Future of Philosophy

The future of philosophy in America looks dismal. I am not going to sugar-coat it. The root cause is job scarcity—a matter of supply and demand. There are very few jobs for too many people and it’s not going to change any time soon (probably never). Not many new people can get into the field. The result is that fewer people even try to. It just makes no prudential sense. A brilliant person with employment options will not risk a lengthy education in philosophy—he or she will go into law or tech or show business or journalism or physics. Thus, mediocrity is the likely outcome: lower quality and less quantity. Mediocrity breeds mediocrity. Mediocre teachers, mediocre researchers, mediocre writers—a general lack of spark. This mediocrity will put off brilliant people more. The public image of philosophy will suffer; it will be seen (correctly) as a sleepy dull field. No more articles about philosophy in intellectual publications. This process is already well underway: the intellectual level of the subject has dropped significantly during my time in it. At present some good people are still toiling in the vineyard, but they are old, past their prime, and ready for retirement. No one of comparable quality is there to replace them. Imagine the level in ten or twenty years from now! I also think there has been a noticeable decline in the moral quality of people in the profession—a lack of integrity, decency, courage. The field is full of cowards and moral fools (I told you I wouldn’t hold back). And morality and intellect go together. I won’t name names but I have been startled by the stupidity and spinelessness of younger members of the profession. Instead of creativity there is careerism. Academic politics has replaced hard work and inspiration. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years philosophy in the universities has become largely history of philosophy, or else intolerably pedestrian. The subject is just not what it was in the old days—up till about the turn of the century. But my point is that this will only get worse because of the job problem. No doubt other factors are at work such as a decline of intellectual standards, the forces of conformity, the lack of real literacy, the sheer brainlessness of culture at large. People are just not interesting anymore, not worth knowing. Dim, dull, depressing. Do I care? Not really—I’m no longer part of it.

Mental Ontology

A certain way of conceiving mental ontology has become entrenched: there are mental tokens and mental types, and token identity does not entail type identity. In other terminology, there are mental particulars and mental properties, and the former may be identical with physical particulars in the brain without there being an identity of mental and physical properties. These entities are generally thought to be events—hence event tokens (particulars) and event types (properties). According to the token identity theory, mental event tokens are identical with physical event tokens, but mental event types are not identical with physical event types. Logically, it’s like saying that all colored objects are identical with shaped objects, but colors are not identical to shapes. That proposition is obviously true and provides a model for the mind in relation to the brain. But how good is the analogy?  Does it make sense of the thesis of token identity? Clearly, that thesis requires that mental events (particulars) can have multiple non-identical properties: a single event can be both a pain and a C-fiber firing, where these two properties are not identical (like red and square). Is that true of events in general? Not according to one plausible account of the metaphysics of events—the property exemplification account. I won’t go into the details of this but merely note that it does not allow for the kind of token identity theory commonly proposed. In short: no single event can have multiple intrinsic non-relational properties, because an event is an exemplification of a specific property.[1] Thus, if the property of pain is not identical to the property of C-fiber firing, then a particular event of pain cannot be the same event as a particular event of C-fiber firing. That is intuitively correct: events are occurrences or instances of a single (non-relational) property at a given time and place. Type distinctness therefore implies token distinctness. There cannot be a token identity theory without a corresponding type identity theory. The relationship between a particular mental event and a particular physical event cannot be identity if the instantiated properties are distinct. What then is it? We can call it by several names—dependence, realization, supervenience, implementation, constitution. The idea is that a mental event occurs in virtue of a numerically distinct but correlated physical event in the brain; it is because of that event that the mental event happens. So, the correct formulation of the intended physicalist claim is that every mental event occurs in virtue of a correlated physical event—though not necessarily of the same physical type (it could be D-fibers not C-fibers). This is not an identity theory but it is a version of a token physicalist theory (there are no mental events that lack such a physical correlate, as in disembodied minds). We can dispense with the ontology of multiply exemplifying token events and replace it with an ontology of singly exemplifying token events plus a relation of correlation (dependence, realization, etc.). This degree of dualism is mild and anodyne, nothing like the full Cartesian Monty (there are no “naked” mental events).

