with one another.4 After ruling out air motion ex­ perimentally, Huygens had himself suspected but not been able to prove that the phenomenon was caused by small motions in the clock case, and the Georgia team proved him right.

Leibniz went considerably further with the thought, however. Mind and body do indeed act as though they were synchronized, and although they do not affect one another in a literal way, for him synchronization is causa­ tion. Nothing could go into or out of a “substance,” in the terminology of early modern philosophy, or a genuinely unified individual thing, which in this respect is rather

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like an indivisible atom. The individual thing is “window­ less,” in Leibniz’s metaphor. According to him the “mental pendulum” and the “physical pendulum” are synchronized in their behavior—fortunately not antisynchronized— though not by interaction. The synchronization comes with their initial creation by God from the substances’ “complete individual concepts,” which detail everything that will happen to them throughout their futures. This view, of course, has implications for freedom of the will, in which Leibniz was keenly interested. What concerns us, however, is the fact that the whole universe is arranged so that what we observe of it manifests all sorts of remark­ able synchronizations. These include but are not limited to the synchronizations of the mind and the body, which, along with all the other synchronizations that constitute the laws of universe, are designed to bring about the best possible universe over time.

There is a big difference between Leibniz’s views and those of the so­called occasionalists. The occasionalists took the view that parallelism is true, but that physical events in the body are the occasion for God to act in the mind, and vice versa. The occasionalists, such as Geulincx, who before Leibniz had used the simile of the two clocks to illustrate parallelism, were impressed by the absolute power of God, and wanted to make all our actions and ev­ ery other action in the world into actions whose motive or moving power is God. That this uncommonsensical and

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implausible view survived as long as it did is a testament to the religious faith of the time, and to the dedication of the occasionalists in following their reason through to where it led, or seemed to lead. On the other hand, as Leib­ niz pointed out, the continuous need for action on God’s part every time mind and body interact makes for a very hard­working God, and it is itself unacceptable on religious grounds as well as the ground of philosophical economy and the theological drive toward simplicity and piety.

The Role of the Conservation Laws

Another historically important point about interaction needs to be made on behalf of those who, like the paral­ lelists, wish to deny that mind and body interact. It has to do with the laws of conservation in physics. Among these laws, which seem to be about as well established as any­ thing could be in physics, the conservation of mass and en­ ergy tells us that in a “closed” system changing over time, the net total of mass or energy in the system stays the same. The system as a whole neither gains nor loses mass or energy. (There are particles with no mass, but they must have some energy, since energy is a function of frequency.)

Suppose that the human body is a closed physical sys­ tem. In other words, it acts as it does because of the physi­ cal energy and mass that it contains, and it is insulated

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from the effects of outside energy. This has been called “the causal closure of the physical.” If we want to change anything within the system, we will either have to use the energy that is already within the system, or we will have to introduce energy from the outside. If we use the energy in the system, then the mind, since it is not within the body, can have no effect on the body. If we do not use the energy already in the system, then mass and energy are not con­ served, or the system is not closed.

However, if the mind is to effect a change in the body, then it must presumably introduce physical energy into the body. But according to our first proposition, the mind is nonphysical, and so it cannot expend physical energy. Here we can see that the conserved mass and energy are playing the same role as linear dimensions did in our first formulation of the mind–body problem. Lack of linear di­ mensions and spatial location on the part of the nonphysi­ cal is what makes the physical and nonphysical unable to interact. But the same result is obtained if we make mass or energy the defining characteristics of physical things. Physical and nonphysical things cannot interact. The body will not accept nonphysical energy, and the mind will not accept physical energy, in both cases because of the causal closure of the physical.

Versions of the four propositions are often if not al­ ways there when the mind–body problem is discussed. A specialized form is present when conservation laws are at

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issue. Ernie Lepore and Barry Loewer,5 for example, ex­ press the mind–body problem as the difficulty of fitting together the following three propositions:

(5) The mind and the body are distinct. (3b) The mental and the physical causally interact. (4b) The physical is causally closed.

