The Deep Problem of Consciousness

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The Deep Problem of Consciousness

In The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, William James quotes from Charles Mercier’s The Nervous System and the Mind (1888): “But why the two occur together, or what the link is that connects them, we do not know, and most authorities believe that we never shall and never can know” (p.136). He is speaking of conscious states and brain states. He asserts both “the absolute separateness of mind and matter” and the “invariable concomitance of a mental change and a bodily change”. James comments that this “’concomitance’ in the midst of ‘absolute separateness’ is an utterly irrational notion”, going on to say that “the whole notion of ‘binding’ is a mystery”. Nevertheless, “there must be a ‘reason’ for them [the correlations], and something must ‘determine’ the laws”. He remarks on the “pitifully bounded horizon” of our “common-sense”. This is the deep problem of consciousness, clearly recognized as such and declared a mystery, probably terminal. Neither author expects this position to be much contested. Thomas Huxley had already stated in 1863 that the emergence of consciousness from the brain is like the emergence of the genie from the lamp, i.e., unaccountable, remarking “But what consciousness is, we know not”. In 1868 John Tyndall stated, “The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable” even if we had detailed knowledge of the concomitance, adding that “the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding fact of consciousness is unthinkable”. There would appear to be a consensus about the nature of the problem, which can be put in the form of an antinomy: consciousness is demonstrably of the brain but is also clearly notof the brain. There exists a kind of magical (mysterious) “binding” whereby two things are one, or one thing manifests itself as two. The problem is held to be impossibly deep, quite beyond us, a total head-spinner. The assumption is that classical dualism and modern materialism are quite inadequate to deal with it—the former failing to acknowledge the physical foundations of consciousness, the latter failing to acknowledge the transcendence of consciousness over the molecules of the brain.

Now skip ahead and survey the present intellectual scene. I can’t help noticing that it is almost exactly one hundred years between Charles Mercier’s 1888 statement and Colin McGinn’s very similar statement of 1989 in “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?”, which was prefaced by Huxley’s genie analogy.[1] I knew nothing of this history then and was surprised to discover it later. It was as if it had been intentionally blotted out in the interim, completely lost sight of; I might almost say regressed from, forgotten, suppressed. Nowadays, however, we have quite a roster of mysterians of one description or another: myself, Thomas Nagel, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Steven Pinker, Martin Gardner, Roger Penrose, Ed Witten, Sam Harris, and no doubt others. We see the point those eminent Victorians were driving at (and before them various Renaissance thinkers—Locke, Hume, Leibniz, and others). What happened to occlude this eminently reasonable position in the interim? In particular, why did a simple form of materialism gain such traction until quite recently? This is something of a mystery—the mystery of why the mystery was not recognized during this period.

I have a theory. Not long after these Victorian insights (the Victorians weren’t all bad) a new school of thought hit the ground running. It annihilated everything in its wake, in psychology and philosophy. I refer of course to behaviorism. The mind was abandoned in favor of the body—the moving reactive body. It was all stimulus and response now. The body is physical: you can see it, touch it, measure it, photograph it. That’s all there is (all that science can observe). There is no deep problem of the “concomitance” of the mind with the brain: it is all one uniform physical system, a well-oiled machine. Accordingly, people stopped thinking about the mind from its own perspective: they adopted a third-person point of view. They pictured the mind physically, as a mobile body. Psychology became a branch of mechanics, in effect. Pain became pain behavior that can be seen and touched. The whole conception of the mind underwent a radical transformation; the mind proper disappeared from view for decades. Any remnant of the old conception was ruthlessly eliminated (Ryle was a kind of exterminator). And it wasn’t all bad, because the mind is inextricably linked to the body and its actions. Deeds are not irrelevant to mental acts. The mind is adaptive and biological. Physiology matters. But eventually the behaviorist creed wore thin: for it neglected the inner, the internal, the intermediary (“intervening variables”). The black box must have something in it; it wasn’t just mush in there. What? The brain, of course. Thus, “central state materialism”. This wasn’t that much of a departure from behaviorism, as it happens. You can trace muscle contractions back to efferent nerves and their busy neural impulses—aren’t they the direct expression of so-called psychological states? But then, these stem from deeper within, going back the brain, specifically the motor cortex. Techniques for investigating cortical activity were developed (implanted electrodes, etc.): scientists could obtain recordings of brain behavior. The brain acts, responds, does things: it is a zone of physical behavior. So, we could preserve the spirit of behaviorism while jettisoning its dogmatic focus on the gross body. We could be sophisticated behaviorists—neurological behaviorists. We shift focus from the whole body to a vital part of it but preserve the metaphysics of mind presupposed by old-style behaviorism. The next step was obvious enough: identify mental states with brain states, or mental actions with brain actions. Not bits of overt behavior or dispositions to same but internal behavior—cerebral behavior. We are still thinking of the mind as the old behaviorists taught us to, but it has been shifted inward. Materialism is behaviorism internalized. True, brain states seem more alien to the mind than ordinary bodily behavior—not how we normally think—but they are still on the same level as behavior (as atoms are like macroscopic bodies). We have retained the third-person point of view (the point of view from a distance). Hence the occlusion, the abandonment, the suppression of the mental as viewed from the inside.

