Metaphysics of Shape and Color

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Metaphysics of Shape and Color

How many shapes are there in the universe, and how many colors? A standard answer is infinitely many in both cases. This answer is not incorrect, but it doesn’t go deep enough. Metaphysically, we want to know how many irreducible shapes and colors there are. As a matter of basic ontology, how many shapes and colors do we need to recognize? And is reductionism the right approach? How unified are the various shapes and colors—what kind of “ism” applies to them (monism, dualism, pluralism, etc.)? Is there a magic number or is it arbitrary? Is there an essence shared by all shapes, and ditto for colors? What is the metaphysics of shape and color?

First shape. We might begin with the idea that geometrical figures fall into a few basic kinds (natural geometrical kinds): triangles, quadrangles, polygons, circles, ellipses; then three-dimensional figures are derived from these. You can combine these to produce infinitely many possible shapes, but they are the basic building blocks; everything shaped is reducible to them. This would be quite an insight and it has shaped (!) human thought from Euclid on. But it doesn’t go far enough: can’t we reduce all possible shapes to variations on straight-sided figures and curved-sided figures? Triangles and squares (etc.) on one side, circles and ovals (etc.) on the other side. The rectilinear and the curvilinear. Once you have these core shapes you can derive the rest: for example, you can simply add a side to a triangle to get a rectangle, and you can squash a circle to get an ellipse; three-dimensional figures are got by analogous means. So, we might endorse a dualistic geometry—roughly, squares and circles. Then the claim would be that all the shapes of nature are reducible to these; and that claim is plausible enough. But have we gone far enough—couldn’t there be a more ambitious form of shape reductionism? Couldn’t geometrical monism be true? For consider: can’t we derive circles from squares by multiplying the sides of the square to infinity, using the concept of a limit? Isn’t there an intelligible procedure that will take you from squares to circles? And what about the idea of taking sections of the circumference of a circle, straightening them out, and putting them end to end? The gulf between squares and circles does not appear unbridgeable (it’s not like matter and mind or fact and value). The circle is a kind of modified square—we can imagine a square growing into a circle (or vice versa). We can always bend a straight line into a curved one and a curved line into a straight one—imagine performing this transformation with a piece of string. Circles and squares are topologically equivalent. Underlying the geometrical dualism, we have a geometrical monism. You can do a lot of work with a straight line (or a curved one). Metaphysically, we have variations on a theme. Ontologically, all shape is based on a single shape. A pre-Socratic might announce “All shape is One”: the many reduce to the one. A theologian might teach that God first created the square and then let nature take care of the rest. A philosopher may proudly call himself a “rectangle monist”. A modal philosopher might go a step further and say that necessarily all shapes reduce to the rectangle—in all possible worlds the only real shape is the rectangle. This might be called “shape minimalism” and Occam’s razor cited piously. And the doctrine is not wildly implausible; in fact, I might include myself under that label. The geometric jungle is analyzable into a single basic figure (I stop at reducing everything to the straight line). I might even be attracted by the idea of reducing every shape to the egg shape, on account of its poetic resonance: all geometry develops from an egg. This is certainly a debatable position in the metaphysics of shape.

But what about color? Here the situation looks very different: the colors are not all derivable from a single color, or even two colors. The basic colors are standardly said to be red, blue, yellow, green, black, and white. There could be other colors too, and some animals may see them, but they clearly form a plurality. You can’t deform blue to get yellow, or black to get white. These are color primitives, irreducibly different. They can combine to generate potentially infinitely many colors, but the procedure starts with a (finite) inventory of primitive colors. Color pluralism is the indicated metaphysical doctrine. Someone who claimed that all colors are one would be on shaky ground (“Everything is green” sounds like a non-starter). So, we know that the metaphysics of color differs in this respect from the metaphysics of shape. Shape is inherently unitary, but color isn’t. It is in the nature of color that there should be a variety of colors, actual or possible. There is no privileged color that reduces all the rest. So, when you look at an object and see the many shapes that compose it, you see variations on a single shape; but the many colors you see are not variations on a single color. There is geometrical unity but not chromatic unity. The two sorts of quality are intertwined, but their ontology is quite different. Colors form a family; shapes form a continuum. Colors are discrete; shapes are continuous. Colors are pluralistic; shapes are monistic. Visual perception is a mixture of both. And it knows it, tacitly anyway: it knows that shapes and colors are different in this way. We need different color receptors, but we don’t need different shape receptors (rods and cones and all that). The processing of shape is essentially simpler than the processing of color; shape perception no doubt preceded color perception in the evolutionary history of vision. The metaphysics of shape and color influences the cognitive science of human vision (and non-human types of vision). Shape is subjectively monistic, but color is subjectively pluralistic. This is a truth of phenomenology. The perceived world (the visual field) has a mixed metaphysics: partly monist, partly pluralist. We see things in both ways (seeing-as).

