Can We Solve the No-Mind-Body Problem?

We usually ask what gives rise to the mind in the body—what the secret ingredient is. This is the positive mind-body problem. But there is also the negative mind-body problem: what explains the lack of mind. Some things have a mind (consciousness) and some things lack it—what is the difference? In particular, what disqualifies an object from having a mind: in virtue of what do some objects lack minds? A behaviorist will say it is the lack of behavior (of a certain kind, say goal-directed movement); but that is not plausible, because of organisms that behave but don’t (we think) have sentience—jellyfish, flies, worms. Also, there are artifacts like robots. The same is true of brains and neurons: it isn’t the lack of these that explains the absence of mind, since they can be present without a hint of consciousness. And it obviously isn’t the lack of fur or legs, because an animal can be conscious without these. Evidently, it is a rather elusive property. The panpsychist will say it is the lack of proto-mental properties at the atomic level, but then everything will be conscious to some degree. There will be nothing stopping even simple organisms from being conscious; being conscious will be the norm, the natural state of nature. But at least these are attempts to explain why mind is absent in certain cases: it is the lack of factor X. According to idealist theories, the problem is not so much to explain the presence of consciousness as its absence—for consciousness is everywhere. There is no material body to present a mind-body problem.

And the absence problem isn’t purely theoretical: we really do need to explain why consciousness is absent when it is. For we don’t really know that consciousness is not more widespread than we tend to suppose (in our Western mind-set). We don’t really know insects are not conscious; we just presume so (on the basis of reasonable but inconclusive evidence). Many people feel convinced that trees have feelings, and we have no definitive way to rebut them. What about the soul of planet Earth? Where do we draw the line in the biological world? It would be nice to have a clear marker with which we could rule out the cases that strike us intuitively as not exhibiting consciousness. We have an other non-minds problem as well as an other minds problem: we don’t know what things have them, and we don’t know what things don’t have them. We know what the absence of heat (coldness) results from, i.e., lack of molecular motion; and we know what signals the absence of life, i.e., lack of a pulse. But we don’t know what causes, or marks, a lack of consciousness. In dreamless sleep and coma, consciousness is lacking, presumably as a result of brain activity of some sort: but what sort? Could it be that nature is naturally and spontaneously conscious (as panpsychists suppose) and that it takes a suppressive agent to inhibit its expression? Then we really would need an explanation of its absence in lower organisms. It looks as if both presence and absence need an explanation. In the case of bodily movement, we can explain presence and absence: it is nerve innervation and muscular contraction, or nerve damage and muscular unresponsiveness (or just the lack of nerves and muscles). Why are some parts of the brain notconscious—what do they lack that other parts possess? Why are some neurons mentally dead, given that some are alive?

It is a mystery why brains are conscious, but also a mystery why other things are not (they look basically the same as conscious things); indeed, these are really aspects of the same mystery. We can call it the mystery of non-consciousness. The problem of other minds is the same: why are these things said to be conscious and those things said not to be? How can we refute the skeptic about other minds and the skeptic about other non-minds (this skeptic says we have no right to assume that rocks and tables are not conscious). A prehistoric animist might be more exercised about the negative problem than the former: he wants to know why we don’t ascribe minds more widely. After all, people have been wrong in the past in declaring certain animals devoid of mind—might we expand our attributions even more widely? There are really two sides to the other minds problem: positive and negative. Maybe if we focused on the negative problem, we would make more progress: why are some organisms not conscious? If we knew that, we would know why some are. Mysterians would find both problems equally difficult. It is an interesting fact that we tend to think of consciousness as requiring some sort of superhuman effort on the part of the body, instead of supposing that its absence is what requires positive action—inhibition not excitation, to borrow physiological terminology. Certainly, for the panpsychist, it is a problem to explain how it is that everything is not conscious, given that everything has the seeds of consciousness in it. It is as if God decided to block the efflorescence of the underlying consciousness of the cosmos from occurring more visibly. It is the same with behaviorism and materialism: what prevents behavior and the brain from indicating consciousness? If the mind is behavior or neural activity, then it exists wherever they do—it requires an explanation to understand why we don’t see it that way. Once the body is endowed with attributes that (allegedly) constitute consciousness, we have a problem explaining why everything with those attributes isn’t conscious. This is the (non-mind)-body problem[1].

[1] Suppose we accept Descartes’s theory of mind: how do we explain why primitive organisms and even physical objects are not conscious? For all that is necessary is the contingent conjoining of an immaterial mind with some sort of physical object. Yet we never come across such cases. Descartes can’t explain why non-conscious things exist, given his metaphysics. Why doesn’t every physical object have its attached mental substance? A complex brain isn’t a necessary condition, according to his metaphysics.