Roughly speaking, (1) (“The mind is a nonphysical thing”) and (2) (“The body is a physical thing”) give us (5), proposition (3b) works like proposition (3) (“Mind and body interact”), and (4b) implies (4), that the mental and the physical cannot interact. The problem is that the physi­ cal world cannot reach out of itself into anything else that is nonphysical, but it must somehow interact with the men­ tal, which is nonphysical. Similarly, the mental world can­ not reach out of itself into anything else that is nonmental, but it must somehow interact with the physical, which is nonmental. Describing the inability of the mind to reach into the physical and of the body to reach into the mental is a way of stating the existence of the law of conservation of mass and energy, which has (4b) as a consequence. “Caus­ ally closed” means that energy or mass from causes outside the physical world, or outside the closed physical system, cannot get into it, and that it cannot contribute energy and mass to outside and nonphysical systems in such a way as to deplete the net total of its own energy and mass.

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Naturally, if the mind is physical, then the body plus the mind can function as a closed system, and there is no difficulty with the laws of conservation. This amounts to denying (5), that the mind and body are physically distinct, which they are not, according to the physicalist.

The only option that does not seem available, given what physics has to say about conservation, is the denial of (4b). So a physicalist will deny (5) and affirm (3b). This involves the interesting claim that the mental is physical, or a denial of the claim that the mind is nonphysical. A parallelist, on the other hand, will affirm (4b) and deny (3b), telling us that the mind and the body are indeed dis­ tinct, but that they occupy parallel and noninteracting realms.

The lesson so far is that we should be either parallelists or physicalists, but not interactionists.

Epiphenomenalism, Emergentism, and Supervenience

There is another form of dualism that was especially popular at the end of the nineteenth century. It has seen a modest resurgence recently, in much more sophisticated forms, though more as an object of study, perhaps, than as a view actually to be believed. Known by its formidable Greek­derived name, epiphenomenalism, it is the claim that mental events and the mind are “epiphenomena.” “Epi­” is

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a Greek prefix that means “on the occasion of ” or “in addi­ tion” to. “Phenomena” are the things that appear, or hap­ pen, so epiphenomena are things that appear in addition to what might be called the basic phenomena. For most epi­ phenomenalists, if not all, the basic phenomena are those of the physical world, and mental phenomena and events are attendant on physical phenomena. Epiphenomenalism is the view that physical events cause mental events but mental events do not cause physical events.

There is an obvious comparison to be made with shad­ ows. My hands curled up in the right way can be made to cast a shadow that looks like an eagle’s head onto a wall or screen. The shadow is dependent on my hands, but what my hands do is not dependent on what the shadow does. It would be amusing but physically difficult for the eagle on the screen to open its beak, say, and force my fingers to move. The image of the eagle projected onto the screen is just a shadow.

Almost nobody holds or has held the reversed epiphe­ nomenalist view that mental events cause physical ones but not the other way round, and it is, I think, fairly obvi­ ous why. For one thing, there are the obvious phenomena to think about, such as brain damage. But at a deeper level the epiphenomenalists are those physicalists who want to be strict physicalists but who cannot quite see their way to deny the existence of fully mental events, though they also find it hard to see how mental events can exist at all. In

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Epiphenomenalism is the view that physical events cause mental events but mental events do not cause physical events.

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conformity with their physicalism, they then downgrade the importance and causal power of mental events as far as possible in the physical scheme of things.

Still, if epiphenomenalists are really physicalists un­ der the skin, they are inconsistent ones, since epiphenom­ enalism admits the existence of genuinely mental events. There are mental events, it claims, but they have no causal power, unlike physical events.

According to the Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, our consciousness is a “collateral product” of the “mechanism of the body” and “as completely without any power of modifying the working of the body as the steam­ whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive en­ gine.”6 Volition too is an emotion that “indicates” physical changes but does not “cause” them.

