Materialism as Metaphor

I think materialism is at best false and at worst meaningless. But I won’t defend these opinions here (I have elsewhere, as have others[1]). I am here to praise materialism not to bury it. If I may descend to the demotic, my view is that materialism is crap, but it is good crap. It is not literally true (or even meaningful), but it is a good metaphor—helpful, liberating, apt, better than other metaphors, intellectually correct (also politically). Its heart and head are in the right place, but it goes too far. It presents the right picture, the right ideology, but in an exaggerated form. For it depicts the mind as a natural phenomenon not a manifestation of supernatural realities: nature not God, science not superstition. It liberates us from old worn-out modes of thought. Instead of religion and the ethereal soul, it preaches scientific naturalism and the animal body. It is a far better metaphor than traditional substance dualism. Its close ally, mechanism, is better than fanciful religious inventions—mysticism, pantheism, miracles, superstition. The mind is like a machine in that it works by natural mechanisms, causes, laws. It is as if the mind were a machine; that is a healthy way to think. It isn’t like a ghost in a machine, or an angel in heaven, but like a machine in a machine—a mental machine in a bodily machine. The physical world is a complex and surprising thing without being a supernatural thing (as described in sacred books), and so is the mind. Materialism is the best image we have to capture the utter naturalness of the human being as a whole (and the rest of nature). It isn’t true, but it points us in the right direction—or away from the wrong direction. It subverts old, outmoded ways of thinking—pre-scientific ways. It is intellectually respectable. Hopelessly reductive, to be sure, but not completely mad, not berserk and bizarre—not utter rubbish. It isn’t a kind of sickness of the intellect.

The best way to appreciate this is historically. Consider the state of astronomy prior to the scientific revolution: biblically based, unempirical, anthropocentric, magical, dogmatic, fantastic. God is at the center of it. Then begins a materialistic astronomy: the prime mover is gravity not God, we are not the center of the universe, the stars are physical objects not deities, the sky isn’t heaven, etc. The so-called heavens are really a gigantic whirling machine. There is no dualism of the sublunary and superlunary. In fact, as we know now, the universe is made of matter obeying scientific laws not some sort of divine playground. Here materialism is true, as it is true of our planet and other nearby planets—a hunk of rock among other rocks, basically. Now consider the organic world: what is it? People used to speak of the elan vital, entelechies, the spark of life, animal spirits, and humors. Then we recognized that bodies are machines made of chemicals, evolved by mutation and natural selection, subject to the laws of physics. Materialism is true of bodies. Bodies are not discontinuous with inorganic matter but a modified form of inorganic matter. At the same time ghosts, spirits, angels, and fairies fell into disrepute; not material enough. All this was a move in the right direction and perfectly true, as far as it goes. Granted, there were quibbles here and there—the nature of causation, Newton’s occult gravitational force, difficulties of actual theory reduction, the workings of evolution. But the materialist impulse seemed to be gaining ground. It opposed the right things, and it had strong intellectual support. It belonged to the enlightened modern world.

But then we come to the nature of mind: here the old ways of thinking are still dominant and disturbing to the materialist outlook. Naturally, scientific people hope for new conquests, vanquishing old foes, keeping religion out of the picture; but alas, it didn’t work out that way. The mind resisted materialistic analysis; the old ways still seem on their feet and kicking. Are we forced to go back to them? Let’s hope not, but the anxiety persists. At this point I would prescribe a dose of healing mysterianism, but that is not my current concern; I am diagnosing our historical moment and promoting the utility of materialist rhetoric. I want to say that the metaphor is still good, useful, healthy; it keeps us on the right track. The mind may not literally be a material machine, but it is like a machine—a naturalistic, law-governed, cause-and-effect, naturally evolved, intelligible, non-supernatural, biological entity. There is no act of divine creation behind it, propping it up. It isn’t pure matter, like a rock, but it is akin to a rock—a distant cousin maybe. That is not an unhealthy or insane way to think, especially given that our theories of mind are still quite incomplete. It is a nice metaphor, image, object of comparison. It’s a lot better than all that wacky mumbo-jumbo people peddled in the bad old days before science gleamed forth. Pain isn’t reducible to C-fiber stimulation, but it is in important respects like C-fiber stimulation—a natural phenomenon evolved by natural means from natural beginnings, not a rather cruel gift from almighty God, who is definitely not material. If you think of pain as roughly akin to C-fiber firing, you won’t fall into superstitious nonsense or bad metaphors. But don’t get carried away; don’t mistake helpful metaphor for literal truth. It’s like thinking of nations as individuals or genes as selfish or electrons as attractive—useful but not real. You can think of pain as a brain state, metaphorically.[2]

