Evolution and the Blank Slate

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Evolution and the Blank Slate

 

 

It is sometimes observed that evolution by natural selection resembles learning by trial and error. Mutation is the trial and natural selection is the error correction. It is certainly apt to think of evolution as a kind of learning process: over time organisms “learn” how to adapt better to their environment, changing in the process. The bodies of organisms are the effects of this “learning”—as if they are stores of knowledge about adaptation and survival. Organisms have gone from simple to complex as they have acquired such biological “knowledge”. This raises the question of how much of evolved species is due to the process of natural selection and how much is due to the initial state of that upon which natural selection operates. How much is “learned” and how much is “innate”? That is, what traits of organisms are the result of their evolution over billions of years, going right back to the origins of life, and what traits are the result of the original state of matter on earth before life began?

The way I have set up the issue is intended to recall the debate between rationalists and empiricists about the origin of knowledge. Of all the knowledge we possess, what is owed to experience and what is inborn? I am suggesting an analogous question about biological form: how much is due to the “experience” of evolution by natural selection and how much is due to the “innate” nature of the original material with which natural selection works? What traits owe their existence to natural selection and what traits owe their existence to the prior state of planet Earth? This is an interesting question in theoretical biology, but not one that I have seen asked. We could put the question this way: how much is really new in the evolution of species? Matter clearly had some traits before the evolutionary process got started, and the question is whether the traits now possessed by organisms transcend what was initially present. How much was really “learned” over evolutionary time? To what degree does the final state differ from the initial state, and in what respects? Answering this question will tell us how “creative” the evolutionary process is—how much it adds to what was present at the beginning. The question of knowledge asks how much knowledge is present at the origin of the mind; the question of biological form asks how much of biological form was present at the origin of life (i.e. before it began).

We can envisage two sorts of theory analogous to classical rationalism and empiricism. At one extreme we have the theory that everything of any consequence was present at the beginning—innateness rules. In particular, all the “atoms” of evolution were present at the beginning (compare “simple ideas”) and all that evolution does is combine these basic components into complex physical forms. Evolution produces no new elements, just new combinations of elements. Geological “evolution” produces no new elements when it makes mountains and rivers, just new combinations of old (“innate”) elements; and biological change is the same. This is the analogue of extreme rationalism: everything significant is present in the initial state of matter on earth, with evolution adding little that is new. At the other extreme we have the theory that matter was a blank slate at the beginning: it had no intrinsic structure, or none of any biological relevance, and everything arose from the creative process of natural selection. This is the empiricist view of evolution: we start with nothing, a mere empty receptacle, and everything about organisms is imposed from the outside by “learning”. There are no constraints deriving from the prior state of matter, just unlimited plasticity–pure potential. Natural selection imposes form on this formless substance, converting it into something rich and unprecedented. The blank biological slate makes trials (mutations) and natural selection eliminates errors while retaining successes; and as a result we have complex biological forms. It is not a matter of combination of antecedent elements but of genuine innovation: for instance, there were no eyes in pre-life matter, but evolution has caused eyes to come into being. Matter was not “born” with eyes, but had to acquire them by a process of “learning”. Biological form is thus acquired not innate—a result of billions of years of evolution, not already prefigured in matter before evolution got to work. That is why we don’t find life everywhere, as if matter could produce life by itself; we need evolution by natural selection, not just the bare existence of matter. We need the machinery of replication, selection, DNA, fitness, and all the rest. Left to its own devices matter has no tendency to generate life–as it would have to under the rationalist model.

Both theories seem to have something to be said for them, so we might wish to find some sort of intermediate position. What is interesting is how much the question resembles the old question of innate versus acquired knowledge, with its metaphors and rhetoric—and lack of clarity. Also its difficulty: it is not at all clear what to say about the question. There is certainly an appearance of novelty, but how deep does it go? Is there perhaps more at the origin than we recognize—more to matter than we tend to think? If we have a rich view of matter, the gap between initial state and final state might not be large, while if we have an impoverished view, the gap appears enormous. Suppose you are an adherent of panpsychism and natural teleology, with a soupcon of élan vital thrown in: then you will favor the rationalist theory and find little that is radically novel in the products of natural selection–it was all already present at the beginning. But if you view matter as merely “mechanical”, you may be inclined to favor the empiricist position—unless you take a very reductive view of the final product. It is difficult to settle the question without a developed view of both the nature of the initial state and the nature of the final state—how expansive to be about the former and how reductive about the latter. It is exactly the same with the classical debate about knowledge: what is the nature of the initial state of the mind and what is the nature of mature knowledge? The richer the latter the more we need to attribute to the former.

However, we can say two things with certainty: the blank slate model is clearly wrong, and we do know quite a lot about matter in its initial pre-evolutionary state. The metaphor of the blank slate does not apply to inanimate matter because matter obviously has a rich inner structure—there is nothing “blank” or “empty” about it. Without rehearsing all of physics, we can confidently report that matter has mass, extension, motion, electric charge, the power of agglomeration, and many other traits. So we know quite a lot about the “input” to the evolutionary process. This knowledge is not controversial or dependent on theoretical commitments: everyone can agree that matter has the properties listed, including the evolutionary empiricist. We needn’t beef it up with panpsychism, teleology, and the élan vital to know it is not a blank slate—we can already see that it has a substantive inner nature. It is not some property-neutral substratum that awaits the imprint of natural selection before it acquires any inherent structure. And because of this we can immediately see that the rationalist position must have a lot going for it: for clearly many of the traits of organisms derive directly from the antecedent traits of matter. Mass, extension, shape, material agglomeration, electricity, and motion—all these properties of organisms derive from the initial condition of matter not from the process of evolution. None of these traits were caused to exist by mutation and natural selection; rather, they are what natural selection had to work on—what was already present in matter.    [1] Thus it appears that most of the traits of organisms are innate in matter—native to matter. No one could suppose that these properties are the product of evolution and did not pre-exist it. Matter did not “learn” to have these traits; it was “born” with them, and evolution simply took them over. The pre-life earth was not a blank slate but a full plate, off which evolution dined. The initial state already included much of the final state.

It might be said that while it is true that bodily extension is derived from a prior property of matter, the particular shapes that animal bodies assume are the product of evolution. These variegated shapes were not present in matter before the evolutionary process got to work: there were no peacock shaped rock formations before life began, waiting to be converted into living peacocks. This point should certainly be conceded, but how much of a dent does it put in the rationalist’s position? For all such novel shapes are really the combination of geometrical properties already found in inanimate nature. The rationalist about knowledge will concede that many ideas are not innate, but insist that those that are not are mere combinations of those that are. Similarly, all the shapes of organisms are iterations and variations of shapes found elsewhere in nature—consider the symmetrical shapes of crystals. True, natural selection forms new shapes, but it does so by combining old shapes; it is not as if a radically new kind of geometry was inaugurated by the evolutionary process. The giraffe’s neck is a famous product of natural selection, but matter can form itself into long objects too—so there is nothing unprecedented there. Certainly the blank slate metaphor finds no support from cases like this: shape-wise the slate is rather full. Isn’t all this just a manifestation of the power of matter to arrange itself into arbitrarily many forms? But then, biological form is derivative from non-biological form, and hence “innate” in matter.