There is something clearly wrong with Huxley’s simile of the steam­whistle, since nothing prevents us from rig­ ging up a steam­whistle so that every time it blows, the steam activates a fan rigged to an electrical circuit that brakes the train, and that when the whistle is not blowing, the train resumes its normal speed. The whistle then has definite and specifiable physical effects, and there is noth­ ing in the nature of the physical world to prevent this sort of causal loop.

In the case of the mind or consciousness or soul, Hux­ ley would rule out the causal loop. Yet why is it impossible? Why is the mind causally inert? Huxley does not address

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the question, but it certainly seems to push epiphenom­ enalism hard in the direction of property dualism. For it is an odd thing indeed, an odd substance, that can have no effects whatsoever. Properties seem more suited than sub­ stances to causal inactivity. Even so, one might think that the property of being hot can cause me to have the property of wanting a drink. Why do I have the property of wanting a drink? Because I have the property of being hot.

We should keep clearly in mind the fact that epiphe­ nomenalism is a form of dualism. It allows interaction between mind and body in one direction, from mental to physical, but not the other. But there is still a contradiction here. Epiphenomenalism has cut the mind–body problem down to half its original size, so to speak, but what re­ mains is every bit as intractable as the original full­scale version. We don’t have to deal with the mind acting on the body, but how can the body act on the mind, if the mind is nonphysical, and physical things cannot act on nonphysi­ cal things? In fact I think epiphenomenalism counts as a rough­and­ready philosophy of mind, but not as a genuine solution to the mind–body problem. This may explain why philosophers have on the whole been less than interested in it, and why it has been referred to as “the curse of epi­ phenomenalism” by one writer (Stephen Law) in the phi­ losophy of mind.7

Emergentism is a view of the relation between mind and body of roughly the same kind as epiphenomenalism,

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in the sense that the physical is dominant and the mental is a sort of by­product, but it is important to see what the difference is between the two. Epiphenomenalism is a kind of dualism, in which two separate kinds of events exist and are causally related. With emergentism, the relation be­ tween the mental and the physical is much closer. It should perhaps be discussed later, in the next chapter, as a form of physicalism, but it seems to me that the comparisons and contrasts between epiphenomenalism and emergentism are interesting ones.

There is a mystery, very much at the center of the modern mind–body problem, of why it should be pain that emerges from the brain areas that are activated by Aδ or C fiber stimulation. (The Aδ fibers are associated with acute and sharp pain, the C fibers with dull or burning pain.) But, according to the emergentist, there simply is no answer to the question why it is pain that ultimately emerges from the brain areas that are activated by Aδ or C fiber stimula­ tion, and not something else entirely. Pain does not emerge from the stimulation of the fibers in the way that sixteen ounces just turns into one pound; but then one wonders how on earth it is related to the stimulation of the fibers. Well, it emerges from them, comes the answer.

The emergentists both accept and deny (1), that the mind is nonphysical. On the one hand, the mind is physi­ cal, because it is really driven by the structures from which it emerges. On the other hand, the mind is nonphysical,

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because it has “emerged” from the physical. But how can truly novel properties, such as pain, emerge from the stim­ ulation of the fibers? If they “emerge” from the physical, then they are nonphysical. But if they are genuinely non­ physical, how can they “emerge,” and why do they need to?

It seems to me that the emergentists must make up their minds. If with the mind we have a genuinely new phenomenon, a nonphysical and nonspatial one that has emerged like a butterfly out of the chrysalis of matter, then it cannot affect the body, since the body has exclusively the wrong kind of properties to interact with the mind, that is, physical and spatial ones. From this point of view it is hard to see how mind could emerge in the first place, since in emerging it makes itself spatial. If, on the other hand, the new phenomenon has a complete dependence on the phys­ ical and spatial phenomena, and can engage with them, it is hard to see how it is anything but them, and therefore not a new and emergent property at all.