I actually like the metaphor; it strikes the right note. And it contains large elements of truth: the mind is essentially bound up with the body and brain, and it is quasi-physical (as Cartesian immaterial substance is not—the immortal soul, etc.). It just isn’t the whole truth. There is something machinelike in the way the mind works—mechanistic, law-governed, deterministic, reflexive. It dabbles in the material—a soft machine within a hard machine. This is a much better metaphor than behaviorism, say, because it doesn’t deny the inner workings of the mind; the mind isn’t a kind of input-output device devoid of innards. Materialism at least directs us to the brain, where we should be looking. Behaviorism is no more plausible than the idea that the body is behaviorally defined—as if it had no insides. The mind is mostly interior, and materialism recognizes that; indeed, it provides a good metaphor for the interiority of mind. It reminds me of necessity and possible worlds: there are not literally such things, but the idea provides a helpful heuristic metaphor for modal reality (otherwise hard to think about). All in all, materialism is not a complete disaster, despite its clear falsity. It points us in the right direction at any rate. We can even declare it obviously false but still get some mileage out of it. Let’s call this metaphorical materialism.[3]

[1] E.g., T. Nagel and N. Chomsky.

[2] Suppose I am excited and say “My neurons are on fire”; I am speaking metaphorically, relying on my hearer’s knowing the association between mental states and neural states. I am not assuming the literal truth of the identity theory. Materialism is this kind of talk writ large.

[3] A personal note: I was first smitten with materialism as an undergraduate in psychology studying neurophysiology. I even invented an identity theory without knowing it had already been done. I gradually weakened the theory with the passing years, influenced by Davidson’s anomalous monism. But I could never accept full-blown reductive materialism. I am glad that I have now come to accept all-out materialism as a metaphor. Even irreducible qualia are material-ish. They hobnob with material entities and maybe even emerge from them. They function like physical particulars. You can think of them by analogy with physical stuff. Just as we can personify material objects, so we can “bodify” mental objects–metaphorically. The mind is of the body, even if not reducible to it.

Light Mind

I have a theory that is too beautiful not to be true. I will state the theory very simply to start with just so we can get our bearings. It is this: bodies are caused by matter, and minds are caused by light. More fully, the evolutionary explanation of the structure of animal bodies lies in the physical structure of planet Earth, while the evolutionary explanation of animal minds lies in the properties of light as it exists on Earth. As the biologists like to say, the primary driver of bodily evolution is the physical environment, while the primary driver of psychological evolution is the light environment. Minds result from light; bodies result from matter. This is a thesis in geo-genetics—the explanation of life characteristics in terms of planetary characteristics.[1]

We should first note that physicists often draw a sharp distinction between matter and radiation, and with good reason. Matter on Earth consists mainly of solid chunks of the stuff (as well as liquids and gases); land animals are surrounded by rocks as well as other animal and plant bodies with which they interact. These are discrete, made of atoms, subject to gravity, mobile, impactful, and of various shapes and sizes. This is the environment in which animal bodies must survive and reproduce. Their bodies must be adapted to this environment and be to some degree master of it. It’s no good if you can’t touch a rock without dying. Light by contrast is not solid, has no mass, is wavelike, of constant velocity, lacking in mechanical impact, composed of photons, and invariant in nature. It leaves no mark on you when it hits you.  Thus, there is a kind of physical dualism in the physics of the world—two sorts of basic stuff. Radiation and occupation, one might say. Naturally, these act differently on organisms: organisms bang into matter, but not into light; you don’t bleed from a stab of light. You can walk right through it. Light isn’t dangerous (heat is). Accordingly, the causal role of light and the causal role of matter are quite different in driving evolutionary development. The shape of a foot is determined by gravity, the local surface terrain, the motion of the attached animal, etc.; but the light falling on a foot does not contribute to its formation. Hands, likewise, are shaped by the material things they grasp and interact with, not by ambient light. On the other hand, light plays a role in the development of mind via the eyes: the visual mind is formed from the nature of light as it impinges on the photoreceptors. You see according to what the ambient light contains in the way of information as it impinges on the eyes. If the organism is unable to process such stimuli, it will not fare well in the fight to survive on a sun-drenched planet. Light is useful: its properties play a role in the evolution of minds, a crucial role. Minds exist to exploit the information contained in light; hands and feet don’t exist to exploit such information, but to act in mechanically advantageous ways. So the beautiful theory is in the business of contending.

