Can the Body be in the Mind?

The classic mind-body problem can be stated as follows: How can attributes of the mind be attributes of the body? Attributes of the mind have been taken to include consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, rationality, privacy, incorrigibility, and unity. How can these attributes exist side by side with bodily or physical attributes? They seem like attributes of a radically different kind, incapable of joint instantiation. How can thought, for example, exist in an extended substance? Some have believed that they cannot—we must recognize a separate entity as the bearer of mental attributes (“mental substance”, “soul”). Others have supposed that the feat is possible because mental attributes are really physical attributes in disguise (good disguise!)—hence materialism. Yet others have thought to accept that two mutually irreducible properties can co-exist in the same thing (the self, perhaps, or particular events—as in token identity theory). Panpsychism has seduced more adventurous souls. Desperate men have declared deep mystery—we just can’t know how the mind and the brain manage to join hands. The range of options is now sadly familiar, if strangely comforting (all those delightful possibilities!). I won’t be discussing them today; my concern is with a different, though connected, question. That question is this: How can bodily attributes be attributes of the mind? How, in particular, can the brain be an aspect of the mind? The attributes that characterize the body and brain are: extension, mass, atomic structure, chemical reaction, motion, and location in space. How can these be instantiated alongside the usual mental attributes? Many organisms have both, but how is that possible? Some will say it is not possible: there has to be material substance in addition to the mental substance of mind or self in which the physical attributes reside. Thought itself cannot be extended, as Descartes would put it, but there is another dimension of reality that provides a natural place for the attributes we call “physical”. Dualism is thus the indicated position. A second view might take the problem to be not so readily solved and feel pressed to explain how so-called physical attributes contrive to come together with the mind—they are themselves covertly mental! That is, we adopt a mentalist metaphysics in which body and brain are minds in disguise (good disguise!), or something approximating to minds in the full sense. Extension, say, is really a species of thought, or proto-thought, or almost-thought. C-fiber stimulation is covertly pain-like, quasi-pain, pain-ready. Others have declared themselves unfazed by the alleged problem: there is no difficulty in the idea that a single state or event might have two irreducibly different attributes, so that C-fibers can happily fire alongside sensations of pain without being pain, or even be intelligibly linked to it. It is simply a brute fact that the same event can be both a pain and a C-fiber firing without the latter compromising its mind-indifferent physicality. Or else a form of panpsychism exercises its attractions: the only way that material properties can coexist with mental properties is that the former have traces of the mental already in them. The link is not then accidental. We also have to contend with those desperate characters who detect signs of deep mystery: we just don’t know (can’t know?) how physical attributes attach themselves to mental attributes—maybe they have a hidden nature that makes this possible. We can call this the body-mind problem in contrast to the mind-body problem. The latter problem is how to find a place for mind in body; the former problem is how to find a place for body in mind (hence my title).