Emergentists accept the fact that mind can turn around and do things to matter, but they do not explain how this can happen if the mind has “emerged” and is not physical. If the mind has emerged as nonphysical, we need to understand the way in which it can then interact with the physical. And that is the mind–body problem.

There is a concept that may seem to help with under­ standing how something can both be nothing but its base properties, and at the same time something emergent,

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something in addition to the base properties. Many, even most, emergentists have used the concept of supervenience and been grateful for the light it casts on the relation be­ tween mind and body. According to these emergentists the mind supervenes on the body.

The concept of supervenience is a difficult one, but the main idea is something like this. Suppose a property A su­ pervenes on a property B. For example, some geometrical or aesthetic property A supervenes on the properties, col­ lectively B, for “base,” of a spatial figure or of painting, such as being thus­and­such a closed figure, or having thus­and­ such colors, lines, and forms. We say that A supervenes on B when there cannot be a change in A without there also being a change in B. One cannot suppose the aesthetic properties of the painting changing without the physical properties having changed as well. If the aesthetic proper­ ties are to differ, so too must the physical properties. In this sense it can be said that the A-properties are generated by the base properties.

The emergentists who make use of the concept of su­ pervenience believe that (2) the proposition “The body is physical,” but will reject (3), the proposition “Mind and body interact.” Instead they will say that mind supervenes on body, or more particularly on the part of the body with the right kind of tissue, namely, the brain.

And yet there does seem to be a kind of causal power possessed by the human mind and consciousness,

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recognized in (3). Mind interacts with body, which is to say it has effects in the physical world. Emergentism, even with the more refined concept of supervenience on board, cannot do justice to this causal power. The reason is that emergentism is actually a form of physicalism, and it at­ tempts to deny the existence of the nonphysical except in a very diluted form that cannot accomplish what philoso­ phers call “mental causation.”

The reason emergentism is not a very popular view is that it is not a very clear one. On the one hand, the mind “emerges” and engages in mental causation. On the other hand, it is the creature of the forces from below on which it supervenes, and cannot attain to any sort of causal power.

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P H Y S I C A L I S T T H E O R I E S O F M I N D

Behaviorism

Given the troubles of dualism, one may be tempted by what is easily the most straightforward solution to the mind– body problem: physicalism. On this view, everything that exists is physical; so the mind is a physical thing, if it is a thing. If proposition (1), that the mind is a nonphysical thing, is false, which it is if everything is physical, then the mind–body problem is solved. The mind is a physical thing, and so there is nothing to stop it from interacting with other physical things, including the body. It remains true, however, that physical and nonphysical things, on this view, cannot interact. But it doesn’t matter, since there are no nonphysical things.

Well and good, but in what way is the mind supposed to be a physical thing? There are a number of different possibilities.

3

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Behaviorism is the view that the mental is the behav- ioral. Mind is behavior. The mind is the body, considered from the point of view of its behavior. Some hardline be- haviorists actually went so far as to deny the existence of the mind and mental events, over and above behavior. There is no mind, but only behavior. This is a very simple but pretty extreme point of view that has not found much favor among philosophers or scientists recently. Part of the problem is that we do seem to be acquainted with our own mental states, our thoughts and feelings, and they are not nothing at all. Another part of the problem is that there do seem to be obvious examples of an interaction from mind to body.

A second and more reasonable version of behaviorism took the line that, from a scientific point of view, we should not study the mind and mental events, because they can- not be directly observed; their existence must be inferred from the external behavior of human subjects. This is not the strongest line of thought, it has to be said, since many entities studied in science cannot be observed directly, but we infer their existence from their effects. Electricity is an example. We know about it by watching lightning, for ex- ample, or by understanding Maxwell’s equations, or how a radio works.

Nevertheless, one can understand how, in the atmo- sphere of the religiously oriented dualism that prevailed in philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century,

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and which many scientifically oriented people found un- congenial, the bold claim could be advanced, on behalf of psychology, that science should allow as its subject matter only what can be directly observed. This is cer- tainly very different from saying that its subject matter does not exist.