But this revised physicalism (the body as the paradigm of the physical) could only maintain its hold for so long. Someone was going to point out that the mind is essentially conscious, that consciousness is real, that it cannot be neglected. The mind came rushing back in its pre-behaviorist form, where it had been left dangling since the late nineteenth century. And with it the old mind-body problem asserted itself—the problem of “concomitance”, the problem of “binding”. When that happened it was a short step to the rediscovery of the mystery, which had not been advanced one jot. Modern mysterians are just the reincarnation of those stiff bearded Victorian mysterians in black and white photographs. We are taking up where they left off after a misguided interregnum. Metaphysical behaviorism is dead, external or internal, bodily or cerebral; we need a new metaphysics—whether we can come up with one or not. The deep problem is back, baby.[2]

[1] Don’t worry, I haven’t taken to referring to myself in the third-person; I just couldn’t resist the alliteration. I note also that Mercier was a British psychiatrist; I was originally a British psychologist. We have both studied the mind empirically in some depth and from many angles, unlike your typical philosopher. We know it’s a tough nut to crack. I like to imagine meeting Charles Mercier over a coffee.

[2] It is always a good idea to have a look at the history of a philosophical problem in order gain a better understanding of the problem. It is easy to get locked into a set of contemporary assumptions that are not compulsory. People in the past were pretty smart too. And they weren’t trained out of thinking clearly in graduate school.

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Against Identity Theories

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Against Identity Theories

Would it shock you to learn that so-called identity theories are not identity theories? If so, prepare to be shocked (I was). Proponents of these theories called them identity theories, but they were mistaken about their true import. This puts them in a new light. Consider the following statements: “water is H2O”, “heat is molecular motion”, “light is a stream of photons”, “gravity is curved spacetime”, “air is a collection of gases”, “genes are DNA molecules”, “colors are dispositions to produce color experiences”, “thought is inner speech”, “sensations are brain processes”. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that these statements are all true. The question is what do they say—their logical form, semantic analysis, conceptual content. The standard view is that they are identity statements like “Hesperus is Phosphorus”, “Clark Kent is Superman”, “lifts are elevators”, “I am Colin McGinn”, “Tuesday is the day before Wednesday”, “hombres are men”, etc. These can all be paraphrased by inserting “identical to” after “is” or “are”. They all have the logical form “A = B”. You can invert the flanking terms and preserve truth. They are typically a posteriori but can be a priori. They obey Leibniz’s law. They are not explanatory or explicative: they don’t purport to tell you the nature of anything. They are not theoretically interesting or speculative. The “is” in them is the “is” of identity not of predication or composition. They form the class of identity statements, expressing a distinctive type of proposition (this is identical to that). The question is whether the list of sentences I first mentioned belongs to this class: do they say, and say only, that this is identical to that? Let us first pay attention to a curious linguistic fact: we don’t usually invert the terms in the sentences in question. We don’t normally say “H2O is water” or “molecular motion is heat” or “inner speech is thought” or “brain processes are sensations” (when was the last time you heard somebody say “C-fiber firing is pain”?). It sounds a bit off, a bit point-missing; yet true identity statements permit it smoothly. The reason for this is not a mystery: such statements are intended to say that something already identified has a certain nature. You designate a specific stuff or kind and then say what its nature is—its essence, its underlying reality. You don’t say “the nature of H20 is water” or “the nature of brain processes is sensation”. These statements are asymmetrical specifications of nature or essence, not (merely) statements of symmetrical identity. The “is” is the “is” of explication, essence-specification. It is not logically required that the kind be identical to its essence; indeed, it sounds funny to say “water is identical to its essence H2O”. It hasthat essence but it isn’t that essence. Does the essence or nature of water come out of taps or form lakes? We have discovered the nature of a certain kind of thing and we give voice to such discoveries by enunciating sentences of this form; we are not merely announcing a discovery of simple identity. We aren’t reporting that two modes of presentation converge; we are saying what the nature of something is. Even if the proposition in question entails a correlated identity proposition (which I doubt), the main point of the statement is to say something not merely informative but explicative—illuminating, penetrating. The chemist or physicist is not just assembling a list of brute identities but a series of substantive theoretical discoveries. We should therefore not describe these as “theoretical identities” but “theoretical explications”. The scientist is not saying anything like “water is aqua” or “heat is thermal” or “thought is cognition” or “pain is suffering”. Nor is it a mere matter of a posteriori discovery like Hesperus and Phosphorus: we could have two names for heat that have different senses, thus allowing for an a posteriori statement, but that is not the same as discovering the essence of heat by scientific investigation (using a microscope etc.). I suggest giving up labeling the discoveries in question “theoretical identities” and replacing it with “theoretical explications”; it aids clarity. The statements in question really mean “the nature of X is Y”, as in “the nature of water is H2O”.