Strangely enough, we have been much preoccupied with the mind-body problem but not with the body-mind problem. We think there is a big problem about locating the mind in the body, assuming that there must be some sort of intimate link, but we don’t worry about how the body can be bound up with the mind. We don’t try to construct clever theories of the body.   Perhaps this is because minds are always enmeshed in bodies but bodies are not always enmeshed in minds; indeed, physical attributes are frequently to be found quite apart from minds (e.g., mountains and minerals). But there is also the point that we don’t normally think of the mind as having physical attributes—as extended, massive, atomic, etc. And we are inclined to doubt that physical properties have a nature that suits them to be partnered with mental properties: extension per se seems to have nothing essentially to do with the mind. But closer examination suggests that the mind must have entanglements with the body and brain: it must have a physical nature in addition to a phenomenological nature, so that the question must arise as to how the mental can find room in itself for the physical. On the face of it, the mind is not extended or massive or chemical, but if it actually is all these things then this must be possible. It must be possible for the brain to host the mind, and it must also be possible for the mind to host the brain, i.e., allow the brain to form part of its nature. These are surely two sides of the same coin; they present a problem of integration. From the body’s point of view, it is a challenge to reach up to the mind, just as from the mind’s point of view it is a challenge to reach down to the body. How is the mind embodied, and how is the body “em-minded”? Could it be that there are two modes of extension, mind-indifferent and mind-directed? Is extension in the brain different from extension in mountains? Is it a complete mystery how matter inserts itself into mind? Or are we driven to conclude that the association is entirely contingent—that the mind just happensto have material correlates? The physical world starts to seem as mysterious and baffling as the mental world once we contemplate the body-mind nexus. How could the physical world come into such close contact with the mental world? How can attributes of the body be attributes of the mind? How can extension be partly constitutive of thought? What is extension such that it forms part of the nature of thought? Is it really a type of primitive thought—more thought-like than we suppose? The imagination reels. What account of the physical world can we give that enables it to form part of the mind? We are used to the idea that we have to reconfigure the mind in order to slot it into the physical world, but now we are seeing that we have to reconfigure the physical world to make it slot into the mind—or admit that no such slotting is possible. The body-mind problem is wide open and extremely confusing.[1] The body turns out to be as problematic as the mind.[2] The relation between the two is as opaque as ever, if not more so.[3]

[1] Here I paraphrase the last sentence of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972).

[2] Simple mechanism brings out the problem most starkly: how can a mere machine form part of the essence of a mental state? But modern physics does not really bridge the gap to the mind either, despite some valiant efforts in this direction—quantum mechanics won’t help us. It is as hard to assimilate the body to the mind as it is to assimilate the mind to the body. Thus, we are faced with an irreconcilable duality grafted onto an evident unity.

[3] I would seem to have introduced a new problem about the relation between body and mind, but I wouldn’t deny that they are rumblings to this effect in the antecedent literature—panpsychism, for example, can be seen as a response to the body-mind problem. The idea that the physical world is really mental in nature suggests an answer to the problem, though one carrying heavy baggage. Idealism is the logical conclusion to this line of reasoning. I think myself that both mind and matter need to be reconceptualized in order to make progress with the problem, whether that be possible or not. I do not believe that what may be called naïve property dualism is a satisfactory solution. The mind-body problem is really astonishingly difficult; the word “hard” doesn’t do justice to it (calculus is hard, or Shakespeare’s language). Even the word “mystery” doesn’t cut it, since many so-called mysteries turn out to have prosaic solutions. Perhaps we should speak of “super-mysteries”.

The Survival of the Fittest?

Herbert Spencer’s phrase “the survival of the fittest” has done a lot of mischief, not only in biology, but also in politics, economics, ethics, history, and education. The phrase is riddled with confusion, ambiguity, and tendentious error. I will indict the phrase, first its use in biology and then in other fields, particularly economics. We can start with some trenchant remarks from Keynes: “The philosophers and the economists told us [in the nineteenth century] that for sundry deep reasons unfettered private enterprise would promote the greatest good of the whole. What could suit the business man better?… Thus the ground was fertile for the doctrine that…state action should be narrowly confined and economic life left, unregulated so far as may be, to the skill and good sense of individual citizens actuated by the admirable motive of trying to get on in the world…  The economists were teaching that wealth, commerce, and machinery were the children of free competition—that free competition built London. But the Darwinians could go one better than that—free competition had built man. The human eye was no longer the demonstration of design, miraculously contriving all things for the best; it was the supreme achievement of chance, operating under conditions of free competition and laissez-faire. The principle of the survival of the fittest could be regarded as a vast generalization of the Ricardian economics.”[1] Accordingly, Darwinian biology could be touted as the foundation and rationale of individualistic capitalist economics, and hence anti-socialist politics (as well as egoistic ethics). The phrase “the survival of the fittest” was the expression of solid biological science—and hence of the general nature of life on earth. But the phrase was not much scrutinized, falling off the lips as it does—it sounds like common sense made rigorous. So, let’s ask what it means and whether it describes anything actually true in the biological world.