An even more reasonable variant of behaviorism is that mind as such is not interesting or important, and its study should be replaced by the study of behavior. There is no mention in this view of what is directly observable. It is almost like saying, “I am more interested in behavior than I am in mind.” This is, of course, an impossible view to rebut, if it is true that you are more interested in behavior than in mind; but the question remains whether you should be more interested in mind as such, or whether its study would offer you some benefit.

This third and more reasonable line of thought, how- ever, would make it impossible to solve the mind–body problem in a way that is satisfactory for science, or even to state it. We should not study or talk about minds, so we will never be in a position to say either that the mind is a nonphysical thing with any scientific authority, or, for that matter, that it is a physical thing. Our first proposition, that the mind is nonphysical, is one whose truth or falsity we should not actively pursue, because its truth or falsity is something that should not be talked about!

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There is a fourth form of behaviorism, however, that is more appealing than any of the first three forms. It is the view that the mind is behavior in the sense that any proposition about the mind can be “translated” into a proposition about behavior. So, for example, if I say “I am tired,” I am reporting not the presence of an inner feeling of drowsiness, but rather of a tendency or disposition to stop work, to lie down, to close my eyes perhaps, to rest, and so on. All of these things are external behavior, observ- able by others and fully within the purview of science and of common observation.

Gilbert Ryle wrote in his influential 1949 book The Concept of Mind that

when we describe people as exercising qualities of mind, we are not referring to occult episodes of which their overt acts and utterances are effects; we are referring to those overt acts and utterances themselves.1

It is hard to believe, reading the admittedly rather few pas- sages like this in his book, that Ryle was not a behaviorist, and indeed he himself remarked of the book that when he wrote it, “certainly one of my feet was pretty firmly encased in this boot.”2 Nevertheless, there is more to the story. Ryle writes in the passage above that when we talk about minds, “we are not referring to occult episodes” (my

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emphasis); but there is a case to be made that all the same he does not deny the existence of these episodes. Perhaps he means that when we say publicly that a person is tired, we are “referring,” not to that person’s private and inner feeling of tiredness hidden from others, but rather to his tendency or disposition to stop work, to lie down, to close his eyes, to rest, and so on. This is not to deny that the in- ner feeling exists. In chapter 6 I describe the other side of Ryle’s view, his “dissolutionism” as it has been called, and again take up the question whether he is to be considered a full-blooded behaviorist.

What is wrong with the idea that the mind just is some sort of behavior? One difficulty is that this view seems to leave out what we think of as the “inner” life of thoughts and feelings—the mind! Behaviorism solves the mind– body problem by denying the mind in one way or another. We can produce behavior without it, and without its rich experience of sensation and perception, colors, sounds, and tastes, for example, or qualia. We can easily imagine a machine that reacts to red things just as we do, picking them and eating them, perhaps, but which has no experi- ence of the colors. It behaves as if it saw red, but it does not have the experience. This has been called the “problem of absent qualia.”

There are other twentieth-century philosophers who, like Gilbert Ryle, might also seem to be offering behav- iorist arguments but are not. A famous example is the

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“beetle-in-the-box” part of the so-called private-language argument in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein is arguing that there could be no language in which we could report our own private sensations. Suppose, he writes, that everyone has a box with some- thing in it, or perhaps nothing at all. There is a rule that no one is allowed to look inside anyone else’s box. Every- one calls what is in his own box a “beetle.” But where no checking is allowed about what is in anyone else’s box, the word “beetle” would not come to mean “an organ- ism of the order Coleoptera, with hard fore-wings,” but rather “whatever is in anyone’s box.” Yet Wittgenstein explicitly denies that he is trying to deny the existence of sensations, somethings in the boxes. The issue is one of meaning.