Is there any trait of organisms that is not innate in matter? The structure of DNA surely is: it is just molecular combination—improbable perhaps, but grounded in inanimate molecular reality. All the elements are present in pre-life matter, though the combination is novel (and hard to explain). What about mind? This seems more promising: surely evolution is responsible for the production of mind—there was no mind on earth before life began. So mind is not innate in the initial state of matter. But isn’t it? Some believe in proto-mental properties of matter; if that is right, then mind was innate in matter—there at the start, inborn. But even without that view it is plausible that matter had the potential for mind from the start; it wasn’t injected from the outside into something inherently unable to produce mind. We don’t know how mind arose in the course of evolution, so we don’t know whether it was somehow present at the beginning in implicit form (like innate ideas according to rationalists). So we still don’t have a clear example of a genuinely acquired characteristic of living forms. What looks at first like novelty is apt to reduce to combination or implicit presence at the outset. It is hard to find the analogue of the empiricist’s claim that the blank slate can be filled with a brand new idea of red upon exposure to red objects. Nothing about organisms seems like a radical innovation not prefigured in the nature of matter: life emerges from matter producing new properties, but there is no evidence of life introducing totally novel elements with no preparation or precursor. Empiricism about life has some truth to it, to be sure, but rationalism expresses the deeper truth—organisms are built from matter and only from matter. That is, bodily forms are expressions of innate properties of matter—properties that were present at the outset. How, indeed, could that not be so, given that mutation and natural selection are just causal processes operating on chemical elements originating in far-flung stars? There is nothing magical about these processes, nothing capable of infusing organisms with properties not anticipated in the primordial soup. There is plenty of scope for combination and reorganization, but we won’t find some new primitive ingredient added to what was there at the beginning. Thus the rationalist position is fundamentally correct.    [2]

 

Colin McGinn     

    [1] With respect to the eye, the rationalist position will be that while there were no eyes dotted around the landscape before life evolved (and for a long time after) the basic mechanism of the eye was present in matter. This is because an eye is a light-sensitive mechanism—something that responds differentially to light. But matter responds differentially to light in all sorts of ways, absorbing, reflecting or refracting it, so the physical basis for the eye existed in matter before life came along to make use of it. Evolution did not invent light and receptivity to light when it produced eyes; it drew upon what was already there. 

    [2] In the case of psychological empiricism there is a potential source of novel material not anticipated in the original constitution of the individual, namely sense experience (however wobbly this theory may be). There is somewhere external to the mind from which it might derive knowledge, thus supplementing its initial state, i.e. the perceived environment. But in the case of evolution there is no such external source: there is just matter and its machinations, pushed and pulled by mutation and natural selection. Where could this process derive novel materials? Not from outside matter! If it could tap into some supernatural reality, that would afford a potential source of novelty, but without that it is not going to get much beyond the material world from which life arose. The rationalist position is really the only game in town.

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Language As a Tool for Thought

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Language as a Tool for Thought

 

 

A typical tool must meet two requirements: it must be able to be used by its intended user, and it must perform its designated function. Often the tool must be firmly gripped and manipulated, so it must fit into the human hand, while its other end performs the task in question. If we think of spoken language as a tool for communication, we should expect the same duality: it must be both usable and effective. What this comes down to is that the words of the language must be pronounceable and audible. The speaker must be able to utter the words and the hearer must be able to hear them. These are nontrivial requirements, familiar as they are: words could be pronounceable yet inaudible (mere whispers) or they could be audible yet not pronounceable (not conform to the human vocal system). Spoken human languages, as we find them, combine these two characteristics, so they are both usable and effective. True, words can be hard to pronounce and fatigue can set in, and ambient sounds can drown utterances out; but generally words meet the two necessary conditions of a successful communicative tool. We can imagine situations in which they don’t, where nothing pronounceable is audible and vice versa (a noisy planet and inept voices). Then there would be no such thing as a spoken language–or a sign language, if visual conditions were not conducive (perpetual thick fog).

            But what about language as a tool of thought—what design features would we expect to find built into language that performed this function? It would need to be mentally manipulated and it would have to serve the purposes of thought. Thus it would need to consist of storable, segmented, manageable words that combine to produce complex novel constructions. It’s no use if the complex constructions consist of parts that the mind can’t handle (the analogue of words that can’t be pronounced), or if the parts can be easily handled but can’t form complex constructions like sentences. But natural languages meet the two requirements for being a cognitive tool quite neatly: the human mind can store, process, and manipulate words; and words can combine into phrases and sentences that can express an infinitude of thoughts. The basic architecture of natural languages thus suits them to be tools of thought, since they can be both used by the thinker and also serve the purpose of thinking, viz. encoding complex novel thoughts. The lexicon plus the grammar can be mentally manipulated, and the products of this manipulation serve to encode thoughts, which can enter into reasoning, practical and theoretical, which can lead to action. Without this finely wrought tool thought would not be as effective as it is (it might not exist at all in anything like its present form), and luckily an effective tool exists that can also be handled by the thinking mind. If words could not exist in internalized form, then language could not perform the cognitive function it now performs—at best we would have to speak out loud whenever we entertained a thought. Words and syntax can exist both internally and externally, and because of this language can serve as both a tool of communication and a tool of thought.

I am stating truisms. I have simply set the basic property of language in the context of the notion of a tool—language as a finite stock of discrete digital elements that can be combined by syntactic rules into an infinite array of structured hierarchically organized complex expressions. I have said that this formal object satisfies the two conditions on being a tool of thought: it is both mentally accessible and functionally effective. If it were not finitely based, it might still serve the purposes of thought as a potentially infinite system, but it would not be accessible to finite minds such as ours–while if it could not express a potential infinity of thoughts, its mental accessibility would not help in performing the task at hand. Many animals have access to symbolic systems of some kind (bees, whales), but these systems do not permit the kind of recursive unbounded scope we find in human languages. And the gods might speak languages matching or exceeding ours in expressive power, but are beyond our capacity to master (perhaps because of memory limitations). The design features of a tool are suspended between the two requirements, reflecting those requirements, and are sometimes compromises between them. They are best understood as the joint result of limited human capacities and a desired objective—possibly being a trade-off between the two. There is no point in designing a perfect tool that can’t be used, and usable tools can be effective enough without being perfect.

With these preliminary points in mind, then, I wish to make my main positive proposal: human languages make effective tools of thought (partly) because they permit the formation of conceptual distinctions. Words enable us to formulate distinctions that would not be possible without them—not possible given our contingent psychological nature. They may not be ideal tools for this job—no tool is ideal for any job—but they perform it well enough, and it is hard to see what might perform it better. One central goal of thought is the making of fine distinctions (in addition to producing new thoughts) and language is inherently suited to facilitating this process. Lest I be accused of further truism, let me state the thesis more forthrightly: the distinctions that exist between words as such are used as a tool to construct distinctions of meaning, i.e. conceptual distinctions. The mind invokes words qua formal objects to aid it in the process of conceptual distinction making. This is the analogue of the thesis that the mind uses the combinatorial power of language to aid it in combining concepts into thoughts—it recruits syntax as a device of thought assembly. Similarly, the mind uses lexical distinctness as a tool for generating conceptual distinctness. Note that this is not the thesis that conceptual distinctness is lexical distinctness but rather the thesis that lexical distinctness is used as a tool for constructing conceptual distinctness. A hammer is a tool for knocking nails in not a nail that has been knocked in; a language is (inter alia) a tool for making conceptual distinctions not a conceptual distinction itself. It is not just that human language permits an infinite number of thoughts; it also permits an infinite number of finely individuated thoughts. A language is a thought-slicer, a concept-differentiator. It is designed to generate ever finer conceptual distinctions, and it does so by containing fine distinctions itself.  [1]

There are many kinds of conceptual distinction; I shall mention three. First, we have distinct but co-extensive concepts, expressed by co-denoting names and co-extensive predicates. We have separate words for these concepts (“Hesperus” and “Phosphorus”, “creature with a heart”, “creature with a kidney”). There might possibly be a language that failed to provide for such conceptual distinctions—that was completely extensional in meaning: but no human language is like that. It would surely be impoverished relative to ours, if more to the liking of certain logicians. Second, we have near-synonymy—words that are close in meaning but not really synonyms: “house” and “home”, “friend” and “ally”, “stone” and “rock”. These are important because they illustrate the pervasiveness of distinction making: the concepts may be very similar but they are not exactly the same; there is a conceptual distinction to be made. Third, we have straight synonymy—identity of concept expressed: “bachelor” and “unmarried male”—that type of thing. Even here different words are suitable in different contexts, so there are distinctions to be made. Human language is rich in synonyms, as well as near-synonyms and co-extensive non-synonyms: that is, it is rich in conceptual (semantic) distinctions. It seems to make a point of registering such distinctions, as if it matters. It insists on marking subtle differences of meaning. This is not throwaway redundancy, but attentiveness to fine distinctions of human thought. I venture to suggest that it is a universal feature of all human languages (though not all possible languages): they all contain the machinery for recording fine-spun distinctions, and also the machinery for making new fine-spun distinctions. In thought we are constantly recognizing and creating conceptual distinctions: the thesis is that human languages aid in that process, crucially so. Words are the knives of thought: they chop things up finely.

