The Subjective Mind(-View)

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.