Why does it matter? First, it is quite wrong to say that brain scientists have discovered an identity between mind and brain; they have discovered a correlation which philosophers claim to be an identity. It isn’t at all like discovering that Hesperus is Phosphorus or Clark Kent is Superman, in which you can trace the object through space and time and observe its different appearances. But second, and more important, once we see what the claim really is its plausibility tends quickly to evaporate. Suppose I assert “the nature of pain is C-fiber firing”: that bold claim is apt to be met with a resounding “No, it’s not!”. There is something mumbo-jumbo-ish about “pain is identical to C-fiber firing” (only a philosopher would say it), whereas “the nature of pain is C-fiber firing” is creditably straightforward—there is no hanky-panky going on. We know just what is being claimed, and it is not remotely symmetrical (“the nature of C-fiber firing is pain”). In the case of water and heat such statements are clearly true, but in the case of pain this is not so—we have been given no cogent reason to accept that the nature of pain is C-fiber firing. Is the nature of thought neural activity in the pre-frontal cortex? Is that its real essence? Hardly. The so-called identity theorist needs to put his cards on the table so that we can see what he has, and when he does his hand looks decidedly weak. We know what he wants to say—what a genuine materialist believes—but he cloaks it in talk of “theoretical identities” based on misdescriptions of what goes on in science. He derives spurious support from this sketchy maneuver. Better to come right out with it in plain language—“sensations have a neurological essence” or “thoughts have an axon-dendrite nature”. Then at least we know what exactly is being claimed. And we are apt to respond with incredulity, since we intuitively suppose that pain’s essence is a certain type of feeling (and we definitely don’t naturally take to the idea that feelings have a molecular nature). When the position is stated in terms of identity, we easily fall into the picture of two modes of presentation of the same thing, but that model does not work in the present case (since the appearance of pain is pain). So-called identity theorists have traded on these confusions for a long time; they would serve us better by owning up to the actual content of their doctrine, viz. that consciousness and all its contents have a bodily-physical essence involving biological cells. That sounds preposterous to most people, while the corresponding claims about water, heat, gravity, color, thought and inner speech, etc. seem eminently reasonable. The truth is that there is no such thing as the identity theory: that is a misnomer for something else entirely, i.e., a claim about essence or nature. By all means carry on saying “heat is molecular motion”, but don’t gloss this as “heat is (strictly) identical to molecular motion” while thinking the while about the model of “Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus”.[1]

[1] If I were to make a list of all the types of “is” I would say: the “is” of predication, the “is” of identity, the “is” of composition, the “is” of essence or nature, and the “is” of definition (there may be others). Part of the problem has been that philosophers have only thought about the “is” of predication and the “is” of identity (sometimes adding the “is” of composition); but sometimes we use this little word to convey what we have impressively discovered (or think we have) about something. If anything, this is the “is” of predication. And it is really not plausible that we have discovered materialism to be true of the mind, as we have discovered atomism to be true of matter. It’s a philosophical theory not a scientific fact.

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Composers, Singers, and Instrumentalists

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Composers, Singers, and Instrumentalists

These three occupations are not commonly combined. Opera singers don’t compose and play an instrument as well as sing. Lead guitarists usually don’t sing as well as play. Composers are rarely performers of note. There are exceptions, but the demands of each occupation are liable to encroach on the other occupations. Has anyone ever been a great composer and a great singer and a great instrumentalist? Each of these is difficult enough, requiring specialized skills, so combining them is beyond normal human capabilities. There has to be a division of labor: writing, playing, singing. It is reasonable to suppose that doing all three will detract from achievement in any one of them. One will usually dominate. In particular, songwriters are not usually great singers, nor singers great songwriters. Excellence in each of them competes with excellence in the others. How many ace drummers are fine singers or songwriters (Buddy Rich?).  Does Celine Dion write her own stuff and accompany herself on piano? Did Leiber and Stoller ever perform their own songs? That’s the rule. People specialize, as they do elsewhere (has anyone ever been a great athlete, musician, and intellectual?). There is a psychological law at work here: to succeed you have to specialize. You have to beone thing or the other, single-mindedly, exclusively.