The phrase is evidently intended to express the idea that the “fittest” organisms live longer than the less fit ones: fitness produces longevity. An individual organism will survive longer than other individuals with which it is in competition if it has a higher degree of fitness. But what is fitness? The OED gives us the following for “fit”: “in good health, especially because of regular exercise”. This is the use of “fit” we employ when we say “You are looking very fit” or “Are you keeping fit?”. We may thus paraphrase Spencer’s phrase as “the survival of the healthiest, especially because of regular exercise”. Those animals survive best that are, and keep, fit—that are “in good shape”. So, now we know what the phrase means, pretty much, but is it true? And let us observe that it is intended to exclude other factors that might be thought to lead to survival—such as being designed by God, or well-connected, or of superior breeding, or notably virtuous. Survival depends solely on fitness—on physical good health. If you want to know whether a given organism will survive longer than its rivals, then you need check its physical fitness and nothing else. However, this test is neither necessary nor sufficient for survival, or even its relative probability. Not necessary because not all organisms are fit in the stipulated sense: are plants fit or bacteria or jellyfish? Do they exercise regularly? Do some have stronger muscles than others, or get out of breath less easily? Of course not, so their survival is not a matter of being more fit than other organisms in the customary sense. Here we might appeal to the definition in terms of “good health”—plants etc. can be more or less healthy. But what is the criterion for good health? It had better not be “conduces to survival” on pain of generating a tautology (“organisms survive best by having traits that conduce to survival”). To avoid this kind of trivialization we need to specify what kind of trait is “healthy”—such as muscular strength, or speed, or flexibility. But these are not universal traits of organisms subject to evolution by natural selection. Many organisms are not fit at all if we mean by “fit” what the dictionary says.  But what else could we mean? Isn’t that definition exactly what we have in mind when we hear the phrase “survival of the fittest”, not noticing that it applies only to a subclass of organisms (mainly humans). And what of rich well-connected humans who are sickly and bed-bound but supported into old age by wealth and privilege, while fit strapping youths die in battle at an early age? It all depends on your circumstances, your environment. Physical fitness is surely just one of many factors that contribute to longevity (in favorable circumstances)—what about intelligence, sociability, cunningness, good looks, an optimistic temperament? Individual physical differences are not the only things that affect survival; the mind does too. Mental qualities are not types of fitness yet they have an impact on survival. We need a more inclusive general notion than “fitness” if we are to capture the full range of survival-conducive traits—without falling back into the tautological “anything that contributes to survival”. The truth is that there is no such general notion, which is why “fitness” is so regularly (and uncritically) invoked.

The upshot is that there is no law of biology that specifies what trait an organism must possess in order to survive, or have the probability of its survival raised. The fitness formulation attempts to specify such a trait, but it fails to say anything true (even approximately). There is no law of the form “All organisms must have trait T in order to survive”. There are many traits that can lead to survival (or its opposite) with nothing significant in common, and many kinds of environmental context that affect the efficacy of those traits (being fit and strong won’t help you survive long in a gladiatorial culture, compared to your less pugilistic compatriots). There is no single trait that is correlated lawfully with survival—not fitness and nothing else. The world is too messy and complicated for that. Nor does Darwinian biology require the existence of such a law. Natural selection acts variously and contextually. So, there is no scientific law of biology that that can be invoked by other disciplines in order to confer respectability on their own predilections. Darwinian biology is not a prelude to laissez-faireeconomics and individualistic capitalism. In particular, there is no biological invisible hand that ensures that the laws governing survival necessarily produce the “fittest” future populations. Natural selection does not select for something called “fitness”, i.e., the state of being fit; it does not increase the level of bodily vigor in the organisms it operates on, or some such thing. Human nature, for instance, is not the result of a law that leads inexorably to an increase in something called “fitness”—we are not the fittest of all creatures (many of us are not fit at all). If being fit is thought to be a perfection, there is no law of biology that leads to a more perfect species. There is no “the survival of the X-ist”, where X is some general trait common to all organisms. There is no law of this form leading inevitably to improvement, progress, a more perfect world. So, there is no law of nature we can rely on to do what an intelligent designer is supposed to do. There is no substitute in nature for what God was supposed to ensure. Evolution could lead to a worse world, a less “fit” world. Natural selection just selects; it doesn’t select for some admirable trait like fitness. When the dinosaurs were wiped out it wasn’t because they weren’t fit—that they didn’t take regular exercise or mind their diet. In the biological world, shit happens; it isn’t all a steady accumulation of fitness, viewed as a type of perfection. It isn’t that evolution will inevitably lead to organisms comparable to Olympic athletes. It isn’t that in the end all animals will be incredibly fit (or incredibly smart or sexy or moral). That is all mythology supported by a rickety phrase invented by a chap named Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century.