How does all this bear on the contents of platonic heaven? Interesting question. With color we would naturally say that it contains the usual six colors and no others—no shades or mixtures. These come from the mixing of colors that occurs in the empirical world. There is no need to stack up endless derivative colors in Plato’s heavenly storehouse. In the case of shape, one gets the impression that Plato favored a well-stocked geometrical heaven—triangles, rectangles, ellipses, circles, etc. But in the light of our reductive efforts, we could cut this down to the basics; and we appear to have a choice—the circle or the square. Circles seem the most appealing choice, in view of their reputed perfection; so, let’s go with that—the Form of Circularity only. Then we obtain the rest by sublunary operations and iterations. There is the Good, the Circular, and the Colors (neatly side by side). Geometry is commendably minimal (Occam-shaved) in its quota of basic Forms. It has a small but powerful cardinality. There is no need to wax extravagant in constructing Plato’s heaven, at least when it comes to shape. One shape will do the job.

Lastly, how do we explain these numbers—what do they signify? Or are they entirely arbitrary? Our mystical tendences favor special mystical numbers, but it is hard to see any meaning in the numbers we have arrived at. One is a nice round number for shapes, but six doesn’t sound very meaningful for colors—and anyway there may be other colors perceived by other perceivers. There is nothing Godlike about the number six (three maybe). Could there be worlds that have fewer colors, or completely different colors? That sounds strange, but it may be the result of our limited perception-driven imaginations. Surely, black and white will be universal, and it would be an impoverished world without red and blue. I will leave this question for further research into the mathematical metaphysics of color. The point I have wanted to make is that shape and color have different ontological profiles.[1]

[1] Isn’t it odd that this question has not been pursued in work on shape and color? To my knowledge, the questions I raise (and answer) in this paper have no traditional literature devoted to them, despite the interest in the two topics. The usual focus is on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, not the question of intra-category reduction and inter-category divergences. Colors have no real essence in common, but shapes do. It is customary to construct geometry from points and lines in an atomistic style, but no such atomism will work for color science.

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In His Own Write

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In His Own Right

I just re-read John Lennon’s book In His Own Write, which I won as the English prize at my school in Blackpool. I last read it at age sixteen, sixty years ago. It consists of short stories composed of malapropisms and invented words. I still found it as clever and funny as I did when I first read it. I now see that it must have taken a lot of work, because it can’t have been easy to think up all those verbal solecisms (e.g., “hippoposthumous”). Strange that he never wrote anything else apart from songs, because he has a real feeling for language, especially nonsense language (the best kind).

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A Proof of Platonism

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A Proof of Platonism

I am going to prove that the universal whiteness is not identical to the class of white things. The proof is similar to the well-known proof that pain is not identical to C-fiber firing.[1] Thus: I can think of whiteness apart from the class of actual white things; I can conceive of a possible world in which a different class of things is white. That class is not identical with the class of actual white things, but the same universal is being instantiated. Therefore, whiteness is not identical to the class of actual white things. QED. Compare: I can conceive of a possible world in which pain is not correlated with C-fiber firing, but instead is correlated with D-fiber firing. It is the same sensation but a different physical correlate. Therefore, pain is not identical to C-fiber firing. Pain is modally detachable from C-fiber firing, so it can’t be identical to that. Whiteness is modally detachable from actual white things, so it can’t be identical to them. It can’t be reducible to those things, as pain can’t be reducible to that brain state. What about the claim that pain can exist without being attached to any physical state? That too seems conceivable, at least at first sight (pending a clearer idea of the “physical”). Similarly, it seems conceivable that whiteness could exist in a possible world without any white things; if so, it is detachable from all possible white things. This intuition is reinforced by the following reflection: if I reduce the number of white things in a possible world, I don’t reduce the universal whiteness—it doesn’t get any smaller. Indeed, what would it mean to say that a universal had been reduced in size? Classes can be reduced in size, but not universals. The identity and existence conditions of universals are not the same as those of classes of particulars.