You might reply that there is a notable exception to this law: the Beatles. There are partial exceptions: people who successfully combine composing, singing, and playing an instrument (Elton John, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Prince). But the Beatles seemingly succeeded in being preeminent songwriters, tremendous singers, and gifted players; in particular, they managed to be outstanding performers and brilliant songwriters. Perhaps they were the best ever in this combination of talents. And yet, laws are laws: everyone is subject to them. So, we must ask: did the Beatles suffer from under-specialization? Did they try to do too much? Did they stretch themselves too thin? I fear the answer is yes. They notoriously wrote songs to deadlines, failed to become master instrumentalists, and didn’t develop real singing chops. Oh, they were good at all three, no question, but could they have been better if they had limited themselves? My suspicion is that they could have been better songwriters had they not performed so much and so well. I don’t think their later songs are as good as their earlier songs, though they are often excellent. It feels as if they are doing a job not responding to an inspiration. I think No Reply is much better than Norwegian Wood, for example. Songs take time to appear and develop; they can’t be forced. That’s why people often write only a few great songs, or even just one (e.g., Hang on Sloopy). The Beatles suffered from songwriter’s fatigue; John was notoriously dissatisfied with many of their later songs. Yes, Lennon and McCartney were great songwriters, but they could have been better. They needed more time and focus. There are occasional gems (Strawberry Fields, In My Life), but often they are fairly routine ditties by their exalted standards. George latterly produced some outstanding songs, but he had more time to do it. I wonder whether when the Beatles broke up, they were half-consciously aware of the problem: how could they keep on advancing musically given the pressure of three different forms of musical ability? They needed to Get Back, but there was no way back. Certainly, their post-Beatles output shows signs of fatigue. Their first couple of albums were free of this problem precisely because they did not compose all the songs. They were trying to do the humanly impossible. Imagine asking Pavarotti to compose his own operas, sing them, and perform the musical accompaniment; it won’t happen. The Beatles were just plain overworked.

Speaking of myself (excuse the bathos), I don’t sing and play the guitar at the same time—the singing is hard enough on its own. And when I am writing a song, I am not thinking of performing it; just writing it is a difficult task in itself. These are separate abilities, one not entailing the other. I always think I am really a drummer: that’s where my main talent lies—the rest is amateur hour. I actually think Lennon and McCartney were mainly composers; performing was secondary.[1] Ringo, however, is a born performer—and George was an enigma.

[1] When they sang covers, they were selecting if not composing: they chose according to their own musical tastes. And they also had to compose a way of covering the song—so they were partially composing. Arranging is a type of composing. I would particularly cite Anna, Twist and Shout, and You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me, among many others.

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How to Prove the External World

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How to Prove There is an External World

Suppose you are doing metaphysics, working on which worlds are possible worlds. It occurs to you that no worlds can be immaterial; the idea makes no sense. Thus, you conclude that all worlds must be material. Your paradigms of the material are solid bounded objects in space. You then wonder whether the existence of such things can be proven—after all, there can be perceptual illusions. Don’t they have to be inferred from data that don’t logically entail their existence? Your metaphysics then poses a problem for your epistemology. But then, relief comes in the form of the Cogito: you can prove that you exist, and you can prove that everything that exists must be material, so you can prove that at least one material thing exists. And if one exists, why not others? That thing will have parts that may separate and recombine forming other objects. Your existence thus entails the existence of material objects, given reasonable assumptions. Your metaphysics plus the Cogitogives you an external world. Similarly, your metaphysics might dictate that all possible existences exist in space (the alternative is inconceivable): asked to prove that space and spatial objects exist, you wheel out the Cogito again—you know that you exist and that everything that exists is spatial. A necessary truth in metaphysics joins with the certainty of the Cogito to prove the existence of something that goes beyond the appearances—the real existence of things in space. It wasn’t your aim to prove the existence of an external world, but per accidens you did, thanks to the Cogito.

Sometime later you hit on another metaphysical truth: every possible world is law-governed; so, the actual world must be law-governed too. You think this because otherwise the world would be unintelligible chaos; nothing would be explicable; crazy senseless things would happen all the time (marbles turning into pigs, etc.) You might hold that every world must be subject to strict laws and nothing but strict laws, or you might relax this to require only some strict laws coexisting with non-strict laws; you draw the line at worlds consisting of nothing but non-strict laws. You might hold that causation requires strict laws (though there may also be non-strict causal laws), and that every world must include causation. But how do you establish that these laws must concern an external physical world? The Cogito won’t help you, but something close to it might: for the mind is subject to psychological laws and these are non-strict. This you know from first-person inspection. But every world must contain at least some strict laws, so there must be laws other than psychological laws; by elimination, these must be physical. Your metaphysics of causation and laws entails that there must be strict laws in every possible world, but they cannot be psychological, so they must be physical. Therefore, there must be a physical reality in every possible world, given that psychological laws are non-strict. If these laws were strict, then this argument wouldn’t work, since they could constitute the laws of the universe in which such minds exist. You know your mind exists (“I think”) and you know it doesn’t obey strict laws; therefore, it must exist in a world not exhausted by its own existence, i.e., a physical world. You can prove the existence of the external world from the lack of strict laws governing your mind plus your metaphysics. We get a kind of physical Cogito: “My mind does not obey strict laws, therefore the external world exists”. The argument works because your metaphysics allows it to, since it requires every world to contain (some) strict laws. To be concrete, I know that I don’t always act on a given desire, though I sometimes do, so there must be a strict law underlying this causal fact; and this has to be physical.[1] I can use the metaphysics of causation to prove that the external world exists—facts outside my mind. If worlds could subsist on non-strict laws all the way down, then I couldn’t argue this way, since my mind would satisfy the conditions necessary for world existence. But if worlds need strict nomological nourishment, I can argue this way. Thus, metaphysics has its epistemological uses. We are not trying to establish the existence of the external world by showing how we can infer it from our sense-data; we are relying instead on metaphysical truths about the possibilities of existence plus some first-person knowledge of the mind. It’s not about reasons for belief, good or bad, but how reality has to be.[2]

