The Subjective Mind(-View)

How subjective is our view of the mind, our own and other’s? How much are we skewed and limited by our given viewing faculties and conceptual resources? We have a view of the physical world—a picture, a conception—and we can ask how subjective it is, i.e., how dependent on our peculiar sensory and cognitive faculties. How far can we prescind from these and attain a more objective view? That is a controversial question; I would say only to a limited degree. Sticking my neck out, I will assert that our view of the physical world is 80% subjective and 20% objective, even among the most objective-minded human beings.[1] The blinkers are on pretty tight. One thing we have going for us is that we have five distinct senses that give us access to the same physical world, correcting each other, rounding the picture out. Then we have some high-powered cognitive faculties—and still only 20%! I am not talking about prediction and explanation here but about grasping the intrinsic nature of physical reality—what the stuff out there really is in itself. Our view of external reality is highly perspective-dependent, species-specific, and perceptually imbued. But in the case of knowledge of the mind we don’t have five senses—five ways of knowing—but just one, viz. the faculty we call introspection. We know next to nothing about this faculty: its physical basis, its modus operandi, its evolutionary history or individual development. Our view of it is itself subjective and partial (like looking through a keyhole at twilight). True, it gets things right at a superficial level, but it is hardly penetrative or sharp-sighted. And it conveys just one mode of presentation of its objects. Imagine if we had five introspective senses–we would be rich indeed compared to our current epistemic poverty. We are just not getting the real goods on the mind, the low-down, the back-story. We got zilch, nada. All we got is a subjectively formed glimpse of our elusive object. Sorry, bub. Detective-wise we are nowhere near. We don’t even have two introspective eyes. Introspection is strictly superficial, though adequate to its function.[2]

And that is with introspection of the mind—what about the minds of animals not like us? Bats, octopuses, snakes, spiders—what about them? Here we readily admit how subjective our view of their minds is—how dependent on our own type of mind (in so far as we grasp that). In this respect our conception of mind is woefully perspective-dependent (anthropocentric). And what about minds biologically unrelated to ours—those that are not even in our evolutionary family? Your extra-galactic stone people and electro-magnetic sky-dwellers—we have no conception of the kinds of mind they might have. Is consciousness even the same in such remote creatures? Even on our planet, we wonder what kind of mind a plant would have if it had one. Our knowledge of minds in general is about as extensive as our knowledge of life forms from other galaxies. We have a highly subjective viewpoint on the nature of mind, centered on ourselves (itself subjective). The introspective view is not an objective view. Do we have any inkling of mind as it is objectively? Here is one suggestion: we have a more objective view of mental structure than mental content, i.e., form rather than substance. In the case of the physical world, we are ready to allow that we don’t know the substance of matter, but we do know its abstract structure, as mathematically described. Could the same be true of the mind? Do we know its geometry better than its chemistry? Perhaps we apprehend the mind by means of secondary qualities (or something like them) that we can discount in order to get to the objective core of the mind. Thus, we know the structure of thoughts better than we know the items (“concepts”) that compose them: logical form is more perspicuous to us than lexical content. We are relatively objective about mental structure (form, geometry). Similarly, we may wonder whether any parts of the mind are more objectively known to us than other parts–for example, sensations more than thoughts. Sensations have been around for longer, and perhaps introspection is more attuned to them; but thoughts are relative newcomers on the evolutionary scene, and introspection is still finding its feet with them. Objectivity and subjectivity come in degrees, and so our introspection-based view of the mind might vary from case to case—some parts may be more objective than other parts. Some parts may be twice as subjective as other parts, or at any rate a good deal more subjective. Our view of some parts of the physical world is more subjective than our view of other parts, e.g., our view of the olfactory world versus our view of the spatial world. Well, it may be the same for the mental world: there are degrees of subjectivity where that is concerned too. Mind has an objective nature, just like everything else that exists, but our mental representations of it are subjective to varying degrees. Subjectivity begins at home—with our own subjectivity. Our view of our own minds is a subjective view. Subjective experience has an objective nature, but our (introspective) view of it is subjective to one degree or another.