Chomsky talks about the Merge operation that combines words into collections of words, construed as a function from sets to sets.  [2] Clearly language requires such an operation, because it is combinatorial; and the mind must be able to compute Merge if it is to exploit the combinatorial power of language. Let me likewise introduce an operation I call Dissect that operates on concepts to generate more fine-grained concepts. Suppose we start with an undifferentiated concept people and then apply Dissect to this concept to derive the concepts men and women: we have gone from a concept treated as unitary to two concepts that distinguish among the members of the class consisting of people. If we applied Dissect to the set of people (not the concept people), it would partition that set into two subsets, viz. the set of men and the set of women—so it would be the opposite of Merge. If we apply it to concepts (or word-like elements in the language of thought), it generates two new concepts (or inner words)—thereby introducing a conceptual (semantic) distinction. I do not claim that I know how Dissect works (it seems rather mysterious), but evidently it does, since we make new distinctions all the time. We suddenly (or slowly) “see the difference between X and Y” and feel a sense of accomplishment or enlightenment. We implicitly grasped the distinction (whatever quite that means) and now we grasp it fully and consciously. Language enables us to make the leap: our language faculty feeds into our cognitive faculty and awakens us to distinctions that had been blurred or elusive before. Thus we employ Dissect in conjunction with Merge in our mental operations: we merge different elements into one, but we also dissect a single element into two (and those in turn may be dissected). Both operations enlarge our cognitive scope: by permitting the formation of new thoughts by means of combination, and by making finer distinctions that produce increasingly refined thoughts. Both are “generative” or “creative”, but along different dimensions of semantic space (inter-concept and intra-concept, respectively).

It might be wondered why thought dissects: what is the point of making concepts ever more acutely distinct? The answer is that finely individuated thoughts are useful thoughts: the distinctions are real and they affect the ability of thought to function effectively in the world. There is a selective advantage to having thoughts with this degree of differentiation: semantic differentiation is biologically adaptive. Thought is relatively crude without it. We may surmise that many animals have thoughts of some kind, but it is also likely that they don’t do well on the score of conceptual differentiation. Some animals may even have the ability to entertain a potential infinity of thoughts, but their thoughts are not chopped as finely as ours. Productivity and differentiation are distinct properties of a cognitive system, so they can in principle be dissociated. And the reason our thoughts differ from animal thoughts in this way is that we have a language rich in lexical distinctions and they don’t. It is estimated that human speakers have mastery of 30,000 to 50,000 lexical items, as well as the ability to combine these to produce indefinitely many distinct expressions for what is intuitively the same thing. Our language consists of clusters of distinct but semantically related words, the result of Dissect. Dissect evolved at some point and it opened up the possibility of creating new conceptual distinctions from old concepts: it took us from an initial relatively crude lexicon to a more sophisticated lexicon rich in semantic distinctions. Thus we became advanced thinkers compared to other animals, and we made adaptive use of this cognitive advance. Dissect is what made science possible, as well as religion, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, politics, and so on. A creature stuck at the level of purely extensional concepts (or worse) would not have our advanced cognitive powers. Part of this is that more fine-grained concepts are needed for the purposes of explanation—an area in which other animals are conspicuously lacking. In explanation we need to distinguish between different properties of things, not just different things: for example, we need to distinguish weight and mass in physics, species and genus in biology, and belief and knowledge in psychology. One wonders whether there are any such fine distinctions to be found in bee or whale language (and thought).

The standard emphasis on the combinatorial power of language stresses the quantitative results of this power—the sheer number of sentences that can be generated. Thus its utility as a tool of thought rests on its ability to increase the quantity of thoughts a creature can entertain. But the emphasis on the differentiating power of language stresses the qualitative results of that power—the acuity and finesse of the thoughts it can facilitate. It can generate superior thoughts (a normative notion): as Descartes would say, clear and distinct ideas in contrast to unclear and blurred ideas. We obviously value our distinction making capacities, for reasons both practical and non-practical (e.g. philosophy). Not to be able to make sharp conceptual distinctions is a definite intellectual handicap. Somehow the thinking mind taps into the structure of language and uses that structure in acts of Dissectto produce ever more refined conceptual distinctions. It uses distinct words as concept markers, thereby eliciting concept division. That, at any rate, is the hypothesis—though we have virtually no understanding of how the process works, computationally or cerebrally. We know that language serves as a tool in the making of distinctions (or we have good reason to suspect that it does), but we don’t know how it does this—except that it appears to have something to do with the distinctness of words themselves (whatever they are exactly). The lexicon itself is quite mysterious, intrinsically and evolutionarily, and its mental operations inherit that mystery—thus Dissect is shrouded in obscurity. Concepts give rise to other concepts by a process of differentiation, but how precisely this comes about is unknown. Language acts like a tool in the process, but the underlying mechanics are not apparent.  [3]           

 

  [1] Mental images were once viewed as the elements of thought, or at least vital tools of thought. That idea has come in for a lot of criticism and is no longer widely accepted. Although images have some combinatorial powers, it is unclear that they can match those of concepts, which are essentially unlimited. But it is also true that images don’t have the kind of fine-grained individuation that meanings have: several meanings can correspond to the same image (say, an image of a man fishing), and meanings can be abstract in a way that images cannot (as with the abstract concept of a triangle). Images don’t have the right properties to generate fine-grained thoughts, but words do. Language as a formal object consisting of a lexicon and a set of syntactic rules is exactly the right kind of structure to serve as a tool for facilitating thought, because it maps so neatly onto the structure of thought.

  [2] See Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (MIT Press, 2016). I won’t go into the details of Merge.

  [3] I am not saying Dissect is a permanent mystery, only that our current understanding of it is quite limited. Mergeis also not free of mystery at the psychological and neurological levels, despite its clarity as an abstract set-theoretic operation.

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Pan-Mentalism and Geometry

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Pan-Mentalism and Geometry

 

 

Russell’s neutral monism is enjoying something of a recrudescence. He starts with the thought that physics does not disclose the intrinsic nature of matter, being merely structural and relational, and then postulates that this nature is mental in character. That is, the intrinsic nature of matter is not known through physics, so there is a gap in our knowledge of the physical world; but we can fill this gap with a philosophical conjecture, to the effect that the so-called physical world is really a mental world. Thus we (a) solve the problem of the intrinsic nature of matter and (b) solve the mind-body problem as a corollary. Russell calls this theory “neutral monism”, though it not very neutral but clearly idealist; others have called it “panpsychism” or “panexperientialism” (Eddington and Whitehead also espoused the theory at roughly the same time as Russell).  I prefer the term “pan-mentalism” for stylistic reasons (with the hyphen). I will present an objection to the theory that I have not seen made before (there are several other well-known objections).

            Let’s call whatever it is that constitutes the underlying nature of matter M. It used to be said that M is a type of substance or a type of stuff—something real and concrete, if very general (everything physical is made of the same substance). M is traditionally contrasted with whatever it is that constitutes the underlying nature of mind, which we may call P. P must be suitable for sustaining the distinctive properties of mind—in particular, thought(according to the Cartesian tradition). M by contrast must be suitable for sustaining the distinctive properties of matter: it must be capable of having such properties. What are these properties? Chief among them are properties of extension: shape, size, spatial location, and measurability. So M must instantiate the properties characteristic of extension: for example, M (or a piece of it) constitutes a cubical object resting on a table with sides measuring 1 meter. It is a given that M has just such geometrical properties—since that is what a material thing is (as well as mass, charge, motion, etc). Nothing could be M and yet lack a geometrical form (a spatial nature). We may not know much about the ultimate nature of M, but we do know that it must be geometrical. Anything of the nature of P could not be M, since P is by definition not extended—the immaterial substance can’t be the material substance.