[1] This argument resembles Davidson’s argument for the identity theory in “Mental Events”.

[2] This paper should be read in conjunction with my “A New Proof of the External World”. A popular style of argument is that we know there is an external world in the way a scientist knows a theory of some part of nature, i.e., by inference to the best explanation or some such thing. The knowledge is based on sensory evidence, though not reducible to it. By contrast, I am grounding such knowledge in metaphysical necessities and introspective access.

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A New Proof of the External World

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A New Proof of the External World

It would be nice to be able to prove the existence of the external world (it would also be nice if there were a heaven). I am going to consider an argument that purports to do just that, not because I think it is sound, but because I think it is interesting. It is not simple like “I think, therefore I exist”; it isn’t anything like “It doesn’t think, therefore it exists”, which is not exactly watertight (more alcohol-tight, as in drunken). Nor did it occur to me while reading somebody famous and thinking that it might be an interpretation of that philosopher. As far as I know, it is spanking new–and rather infuriating; I think of it as an almost-proof. We can call it “the intelligibility argument”. In outline, it goes as follows: the world as represented by our experience and thought is not an intelligible world; but the real world is and must be an intelligible world; therefore, there must be another world external to our experience and thought. Let’s call the world represented by the human mind the “intentional world”: the claim, then, is that the intentional world cannot be all there is, because it is not fully intelligible; but reality must always be fully intelligible. There are no unintelligible real non-intentional worlds. The human intentional world has a lot of unintelligibility built into it, but then it cannot be real; so, there must be a further reality outside that world. To put it in more familiar terms, the world of the human imagination must be only part of a wider world that is not intrinsically unintelligible—which is our commonsense conception. If the imagined world were all there is, then reality would be inherently unintelligible (partly or wholly): but that cannot be; therefore, there must be more than this world.

There is a lot here to explain and I want to be brief. By an intelligible world I mean roughly one that is governed by laws which have some kind of necessity (this is sometimes called ontological rationalism). Nature must be uniform; it can’t be completely unpredictable and random. It can’t contain logical impossibilities. It can’t be intrinsically nonsensical. Classical mechanism provides a good model, though not the only one conceivable: chunks of matter conforming to Euclidian geometry and laws that could not be otherwise. This can be modified and extended in various ways, though not to the point of incoherence and madness. The world must work according to general principles that make sense. The intentional world is not intelligible in this sense: it is full of incoherence, illogicality, sheer nonsense, and breakdowns of natural law. I don’t mean anything exotic by this—it is a matter of common knowledge. Thus, dreams, fantasy fiction, Escher drawings, meaningless sentences, category mistakes, astrology, alchemy, visual illusions, imaginary scenarios of one kind or another. Take Escher drawings: these cannot depict possibly real things—there could not be a world composed of such things. Likewise, dream worlds are often impossible worlds, where things change lawlessly, illogically. The point is that the human mind is creative beyond the bounds of intelligibility. Therefore, our intentional world cannot be a real world. In fact, of course, we don’t suppose that it is: we assume that there is a world beyond this that obeys suitable laws—an intelligible natural world, free of absurdity. This world cannot be our world—the things we conjure up in our over-imaginative minds. It is thus part of our “conceptual scheme” that these two worlds must be kept apart, on pain of endowing reality with nonsense.