I would dearly love to put a number on this—then philosophy would be an exact science! How much more subjective is our view of the mental world than our view of the material world? The number that shouts out its truth to me is (wait for it) three—three times more subjective. It’s a ball-park figure, I concede, but it has the ring of truth to it: given our actual modes of access, the mind is subjectively represented at three times the rate of the physical world. Or as my wise advisors advise me to say, it is “quite a good deal” more subjective than our view of the physical world. The mind has an objective reality that departs considerably from the limited subjective view we have of it.  Yet we are under the illusion that it is less subjective: we think we know the objective nature of mind better than we know the objective nature of matter. I believe this illusion arises from what we are pleased to call privileged access—we make fewer mistakes about mind than we do about matter. Introspection is more reliable than perception. That is no doubt true, but it doesn’t follow that we know what mind is better than we know what matter is. I know for sure that I am in pain, but I don’t know what pain is in its real essence, i.e., in its objective nature. I know how it seems to me, but I don’t know how it seems to the universe. I know it from my own particular and peculiar point of view, but not from its point of view—objectively, absolutely. My view of my own mind is very subjective, but my view of matter is only somewhat subjective—roughly speaking. Hence, the attraction to the number three.

This has an obvious bearing on the mind-body problem. For we are not likely to get a good handle on the mind-body problem if our grasp of mind or body is seriously subjective—we need an objective conception of both to make any headway. If our view of mind is grievously subjective, to the point of being positively misleading, then we are not in much of a position to connect it intelligibly to the brain, itself (somewhat) subjectively represented. It’s like trying to see a mechanism through a mist. We are mystified because we are locked into our given cognitive perspective, as if wearing dark glasses our whole life. The trick would be to lift the subjective veil and reveal the glowing objective face beneath—and not to shift one’s gaze to some connected imposter (such as the biochemical brain). Solving the mind-body problem involves achieving an objective view of all of nature—not an easy task. Imagine the degree of subjectivity that characterizes a simple organism’s perspective with regard to both mind and matter: do you think it would make much progress on the mind-body problem? We differ from that organism in degree not in kind (same sense modalities, neural brain); we are not free of those subjectively fixed blinkers. We just don’t see our minds (and the minds of other beings) at all clearly—see into them. Our view of our own subjectivity is a subjective view, markedly so.[3]

[1] Subjectivity in the intended sense has nothing to do with error or lack of justification; it concerns whether we have a conception of the nature of things that contains ingredients derived from our specific perspective, sensory and conceptual, on the object in question. See my “Philosophy of Objectivity and Subjectivity”, “Objective and Subjective Knowledge”, “A Paradox of Objectivity and Subjectivity”, and “A Program Delineated”. Of course, this discussion goes back to Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere. We are investigating the degree to which we can transcend our particular perspective on the world, to obtain a “view from nowhere”. Thus, can we view our own minds from a perspective outside of them? Put that way, the task seems impossible. But that doesn’t imply that we can’t have a lot of objective knowledge of the world in other senses of “objective”. (This is a delicate subject.)

[2] There is something almost paradoxical about this, since we do have a special kind of access to our own minds. This access seems in tension with the hiddenness of the mind to the introspective eye: how can the mind be both so visible and yet so hidden? The answer is that freedom from error is not inconsistent with hidden depths: the former is about existence, the latter about essence. I can know that a pain exists in my arm without knowing what the underlying nature of pain is (the reality behind the appearance). It is not so different from knowing there is a sheep in front of me and knowing what a sheep essentially is. Knowledge of the one thing is compatible with ignorance about the other. In the case of the mind, we seem to be both spectacularly ignorant and splendidly knowledgeable. The latter is apt to conceal the depths of the former.

[3] I have written this essay in a somewhat boisterous style; this is the way it came out, so I left it that way. Maybe philosophy is sometimes best written thus, as opposed to in our usual staid style. The sense of excitement should not be stifled (there is such a thing as philosophical ecstasy). Nor should we hold back from bold statement if the subject is served by it. That is: reader, I know what I am doing.