            But now, according to pan-mentalism, the intrinsic nature of matter is mental—consciousness itself on standard views. The “stuff” of the world is experiential—conscious experience of some type. How can this stuff be geometrical? How can experiences be cubical or 1 meter wide or rest on a table? How can instances of consciousness have a spatial nature? In particular, how can they have the spatial nature of ordinary physical objects? A solid cubical object sits on a table, and this object is said to be completely (intrinsically) experiential in nature: how can that be? Experiences can’t form cubes! Minds have no such geometry. Yet they must have geometry if M is mentally constituted, since M is inherently geometrical. Pan-mentalism entails that some (most) mental particulars have the geometry of the ordinary physical world. The objection, then, is that no such thing is possible; therefore, pan-mentalism must be false. Whatever M is it must be possible for objects constituted by M to have properties of extension, but mental things necessarily lack such properties, so they cannot constitute M. That is, matter can’t be mind, given that matter is geometrical and mind is not. The nature of matter can’t be a mental nature.

            It might be replied that this argument is based on the assumption that all mind resembles our mind: why should we accept that everything mental is non-geometrical just because human mentality is? The tracts of mind that constitute matter are geometrical, it will be said, even if our minds are not: this is simply an entailment of the theory, one that we should learn to accept. But the trouble with this move is that the components of the cosmic mind are supposed to constitute the kinds of minds with which we are familiar, and so those minds would have to be geometrical too. How could the geometry of the cosmic mind, latent in all of physical nature, magically disappear when mental elements are combined to form human minds? If the micro mental components that form macro minds have shape and size, then so will the macro minds themselves. Then let it be: pan-mentalism entails that our minds are geometrical—just like our brains—so why not accept that consequence? It might accordingly be held that the geometry of the mind is the geometry of the brain. True, it sounds odd to talk this way, but (it may be said) it is a consequence of the theory we just have to accept: contrary to the appearances, ordinary minds have ordinary spatial geometry. It may not seem so to the introspective eye, or to commonsense psychology, but there are plenty of cases in which sound scientific theory has contradicted the appearances. We have discovered that our consciousness has a spatial nature, despite our commonsense prejudices.

            The trouble with this particular piece of bullet biting is that it is hard to see how we could not know this spatial nature given that we know our own minds. If consciousness has a spatial nature, how can we be blind to it? Shouldn’t we have been onto it long ago? We know that matter has a spatial nature, since this is evident from observation of instances of matter, so why don’t we know that mind has a spatial nature, if that is indeed what it has? It has such a nature no less than matter does, and we can know our own minds, so why does it escape our attention? We ought to know it from the start, not as the result of elaborate philosophical argument. Yet we don’t: this is very strange, to say the least. What we really have is a reductio ad absurdum of the theory that the unknown nature of matter is constituted by a mental reality. For once it is noticed that this requires that the mental be geometrical, we are led to the conclusion that our own minds must be geometrical and known to be so—but this is not the case. The only way out is to insist that our minds really are thoroughly geometrical, no less so than ordinary physical objects, but that we are unaccountably ignorant of this fact. My current visual experience of a red ball is really star-shaped and 3 centimeters wide, but I am oblivious to this fact. But why should I be so oblivious, and what would it even be to have a star-shaped experience (as opposed to an experience of a star-shaped object)? We thus have to reject the initial assumption that matter has a mental nature. Pan-mentalism is false.

            Russell’s starting-point was that we don’t know the intrinsic nature of matter, only its relational-extrinsic structure. He then conjectures that this nature is experiential. It turns out that the theory faces a problem deriving from the geometry of matter, as just outlined. But there is still the question of what the intrinsic nature of matter might be. We know that it is not mental, on pain of geometrizing the mind, but we have no positive idea of what it is. All we know is that, whatever it is, it must be capable of geometrical form. Whether there is any other available theory that answers the question remains to be seen. Of course, if pan-mentalism is demonstrably false as a theory of what matter is, then it cannot provide a solution to the mind-body problem. However, it may be that the unknown nature of matter is relevant to the mind-body problem, possibly because both the known structure of matter and the mind result from it in some way we don’t comprehend. There may be some sort of hidden unity to the universe at its deepest level. All I have argued here is that this deepest level cannot be mental in any sense that we can recognize.

 

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Ideal Communication

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Ideal Communication

 

 

Life on earth has reached the point that germs are in the ascendant. You can’t touch someone without catching a disease. Naturally this puts a crimp in people’s romantic lives: no more dating, no more kissing, and certainly no more sex. The future of the human race is in jeopardy. Fortunately, however, technology is advanced, particularly robot technology: it is possible to buy a disease-proof avatar that can go proxy for you in romantic encounters. Thus love life is conducted by employing such avatars as intermediaries—with the advantage that they are beautiful, ageless, and skilled in the arts of love. You send your avatar on a date to meet the object of your romantic interest, while she sends hers to you; by remote control you take it from there. Marriages are made this way, sex becomes feasible, and the human race is saved. The main difference from current arrangements is that languagebecomes far more important in this brave new romantic world, because you have to instruct your avatar about what to do, as well as speak through it to your human partner. Instead of touching your partner, you instruct your avatar to touch him or her, and this can get quite complicated and detailed. The act of love becomes an elaborate series of verbal maneuvers, more or less well executed. Accordingly, verbal skill is paramount, as opposed to actually doing any touching. What was once non-verbal has become verbal: physical interaction has been replaced by linguistic interaction—talking not touching.  [1] There is a language of love, literally.

            After a few centuries of this it becomes taken for granted. Everyone has a romantic avatar and all amorous relationships are conducted via avatar; it works quite well now that the kinks have been ironed out. People have become adept in the linguistic feats needed to operate the system, and a whole industry has sprung up to serve their new romantic needs. There are no more wordless amorous interactions, since participants need to direct the proceedings verbally—instead of actually kissing someone the human operator says, “Kiss now” to the avatar. Everything is mediated by language, with no direct communion between people. Human bodies never actually touch; instead words are exchanged, information is transmitted, and a goal is achieved. People do get into romantic contact, but indirectly, using a symbolic medium. They are in direct physical contact with avatars, but not with each other. The avatars act as expressive vehicles for flesh-and-blood humans—a communicative medium, in effect. People romantically communicate, but only via language; there is no direct body-to-body communication, such as we observe today (though the avatar body provides a satisfactory surrogate). People can be married with children and yet never meet and touch—they have a “long-distance” relationship. It is fortunate they can speak, for otherwise they would be condemned to a solitary life; and indeed for the few with language problems romance is ruled out.

            It seems to me that this parable mirrors our actual situation with regard to interpersonal communication. Consider Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and suppose that they have no communicative language, communing with each other non-verbally, yet happily. They are perfectly attuned to each other’s emotions and can pick up on the subtlest of cues—they have a perfect mutual understanding. They can even communicate telepathically. But then Eve bites into the apple and they are cast out of Eden—finding that they can no longer communicate as they did before. Now they must invent a public language with which to express themselves, making audible noises that are intended to convey messages. Oh, the labor and tedium! It used to be so easy, so immediate and so intimate; but now they have to pronounce these things called “words”, stringing them together into monstrosities called “sentences”. Jagged noises issue from their mouths, clashing with other noises, often not making it to the recipient. Thoughts and feelings get mangled in translation. Misunderstandings abound. Adam and Eve dejectedly wish they could read each other’s mind, as in days of yore, but now they have to resort to the intermediary of speech—so clunky, so inept! The sinners have been forced to become speakers (the word itself repels them). They are condemned to indirectness, remoteness, mental distance—their minds never touch any more. They squeak out their messages, wielding the avatar of language, but they yearn to communicate more directly—mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart. True, God has not condemned them to communicative solitude by subtracting all means of communication (for he is a merciful God), but he has condemned them to an inferior proxy in the form of spoken language. Since that distant time in Eden the human race has grown accustomed to the new communicative reality, but underneath it still irks and rankles—it still seems distinctly second best. They fantasize of direct mind-to-mind contact (as my imaginary lovers fantasize of direct body-to-body contact), but words are all they have.