Behaviorism does indeed solve the mind–body prob- lem, very easily, by denying that the mind is a nonphysical thing. Behaviorism simply denies proposition (1). So the discussion at this point should turn to the question of how plausible behaviorism itself is. The judgment of history, it is fair to say, is “Not very.” One powerful reason is the prob- lem of absent qualia, mentioned above. Another objection is the possibility of the inverted spectrum and its analogues in other sensory modalities. We can imagine people behav- ing systematically in the right way, but having the “wrong” experiences. Their “inner experience” might be of all the colors, but with their positions in the visual field reversed

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Behaviorism does indeed solve the mind–body problem, very easily, by denying that the mind is a nonphysical thing.

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from ours. The subjects with inverted color experiences would see a cyan green-blue color where we see red, a blue where we see orange, and so on throughout color space. But the behavior of these people would be the same as ours. When we see red, and call it “red,” they see what we call “cyan,” and call it “red,” and when we see cyan, and call it “cyan,” they see red and call it “cyan.” Accordingly, having the experience of red cannot be a matter of producing the right behavior. Our subjects suffering from an inverted spectrum behave around red just as we do, even calling it “red,” but actually experience a green-blue cyan color. Ac- cording to behaviorism, the subjects are experiencing red; but this is false. Therefore, behaviorism is false.

There are other overwhelming arguments against be- haviorism, but perhaps the biggest has been the realization from psychiatry, psychology, and physiology that events in the brain can explain behavior. If the relevant parts of the visual cortex are absent or damaged, for example, color vi- sion can be affected, and our behavior will not be the same as the behavior of someone with a properly functioning vi- sual cortex. During the two World Wars the evidence from neurology and from the hospitals mounted up. It began to look as though the state of the brain is what is mak- ing us behave in the way we do, or at the least allowing us to—though these are hardly the same thing. When in the 1950s the evidence for a causal explanation of behavior in the brain, or anyway a causal explanation of abnormal

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behavior, became too telling, behaviorism started to lose almost all its popularity, and very quickly at that.

It was especially troubling that if, according to behav- iorism, a mental state is a disposition to behave, then if what explains the behavior is the mental state, as we would ordinarily think, we have to say that what explains the behav- ior is the disposition to behave in that way! Thus behaviorism amounts to a tautology—a trivial truth—if there is such a thing as an explanation of the body’s behavior by mental causes.

The Identity Theory

By the mid-1950s, when things began to change, they changed completely. Starting with a pioneering paper in 1956 by U. T. Place, more and more philosophers and sci- entists were persuaded that the explanation both of what people do and of what they experience lies in the brain. American and Australian philosophers in particular began to advance what became known as the “mind–brain iden- tity theory,” or the “identity theory,” as it is called for short. This view, as its name suggests, is the claim that mind and brain, or anyway the relevant bits of the central nervous system, are identical, one and the same. Here too, the mind–body problem is solved at a stroke, by physicalism, by the denial that the mind is a nonphysical thing. Every

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mental event is a physiological event within the nervous system. Accordingly, the theory that the mind is the brain has sometimes been known as “central-state” materialism, a materialism making the mind into the central nervous system, distinguishing it from the “peripheral-state” ma- terialism of the behaviorists.

In its favor, the theory can be said to be commonsensi- cal, given the facts of neurology such as the effects of brain damage, and it makes a great simplification in the philoso- phy of mind. But it is hardly an “astonishing hypothesis,” as Francis Crick claimed in a book of that title published in 1994. It is important and interesting, certainly, but not so astonishing. Like behaviorism, it solves the mind–body problem at a stroke, by denying that the mind is nonphysi- cal. If this proposition about the mind is true, then the solution is, as before, impeccable. The mind is the brain and the brain is a physical thing, so the mind can interact with the rest of the body without difficulty. Yet we miss the essential thing needed for a solution: how has the physi- cal, which has physical properties, turned into the men- tal, which has properties incompatible with being a part of the physical? What do neurons have when they fire that produces mind rather than electrical signals, or soap bub- bles, for that matter?