Philosophy of Learning

In philosophy we study perception, knowledge, belief, memory, and reasoning—but not so much learning. In psychology learning is central, but in philosophy it is peripheral at best (perhaps part of philosophy of education). I propose to make some programmatic remarks about learning as a philosophical topic (I happen to have a strong interest in the subject). What is learning? It is the transition from ignorance to knowledge: at time t you don’t know something and then at time t+1 you do know it—the process between is the learning process. To define it we need to use the concept of knowledge: you can’t learn something false (“learn” is factive). To learn is to come to know. The OED gives us “acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) through study or experience or by being taught”. You can’t say “Today I learned that Paris is the capital of England”. The upshot of learning is knowledge not mere belief. So, any definition of learning will incorporate a definition of knowledge. What kind of knowledge? All kinds—any kind of knowledge can be learned: knowledge-how, knowledge-that, knowledge-what. You can learn how to play tennis, or learn that global warming is real, or learn what mango tastes like. Learning is as conceptually promiscuous as knowing. In all cases it signifies the transition from not knowing to knowing. There is no kind of learning that is not a case of knowing. You can learn consciously or unconsciously, but either way you end up knowing something you didn’t know before. Growth isn’t learning because getting bigger does not involve knowing anything. Learning always involves change, but not all change involves knowledge. All learning is epistemic (analytically so).

So far, so obvious. But we can raise unobvious questions: is it possible to learn a tautology? You can learn that Hesperus is Phosphorus, but can you learn that Hesperus is Hesperus? Intuitively, no; nor can you learn (discover) that bachelors are unmarried. Why? Because you already knew these things by knowing what the words mean; there is no transition to a new state of knowledge. If your kid came home from school and announced he had learned that bachelors are unmarried, you would want your money back. You have to learn a new proposition not an old proposition dressed in new words. Indeed, what can be learned is a criterion of identity for propositions, as Frege taught us. More challenging, what kinds of thing can learn? Can a rock learn? Not unless it can know things—and it cannot. What about genes? Here I am inclined to say yes, because genes can come to know that certain traits are conducive to survival. That is, they are naturally selected by the evolutionary process because they enable survival and reproduction. The evolutionary process is in effect a learning process: existing traits are the result of learning. The environment has taught the genes to produce certain traits and not others. The organism is a product of genetic learning. It is much the same with simple organisms: they learn things without being rational conscious agents, but by classical conditioning. Conditioning is a type of learning; so, the result must be a type of knowledge. Pigeons know which lever to peck as a result of trial-and-error learning. Genes are similar (as has often been noted) because they are the result of a selective process leading to a useful trait. So, I have no problem with the idea that genes are the result of a learning process, and hence know things. The concept of knowledge is broad enough to apply in their case—as it is to worms, rats, and baby brains. There is no reason to be snooty about knowledge and learning, as if you could only learn at school. You could in fact teach genes by artificial selection, hoping to improve the resulting organisms, thus causing them to learn. The genes of one species might be better at learning than another. Logically, the genes can learn and have done so over millions of years. This is why people speak of the genes as containing information, and of the genotype as a “book of the dead”. The analogies are strong enough to justify extending the concept of learning in this direction (and discounting the implicatures).

Here is a question: can there be Gettier cases of learning? Brief reflection suggests yes. If you see Jones parking a Ford, you will be justified in believing he owns a Ford, and this may well be true, even though the Ford he is parking isn’t the Ford he owns. You are right only by accident and hence don’t really know he owns a Ford. But by the same token, you didn’t learn that he owns a Ford; you came to believe it by accident. So, true justified belief is not sufficient for learning; learning requires full-blown knowledge, but Gettier cases show that knowledge cannot be defined as true justified belief. We can’t say that x learns that p if and only if xcomes to have a true justified belief that p. What you learn you must know, but knowledge isn’t definable as true justified belief.