Suppose a creature lived in an intentional world of complete nonsense. It couldn’t be that this world was identical to the real world, or else reality would be nonsensical. The reality in which this creature actually lives is not objectively nonsensical; it just represents reality that way. We are like that: we know that reality cannot be as we imagine it—we know our intentional world is not the real world. But could our intentional world be all there is, with no reality beyond it? Could it all be a dream, even the non-dreaming world (as we commonly suppose it)? You might think the answer is no, because then reality would be unintelligible, consisting of nothing but our unintelligible intentional world. But that is too hasty: for we must not confuse our intentional world with our mental life–the world of our imaginative acts, our illusory perceptions, our episodes of dreaming, etc. It may well be that the world of the mind itself, as opposed to its intentional objects, is an intelligible world—a world governed by necessary intelligible laws. Psychology might be an intelligible natural science, while its intentional objects are the very antithesis of science. So, the world of our imagination is a real world, though what we imagine is not. There is then no valid argument to a distinct intelligible physical world; we already have a real coherent world in the shape of our own minds. A world containing only our minds is therefore metaphysically possible, no matter how unintelligible our minds may be in their intentional objects. After all, madness is real. It might be replied that we could adopt a different argumentative strategy: we could argue that such a mind would need a mind-independent physical brain to house it. That may be a sound move, but then we have dropped the intelligibility argument and replaced it with a new argument. This is why I said we only have an almost-proof. It is true that if the mind itself were not subject to intelligible laws, as well as its intentional objects, then we could apply the original argument—such a thing is metaphysically impossible, because reality cannot be intrinsically unintelligible. But the mind could be fully intelligible, even mechanistic, compatibly with being overrun by representations of the unintelligible. What we have is a proof that our intentional world is not the real world, so that some other world must exist to make it possible, either external to our mind (as we commonly suppose) or just the mind itself considered independently of its unintelligible contents. We know that reality cannot be the world as we imagine it, because that world is not a proper candidate for reality, by the intelligibility argument; but we have no proof that the further world must be the external world. It could, for all we have said, be the internal world, assuming that this is itself intelligible. It cannot be unintelligibility all the way down, but the bottom might be intelligible mental acts with unintelligible contents. Close, but no cigar. I suppose it might be objected that this position is suspiciously stipulative—we are just stipulating that the mind is a law-governed intelligible reality in order to avoid the inference to the real world as we commonly think of it. It has been conceded that our intentional world cannot be the real world, which was the main target of the argument. All we have left is the claim that the mind must be intelligible, i.e., governed by laws that make sense. We have no clear idea of what these laws might be; they are surely not the same as the mechanistic laws of matter. What are the laws governing dreams, illogical reasoning, and Escher-drawing perception? Might there be no such laws? Then we would be able to move to the desired (heavenly) conclusion that there must be an external world over and above the mind and its products. In any case, the dialectic has its own interest and charm, and that is all I promised.[1]

[1] It would be interesting to run the argument on mathematics or logic. We can agree that mathematics is inherently intelligible, and we can probably agree that it is possible to have unintelligible mathematical thoughts; but then mathematical reality cannot coincide with mathematical thoughts. Still, if unintelligible mathematical thoughts are psychologically intelligible, then we can’t use an intelligibility argument to infer that mathematical reality exists independently of mathematical thought, since we can fall back on psychological intelligibility to block the move to mathematical realism. The same structure applies to logic—and indeed to ethics. Ethical reality must be intelligible, but ethical thought may not be; therefore, ethical reality cannot be the same as ethical thought. Discuss.

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Analysis of Perceptual Knowledge

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Analysis of Perceptual Knowledge

Suppose I see a bird in the sky, thereby coming to know there is a bird in the sky (of a certain shape and color). I don’t form the belief that there is a bird in the sky; I simply know by perceiving. I might not be a believer at all, as many knowing animals are not. What is the correct analysis of my state of knowledge? It isn’t going to be that I have a true justified belief about the bird, because I don’t have that belief. Nor do I make a statement to that effect. I simply have the experience. That is a necessary condition of knowing perceptually—I do need to be in some sort of psychological state analogous to belief. But it is not sufficient. Clearly, we need to add that the experience is veridical: there really is a bird there fitting my experience (to some degree). Is thatsufficient? We can add that my experience must justify my claim to knowledge, if I make any such claim. But I might not make any knowledge claim, and we have already said that the experience must occur and it is justification enough—unlike the case of belief, which requires something further (typically an experience). So, the analysis seems very simple: x perceptually knows that p if and only if (a) x has an experience as of p, and (b) x’s experience is veridical.

Are there any counterexamples to this analysis? What if there is no causal connection between bird and experience? Normally, there will be, but what if we set up an abnormal situation in which the causal connection is absent? I don’t think it matters: x will still perceptually know about the bird. Information as to bird presence will still be flowing into x’s nervous system, whether from the bird or otherwise: he is being informed, rightly or wrongly, of a bird up there. And in fact, there is, so he knows. If causality is a myth and the world is ordered by pre-established harmony, it makes no difference to x’s status as knowing. Are there any Gettier-type cases? No, because no inference takes place: it is not like inferring that Jones owns a Ford from seeing him drive up in a Ford, where the Ford is not his, though he in fact owns a Ford. I was not inferring one belief from another in the bird case; I just directly knew that the bird was up there without any inference. Are there any “red barn” cases? I see a red barn after seeing a bunch of fake barns: intuitively, this undermines my claim to know that there’s a red barn there, since I am only right in this one case “by accident”. Actually, I don’t think this is the case for primitive perceptual knowledge: I do perceptually know about the barn despite the veridicality condition failing in the other cases of apparent barns. For the barn in question is seen by me and I have accurate information about it; it doesn’t matter about the fake barns surrounding it. I am in the perceptual state of having information about that barn, since I am seeing it; and seeing is knowing. No one claims that I don’t see the one genuine barn, but then I know about it visually. Perceptual knowing is about the operation of the senses on an occasion; it isn’t about what beliefs one can infer from perception. Do I know that I know about the barn, i.e., have a true justified belief about my perceptual state? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop me from having perceptual knowledge of the barn. There is a real barn there and I have a sense impression of that barn. Veridical experience is sufficient for perceptual knowledge.