Against the theory are also certain logical and philo- sophical difficulties. The central-state materialists do not claim and are bound not to claim that the word “mind”

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means “brain,” which is fortunate for them, as “mind” as a matter of fact does not mean “brain.” If it did, the claim about the meanings of the words would make the main claim of central-state materialism (that the mind is the brain) into a necessary truth generated by the meanings of the two words. Its truth could have been discovered simply by looking in the dictionary. However, what the mind is was taken by the central-state materialists to be an empiri- cal and factual question, not one of meaning. Central-state materialists, including Crick, took the question to be scien- tific, in just the same way as the question of what the gene or unity of heredity is was empirical and factual, to use the central-state materialists’ own favorite example. The gene turned out to be DNA, but this could not have been known from the meanings of words “gene” and “deoxyribonucleic acid.”

So far so good. But then there appeared an unpleas- ant proof from the world of logic. Identity, as it turns out, is always necessary. Suppose a = b. a has the following in- teresting property. It is necessarily identical with itself, a. Take this last statement, that a is necessarily identical with a. Substitute b for the second a; we are entitled to do this, since we have supposed that a = b. But now it follows that a is necessarily identical with b. Accordingly, if central-state materialism is going to claim that the mind and the brain are not necessarily identical, it must itself be false. This proof was published by Saul Kripke in lectures given in

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1970, and he developed extraordinarily interesting related arguments in the same work.3

Proofs of this sort, it should be noted, rely on the fact that the terms on either side of the identity sign, here “a” and “b,” are fixed names (“rigid designators,” as Kripke called them) and not descriptions that can be applied to different things. “The human mind” and “the human brain” are names, and so are “pain” and “events a in the thalamus, b the pre-frontal cortex, or c the primary and secondary somatosensory cortex (S1 and S2).”4 So the proof does not imply that it is somehow necessary that the Queen is Elizabeth II, which is true as I write. “Elizabeth II” is a name, but “the Queen,” even “the Queen of England” is really a compressed description that can apply to differ- ent persons, as it has done in the last hundred years. It is not a rigid designator because the place of the object of its description can be different objects.

Furthermore, the claim that the mind is the brain also turns out to be equivalent to the claim that the brain is the mind, since identity is what logicians and mathemati- cians call “commutative.” If a = b then obviously b = a. But the claim that the brain is really at bottom the mind could hardly be expected to appeal to a hard-headed central- state materialist, since it makes a claim more suggestive of idealism (everything is mind) than of materialism (every- thing is matter).

What is a central-state materialist to do?

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One answer was to take advantage of a distinction that had existed for some time in general philosophy, including metaphysics and the philosophy of art: the distinction be- tween types and tokens. Take, for example, Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor. It has been played many times, including its disastrous premiere in 1919, Jacqueline du Pré’s triumphant and elegiac performances in the 1960s, and hundreds of others. How many Elgar Cello Concertos are there? Could one say that there are hundreds? In that case, since Elgar wrote the work or works, he wrote hun- dreds of Cello Concertos. But he didn’t. He was enormously hardworking, but not that hardworking. Or is there only one concerto? But then how could it appear in all sorts of different places and at all sorts of different times with so many different soloists? The answer developed by philoso- phers is that there is one concerto type and many concerto tokens or instances, in much the same way that there is one book called Pride and Prejudice, but many copies of the book. The copy both is and is not the work; it is a token of the work, but it is not the type. There is a difference between the Cello Concerto case and the case of the book, though, because there is nothing that could be regarded as the performance of Pride and Prejudice. But though what is played is “the music,” as it is written, all the same it can be said that the glorious sound that is the Cello Concerto is not the sheet music, whereas the printed copies of the book are the novel.