            The point I want to urge is that we yearn for a more intimate form of communication (while also perhaps dreading it). For language is not the sole and necessary method of communication. It is contingent and dispensable, not the very essence of communication. The OED defines “communicate” as “share or exchange information or ideas”, and “convey (an emotion or feeling) in a non-verbal way”. Here there is no explicit mention of language (except negatively): language is just one way to communicate. Animals communicate in all sorts of ways that don’t require language–and so do humans; language is just one component of our communicative repertoire. If telepathy were biologically possible, it is doubtful that spoken language would ever have evolved—a gene for telepathic communication would surely have arisen. Language (the external kind) only exists because of the problem of other minds; it is designed to make up for an epistemic deficit. And it is not difficult to imagine modifications in human faculties that would render spoken language otiose. For instance, suppose that we had brain receivers that could pick up whatever someone else is thinking: why wait for people to express their thoughts in language when thoughts can be detected before anyone opens his or her mouth? Why bother to speak if you can communicate what you are thinking already? I want to share an item of information with you: I just direct my brain to your brain scanner. This would make giving lectures a lot easier. Or the human brain could evolve tentacles that physically reach out to the brains of others and insert themselves into their informational pathways, thus actually sharing the thoughts of another—a “brain-meld”.  [2] No more squeaky noises emanating from the oral cavity, subject to masking and misunderstanding, just direct contact with the cerebral centers of information themselves—a return to Eden. If we are to believe the futurists, the human species will soon be half-robot anyway, possessing downloadable brains, with files swapped at will: what need for speech? We are already talking less, what with the rise of texting—how long till writing gives way to direct brain transmission? Speaking and writing are just dispensable tools, destined to go the way of the dodo. Communication is transferring information from A to B—by whatever means possible. In all likelihood language first evolved as an instrument of thought and was only later co-opted for communication; it might then eventually fall away, if and when new means of communication become available. The issue is technological not conceptual.

            This means that the study of communication is not the study of spoken language, save per accidens. Language is one means of communication not communication itself. We have grown used to language as an intermediary in our contact with other minds (like my distant chattering lovers), so that it looms large in our vision of what communication is; but really it is not at the heart of the phenomenon. The technology of communication has changed and advanced over the years, and it may well be that it is destined to change even more dramatically as neuroscience progresses. But even if nature stands in the way of such progress, conceptually it is wrong to place emphasis on spoken language. First, we must reckon with language as a tool of thought not communication; second, language is just one mode of communication not the essence of it. If communication is the intentional conveying of information, then the means of conveyance can vary. And let’s not define language so as to make it trivially true that all communication is linguistic (“anything that serves to convey information is a language”); we are speaking here of actual human languages with their distinctive properties—lexicon, grammar, phonology, and so on. This is what is a dispensable tool. Bats may think that the only way to fly is by means of a wing made of a hand-like organ with skin stretched between the fingers, but birds know better—as do airplanes and rockets. No doubt there are those who believe that only sounds can act as a means of linguistic communication, because they are so familiar with that medium; the existence of sign language may therefore come as a surprise (though the possibility of it is not conceptually remote). Similarly, spoken language is just one species of a genus—and a recent arrival at that (maybe only 80,000 years ago  [3]). As philosophers, it behooves us to take in the full range of communicative possibilities. And in so far as meaning is bound up with communication, our study of meaning should not be confined to human public language as it now exists: that is like studying cooking by inspecting pots and pans. There are many ways to skin a cat.

            I return to the point that spoken language may not even be optimal as a means of communication, let alone unique. It is true that human language has the important characteristics of discrete recursive infinity and fine-grained lexical differentiation, but it has also been found wanting in its expressive powers: not everyone can talk like Shakespeare, and even he probably couldn’t talk like that. It takes work to express perfectly what is on your mind, if indeed that is ever achieved. A lot can go wrong—which is why people regularly complain that language is more an obstacle to communication than a means to it. Our relationship to language is fraught—we wrestle with it as much as we blend in with it. On some occasions it seems wholly inadequate to express what we want it to (“There are no words to express…”). Let’s not idolize human language—any more than human anatomy. It is not a transcendental gift from God, perfect in every detail.  [4] Like other evolutionary products, it is a practical solution to a problem, based on what existed antecedently, capable of improvement, and maybe destined for extinction. It’s the giraffe’s neck of human evolution—one way to achieve a certain goal, but with its downside. Language is elongated, to be sure, but it takes some learning and operating, and is prone to breakdown, as well as being somewhat lacking in the expressive department (compare music). It may well be a better tool of thought than it is of communication. The fundamental problem with it is existential: it is an external sign of an inner reality—in its nature it is removed from that which it is supposed to convey, viz. thought and emotion. Mindreading would be so much better, so much truer to the facts. Speech is as much diversion as revelation. What have sounds got to do with thoughts? How can feelings be conveyed by phonemes? So we naturally ask, and we are not wrong to do so. The phenomenology of human “being-with-others” is conditioned by the proxy status of the spoken word—we never get the genuine article. This is very evident in the case of a foreign language—nothing of the other’s mind comes across without a means of translation. But even in the domestic case the hearer must interpret what he hears—the other’s state of mind is not present in his words. We are always trying to get behind the spoken word, so we have the idea of accessing this ulterior thing directly (hence the attraction of telepathy). Communication in its ideal form is not mediated by language. We resort to language in our communicative efforts.

 

  [1] The avatars touch the humans, but no human touches another human. No one loves an avatar, only the human it represents. Avatars don’t speak except as mouthpieces for their human operator. What has changed is that humans no longer have physical contact with each other—though they have verbal contact.

  [2] Followers of Star Trek will recall the Vulcan “mind-meld”—a deep mind-to-mind connection caused by Mr. Spock placing his hand just so on another person’s forehead.

  [3] Evolution took a “linguistic turn” only very recently, but surely there was plenty of animal communication on planet Earth before language arose.

  [4] Flaubert: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

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Word and Hand

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Word and Hand

 

 

It is sometimes suggested that human dominance is due to language. Up until about 80,000 years ago humans were not dominant, being pre-agricultural and pre-industrial. Then language evolved and we were off and running, with our technology and social organization. Language was the lever to greatness—the Giant Leap Forward. We could test this hypothesis if language had evolved multiple times in other species: does it invariably lead to dominance? Is language the crucial causative factor? If we found that many speaking species remained relatively powerless, that would be evidence that language is not the main factor at work. So the hypothesis is in danger of conflating variables—there might be other traits of humans that played a more important role than language. We simply lack the relevant empirical data. But we can at least consider counterfactuals and seek to arrive at a reasoned conclusion: what if language had evolved in other species—would it have led to dominance?

            What if lions had developed language? A mutation occurs (or a lucky sequence of them) and lions are merrily speaking to each other; moreover, they are speaking a language like human language—a finite set of lexical items combined by hierarchical rules into infinitely many sentences. Lion language is no whit inferior to the human kind, and they converse with the facility of humans. We can certainly assume that lions are thereby rendered “intelligent”, maybe as intelligent as humans. Are they then set for world dominance? Will they come to live in mighty cities equipped with advanced technology? Surely not—and the reason is not far to seek: they are unable to construct and manipulate tools. They are big talkers, but they are not big tool users. This is because the lion’s paw is not designed to hold, grip, and manipulate—it is a foot. And the lion’s mouth is not skilled in the art of gripping either: it can seize and bite its prey, but not hold a pen to write or grip a spear to throw. The lion may be able to talk up a storm, but it has no way to interface with tools—it lacks the equivalent of a human hand. It is therefore limited in its material culture. And the same is true for elephants and birds: relatively limited prehensile powers, despite possessing trunks and beaks.  [1] The animals that show the greatest symbolic capacity—whales, dolphins, and bees—are not markedly more dominant than species without symbolic capacity. They are not even runners-up to humans on the world stage. And again it is the lack of a sophisticated prehensile organ that seems to be the problem: they have no means to convert their symbolic intelligence into effective technological action. Just as there can be tool-users without language, so there can be language-users without tools—because of the absence of a tool-ready anatomy. No hands, no tools—beyond the bare minimum.  [2]