There is a more general point to be made: what explains the ability to think of universals in the absence of particulars instantiating them? The most obvious explanation is that the two are separate and distinct: when I think of whiteness I am not thinking of a class of particulars. The explanation is simply that they are not the same thing. Similarly, for pain and C-fiber firing: the concepts are different because their reference is different. Intuitively, that is very plausible, because a class is a plurality of things but a universal isn’t—it is one thing. Also, particulars have many other properties, but whiteness doesn’t have this kind of heterogeneity; it is whiteness pure and simple. Universals aren’t collections of anything; they are unities. Nor can we say that whiteness is just a mode of presentation of the class of white things, since the same could be said of the class, i.e., that it is just a mode of presentation of whiteness. In fact, it is more plausible to suppose that whiteness is ontologically basic, since it is what unifies its instances into a class. The class doesn’t generate the universal; the universal generates the class. The class would not exist without the universal; it cannot be detached from the universal that forms it. The particular presupposes the general, not vice versa.[2]

[1] See Kripke’s Naming and Necessity.

[2] Actually, I don’t much like the traditional labels “general” and “particular”:  the particular is also general in that it has many properties (it is multiple), and the general is also particular in that it is a specific thing not some sort of generalized nothing. The particular is many and the general is one. We could call the universal whiteness a “particular” because of its specificity, and the particular white thing general because it is host to a plurality of properties. Calling a universal “general” suggests some sort of distributed unspecific nature, but in reality, universals are as particular and specific as one might wish. One is not thinking “generally” if one thinks of the universal whiteness. Still less is one thinking vaguely or indiscriminately or plurally or imprecisely. One is thinking of one specific universal in particular. We must rid ourselves of the idea (prejudice) that universals are somehow cognitively and ontologically improper or badly behaved. Plato elevated them over particulars for a reason.

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Car Evolution

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Car Evolution

Suppose a particular car is designed and built. No other car is created. The car is then copied by technicians multiple times over many years, say one thousand. Errors in the copying are sometimes made, resulting in a car slightly different from the original. Suppose a million new cars are built, so many errors creep in. The cars are sold to consumers following their preferences. Some of the errors are not favored by any consumers, but some become popular. We can imagine that the original is slowly changed over time, to such an extent that no true replicas remain. The transformation could be quite drastic. What we have is a gradual metamorphosis from an original design that mindlessly produces diversity, which is then selected for and produces new models of car. We have an evolution of car species that mirrors the evolution of animal species. The same logic applies to both.

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Office Vacation

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Office Vacation

I remember the day, fourteen years ago, when I vacated my office. The university had given me a short deadline to get this done, so I requested an extension. They denied my request (without explanation) and told me they would charge me for every day I went over the announced date. I therefore recruited the head of department (Harvey Siegel) to assist with the work, along with my wife and a handyman we were employing at the time (he had a truck and handyman’s hands). We showed up one day soon after and carried out in boxes my many books and papers; it wasn’t light work. Given the urgency of the deadline, it wasn’t possible to take all the books (the truck was too small for one thing and the workers were getting tired). I therefore left many books in a big pile on my office floor. I instructed the departmental assistant to let any graduate students help themselves to my erstwhile library, which apparently they did. This was just one incident out of many, but it has a special poignancy.

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Evolution by Nutritional Selection

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Evolution by Nutritional Selection

Animals need food. They cannot survive and reproduce without it. They therefore have adaptations that ensure that enough food is consumed: traits that enable them to find food and consume it. This is not selfishly confined to the individual animal; animals also procure food for their young, often going without themselves. You have heard about the survival of the fittest; well, this appetite for food is the survival of the fattest—the fullest, the foodiest. The animal that eats well lives the longest and produces the most babies (which it feeds). Evolution by natural selection revolves around food. It is the original biological imperative: eat, eat, eat! Eat or die. And it is constant (unlike sex and reproduction)—the hunger, the searching, the gathering, the consuming. Animals are basically eating machines. They do it in different ways, but they all do it—there are no non-eating species. It is a biological universal (unlike sex and horns). For animals need energy and energy comes in the form of food (originally from the Sun). Animals need fuel (the Sun is their gas tank). The most successful animal, accordingly, is the best eater—the one that always has food available and is able to digest it effectively. This animal will be the most prolific propagator. Evolution is by nutritional selection (not so much sexual selection or aggression selection or intelligence selection).