You may object that the visual mind is not the whole mind, so light can’t be the complete story of mind. Here is where things get a bit complicated, but they don’t contradict the main thesis of the light theory. For that theory says only that light is the primary driver of mental evolution not the sole driver. Maybe pain came first, before eyes even existed (about 500 million years ago), but eyes were a very significant step forward in the evolution of the conscious mind; they enabled organisms to exist that don’t just float and filter-feed but move of their own volition and actively seek food (including other organisms). The presence of eyes characterizes nearly all life as we know it—almost any animal that lives its life in the light. This is a commonplace among evolutionary biologists. Thus, we read: “The mind, in a very physical sense, is an engine built to decode light”; “Ultimately, while the mind requires other variables in order to exist—such as gravity, touch, and chemistry—it was the ancient necessity of navigating a world bathed in sunlight that forced simple nervous systems into complex self-aware minds”.[2] Without light minds would be much poorer things, hardly minds at all. If the Earth had been dark, there would have been no minds to speak of. We therefore have the light theory of terrestrial minds and the matter theory of terrestrial bodies—a pleasing duality.

If this is so, we can expect to find some commonality between matter and bodies and light and minds. Not identity, to be sure, but signs of origin and consequence. Can we infer one from the other? In the case of the body, this does not seem difficult: the body has just the features its environment would suggest, since it is adapted to that environment. In the case of the mind, matters are less straightforward, because the mind is such a peculiar thing; but there are some impressionistic things we can say. First, the mind, especially consciousness, is inherently active, like light—which is never at rest but always moving (at top speed). Second, the mind has a continuous quality, like perceived light; it doesn’t come in discrete packets (phenomenologically). Both are impalpable. Third, consciousness can be switched on or off, like light (and unlike matter). The dualism of the physical world is recapitulated (mirrored) in the dualism of the organic world. Bodies are a distorted imprint of the physical environment, and minds are similarly reflective of the world of light (this is why we use “see” so freely of the mind). You might think that light is less complex than the physical environment, so less able to drive complexity in the mind; but that is not so clear when you consider all the ways light can behave–brightness, shadow, light and shade, colors, etc. Vision is clearly central to the minds of many species, and light in all its variety is its stimulus; the seeing mind must handle this complexity. The reason is that light contains information, and information is vital to survival in advanced organisms. Light needs its own responsive organ; the mind is that organ, among other things. It is light that makes organisms have the minds they have not gravity or sounds or smells or collisions.

What caused human language—light or matter? I think both: matter played a role in the segmentation of language, its subject-predicate structure, and its vocal medium; but light also played a role in that light conveys information about the perceived world. Language needs the world of matter and the world of light in order to get off the ground. It needs the mind that was made possible by light and the surrounding material world itself (the world language is about). Language thus falls between bodies and minds geo-genetically, a kind of hybrid of the two. It doesn’t spring miraculously from nowhere. It has a complex causal evolutionary history rooted in the physics of planet Earth.

What, then, is the mind in the light (!) of these considerations? It is certainly not identical to light itself or made of light; it needs the matter of the brain too. It is matter as shaped by light, because light caused brains to be constructed as they are—specifically, the visual cortex. If you combine matter with light in the way evolution does, you get minds—how, we don’t know. It is possible, scientists tell us, that light created the neuron, as opposed to other types of cells–in which case light created the brains of sighted creatures and any creatures whose brain is made of neurons. Then the causal history of all existing brains would include light as well as matter. Light certainly created visual brains and visual experience (but not kidneys and hearts). Evolution owes a lot to light, despite its lightness of being. Light led the way.[3]

[1] See my “A Causal Theory of Everything”.

[2] I came across these two statements by conducting a simple AI search. I was surprised to find such forthright statements, indicating that the theory I was toying with already had numerous supporters in evolutionary science. Evolution went from mindless primitive organisms with eyespots and opsin to the advanced camera eyes and minds that we see today. That would not be possible without the inner intricacies of light.