            The hypothesis suggests itself that both language and hands are necessary conditions of species dominance of the kind we observe in humans. We are the only species with both, and we are uniquely powerful. Perhaps Neanderthals had hand-operated tools but no language, so they remained limited in their power; and we can imagine creatures with language but no tools (because no hands), as with talking lions. Humans happened to possess at a certain point in their evolution both a dexterous hand and a language faculty, and it was the joint possession of these that made all the difference. If language had evolved in an earlier species by dint of a suitable mutation, it would not by itself have the power to propel the animal into dominance—hands were necessary too. And hands by themselves are not enough—as witness other handed (but speechless) primates. Thus the evolution of our kind of power will be a rare phenomenon—unique on planet earth. We could have had a serious rival if evolution had installed hands and language in another species, but that never happened—and is intrinsically improbable. You need the double adaptation, the convergence of traits in a single animal. Maybe we forced the Neanderthals out of existence because we, but not they, had that double nature—both handy and talky. There is no single causal factor that accounts for human dominance, but a conjunction of factors, seemingly unrelated. Once they are brought together the magic happens, but separately they have little potency. Word must join with hand to produce our uniquely thrusting nature. Our specific form of intelligence and action is the upshot of these two factors operating in unison. Speech acts and manual acts are the human way.

            We should not think of the two factors as operating independently, as if merely on parallel lines. It is not just hand and language but hand combined with language—the hand/language nexus. For once the two traits came to co-exist in a creature they began to evolve as a unit: in particular, speaking and tool use operated together—both in learning and implementation. People spoke of tools—with the requisite vocabulary and associated conceptual scheme. Tool words, nouns and verbs, became embedded deep in language. We became tool talkers as well as tool users. Also, of course, the hand itself features in language use, either in an ancillary way or as the vehicle of speech. If early speakers used a form of sign language, the hands would have been the fabric of language (in its external form)—speaking was gesturing with the hands. Thus language, tool use, and hands would have been intermingled—even though the evolutionary origins of tool use and language were quite separate. Language could have arisen from a specific mutation quite independently of the mutations that led to the human hand  [3], but the two could still join forces once installed. The important point is that after the inception of the double adaptation the two could evolve together, thus enhancing the powers of each. It was this deadly combination that led to the unique power of humans to dominate. Not language by itself, or hands by themselves, but the fusion of the two. Language by itself is impotent without a body that can act constructively on the world, and the hand is our way of seizing and shaping the world around us. But hands without the intelligence entailed by language are limited instruments of power. Human civilization (if that is the word for our hegemony) is the joint product of the manual and the linguistic.

 

  [1] In fact, elephants may be the species closest to primates in prehensile capacity. If they came to possess a humanlike language (and accompanying intelligence), they might well be able to forge a culture approaching ours, courtesy of the trunk.

  [2] I discuss the role of the hand in Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity (MIT Press, 2015). This essay continues the theme of that book.

  [3] As with Chomsky’s idea that a specific mutation led to the Merge operation that underlies human language—this has nothing to do with human manual evolution. The interdependence of language and hands is a fortuitous convergence, an evolutionary accident.

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The Unity of the Word

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The Unity of the Word

 

 

What is a word? It seems safe to say that a word is something that combines with other words to produces phrases and sentences. We can also describe words as discrete units of meaning, finite in number: they are digital not analogue, never shading into each other or blending together. They are the atoms of discourse. But what are they? We can say what they do and we can characterize their general structure, but we have not yet said what they consist in—what constitutes their essential being. What are words intrinsically? We have a kind of functional-structural description of them, but not a description of their inner nature (compare the physicist’s description of elementary particles).

            A first thought might be that words are acoustic signals—the kind of thing that can be recorded with a speech spectrograph. This is certainly the kind of thing we are looking for—it attempts to say what a word is—but it is clearly inadequate. First, the same word can be uttered in many different ways acoustically. Second, the same acoustic signal could be produced by a non-speaker and it wouldn’t count as a word. Third, we must account for words as they are produced inwardly and these are not acoustic signals. Fourth, we are seeking the psychological nature of words not the physical nature of utterances of words—the sound that is made when a word is externalized vocally. Fifth, words can occur in sign language when no sound is made. The sounds (or signs) of speech are not the same thing as words themselves—a word is not what it is in virtue of the sounds speakers make when they utter it. A word is something that underlies external utterance: it is part of linguistic competence (not performance). Our competence consists of a set of stored lexical items (inter alia) and these must be realized somewhere in our mind or brain (usually called “memory”, though this can be misleading).  [1]

            A second suggestion brings in reference: words differ if and only if their references differ. This also is clearly wrong: not all words refer to begin with, but even when they do they are not individuated by their reference, since many words can have the same reference (and vice versa). Words are individuated even more finely that senses, so reference will not do the job. Besides, reference is not intrinsic to words as such, so it can hardly be what distinguishes one word from another. Nor can word difference be explicated in terms of associated mental images, any more than meanings can (even less so). Words also have no distinctive phenomenology, so this is not a viable way to individuate them. Is a word some sort of disposition? What kind of disposition? We do have certain dispositions in virtue of mastery of a word, but it is not plausible that a word is a disposition—say, a disposition to utter it. We might not have such a disposition in conceivable cases, and anyway the word is the ground of any such disposition, not the disposition itself. Is the word perhaps a neural state of some sort? But that is far too reductionist, implying that words require specific neural structures (“W-fibers firing”). Again, there is no doubt a neural basis for word storage, but words are not identical to such a basis–words are not synaptic clefts. Words are entities in their own right.

            We are having trouble finding a fact for words to be: they are psychological entities of some sort, but we can’t locate a suitable entity for them to be. At this point we might turn skeptical: we might say that there is no fact of word possession, so there are no words. Just as the rule-following skeptic says there are no linguistic rules, so the lexical skeptic says there are no words.  [2] There are sounds, but there is nothing word-like underlying those sounds: there are no such segmented psychological units. Thus an eliminative position will be recommended: the ontology of words is just misguided folk linguistics, not sustainable under analytic scrutiny. Just as some have denied the existence of grammatical rules, so the existence of the lexicon will be denied: there is nothing psychologically real corresponding to the intuitive notion of word—just the flux of sound. Talk of discrete words is nothing but a useful instrument for summing up something much more amorphous—instrumentalism about linguistics. These are all familiar options, which is why I have passed so quickly over them. And a final option is also familiar: we simply don’t know what a word is. Maybe we can’t know, but in any case we don’t know. Words have an unknown inner nature. They have various known extrinsic properties—such as sounds, dispositions, a neural basis—but what they are intrinsically remains mysterious. It is sometimes remarked (e.g. by Chomsky) that we have no idea about the evolutionary origin of the lexicon, though it is clearly innately based; now we see that we have no idea about the constitutive nature of the lexicon either. Indeed, it is hard to see how we could make progress with the question of origin without a better understanding of that which evolved—i.e. without understanding the nature of words. Words are mysterious—welcome to the club.