We can put all this in terms of genes. The selfish gene is the greedy gene—the gluttonous gourmet gene. The greedy gene likes to be well fed; not the individual animal, mark, but the gene itself. Because the selfish gene is equally concerned about identical genes in other bodies, especially offspring. The greedy gene will help build a mother that feeds its descendant genes—it will produce good and plentiful milk for the babies that carry that gene. In mating the greedy gene will favor mates that will best feed its offspring; it will select a mate that brings home the bacon. The male will make the best food gatherer and the female will produce the finest milk. A good parent is one that puts food on the table. Siblings will fight for food, also following genetic imperatives. The genes are food-obsessed because food provides the indispensable fuel for genetic reproduction. A selfish gene with no appetite for food will not survive long in the gene pool.[1] It must build bodies that are ravenous for food and skilled at getting it. Evolution has been perfecting food consumption from its earliest days—from hunting to digesting. Find the food, swallow it down, then effectively digest it (then excrete the remains). The whole ecosystem of an animal (and its genes) is a food ecosystem. Animals copulate, compete, and fight—but mainly they eat. When an animal is described as territorial that is a misnomer; the animal (or its genes) doesn’t care about owning property—it cares about the food that is found on that property. Not territory but the accompanying comestibles; if the animal could get the food without the area it is found in, it wouldn’t bother defending that territory. Who wants to wander round all day defending a piece of land (you can’t eat that)? People used to say that nature is red in tooth and claw; maybe so, but it is also mashed in mouth and belly. Saliva not blood, and violent in the service of eating (as well as mating). Life on earth is all about getting enough to eat.

What about humans? We are a very successful species, probably the most successful in terms of world domination. We are also accomplished eaters: we produce our own food, of all kinds, distribute it, and devote ourselves to consuming it. We have a food economy, restaurants, chefs, TV programs, the works. We are fat to the point of ill-health (is there an obesity problem in any other animal species?). Our huge population growth is made possible by our food productivity. We are not held back by food shortages. We have a food-oriented brain. It is sometimes supposed that we got rid of Neanderthals by making war on them, but perhaps we just out-ate them. We had a better food delivery system. We have taken food to an advanced level, far beyond any other species. We have made food an art and a science. We actually cook (fire was surely crucial in achieving food supremacy). Our culture is centered around food. We now live to eat while other animals eat to live (and do what exactly?). We are the foodie species. We eat everything and we put a lot of thought into it. Our hands are well designed for food gathering and preparation, as well as actual eating. Our tools are often food related. Without our human hands we might not have become so expert in the business of food. Thus, our bipedal gait is a pre-adaptation for food dominance, freeing up the hands for food activity. The hands are perfect instruments for food gathering, food preparation, and food insertion. We even supplement them with utensils (very rare in the non-human world). We go on dinner dates to fancy restaurants with the express purpose of seeing how potential mates conduct themselves around food. Marriage is all about providing and sharing food. Food and sex are closely intertwined. There is also the matter of children: who will be better at feeding them? Back in the day the ideal man would be healthy and strong, good at providing food, while the ideal woman would be good at feeding babies. We might speculate that the attraction of large breasts has something to do with providing plentiful milk for babies; those selfish greedy genes will have their beady eyes on the most nourishing breasts. Big muscles, big breasts—plenty of good grub for all concerned. The naked ape is a hungry ape and wants to be assured of a reliable food supply. Fear of food shortages is a constant anxiety, given the ruthlessness of nature, so you want all the information you can get with regard to a potential mate. Mate selection is nutritional selection, just like natural selection. Animals are selected according to their nutritional fitness. A hopelessly skinny half-starved animal will not do well in the battle for survival and reproduction; it’s survival of the fattest out there. The presence of fat is a guarantee that you won’t starve to death. Given that obesity isn’t generally a problem in the animal world, fat is better than thin, ceteris paribus.

What is an animal? What are the fundamental mechanisms of evolution? These are clearly interconnected questions. One image has it that animals are violent power-hungry brutes out for domination over their fellows; this image reflects social conditions in capitalist Victorian England. Another image views animals as filthy crude pre-human beasts wallowing in squalor; this perhaps reflects the condition of peasants in the Middle Ages, as seen through the eyes of the upper classes. A third image depicts them as libidinous creatures perpetually primed for sex; this picture seems to have taken hold during the 1960s (see Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape). The present image, derived mainly from TV documentaries, is that of an anxious creature always searching for food—a kind of sentient eating machine. This animal is long-suffering but driven—driven to spend its days in the pursuit of something to eat. I think this view is less anthropocentric than the others: animals really are victims of a mindless evolutionary process that compels them to seek out food or die. They are tragic beings, though in many ways admirable—not violent filthy sex maniacs. Even the apex predators are caught in a cycle of deprivation and lucky relief from starvation (like many unfortunate humans). They eat or die. That is the basic fact of animal life.[2]

[1] The same line of reasoning applies to memes, but I won’t go into this. All replication requires fuel of some sort.