Now we must talk about the appropriation of the offending phrase by economists and sundry others. The idea is that entrepreneurs and their products are subject to the same law that Darwin enunciated and Spencer christened: they survive according to their “fitness”. They compete with each other, subject to no outside authority, in the quest to make a better product, and the best man wins. In this they are just following the dictates of nature, engaged in a battle for survival. But that survival will inevitably bring with it a rise in the quality of the world, i.e., better goods and services. The fittest wins, survives into the future, outclassing the opposition. The business man is like a tiger in the wild, ruthless but bent on benefiting the world by being super-fit. Just as Darwinian laws benefit the species (allegedly), so economic laws benefit society as a whole. The trouble is that there is no such biological law, so that we will need to look elsewhere for a defense of laissez-faire economics. I won’t discuss all the problems of laissez-faire economics—I am not an economist and they have been amply discussed by experts[2]—I wish only to point out that biology provides no rationale for such an outlook. The same is true for politics, morality, history, and education. No respectability accrues from any supposed analogy to orthodox biology to certain doctrines in these areas, because the whole idea of the survival of the fittest is shot through with difficulties. There simply is no well-defined notion of fitness applicable to all organisms such that that trait is selected for in the battle for survival. There is just survival and its absence, aided by a large range of traits each suitable for the species that has them. We can certainly say that those organisms survive that are the fittest to survive, but that is a mere tautology and does not include the ordinary notion of fitness; here “fittest” means “cut out for” not “physically fit”. The phrase has survived as long as it has by dint of ambiguity, vagueness, and suggestiveness, not by denoting a well-founded piece of science. It should be retired from civilized discourse.[3]

[1] This is from Keynes’s 1926 essay “The End of Laissez-faire”.

[2] Keynes has a nice discussion in “The End of Laissez-faire”.

[3] It isn’t that markets don’t operate like species, though they don’t; it’s that species don’t operate like species, as conceived by the survival-of-the-fittest trope. This is really a meme not a scientific theory. Nor is survival the essence of the matter; reproduction is. It should be obvious that the contemporary biologist’s notion of fitness, defined in terms of quantity of offspring, has nothing to do with fitness in the vernacular sense invoked by Spencer’s phrase. There is a lot of confusion surrounding biological terminology here.