[3] The physics of light lies behind the evolutionary production of consciousness, though opaquely, mysteriously. It is almost as if this is what light is for; in reality, it is a kind of cosmic coincidence. Still, poetically, it seems fitting that light is what lit the way to the mind in all its glory—to a conscious universe. The origin of species, as we know them, owes a lot to the strange physics of light—massless particles travelling uniformly at maximum velocity. Light is what led in the fullness of time to enlightenment—science, art, morality, philosophy. Light is mighty. It is a kind of natural miracle in itself as well as being the seed that gave birth to mind. The closest thing we have to God perhaps (“Let there be light!”).

Yesterday

Yesterday was an interesting day for me. It began with a table tennis match between Michael, my gardener and car-washer, and me. We have been playing a while, and he has gotten steadily better; he is now a very good player and has even beaten me on one occasion. It was extremely close yesterday, though I emerged the winner at 8 games to 3. But who was the winner is immaterial; the excellence of the play is the point. We competed, yes, but we also cooperated, by bringing out the best in each other. It could have gone either way. There was exhilaration in the air—the joy of skill. He has a formidable serve, and I needed to return it aggressively on the backhand with a sharp upward motion. We will be playing again next week. Then I took care of some academic stuff (boring!).

I had a one o’clock appointment at the hospital to see my surgeon of three years ago, Dr. Civantos. It was a yearly follow-up appointment, and the doctor declared me in the clear as far as he was concerned, joyfully discharging me. A nice meeting, delightful man. I had a tennis game arranged with my friend Eddy at 4pm. Here is the amazing thing: it was clearly the best tennis game I have ever played in my life, and I even won a game against him (11-8). Eddy is an excellent player, and I rarely take a game from him. But again, who won is not the point: he enabled me to play the best tennis of my life at 76. We have played over a thousand times together over a twelve-year period, so he knows my game—and he agreed it was my best game ever. Remember that my neck surgery nearly put paid to my tennis life, and it took me three years to recover to this point. I wonder whether my recent writing about skill played a part in my rejuvenation.

But that wasn’t quite all yesterday. At home I practiced my singing for twenty minutes and lo and behold, miraculously, magically, my voice found a new register—more forceful, more supple, more soulful (if I may say so). I was genuinely surprised at what was coming out of my mouth. Songs I had sung a thousand times sounded more vibrant, more resonant. This Boy had acquired new depth. Baby I Love You shook the rafters. Hanky Panky really rocked. Then, later, I watched Abby Phillip on CNN while playing the guitar (nothing special here but okay). She was her usual impressive self: hugely pregnant, penetrating, polite, beautiful through and through. I thought: not a bad way to spend a day.

Chapter 7

Philosophy and Skill

Skill hasn’t played much of a part in the history of philosophy; one would think it doesn’t exist. Let’s rectify that omission. We can start with the explanation of action: what factors contribute to a person’s action? A standard answer is belief and desire: people act because they have desires and beliefs about how to satisfy them. I desire to play a game of tennis, and I believe there are tennis courts at the Biltmore, so I pop over to the Biltmore; if you like, my desires and beliefs cause my actions. But I must be able to execute the popping or no popping will occur. Typically, I must have the necessary skills so to act—riding a bike, driving a car. These are complex skills that took a certain amount of learning. We act within the confines of our skills; we act because of our skills (they are a causal factor). Our skills combine with our desires and beliefs to bring about our actions. The desires and beliefs are powerless without them. But philosophers of action never mention this; they take background skills for granted. Take the action of hitting a tennis ball over the net and into the opposite court: it is explained partly by the fact that the player has the necessary skills so to act; he couldn’t do it without them. Skilled behavior is explained by—what else?—skills. Skills are states of the agent, ultimately of his brain—real causally operative states. No philosophy of action is complete without them. A belief-desire psychology is a belief-desire-skill psychology.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and related concepts. But knowledge includes practical knowledge—knowing-how. We acquire propositional knowledge in the course of normal human learning, but we also acquire practical knowledge about how to act—skill knowledge. Remember learning how to tie your shoelaces or tie a tie? An enormous amount of learning is skill learning not fact learning. Epistemology therefore needs to include knowledge of skills; and these skills are of many kinds. Yet traditional theory of knowledge is silent on the subject. Is skill knowledge deemed too proletarian to be worthy of discussion? Or is it just hard to understand? It clearly involves the body not just the detached rational mind, and also tools wielded by the body. It is knowledge enmeshed in flesh and bone—muscular knowledge. People talk about muscle memory; well, there is also muscle knowledge. It is as if the muscles know stuff—not just the intellect or soul. We need a motor epistemology. Such knowledge is not true justified belief but something else entirely. But what? Here matters turn murky; serious philosophy (and psychology) needs to be done. Our theories start to look incomplete at best, wrongheaded at worst.