Thus, we appear to be in the clear concerning our analysis: we have got it right. This contrasts with what is called propositional knowledge (the true justified belief kind): this kind of knowledge has resisted complete analysis. So, it isn’t that knowledge per se is hard or impossible to analyze; it’s just one type of knowledge that is. Knowledge in general isn’t conceptually problematic, or undermines the whole project of conceptual analysis; perceptual knowledge is easy to analyze, and it shows that conceptual analysis is a feasible undertaking. Epistemologists have not surveyed the field of knowledge widely enough. In the fundamental case of perceptual knowledge, the old bipartite analysis works just fine: a psychological state plus a veridicality condition. Knowledge consists of a psychological state of the knower and correspondence with reality, plain and simple.[1]

[1] The significance of this point is that the whole industry of counterexamples to the traditional analysis of knowledge has been overblown: knowledge is not so recalcitrant to analysis as has been supposed. An important class of knowledge has an easy and pellucid analysis consisting of just two conditions. Of course, that should already have been obvious from the cases of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge-how: these are clearly not subject to Gettier-type cases. What to say about so-called propositional knowledge is another question (I discuss it in Truth by Analysis).

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Beatle-Philia

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Beatle-Philia

Why were the Beatles so good, so beloved? Why do they stand out from everyone else? You might think it was because they were super-talented: each of them was really good at what they did. I think the opposite is true: they were that good because they were not all that talented or accomplished. Am I being willfully paradoxical? Not so. Instrumentally, they were not virtuosos: George was not an ace guitarist like, say, Eric Clapton; John was not a great guitarist either; Paul was not a first-class bass player (compare John Entwhistle); Ringo was no Buddy Rich or Keith Moon. As singers they were nothing special: not like Roy Orbison or even Elvis Presley (not to mention Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston). This meant that they couldn’t rely on outstanding performances, instrumentally and vocally. You were not amazed at their sheer musical brilliance. So, they had to be creative, different, new. They had to make up for their lack of musical talent (ability, education, expertise). They were good individually, but they were not as good as the overall result. They wrote great songs, they sang great harmonies, they made a great sound; but they were not individually anything remarkable—unlike Steve Winwood or Stevie Wonder or Prince or Jimi Hendrix. They were not a super-group like Cream (much the same is true of the Rolling Stones). George had to be innovative not a shredder, John had to be charismatic not vocally acrobatic, Paul had to be catchy and melodic, Ringo had to be musical and fit the song. It wasn’t about “chops”. So, the reason the Beatles were so good is that they were not that good at the level of musicianship; they had to rise above their limitations. If even one of them had been super-talented, capable of capturing the attention of audiences by sheer virtuosity, they would not have been so good as a band, because they could have relied in this talented member to carry them. They needed each other, despite their individual talents, because individually they were not natural stars. I doubt that any of them would have amounted to much if they had never met and pursued individual careers; they might have had some success separately, but there would never have been the level of Beatle-philia that actually occurred. Imagine if the four of them had Steve Winwood or Prince in the band: they could easily have depended on him to draw the crowds; they wouldn’t need to come up with something special.[1]

[1] Here is a similar question: would Bob Dylan have been so successful and beloved if he were a better singer and guitarist? If he could sing like Orbison and play like Clapton, would he have produced the body of work he did produce? I doubt it: his sheer musical talent would have carried him. Why are the Stones so successful? Because Mick can’t sing very well and Keith is not a great guitarist—so they had to come up with something. I also think that the Beatles and Stones could have had successful careers and not write their own material, though that certainly helped: they were initially great cover bands with a lot of success. I actually like their covers more than their originals, because they could select from among the many terrific songs already available (though I do like many of their originals).