Reality and Appearance

Appearances are part of reality, even when they are illusions; they are real things, no less so when not representing reality correctly. But is reality part of appearance? Certainly, not all reality is presented in appearances, since some parts of reality have appeared to no one (unless we include God). But is reality everpart of appearance—does reality ever appear? I will argue that reality never appears as it is in itself. In its actual nature it never appears; it never appears as it is. No aspect of it ever appears as it really is. This means that we never experience reality as it is in itself in any respect. It would be widely agreed that some of its appearance is foreign to it as it is in itself (e.g., secondary qualities); I am suggesting that all of it is strictly outside the scope of appearance. For example, no one has ever seen an object as it is in reality, though it is a certain way in reality. The reason for this is simple, indeed truistic: appearances are always viewpoint-relative, but reality is not. The way the physical world is in itself is independent of any viewpoint; no viewpoint is built into it. But viewpoint is always built into appearance, necessarily. The easiest case is spatial perspective: we sense things from a position in space, but things in space don’t themselves have any spatial perspective. Perspective belongs to the appearances but not to the reality that appears. In other words, perspective is subjective (subject-relative) while reality is objective (not subject-relative). Appearance contains a point of view; reality does not. There is no point of view in reality, just brute existence—being in space is not a matter of being perceived to be in space. This is a fact about reality—a metaphysical fact—but it is a fact that cannot be represented in perceptual appearances. Thus, reality could never be perceived just as it is: the way it is for no one cannot be captured in an appearance to someone. Nor could it be captured by the universe itself, since the universe does not appear to itself. If it did, it would have a point of view, thus undermining its claim to complete objectivity. To put it differently, sense-data cannot represent objective states of affairs objectively. Sense-data may be caused by objective states of affairs (no doubt they are), and in that sense may be said to be de re objects of experience, but they cannot represent how the states of affairs are in themselves and only in themselves. That, indeed, is a conceptual truth.

At this point questions crowd in. Is this conclusion true only for perceptual experience but not for appearance in thought? What does it imply about human knowledge? What about Berkeley? Is it true for numbers and mental states? I will consider each question in turn. The first question is answered by observing that thought and perception are not unconnected: to the degree that our thoughts reflect our perceptions, they too are incapable of representing reality as it intrinsically is. Even a mild version of empiricism will generate this result. Certainly, we can’t imagine the real world without any tincture of our world of subjective appearance, because imagination tracks the senses. And isn’t it true that if we try to focus on our thoughts about the physical world, we find that we are forced back to a perspectival conception of reality? If I try to think of the world from noperspective, I find that I don’t know what I am thinking—my own self keeps intruding (hence the temptations of solipsism). Every conception of things is a type of view, but there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. We ask about someone’s views, tacitly conceding that they are locked into a certain perspective, even if it is just the human (or mammalian) perspective. Reality does not come to us neat but diluted by our own sensibility, sensory or intellectual. The phenomenal world is our world; we can’t grasp reality noumenally. So, thought cannot escape the tyranny of the appearances. At the limit we are subject to the tyranny of intelligence (reason, intellect) in that we see things from our cognitive vantage point—our concepts, our logical faculties. The subject cannot escape himself altogether. But reality is under no such constraint, simply possessing being itself, knowing subjects be damned. Thought, by contrast, cannot escape its status as thought: thought is always present to itself, intrusively so. Thought is not transparent. There is no such thing as a fact being embedded in thought just as it is, neither more nor less. Thought always adds and subtracts, because thought is a form of appearance (the intellectual form). A physical fact thought about is always thought about under a mode of presentation, but facts themselves have no mode of presentation—they are pure reference, so to speak. Being is not being for anyone. There is thus a fundamental mismatch at the heart of all mental representation. The mind never encompasses reality just as it is in itself. The idea is contradictory.

Does that mean that human knowledge of reality is impossible? No, because knowledge does not require complete objectivity; it requires, rather, a type of tracking. The knowing mind must correspond to reality, reliably, deeply, but it need not be reality—as if only the object itself can truly know its own nature. Knowledge does not require identity between subject and object, only correlation. Knowledge is true justified belief—a type of mapping—not the upload of world into mind. Scientific knowledge is not compromised by the admission that it cannot describe the world in completely unadulterated objective terms, as if the knowing subject has somehow disappeared. The knowing mind never collapses into the world; it parallels it. Maybe we have a fantastic ideal of knowledge in which the mind is invaded by the world as it objectively is, setting up camp in it as it were; but realistically, knowledge cannot aspire to such an encounter–it must be content to provide an atlas of reality, a guide. No one ever contended that x knows that p if and only if x’s mind apprehends reality as it objectively and intrinsically is: that is far too strong a requirement. Scientific realism does not require that reality should enter wholly and directly into the scientific mind, like a shoe in a box. It does not require an epistemology of containment.