[2] Life on Earth is perhaps unusual compared to other inhabited planets. We are the only civilized eaters on Earth, but on other planets there may be many species with our degree of culinary sophistication (see Star Wars for documentation). There may be even more expert eaters elsewhere with greater planetary domination (galactic domination). The food might be better and more plentiful in these places. The well-fed aliens might have bigger brains, fleeter feet, greater flexibility, and superior morals. We are at the culinary pinnacle here on Earth, but so what?

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For Unemotional Ethics

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For Unemotional Ethics

It is often said that ethics (morality) is concerned with the passions not the intellect. It is about feelings not knowledge, desires not beliefs. Hence, ethical non-cognitivism. On the other hand, subjects like physics, mathematics, and philosophy are cognitive pursuits, quite removed from emotion. Ethics is motivating, so it needs passionate motive force, but mathematics (say) is not motivating and is coolly contemplated. According to one tradition, ethics is motivated by love, while mathematics has nothing to do with love; it can be done without a loving bone in one’s body. The ethical individual is brimming with emotion; the mathematician is scrubbed clean of emotion, for good or ill.

I think this is the opposite of the truth: mathematics (and physics and philosophy) is imbued with emotion, while ethics is inherently unemotional. People do mathematics because they love it, but you can do ethics and feel no emotion at all. The central point is that mathematics is not about anything emotional, so it needs emotion to motivate our interest; but ethics already has motivation built into it, so that it needs no emotion to get a grip on us. People (some of them) love mathematics because it gives them pleasure, passes the time enjoyably, provides them with fun; but this is not why people become ethically engaged—they do it because they feel they ought to. Better: they know (and also believe) they ought to. They are not motivated by a desire for a good time, but by a sense of duty. Morality is not all fun and games, parties and laughter; it is serious and demanding and may interfere with one’s love-life (in a broad sense). It may even go against one’s desires and good feelings (as Kant reminded us—not that we needed reminding). People typically go into philosophy because they find it enjoyable, but no one seeks out ethical questions for hedonistic reasons—in fact, it is mainly a downer (have you met Debby Downer?). People don’t come on all ethical because of the laughs and delicious tidbits; they do so because they have to—because morality is its own motivation. You could be moved to act by morality and have no emotions at all, but what could move you to spend time doing mathematics without some of sort of emotional pro-attitude towards it? The devoted mathematician smiles when doing mathematics, but the committed moralist has no smile on his face when contemplating genocide or animal cruelty or the death penalty. He thinks about these because he has to not because he gets a kick out of it. The hedonist is no moralist, but he can be a dedicated mathematician. Pleasure comes in many forms, but ethics is not one of them. Ethics is not a game, a fun hobby, a leisure pursuit, a barrel of belly laughs and jolly times. People don’t say to their friends, “Let’s get together Saturday night and do some serious ethics!” When you are faced with a serious ethical problem in your life, you don’t lighten the load by earnestly discussing it with people; it’s more of a burden than a source of amusement. People don’t go on ethical vacations or buy tickets to an ethics concert by their favorite band. Ethics is duty not pleasure. We don’t do ethics because we think it will cheer us up; we do it because we have no choice. This is why we resent ethics much of the time; it interferes with our ability to enjoy ourselves. Children don’t take to ethics the way they do to a sport or to music or to chess or even to mathematics; they do it because they feel they have to. Fortunately, ethics has norms built into it, so there is no need to seek some delightful outside motivating force or factor. The question “Why should I study mathematics?” has much more bite than the question “Why should I learn about ethics?”. The latter question is a sign of psychopathology; the former deserves a clear answer (“It is so much fun!” or “Because you will never get a job if you don’t know any”). Ethics is essentially and intrinsically emotion-independent, yet motivating; but other activities need to be motivated by something external to them—passion, desire, emotion, pleasure. We don’t think about ethics because it will make us happy, but everything else is subject to that law. I work on philosophy because I enjoy it, but I get no pleasure from thinking about the evil of the world (if anything it makes me angry and grief-stricken). When emotions interfere with clear thinking about ethics, I do my best to banish them from my mind; but I am happy to wallow in philosophical emotions. All you need is love—outside of ethics but not inside it. You just need a conscience. Elsewhere you need passion to get you interested.[1]