Is innate knowledge learned? It is commonly said that it is not, because the animal had the knowledge all along; you don’t have to learn what you already know. So, innate knowledge might be described as unlearned knowledge. But this ignores a possibility alluded to above, namely that the genes learned it. The genes encode this knowledge, but it was instilled in them by the evolutionary process; so, they learned it from the world (“experience”) by natural selection. Thus, we can say that innate knowledge is acquired knowledge, though not acquired by the animal in question; it was acquired by the genes long ago and then passed on to the animal. Accordingly, all knowledge is acquired knowledge, i.e., learned. No knowledge is unlearned. Instinctual knowledge is learned as much as perceptual knowledge. The empiricist could correctly claim that all knowledge is learned knowledge, with the environment enlisted as teacher. The educated genes give us our innate knowledge (it wasn’t innate in them). All knowledge has to be learned from someone or something, given that evolution is the way instinctual knowledge comes about. Innate is not the opposite of learned, but a special case of it. Learning and knowledge go inextricably together.

Finally, we must say something humanistic about learning, because learning is highly prized by human beings (but not by worms and genes). People feel it is good to learn—skills, subjects, how to be a better person. The human animal is the learning animal par excellence. Why? Because we prize knowledge, and you can’t get far with that without learning. To know requires learning, and learning isn’t always easy. So, we sacrifice to learn. Knowledge is good for us, we feel, but you can’t possess that good without working for it—learning being a type of work (if only just looking around you). Learning is woven into our lives because knowledge is mentally nourishing. The quality of a man’s soul is calculated according to the learning that has gone into forming it. People say “I love to learn” and the verb is apt; we are nothing without learning. A blank slate is a worthless slate, sheer vacuity, rank nothingness. Learning is a moral imperative. We might even say it is the meaning of life. A worthy philosophical subject.[1]

[1] In this subject, as in others, it is methodologically unwise to focus exclusively on the human case; our mental concepts extend beyond us into the animal kingdom. We need to stay conceptually flexible if we want to limn the biological natural kinds. This is why anthropomorphic language comes so naturally in the case of worms and genes: they are at one end of a spectrum occupied by us (and by beings potentially superior to us—whatever that means). Thus, worms learn where the water is (and know it) and genes learn that fingers are useful (and know it). We are latecomers in the learning business not its paradigm.

Skeptical Solutions to the Mind Problem

Early thinkers had a body problem: what is body? What is the stuff we call “matter”? The pre-Socratics had a go at answering this question: matter is water, or variations on the four elements (earth, fire, water, and air). More advanced thinkers proposed invisible atoms, or spatial extension, or energy, or elemental mind. These are straight answers to the initial question—no funny business. None of them involves questioning the very existence of body, or explaining it away, or finding some sort of surrogate for it that is less mystifying. They are not skeptical about the existence of matter. They take it for granted that matter exists and try to say what it is—eminently sensible, perfectly rational. In parallel with this, people have asked what mind is: what is the thing we call “mind”? What constitutes it, what is it made of? We know it exists—we feel it at every moment—but what the devil is it? It doesn’t seem like body, so we can’t just apply our theories of matter to it; it requires separate treatment. But it strikes us as a tough nut to crack, a bit of an enigma, not the work of a couple of spare minutes. Let’s go back to thinking about matter—it’s less perplexing! We wanted a straight answer to our question: mind is real, but what exactly is it? We wanted a constitutive informative answer—certainly not one that questions the existence of mind. We don’t want to be told that mind doesn’t really exist and therefore has no nature. We want a straight solution to the problem of mind not a skeptical solution (that’s no solution).[1]