Is that the end of the story? Unfortunately, no: for the question is immediately raised as to what explains the correlation. The names for the relation are really just names of a mystery. That is the mind-body problem: how and why are the mental and physical properties related as they are? Is the mental property reducible to the physical property on which it evidently depends? If not, what is this relation of emergence, generation, creation, or what have you? If we knew that, we would have solved the mind-body problem to all intents and purposes. Let’s consider a well-worn analogy—the ethical and the descriptive. There are ethical events—events of generosity or cruelty, say. They are clearly related to physical events—bodies moving etc. How is this possible, given that the ethical and the physical are such different domains (discourses, facts)? It’s because ethical events are actions, i.e., movements of bodies. It is in virtue of these movements that events can be ethical or unethical. Ethical events are the kind of thing that can be intelligibly related to the body, because they are bodily actions in their very nature. But what can we say about mental events that renders them intelligibly related to the body and brain? We clearly cannot say that they are bodily actions: the “token identity” (physical realization) is not grounded in the very nature of mental events as movements of the body. So, the physical correlate in the brain does not follow from the mental event as such; it isn’t simply the basis of the bodily action that a mental event manifestly consists in. Mental events are not bodily movements. Therefore, we cannot explain their dependence on the brain by invoking their manifest nature; it’s like trying to explain red by square—as if being red were a type of shape. Clearly, ethical types are not identical to physical types (ethics can’t be reduced to physics), but we can easily understand how ethical tokens are related to physical tokens—since they are bodily acts. But in the case of mental tokens, we can’t even do that: the mental ontology fails to mesh with the physical ontology, so even token physicalism is a mystery. Doing wrong is performing a physical action, but feeling pain is not a physical action (as it might be, writhing); so, we have no bridge to the body and brain. Token physicalism might be true (I think it is), but it is not intelligible—transparent, evident, self-explanatory. It is brute, opaque, and baffling. Thus, mental ontology is not conducive even to very weak forms of physicalism—that is, as an intelligible, explicable theory. Mental tokens are not intelligibly linked to the brain states that must underlie them. We have what might be called unintelligible physicalism.

And there is a deeper problem: it is not even clear that the ontology of types and tokens, properties and particulars, applies to the mental realm. Sure, we have analogies, hopeful parallels; but are they accurate models of what is really going on with the mind? Is a mental event even an event (is a belief a state)? We explain the customary ontology by comparing the mental “thing” to something with which we are already familiar–types and tokens of letters of the alphabet, or objects with color and shape. But does the mind really conform to those models? All we can say is that things happen in the mind and these things can be similar or dissimilar to other things that happen in the mind; but that falls short of discerning a genuine shared ontological structure with letters of the alphabet and colored objects. We have analogies without insight. We try to force the mind into preconceived categories; we don’t observe it to merit these categories. Neural complexes exemplify mental properties, we say—but what does that mean? (Ryle would say it’s a category mistake.) Is it like a soldier exemplifying bravery or a flower exemplifying beauty? We can talk the talk, but can we think the thought? What are we thinking exactly? I think we are thinking it’s kinda like those other things but also kinda different. Wittgenstein would say we are in a muddle; I say we are in a puddle—a murky medium in which clear vision is impossible. I am a mysterian about token identity (let alone type identity), or about the dependence relation between token mental events and token physical events (if we drop talk of token identity). Mental ontology is an obscure business, even at the level of abstract structure. We inherited the particular-universal distinction from Plato and it works well for ordinary perceptible objects, but even Plato did not (to my knowledge) generalize it to the soul (consciousness, thought); he didn’t suppose that the mind is populated by particulars and universals, objects and properties, tokens and types. That is surely an imposition from outside not a matter of casual observation. We regiment (in Quine’s sense) our thought about the mind according to these traditional categories, but it is not at all clear that such regimentation is not a form of deformation (or even defamation). We might be ontologically blinkered, or blind. The mind is rooted in the brain, no doubt, but all the talk of tokens and types, particulars and universals, objects and properties, looks like so much wishful thinking, analogies masquerading as analyses.[2]

[1] Old hands will know that this is the debate between D. Davidson and J. Kim.