[1] Obviously, I am adopting a Kantian view of ethics here, but not because of reverence for that philosopher; rather, from personal experience. It is really just plain common sense. Of course, ethics can interact with emotion, but it is not constituted by emotion; its motivation is not essentially emotional. But everything else is—either in the short term of the long term. In prudence we act so as to ensure positive emotions in the future, but in ethics we drop this reliance on emotion and simply do what we think is right. We aim to make others happy, not to make ourselves happy.

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Counterfactual Empiricism

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Counterfactual Empiricism

Classical empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge is knowledge of impressions: you know what, and only what, you have perceived with your senses. This doctrine runs into trouble with things you know but have not perceived—concepts of the unperceived. It would appear to imply that you can’t have concepts of, and knowledge about, atoms and bacteria (among other things). What I am calling counterfactual empiricism seeks to avoid this problem while remaining true to empiricist principles. It says we can have knowledge about things we can imagine seeing (hearing, tasting, etc.). I can imagine seeing bacteria and atoms, since they are just smaller versions of what I actually see all the time (or so we can suppose). I know what it would be like to see an atom or bacteria. Hence, I have the concept and can grasp the meaning of the terms. The doctrine, then, is that all knowledge is of actual or possible impressions—what I would see if I could see. Knowledge is of what I can envisage seeing. This seems an improvement on the classical, more restrictive, doctrine. In what follows I will confine the discussion to seeing and ignore the other senses, though the same points apply mutatis mutandis. I will be particularly concerned with the concept of mind.

Counterfactual empiricism is not free of difficulty: for there are apparently many things that cannot be seen, no matter how counterfactually. A partial list would be the following: numbers, values, universals, logical forms, propositions, causation, necessity, infinity, selves, and minds. Do you know what it would be like to see any of these things? Can you envisage (imagine) seeing a number, an ethical value, a Platonic form, a logical form, causal or logical necessity, an abstract proposition, an infinite collection, a self, a mind? These don’t seem like the kinds of thing anyone could see, and hence imagine seeing. But perhaps we can partially imagine seeing them; some sort of sensory content is associated with them. Perhaps we can imagine seeing a number by imagining seeing a numeral (we actually see those). Perhaps we can have a mental image of the color red considered in itself. Perhaps a logical form looks remarkably like a written sentence. Perhaps necessity looks rather like a man pushing a cart. Perhaps a self looks like a glowing point. All these seem pretty farfetched, though not entirely devoid of intuitive appropriateness. Perhaps exceptionally imaginative people have quite vivid images of such things; they may say they know just what these things would look like if they could be seen. And wouldn’t this be a valuable form of knowledge—knowledge of how thing would look if they could be seen? Even if it is impossible that they could be seen, this is how they would look if seen; we can at least imagine that. Can’t God imagine what a number would look like if it were seen—even if he could never see it? It is possible to imagine impossibilities (Escher drawings). True, we cannot imagine nonsense—we can’t imagine seeing colorless green ideas sleeping furiously. But it isn’t nonsense to suppose that numbers can be seen—just metaphysically impossible. It isn’t contradictory. Nor is it like envisaging seeing slithy toves gimbling in the wabe. There can be difficult cases in which it is hard to decide whether something can be imagined being seen.