            It might be wondered whether the problem of words is just the problem of concepts in another guise—we don’t have much insight into their nature or evolutionary origins either. But the problem of words is a separate (though related) problem, simply because you can have several words corresponding to the same concept. Words are the vehicle of concepts not concepts themselves. What is surprising is that even words present serious problems of understanding—weren’t they supposed to be the solid ground in our understanding of language? We utter and hear words all the time, yet we have no idea what they are. We know their functional-structural properties well enough, but we can’t say what they consist in—they could be states of a Cartesian substance for all we know. Concepts are elusive, admittedly, but words promised to make themselves transparent. It turns out, however, that the level of syntax is as problematic as the level of semantics. Once we appreciate that words are not to be identified with the sounds made when uttering them, we can quickly see that nothing else suggests itself. We can’t say what words themselves are. We are reduced to thinking of them as primitive constituents of the mind, beyond introspection.  [3]

            What is the relationship between words and concepts? Here we must guard against a misconception arising from spoken language: acoustic signals can be said to express concepts, so we may be tempted to model the word-concept relation on the sound-concept relation. That relation is entirely arbitrary and conventional, eminently breakable: but words are not sounds, so they don’t express concepts as sounds do. Words are more abstract and psychological than physical sounds, so they may well be more intimately related to concepts than sounds are. Maybe the relationship is not arbitrary at all, but natural, integral. Words in the language of thought are not external to concepts or imposed on them; they are designed for concepts—expressing concepts is their purpose. Real internal words have concept-specific architecture, not a merely conventional association. We draw a blank when we try to say what words are, so we can’t describe this architecture—but surely the relationship to concepts is anything but conventional or arbitrary or stipulated. We should not assume that it resembles the relationship between sounds and concepts. I see words as the mitochondria of the mind: isolable units performing essential biological work, operating under the radar, surrounded by grosser tissue (concepts, thoughts). Words are somehow encoded in the DNA, though they are of mysterious origin and nature; they provide the sturdy underpinnings of language, used both as a tool of communication and a tool of thought. We can’t say what they are exactly, though we know well enough what they do (though not how they do it). The basic lexicon is no doubt shared by all humans and inherited from a common ancestor. What are vulgarly called words, i.e. vocal or graphic products, are far removed from the underlying psychological reality of lexical competence: it is not sounds or marks that are mentally combined according to grammatical rules to produce sentences (which are not sounds or marks either), but psychological elements of unknown nature. We must not confuse the outward utterance of words with words themselves—the items stored in memory or some other compartment of the mind-brain. Words are constituents of psychological reality, capable of various uses and types of expression, both internal and external.  [4] The unity of a word is the unity of this unknown entity.

 

Colin McGinn

  [1] It can be misleading because if the basic lexicon is innate it is not stored in memory but in some other data storage facility. Memory stores what has been learned not what is inherited. What memory contains are the particular sounds of spoken languages as they externalize an innately given internal vocabulary.

  [2] This has a bearing on the nature of quotation. A quotation name of a word is certainly not a name of the physical material appearing literally inside the quotation marks, but a name of the word itself, which is far removed from that physical material. Depending upon what we think a word is, the quotation name is a name of that thing—as it might be, a brain state or a disposition. One can imagine a form of epistemological skepticism arising from this: how do we know what word is named in a quotation name? How do we know, for instance, whether the quotation name ‘“addition”’ refers to the word “addition” or to the word “quaddition”? We think we refer to particular words by our quotation names, but how can we be sure we are referring to the words to which we think we are referring? Maybe we are referring to quite different words. This is a radical form of skepticism because it questions our ability to know what language we are speaking, i.e. our lexicon: we don’t know what symbols our language contains! Intuitively, words are more remote from perception than we are apt to suppose. (Note that this kind of epistemological skepticism is different from the constitutive skepticism mentioned in the text.)

  [3] Do words really “go through the mind” when we “think in words”? Or is it that images of the sounds of words go through the mind? How accessible are words to consciousness? Is the lexicon unconscious?

  [4] There still exists a stubborn behaviorism or materialism about language that insists that words must be some kind of corporeal entity—an aspect of stimulus and response. We must get beyond such peconceptions: words are as internal as the rest of the mind.

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Semantic Discreteness as a Logical Defect

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Semantic Discreteness as a Logical Defect

 

 

 

It used to be said that natural languages are logically defective in one respect or another: quantifiers look like names, definite descriptions look like names, names look like names, vagueness is pervasive, no distinction is made between object language and meta-language, and so on. But I have never heard it alleged that the very discreteness of words is a logical defect. Words are individual units of meaning that combine with other such units to produce composite sentences—they are digital not analogue. The meanings they carry are also discrete and digital: meanings combine as self-enclosed units—there are no borderless meanings. Meanings don’t mix or blend or flow into each other. They are not more or less, higher or lower, weaker or stronger. They have no amplitude. Every (meaningful) expression is equally meaningful. Natural human languages are like Morse code not like a graph or a thermometer—discrete not continuous. Words and meanings are like atoms not fields: bounded, discontinuous, and combinable without loss of identity. The infinity of human languages is a discrete infinity not a continuous infinity.

            It is a question why this is so: is it because of the world or the mind? Is language discrete because objective reality is discrete and language merely reflects that, or is it that the language faculty itself, as a component of mind or brain, imposes a discrete structure on language? Are words discrete because what they represent is discrete, or does their discreteness result from endogenous constraints on the language faculty? If we suppose that the language faculty evolved from a specific mutation (or set of mutations), is it that this mutation carried a preference for structural discreteness, whether the world conformed to this preference or not? And if the discreteness is endogenously based, then there is a question whether that is ideally suited to the reality that language purports to be about: the discreteness would seem to reflect us not the world. Is the world as “chunky” as language? Does it divide up in the way meaning divides up?

Certain features of reality might prompt an affirmative answer: there are distinct objects bearing distinct properties, corresponding to singular terms and predicates (this is the stuff of Logical Atomism). Meanings are segregated because objects and properties are segregated, and meanings combine into propositions in the way objects and properties combine into states of affairs. Thus the structure of language reflects the structure of reality—not our structure as psychological and biological beings. Semantic discreteness merely mirrors ontological discreteness, and so is no kind of logical defect. But this is a very partial picture, completely ignoring the continuousaspects of nature: space, time, heat and cold, colors, pitch, loudness, intensity, speed, happiness, distress, and so on. There are continuous magnitudes as well as discrete entities. But there are no magnitudes in natural language corresponding to these objective magnitudes; they are handled digitally. We don’t have symbols that vary in some magnitude to represent variations of magnitude in reality—we just use another (discrete) symbol. Wouldn’t that be better—truer to the facts? Why not have analogue components as part of the resources of the language faculty?

            What would that be like? Suppose we used pitch and duration to indicate degrees of a magnitude: instead of saying, “The soup is very hot” we say, “The soup is oooooo”, where the oooooo sound is made at a high pitch and for a significant duration. This would contrast with uttering the same sound at a lower pitch and more briefly to indicate that the soup is lukewarm. We would then be availing ourselves of a representational device that permits fine continuous gradations corresponding to the gradations found in external magnitudes. We could choose different vowel sounds for different types of magnitude (distance or brightness, say), while always using pitch and duration to indicate extent or intensity. Such utterances would have truth conditions that could be stated by the standard Tarskian biconditionals, where we repeat the analogue symbol in stating the truth condition.  [1] Thus our language would have two semantic parts: a discrete part and a continuous part, digital and analogue. It would then be capable of two sorts of infinity: discrete infinity and continuous infinity. Wouldn’t that be logically superior? The language would do justice to the continuous aspects of the world instead of digitizing everything. Bees employ continuous magnitudes to represent distance in their communicative dances—why can’t we? Should we reform language in this direction, or at least hold it out as a logical ideal? Our sensory perception of the world is already heavily analogue, so it is not as if we are unfamiliar with this type of mental representation. Yet our language seems to stick doggedly to semantic discreteness; and it does so in spite of the fact that speech already contains the resources to employ analogue representation—that is, we already have the ability to vary the pitch and duration of our vocalizations. It is not as if we would have to learn a completely new set of skills; indeed, we already sometimes use pitch and duration (as well as loudness) as semantic indicators, as when you scream a person’s name long and loud (“Ste…lla!”). We just need to incorporate this into our explicit vocabulary, replacing the clunky discrete words we use for things like degree of heat, which are typically limited to a few crude distinctions (“hot”, “very hot”, “extremely hot”). We would thereby enhance the expressive power of our language by enabling much finer distinctions of meaning: so why not upgrade to analogue?