What about Berkeley? It might be supposed that a Berkeleyan metaphysics could prevent reality from eluding the clutches of appearance. If reality is appearance (idealism), then it cannot lie outside of appearance; it must be a type of appearance, viewpoint and all. And surely, we can grasp appearances! But remember that reality for Berkeley is appearance in God’s mind not just any old mind (yours, your neighbor’s); and therefore, the kind of appearance that constitutes reality is not like ordinary human appearance. Do we really grasp what it would be for something to appear thus-and-so to God? Do we grasp the full reality of divine appearances, and not from our own limited perspective on them? Doubtful: so, we don’t have a conception of reality in Berkeley’s system that allows it to be captured by our human appearances—it transcends them. It probably transcends them even more than material substance—it is further from our natural modes of comprehension. At any rate, such a metaphysics doesn’t render reality one whit closer to what can enter into human representations; we are not acquainted with a reality so conceived, as we are not acquainted with ordinary objects under metaphysical materialism (i.e., the doctrine that physical objects are material not mental).

I just said that we know our own appearances—that they appear to us just as they are in themselves. But is that really true? This raises the broader question of whether any elements of reality appear to us just as they are, neither more nor less. Does pain, for example, appear just as it is intrinsically? That certainly seems like a more appealing proposition than it does for physical objects outside the mind, but on closer inspection it too comes to seem questionable. For it is arguable that pain also has dimensions that don’t show up in its appearance to us: it may have an underside that escapes our introspective awareness. What about its functional and cerebral properties? These don’t reveal themselves to our powers of introspection, so the first-person appearance of pain is not a mirror of the full nature of pain. And when we include these physical features by taking the brain and behavior into account we are back with elusive physical facts. Is it even clear that we have a complete picture of the phenomenology of pain just from our ordinary introspective awareness? Maybe there are details and similarities that are not immediately apparent to us: the reality of pain’s phenomenology might exceed the appearances it presents to us. After all, first-person introspection is just one perspective on pain, though doubtless a central one; pain itself might have a subjective reality that goes beyond such a perspective. It is a constituent of objective reality as well as a conspicuous presence in my subjective image of the world. It has being-in-itself as well as being-for-me.

Lastly, what should we say about mathematics? When I think about numbers do I grasp their objective reality? I know truths about them, to be sure, but do they offer their whole being to my cognitive faculties? I don’t view them from a particular spatial perspective, so it isn’t as if I falsify their inner nature in the way I do with concrete objects. But do I really perceive (intellectually) their actual intrinsic nature? Is there no more to their intrinsic nature than what appears to my mind? That seems hard to maintain: we don’t even know whether they are abstract, mental, or notational! We are ontologically myopic with respect to numbers. What if they exist in Platonic heaven right next to the Form of the Good—is that any part of our normal encounters with numbers? Scarcely. We may have a very partial and biased picture of mathematical objects; their reality may differ significantly from their appearance to us. Thus, I am inclined to believe that number appearance does not fully disclose number reality, though our knowledge of truths about numbers is one of our stronger areas of knowledge. It is hard, then, to escape the conclusion that reality never coincides with appearance. Appearances always omit aspects of reality as well as impose aspects alien to the thing itself. Our very concept of reality is too rarified for comfort, though indispensable.[1]

[1] Hume would say that we have no impression of subject-independent reality corresponding to our putative idea of it. The idea is thus under suspicion of emptiness. That is no doubt too strong, but it is true that the idea is unnervingly abstract and disturbingly noumenal.