Could the mind ever be seen, and could we imagine this? It can be introspected, but could it be seen by the visual sense? If so, what would it look like? Consider this question: could sounds be seen, and if so, what would they look like? Well, we could clearly hook up sound waves in the atmosphere to our visual cortex and produce visual impressions as a result of auditory stimuli. The auditory inputs simply recruit the optic nerve and project to the visual cortex: the sound waves thus cause visual sensations. But could these sensations have a content that correctly represents the nature of sound waves? I don’t see why not: the sensations are as of waves in a medium, somewhat like seeing ocean waves. Phenomenologically, the sensations are not like ordinary auditory sensations, but they are veridical (as auditory sensations are not), since sound waves arewaves. Sound waves can be experienced with the ears and they can be experienced with the eyes; it is possible to see them, and possible to imagine seeing them. You might get hooked up tomorrow. We know what it would be like to see sound waves, even though we never do. The question I want to ask is whether the mind is like that: we never in fact see the mind, but could we? Could we be hooked up that way—and if we were, what would the mind look like? Someone might say there is no problem, since the mind is the brain and we can see the brain, even if we never do in fact. We could hook the brain up to the visual system in such a way as to produce visual impressions of the brain (or taste and smell impressions come to that). But that is not interesting and presupposes materialism. So, what would the mind look like under immaterialism? It might be said that it would look like a river, because consciousness is like a river; but this too is uninteresting and still too materialistic. Would it look like a cloud? Closer, but still wrong. Would it look like a fireworks display? Would it look like the Sun, or a starry night, or a kaleidoscope? Hmmm. Perhaps we can be more specific: what would a belief look like if it could be seen? Here we might envisage a kind of bridge between one thing and another, corresponding to a believer and a proposition, with the proposition reaching out to a distant landscape.[1] That doesn’t sound too far off; it gives one hope. What about Martians with superb imaginations that can fill in the details and produce an impressive visual impression of a belief? What if we really worked on it, recruiting top brain scientists? It doesn’t sound out of the question. After all, the mind is an empirical entity with definite characteristics, so all we need to do is attach a sensor to it that feeds into a visual system—and (voila!) visual impressions of a mind. We would see thoughts, pains, reasoning, emotions, etc. Yet we are very far from doing this—very far indeed. This is a kind of knowledge of the mind that we are nowhere near possessing, though apparently possessable. The mind does look a certain way if you have eyes that can see it. In fact, it now has a certain look—how it would look if you could see it (which in principle you could). It is disposed to look a certain way, where this disposition is grounded in its intrinsic nature. It has, as it were, a certain shape or form, a certain mode of perceptual presentation. Right now, it is in possession of such a mode of presentation, in addition to its introspective mode of presentation. We can’t imagine how it would look now, except very rudimentarily, but there is presumably a fact of the matter. There might even be a preferred way it should be seen to maximize veridicality.

Now I want to connect these reflections to the mind-body problem: would we be nearer to solving that problem if we knew what the mind looks like? We would have a visual representation of it, which we signally lack now. This might be brought together with our visual representation of the brain, so that they can be placed side by side. As things stand, we have no such opportunity; but if we had conceptions of mind and brain of like nature, we might be in a better position to solve the mind-body problem. Indeed, we might already have solved the problem. We might say, “Oh, now that I know what the mind looks like, I can see how it relates to the brain!” When we had no vision-based conception of the mind, we were at a loss to see the connection, but now we can compare like with like and see (literally) how it all fits together. It would be like comparing macro conceptions of matter with micro conceptions, both of which are vision-based, and seeing no problem of emergence. The problem is that we don’t have a vision-based conception of the mind; hence, the sense of mystery. The mystery might disappear if we had the right conception of mind, i.e., one continuous with our conception of the brain. Or at least we might have a sound basis to reason from, do experiments, etc. If this is so, we now know what it would take to solve the mind-body problem—a visual representation of the mind. And wouldn’t this solve the other minds problem at the same stroke, given that we could actually see the other’s mind not just infer it from behavior? If counterfactual empiricism were true of the mind, then we would be within reach of solving these problems. Of course, we are very far from being able to see minds or even to imagine what it would be like to see them. Classical empiricism always had problems accounting for our mental concepts (“ideas of reflection”) because we don’t sense our minds with our five senses; it would have done better to move towards counterfactual empiricism, accepting that our concept of mind is a work in progress waiting upon advances in brain science and a cure for mind-blindness.[2]

[1] Another example would be mental modularity: would the modular mind look compartmentalized if we could see it? Would it look a bit like a Lego set or a car engine? Would we see the divisions and distinctions in the modules where now they are abstractly understood? If we saw intentionality, would it look like a wire or a laser beam? Would pain look like a jagged edge or an erupting volcano? Or would these things look like nothing we have ever seen before but still look like something?

[2] I am well aware how far out on a limb I have gone in this paper—seeing the mind indeed! But in philosophy (and sometimes science) out on a limb is where you want to be—that’s where the best fruit is. In some possible worlds it might seem extraordinary to people, given their senses, that the mind is not perceptible to some unfortunate souls. In this world children draw pictures of the mind and there are photos of it in books. For these perceptive people we are lamentably mind-blind.

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