Over the years various solutions have been ventured: dualism, materialism, behaviorism, functionalism, representationalism. These all accept the existence of the mind (but see below) and offer to say what it is. But they have not been met with general acceptance; all sorts of objections have been raised. Some are too reductive, others not reductive enough, others not clear enough. Qualia-consciousness theories seem too narrow and raise the same question about themselves (what is consciousness?); materialist theories are just hard to believe on their face (compare “All is water”); immaterialist theories are plain baffling and ignore the role of the brain; behaviorist theories are simply looking in the wrong place; computational-representational theories are too speculative and suspiciously circular. In any case, no one thinks any of these are obviously correct or evidentially well-established. Frankly, they are all clearly inadequate, though not without containing some elements of truth. We haven’t been able to say convincingly what mind is. But if we can’t say what it is (we don’t know what it is), why should we say it is? Why not just go eliminative? That will get rid of the headache—and who says folk psychology is sacrosanct? Thus, we have a skeptical attitude prompted by what looks like a skeptical paradox: the mind simply has no definition, no nature, no correct theory. It’s like the gods or phlogiston or the elan vital—non-existent. So, let’s not talk about it anymore—let’s treat it with the disrespect it deserves. We already have matter, so why do we need mind? Matter is enough for any universe to be going on with. It might even be thought that mind, as normally conceived, is intrinsically impossible: a logically incoherent mental theater, a den of mysterious intentionality, a museum myth (you know the anti-mind rhetoric). Let’s admit it, mind is a baffling business. That would be one response to the difficulty of the mind problem. Junk it, bin it, commit it to the flames. Succumb to ontological skepticism.

But it is not the only possible response: we might try for a skeptical solution, i.e., a proposal that accepts that the mind itself is unreal but offers to preserve our talk of mind. The discourse can be saved while its putative subject matter is “eschewed”. Mental talk has a use but it has no reputable ontology (like religious language). It serves a pragmatic purpose but without any existential commitments. It has assertion conditions but no truth conditions—no corresponding facts. It serves the community’s interests but has no real-world counterpart (again, you know the rhetorical patter). This line is not difficult to conjure: mental discourse is instrumentally useful—a device for making predictions, summing up data, having something to say to your spouse after a long day. Maybe we can’t live without it, or retain our sanity. Still, it is pure mythology (again, like religious discourse). As an extra flourish, we might add that mental language serves an expressive function—we use it to get things off our chest, or to impress a potential mate, or to wind down at night. We do like to chatter about psychological matters, don’t we. This approach resembles the case of ethics: no ethical facts, but it doesn’t all go up in smoke, because ethical talk is emotive or expressive or psychologically healthy (blah-blah-blah). This is a skeptical solution to a felt ontological problem. There is a similar approach in philosophy of mathematics: numbers are useful fictions—non-existent but linguistically practical.

So far, I haven’t said anything particularly new or upsetting to orthodoxy, but that is about to change—radically. For I wish to suggest that all the standard theories of mind are really skeptical solutions in disguise. None of them is really a straight solution, not when you dig a bit deeper. This is fundamentally because they simply cannot be taken seriously as straight solutions; they are all tacit denials of the reality of mind as we know it. They are all ways of replacing the mind with something else and then claiming that mental discourse is really about that. Immaterialist dualism claims that talk of the mind is talk of a curious invisible gaseous substance tenuously linked to the body and brain. This is obviously pure myth, scarcely more credible than postulating immortal gods to explain natural phenomena. The brain obviously has an awful lot to do with the mind and it is not immaterial (whatever that means). The intellectual function of the immaterial substance idea is to provide a prop for mental discourse to hang onto—a sort of impalpable peg. The thought is that we can talk as if this is true and comfort ourselves that we are not talking about nothing. Okay, that may be a worthy goal—it would be hard to give up all psychological talk—but it is hardly sound ontology. This is a skeptical solution masquerading as a straight solution. It clearly beggars belief as the literal truth about the nature of mind, as people subconsciously realize (one thing it does is allow religion to peddle its myth of immortality). It is an imaginative crutch adopted for a pragmatic purpose. If a philosopher or scientist had actually proposed it as a skeptical solution, it would be regarded as such—a myth to allow us to carry on using mental language in the face of the skeptical challenge and its accompanying paradox. No one thinks that the mind looks like a cloud, or has a cloudy composition. This is just what we resort to when we have given up hope of a straight solution. It is a useful fiction.