            In fact, there is a prior question: why is our language not already (partly) an analogue language? Why doesn’t our language incorporate analogue devices alongside digital devices? This seems puzzling: the human voice is capable of analogue performances, and they would enrich the expressive power of the language, yet we don’t find such devices (at least in any systematic and substantial way). Words remain discrete, yet voices are continuous. Why does spoken language eschew a resource that would enhance it? I don’t know, but here is a suggestion: the human language faculty is not in itself a vocal capacity; it is an internal cognitive system with no essential connection to the voice. We know there are visual sign languages with the same basic structure as vocally expressed languages, so the language faculty is not inherently vocal. The vocal system is just one way to externalize the internal language faculty, and that faculty is essentially discrete. The reason we don’t exploit the analogue powers of the vocal system is that the language faculty is a modality-neutral system—speech merely expresses this system, it doesn’t constitute it. Perhaps we could with an effort of will supplement our linguistic resources with analogue symbols, but then we would be stepping outside of the (innate, inherited) language system that lies beneath particular types of sensory-motor articulation. It just isn’t natural. It might be better logically or expressively, but it isn’t what the language faculty intrinsically is as a contingently evolved biological system. The mutation that led to it included no instructions for analogue sentences, though other mutations might have led to such sentences (as in bee language). In other words, our discretely structured language faculty reflects our specific biological nature more than it reflects the objective structure of the word. The world is full of continuities, but our language prefers to stick with discreteness. Thus we digitize continuous magnitudes whether they like it or not. Whether this leads to a distorted picture of reality is an interesting question.  [2] Human language is undoubtedly a magnificent machine, but its parts are stubbornly block-like. That is just the way it evolved to be, maximally logical or not.

 

Colin McGinn

            

  [1] In writing we could use size of letter or thickness of line to indicate degrees. What matters is that we use a medium that can vary continuously, as the height of a column of mercury does in a thermometer.  In principle, we could wheel in musical instruments to fine-tune our vocal performances.

  [2] One possibility is that perception corrects for the distortions promoted by language: we can see that the world is not totally discrete, despite the intimations of our language faculty. A creature with our type of language but no perceptual experience might be more misled about the nature of reality.

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Consciousness Demystified

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Consciousness Demystified

 

 

In Nabokov’s political dystopia Bend Sinister (1947) the philosopher Adam Krug reflects on his eight-year-old son: “And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive groves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.” (188-9) It seems safe to say, in the light of this passage, that Nabokov was a mysterian (Krug is described as a great philosopher) as well as a realist about consciousness (“the only real thing”).  [1]

What if this position had been common during the twentieth century? What if it had been orthodox for millenniums? Philosophers and scientists all believe that consciousness is real and the great mystery of the universe. They reject all the theories that have been concocted as pathetically inadequate (materialism, in particular, is regarded with derision). Some view the mystery of consciousness with enthusiasm, holding that it fits in with a generally supernatural view of the world; others view it with despair, since they reject such supernatural ideas, but they see no way to defuse the mystery. Everyone agrees that consciousness is a totally mysterious phenomenon, variously described as magical, miraculous, enigmatic, arcane, alchemical, astrological, mystical, necromantic, transcendental, and just plain weird. There is nothing natural about it: it is inherently opposed to the rest of nature, a thing apart, on its own plane of existence. A conscious being is a peculiar amalgam of the natural and the non-natural, of body and mind, with nothing to join the two, no bridge leading from one to the other.

            What would my counterpart have to say about this orthodoxy? He would say that the Zeitgeist has missed an important distinction: between the ontological sense of “mystery” and the epistemological sense. He would insist that the mystery is purely epistemological, reflecting merely our own skewed and limited perspective on things; nothing follows from this about the nature of consciousness considered intrinsically. Consciousness is a subjective mystery not an objective mystery: it is a mystery to us but not in itself. People are confusing their own bafflement with a rift in the world, projecting their ignorance onto reality. We need not contemplate, willingly or unwillingly, a queer ontology to back up our sense of mystery; we can hold onto the hope that everything makes sense somehow. From a different epistemic perspective consciousness is just another aspect of nature, no more mysterious than other aspects—a biological fact among other biological facts. The thinkers in our imaginary world will disagree with that verdict: they will regard it as far too deflationary, far too naturalistic. The frankly super-naturalist among them will find in it the negation of their entire metaphysical outlook, while the reluctant mystery-mongers are likely to regard it as simply not credible—for how could consciousness be only subjectively mysterious? The latter can imagine no point of view from which consciousness loses its mysterious edge—even God would find consciousness a mystery. My counterpart’s position will thus be regarded as heretical and implausible—far too dismissive and reductive. The limited degree of mystery that he accepts is viewed as paltry by them, not real mystery at all. It’s like saying that the stars are mysterious to dogs: of course dogs can’t grasp astronomy and find the night sky mysterious, but that is not our position with respect to consciousness–we are not reifying our ignorance. The mystery is not a matter of our contingent limitations but of the objective nature of consciousness. My counterpart will accordingly be reviled for his blinkered superficiality.

I actually sympathize with this response: I don’t think my position is at all obvious—I find it difficult to believe myself. The position says that we are seriously confused about the origin of the problem. This would not go down well with people generally convinced that consciousness is the ultimate mystery. How could this mystery be entirely relative? In my hypothetical intellectual history, my counterpart will be viewed as an anti-mysterian—a sham mysterian. It will be said that he regards the mystery as a fake mystery, with people muttering disapprovingly, “That McGinn is no real mysterian but an impostor”. And he will partially agree: he is not a hard-core heavy-duty mysterian like them; he is a naturalist, a biological monist, an opponent of all things “queer”. He takes himself to have demystified consciousness—compared to those who find it deeply mysterious in its essence. He is like someone who insists that biological reproduction is not fundamentally mysterious, even though they have no idea about DNA, embryogenesis, and all the rest. In an intellectual environment that finds reproduction an indication of divinity, such a thinker will be branded an anti-mysterian about reproduction—for him there is no “divine spark” or “supernatural elixir”. It’s all just chemistry, though he admits he doesn’t know what kind of chemistry. My counterpart might likewise even assert that consciousness is all just neurons, though admittedly he has no idea what kind of property of neurons might lie behind consciousness (it’s certainly not like the kinds we know about). He is no defender of the alchemical and astrological.  [2] He will have no truck with occult psychic energies, subtle animal spirits, or vibrations in the astral field of the élan vital. For him the apparent mystery of consciousness reduces (yes, reduces) to a cognitive limit on the human brain. He is not welcome in philosophy departments stocked with traditional mysterians: “Here comes that tiresome mechanist of the spiritual world again!”

                Still he garners some supporters; a movement germinates. They are a threat to the established mysterian order and are regarded with suspicion (some whispering darkly that we are materialists in disguise). No one would call them “mysterians” (an honorific term in that society) even though they accept that consciousness eludes human understanding. Opponents will point out that belief in the limits of canine knowledge is no form of mysterianism, just an obvious biological fact. They may defiantly refer to themselves as “reductive mysterians” or even “eliminative mysterians”, but the labels will be resented by the establishment. The substantive debate concerns the origin of the agreed sense of mystery, and hence the nature of the mystery: does it stem from our own limitations or does it reflect the objective reality of consciousness? Some will maintain that we can just see that consciousness is an objective mystery, while others will argue that appearances may be deceptive, here as elsewhere. It will be assumed that full-blooded ontological mysterianism is the default position, with the epistemic kind needing to do all the argumentative work. And indeed it is not easy to refute the ontological version—it is not clearly groundless by any means. The epistemic version is the one that flies in the face of common sense—the one that boggles the mind. How can consciousness not be mysterious? How could mere brains generate it?

            I suspect Adam Krug would find me an anti-mysterian of the first order, and I would not disagree with his opinion. For me the mystery is profoundly superficial, if I may put it so, even if deep and permanent. There can be insoluble (by humans) problems that are laughably easy for other kinds of mind to solve. Consciousness has evolved with the greatest of ease on planet Earth many times over, so it should be possible to figure out how. It can’t be that mysterious, despite appearances.  [3]

 

Colin McGinn

 

 

  [1] I was pleased to discover this passage, Nabokov being my favorite novelist. But the book in which it occurs is the most terrifying and disturbing I have ever read—absolutely unbearable in places.

  [2] My counterpart is a reductionist about the sense of mystery, though not about consciousness itself. He has never seen a mystery he can’t reduce to a limitation. Miracles and the supernatural are so much hot air as far as he in concerned.

  [3] It isn’t that I don’t think consciousness is special—I think that it is. It is just that its specialness is no mark of ontological eccentricity—it doesn’t bring the world closer to the alchemical and astrological. Magic has no part in it.

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