[2] The role of space in fixing our notions of particulars and universals is often remarked, but it is a stretch to carry it over to the mental realm. The problem is that without it our thought becomes clouded, shapeless. The “language game” of the mind is not a species of space-dependent discourse denoting spatially individuated particulars. Some have thought it is not denoting at all–hence mental expressivism and the like. The mind and the body don’t have the same ontological logic, if I may put it so. At any rate, we have trouble applying that logic.

Brain, Mind, and Time

Thoughts (and other mental events) occur in time and take time. Transitions between thoughts, as in logical reasoning, are temporally extended processes. Some people think more quickly than others. There is such a thing as the speed of thought, in principle measurable. Mental velocity is real. The brain also operates in time and has a speed. The speed of a nerve impulse (“conduction velocity”) is estimated as 275 mph (120 meters per second) at the high end and a few miles an hour at the low end (it depends on axon diameter and myelination). Given the dependence of the mind on the brain, then, thought speed cannot exceed brain speed, even though it may feel instantaneous. If the mind were not thus dependent, this would not necessarily be so—the mind might be able to go faster than the brain. As it is, however, the speed of the brain constrains and controls the speed of the mind. The machinery of thinking is housed in the brain and it operates according to strict rules. The nerve impulse is much slower than electricity, though faster than the flow of blood, which allows thought to proceed at a fair lick; but it cannot break free of the physical dynamics of the brain. The brain sets an upper limit on mental velocity.

We can infer from this that mental time is the same as physical time: the velocity of thought formation is identical the velocity of neural transmission, roughly speaking. I don’t mean it can’t be slower; I mean that there is no separate time in which mental events occur. In fact, the time between two successive thoughts is the same as the time between their neural correlates. Mental velocity is derivative from physical velocity, a special case of it. Thus, a modest physicalism is true of the speed of thought; it is the speed of the corresponding neural transition, neither more nor less. It is not something separate from, and over and above, brain speed. As brain scientists say, they have the same latencies. Mental velocity is supervenient on physical velocity precisely because it is physical velocity. If the mental machinery were made of something else, the speed of thought could be different, either slower or faster (AI could be much faster). If you ask what is the speed of thought as such, you get no answer; it has no intrinsic natural speed—it all depends on the nature of the relevant brain machinery. If the brain were made of light, its thoughts might reach the speed of light; if it were made of a liquid like blood or molasses, it might be as slow as walking speed. The speed of thought is essentially a physical thing.

Normally, if two entities are separate and distinct, the speed of one does not depend on the speed of the other—for example, two cars moving down the highway. If the things are identical, however, then their speed must be the same (by Leibniz’s law). Clark Kent can fly as fast as Superman; water boils at the same rate as H2O. If the things are joined in some way, glued together, they will move at the same speed, but if disconnected they will be able to move at different speeds. The mind cannot move at a different speed from its associated brain, so there is really only one explanation of its tracking of brain dynamics—it must be the correlated brain state. Why do the two march exactly in step? Because one is the other; the mind isn’t a separable entity capable of moving at a different velocity from its physical basis. In other words, your thoughts are in your brain—that’s why the two proceed through time at the same rate. They may have properties over and above regular brain properties, but they are literally parts or constituents of your brain, as neurons are. We might have concluded this on independent grounds, but the consideration of mental velocity has provided us with another reason for taking this view. The best explanation of temporal coincidence is spatial coincidence—as with the Superman and water cases. This tells us nothing about subjective properties of mental states, but it does tell us that those states are identical to states of the brain described in neural terms. The thought in time is none other than its neural correlate also in time. Mental events are physical events because their succession in time is identical to the succession in time of their brain correlates. They can’t proceed in time independently of the brain, and this must be because they are parts of the brain. A dualist view would imply that the two temporal sequences could come apart, but they can’t and don’t. The mind is tied tightly to the brain in its dynamic aspect, even if it might have other aspects that are not so tied.[1]

[1] It might be said that we have a proof of token identity but not type identity, and this wouldn’t be wide of the mark. The proof proceeds from premises concerning the speed of thought (not, say, from premises about causation and laws, a la Davidson). Mental events must be physical events because of their temporal indiscernibility.