Belief in dualism plays the role of instinct in Hume’s discussion of induction: it provides an explanation of our practices without admitting they have an objective rational basis. We are prone to imagine such things and that is why we keep talking the way we do about the mind, while accepting that we can’t say what it is, or even that it exists. Materialism also provides a basis for mental talk without being believed in as the literal truth about the mind. No one really believes it, not in their heart of hearts (except perhaps a gullible philosopher); it just provides a useful substitute for the mind as we ordinary conceive it. We know what the brain is (we think), so we can’t be made subject to a skeptical paradox about it; well, that’s what grounds our mental talk—it is as ifwe are talking about the brain. We don’t really think the mind is the brain and nothing but the brain; but if we pretend it is, then we can carry on talking as if the mind exists. The brain plays the role of the community in Kripke’s reconstruction of Wittgenstein: it is the alternative reality that can be wheeled in to ground our existing practices, given that nothing factual about the individual can ground them. Again, if a skeptical philosopher had suggested the brain as a skeptical solution, we would see the point, given that it is quite hopeless as a straight solution—the mind being clearly not the brain (as physically described). Behaviorism and functionalism are much the same: clearly not identical to the mind—located in completely the wrong place—but a viable-looking substitute for the mind proper. Behavior prompts mental assertions, so it can provide assertion conditions, but there is no account to be had of truth conditions—for there are none, what with the mind not existing and all. No one really believes that the mind we know so well from the inside is behavior, but it can play a role in explaining our mental talk; we thus eliminate the mind while hanging onto behavior—on pain of having nothing to talk about. Again, behavior plays the role of the community in Kripke’s story—it substitutes for the fact we have been unable to find. We have examined all the available facts and none measures up, so we have opted for a skeptical account of our practice with mental language. In the case of the computational-representational theory of the nature of mind, I will only say that this is a speculative and mainly metaphorical account of the mind, limited at best to only a fragment of the mental. It is best viewed as a skeptical solution not a straight solution—a useful fiction. It is as if there is a language of thought, but of course there isn’t really any such thing. In sum, all the theories offered as straight solutions turn out to be skeptical solutions in disguise. They don’t really set out to tell us what the mind literally is—they are too incredible for that—but they do offer an account of mental discourse that allows us to preserve our mental talk in a kind of diluted form, analogous to expressive accounts of ethics, fictionalist accounts of numbers, and instrumentalist accounts of physics. According to this view, then, most of the philosophy of mind consists of skeptical solutions to what-is problems—not the official story, not by a long chalk.

I have so far suppressed mention of mysterianism, but it is actually key to understanding what is going on here. For it provides an option distinct from straight solutions and skeptical solutions, namely that there is a straight solution but we can’t find it, deeply so. That blocks the move from “we can find no straight solution” to “there is no straight solution”, thereby pulling the rug out from under the skeptical solutionist. If the mind is deeply mysterious, yet has an underlying real essence, there will be no necessity to contrive a fancy (and fanciful) skeptical solution, with all of its implausibility and bullet-biting. So, the dialectic of straight and skeptical solutions does not exhaust the field. We can agree that no straight solution can be found but still insist that the mind has an intrinsic nature that preempts the need for a skeptical solution. The standard theories then lapse without needing to deny the mind or construct a skeptical surrogate for it. Skeptical solutions arise from assuming an anti-mysterian position at the outset. The point I have wanted to make in this paper is that orthodox philosophy of mind has labored under the delusion that it is giving straight solutions to (quite legitimate) problems; but the standard theories are really skeptical solutions of a familiar kind. Put very simply, philosophers have tacitly denied the existence of minds, as we ordinarily understand them, and attempted to find a way to hang onto our linguistic practices; they are like Kripke’s semantic skeptic but extended to the mind as whole.[2]

[1] For background see my “Existence, Consciousness, and Skeptical Solutions”, “Family Resemblance and Skeptical Solutions”, and “Philosophy of Popularity”.

[2] Returning to the question about body, it is fair to report that this problem has also tended to generate skeptical solutions with respect to physics, as straight solutions have come to seem more and more unsatisfactory. Hence, instrumentalism, verificationism, operationalism, structuralism, and mathematicalism. Mysterianism can block these moves; it might indeed be the prevailing state of affairs. It’s either skeptical solutions or mysterian (straight) solutions. Known straight solutions are hard to come by. This is the shape that philosophy is apt to take. We can add epistemic solutions to straight solutions and skeptical solutions.