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The distinction has its difficulties, clearly, but it was used advantageously to distinguish two forms of the iden- tity theory. There is the type pain, and there is the indi- vidual pain that is a token of the type. In the stronger and less plausible form of the theory it was the type or property mental state that was said to be identical with the type or property brain state. In the less sweeping and more con- vincing version, it was instead said to be just the one par- ticular instance of a mental state that was identical with a particular instance of a brain state. It might be that two organisms both feel the same or a similar pain, but that they are not in the same brain state. They are in some brain state; and since it is implausible that everyone’s physio- logical and psychological systems work in the same way, especially when we consider different organisms that have very different kinds of brains, it is much more plausible to identify this pain with this brain state, and accept the con- sequence that two individuals in the same psychological state may not be in the same physiological state. But they must be in some physiological state, with which the pain state is identical. So one is bound to wonder what makes all the tokens into tokens of the same type. Why are they all instances of pain?

In any case, it was suggested that the logical arguments against central-state materialism only worked against identities of types. That turned out not to be the case. The

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arguments, as it was soon realized, worked equally well against identities of tokens.

Even before the logical proofs against central-state materialism were worked out and made public in the 1970s, however, it was already too late; central-state ma- terialism was dead in the water. This came about not be- cause of the intricate logical argumentation against it, but because a much more powerful view had arisen to take the place of central-state materialism, more in keeping with the science of the time.

Functionalism

The new view that took the place of central-state mate- rialism was functionalism. It came upon the philosophi- cal scene in 1967 with Hilary Putnam’s “Psychological Predicates” and other subsequent papers.5 Putnam ar- gues that pain is not a brain state, but another kind of state entirely. It is a state of a probabilistic automaton or a Turing machine. A Turing machine is in essence a com- puter, and it computes, having computational or functional states that are not its physical states. They are described completely differently, for one thing, and for another the computational states are not made of matter, but rather of a kind of functionality, if they can be said to be made of anything at all. One can also imagine that two Turing

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machines could happen accidentally to be in just the same physical states, but in the process of performing differ- ent computations. So their computational states at that moment at which they are physically identical would not be the same states. So if mental states are computational states, as functionalism suggested, they are not the physi- cal states of the organism.

The power of functionalism came from the interesting fact that it deployed to full effect the distinction between computer hardware and computer software. What is going on with functionalism is that the mind is compared to ac- tive software, not to rigid hardware. Even with ordinary computers, one can imagine that two laptops computing the same function, say, the multiplication 7 × 9, might do it in very different physical ways. One might even consider an optical computer that does not work in the same way as an electronic computer, by electrons slowly pushing one another around through the different gates that make up the central processing unit. Clearly the two computers, optical and electronic, are not in the same physical state, since photons are not electrons. But the output (63) will always be the same given the same input (7 × 9). One can think of the function of the two machines as the same; for even their logical architecture might be quite different. Again, even two electronic computers might be running very different programs yet happen coincidentally at some instant to be in the same physical state.

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  p h y s i C a l i s t   t h e o r i e s   o f   M i n d     6 9

Putnam had discovered the multiple realizability thesis, the proposition that one mental state can be realized in multiple and very different ways. Goats, birds, reptiles, and mollusks all feel pain, depending of course what your philosophy of animal minds is. But it is completely implau- sible to think that when they do, they are all in the pre- cisely the same physiological brain state.

One might have thought, as Putnam pointed out, that the effect of the development of computers on the philoso- phy of mind was going to be materialistic, but in the event it was the reverse. The distinction between hardware and software allowed computing systems to be considered in abstraction from their physical states, and to highlight the difference between the computational or Turing-machine state, and the physical.

The time was right for functionalism, and it swept through the philosophy of mind in spite of some rear-guard action by central-state materialists. It rapidly became the preferred philosophy of mind of the artificial intelligen- tsia, those working in artificial intelligence, but also of many philosophers, especially philosophers of mind, and scientists in fields other than cognitive science.

How does functionalism solve the mind–body prob- lem? The most obvious interpretation is that function- alism denies that the mind is a nonphysical thing, not because it takes the line that the mind is a physical thing, but because it takes the line that it is as wrong to think of

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