One consequence of this shift of perspective is that consciousness loses its pride of place in epistemology and philosophy in general. Philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have stressed the role of the body and the unconscious in the acquisition and exercise of skill. At first, the process of acquisition is laborious and fully conscious, but after a while it starts to occur without conscious reflection; it slips underground. The knowledge exists in the unconscious mind not the conscious mind. It becomes almost reflexive. It comes to exist in the body somehow (hence “muscle memory”). Actually, it exists in the brain, in the motor cortex, not literally in the muscles (still less the bones); so, the brain stores skills in an unconscious form. See how different this picture is from traditional conceptions: skill knowledge is not lodged in the disembodied thinking soul of the knower, nor in the passive perceptual faculties (“experience”), but in secret compartments of the unconscious mind. Thus, rationalist epistemology is incomplete at best, and so is empiricist epistemology: they are too focused on consciousness as the zone of all knowledge. Consciousness is peripheral to practical knowledge of this kind; zombies could have it. Knowledge doesn’t exist wholly on the mind side of the traditional mind-body dichotomy; it takes in the body and its unconscious operations. This is to demote Reason as the repository of knowledge; skill knowledge is located elsewhere. We must not intellectualize all knowledge or regard it as necessarily an affair of consciousness. And this means that the knowing subject is not a disembodied and detached entity loosely attached to the corporeal body; the body knows. Or rather: the whole human (or animal) subject knows. As we might say, we are the skillful ape: a certain animal (us) is equipped with the things we call skills—let’s not talk about body and mind at all. These are philosophers’ abstractions; better to think in terms of kinds of living creature. Skills return us to our creaturely status—a certain sort of biological entity.

Thus, we are led to consider the nature of persons: a person isn’t a being detached from the living body, defined by his rational soul or intellect. In skill we see the person as an integrated whole not a cobbled together duality: it is I that exercises these skills—the same thing that thinks and acts. It is a solecism to say that my body is skilled (not my mind); it is both, or neither. It is the creature that I am. Dualism and skill do not go happily together. Descartes ignored skilled action in his metaphysics of persons, and so did Locke; they were too enamored of conscious reason, the disembodied intellect, seeing not doing. In fact, human nature is defined (partly) by our skill set—our can-do profile. We are the result of dedicated skill cultivation. Freud thought we were (largely) defined by our sexual unconscious, but we are really defined by our skill unconscious. This is not the result of repression but simply relegation—we relegate skills to the unconscious part of ourselves. This frees up space for consciousness, and anyway the unconscious seems better at skill than the conscious. As we might say, mindless action is better than minded action. My knife throwing is better when I don’t have to think about it. The skillful self is largely unconscious, hidden away in there, secretive in its ways.

A word on the ontology of skill—what kind of thing it is. Philosophers have become infatuated with dispositions; they view dispositions as the key to understanding what they can’t otherwise understand. Thus, a belief is a disposition to assent to a sentence, or a pain is a disposition to cry out—that type of baloney. In line with this it might be held that a skill is a disposition to do such-and-such: to have the skill of bowling is to have a disposition to make strikes. But this can’t be right simply because you can have a skill but have no disposition to exercise it—you might not be in the mood to bowl, or you have been bribed to bowl badly, or you have hurt your wrist from too much bowling. Dispositions come about in all sorts of ways not all of which correspond to a skill; a skill is only one factor in creating an overall disposition. A skill is what it is—a certain sort of ability (one acquired by practice directed to a specific goal). It is what it is and not some other thing. It is not reducible to some other ontological category. No doubt it is rooted in the brain, like everything else about our minds; and it is shaped by the physical body. But skills are sui generis traits or features or facts. We can’t even say they are all cases of rule-following, because they are not (e.g., catching a ball). Maybe they all involve computations of some sort, or assemblies of reflexes, or neural connectivity; whatever, they are what they are. Let’s not get all eliminative or reductive about them. We can happily quantify over skills, count them, and name them. They are entities in good standing, part of the furniture of the universe.[1]

[1] Could we go Platonist about skills, picturing them as sublime entities in Plato’s heaven? I don’t see why not if we are attracted to Platonism about universals. Next to the form of the Good we have the form of Tennis skills, Knife Throwing sills, and Bowling skills. They are certainly not like empirical particulars.