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Dinosaur Evolution

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Dinosaur Evolution

I saw my first dinosaur skeleton in the late 1950s at the Natural History Museum in London on a family trip. I remember it as huge, alien, and dead; but undeniably impressive. I have seen many more such skeletons since. It has always seemed to me that a lot of evolution separates us from the dinosaurs: a great deal must have happened since then, distinguishing us from these big primitive lizards. We are far more advanced. But I have recently come to the conclusion that this is wrong: not much evolution has occurred since the dinosaurs. Evolution has been fairly static, not progressing much. We are under the illusion that we are far more advanced than they. To see this, consider the following thought experiment: suppose that dinosaurs still existed and have their own natural history museums, and suppose they contain the fossilized remnants of hominid skeletons, lovingly reconstructed. Wouldn’t the dinosaurs be under the impression that these long-dead creatures were not much to write home about? They are just a bunch of lifeless bones. Of course, they seem markedly unimpressive. It is only when you add flesh to the bones, and movement, and all the rest that the creature springs to life. A human skeleton is far from a full-blooded human being—and similarly for dinosaurs. This image problem has been somewhat rectified in recent years by animation: we get to see the dinosaurs as they originally lived and moved, more or less. They have come to life for us. And now it seems to me that the gap between us and them is not as large as I imagined. It now strikes me that rather little evolution has occurred between the time of the dinosaurs and our time; indeed, that this evolutionary time period has the character of a plateau. The animals of today have hardly advanced at all compared to the animals of the dinosaur’s epoch. In fact, we might even detect a decline in evolutionary development: the dinosaurs were really the peak of evolutionary success, from whose heights there has been a gradual (or abrupt) descent. They were the best animals that have ever lived, judged by biological standards—the greatest, the tops, numero uno.

Let’s recall some basic evolutionary facts. Life on Earth began around 3.5 billion years ago, soon after the planet was formed. It wasn’t until about 300 million years ago that dinosaurs appeared: it took an extremely long time before they evolved. When they did, they ruled the planet for over 200 million years. They had eyes, ears, noses, brains, locomotion, strength, resilience, social intelligence, and a whole suite of biological adaptations. At that time, they were the clear pinnacle of the evolutionary process. Then why did they go extinct? We know the answer: because of a giant meteor that happened to strike the earth and unleash mass extinction. If that had not happened, they very likely would still be here, only bigger and better, perhaps with language, art, science, and the rest. It would be a dinosaur planet. Humans would probably not even exist. The dinosaurs went extinct because of bad luck not bad design. They had good genes, but you can’t argue with a giant meteor landing on your house. There was nothing wrong with them adaptively; they were survivors par excellence. Now it has only been about 300 million years since they evolved—nowhere near as much time as it took for them to evolve. That is a short time to make major biological steps forward. If we consider the non-human animals now existing on the planet, we are not going to be much impressed with their edge over the dinosaurs; surely, if the dinosaurs came back, they would soon dominate the species that supplanted them (not counting us). Even the most brilliant of apes is not going to out-survive the dinosaurs. Later species are no match for reborn dinosaur species. You see what I mean about being the peak.

But what about us, you protest: aren’t we superior to the dinosaurs? Could they overrun us? The first point to make is that we are special: the other species now existing are not superior to dinosaurs. Evolution has not in general produced species superior to the dinosaurs; we are really a freak accident (what with language etc.). The trend has not been towards superior species. Second, we tend to exaggerate our uniqueness and ignore our vulnerabilities. Who knows how much longer we will last? What would happen if we lost our vaunted technologies? We are not so darn impressive “in the wild”. Third, our biology is basically the same as that of much more ancient species: we haven’t evolved any new adaptations that dramatically improve our survival chances—extra senses, impenetrable skin, total immunity to disease, etc. We are basically the same old body plan that has been around forever: eyes, legs, mouths, etc. There just hasn’t been enough time to develop radically new body plans, indestructible internal organs, high-speed brains. Face it, we are not that different from dinosaurs anatomically. We have cleverer brains, it is true, but that is no guarantee of survival superiority and might indeed be our downfall (a meteor made dinosaurs extinct, our own brains might make us extinct). In any case, we are hardly the zoological norm: the world is not full of recently evolved species that are streets ahead of the dinosaurs. One might be forgiven for supposing that since the dinosaurs nothing very interesting has happened zoologically. If anything, there has been a decline. That could certainly happen if the world becomes less hospitable to animal life, because of temperature changes, pollution, meteor bombardments, etc. There is no guarantee that species will keep improving and outshine their ancestors. What if the only creatures that can survive on planet earth are ants and termites?

The opinion I have come to, then, is that evolution has not been up to much lately. The same might be said of civilization. The ancient Greeks were the pinnacle of civilization; the dinosaurs were the pinnacle of evolution. The past was better than the present. More cautiously, we should not assume that the extinct animals whose skeletons we sometimes see are somehow less sophisticated biologically than current animals (including us). Nothing much has changed biologically since the time of the dinosaurs. It is an illusion to suppose otherwise.[1]

[1] It was watching a PBS documentary “Walking with Dinosaurs” that most immediately triggered these reflections. You get to see dinosaurs as they actually lived not as skeletons propped up in a museum. Their variety is also well-depicted. These are not lumbering clods or dim grass-munchers. They have sharp eyes, agile movements, and obvious intelligence. They are in no way inferior to the animals of today.

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