Phenomenological Behaviorism

Phenomenological Behaviorism

It wasn’t a bad idea to say that behavior belongs at the center of psychology. But what kind of behavior? The concept is not pellucid, as to intension or extension. Here are some synonyms: action, act, performance, response, reaction, deed, thing done, operation, conduct, deportment, movement. In psychology the term is generally used to denote actions of the body—physical behavior. This is because of the desire to align psychology with physics, the science of matter in motion. There is no necessary connection to concepts like desire or intention or goal. It is a materialistic conception of behavior. The concept may be applied to whole bodies or parts of bodies such as hearts or lungs or kidneys—the behavior of the heart, say, is a pumping motion. Planets move though space and so do human bodies. But this is not the only legitimate use of the concept; we can speak also of mental behavior. Here people refer to acts of perception, memory, belief formation, reasoning, imagination, calculation, trying or attempting. According to some theorists, all intentional bodily action involves mental acts of trying—these are the so-called basic actions. In any case, there are mental actions as well as physical actions; the concept does not exclude acts of mind. It would be possible to be a mental behaviorist: psychology is about mental behavior (as well as physical behavior). It isn’t primarily about mental structure or composition or substance, but about deeds-in-the-head—what used to be called mentation. The mind mentates—acts, behaves. Psychology is therefore awash in mental verbs. That is the mind’s ontology—its mode of being. It’s not passive and static but active and dynamic. If you want to know what kind of ontology the mind has, you can’t do better than say it consists of mental behavior—internal performances. You might then go on to report that you favor phenomenological behavior—conscious acts of inner mentation. You thus combine behaviorism with phenomenology—mentalistic behaviorism. You might even think that outer behavior is peripheral to the subject of psychology; that science is really the science of the inner mental act. The outer physical act belongs to physiology—limbs, muscles, motion through space. You are a kind of Wundt-Watson hybrid and proud of it.

What, then, is your metaphysics of mind, your mental ontology? I suggest the following: the mind consists of behavior of the brain. The brain is made of neurons and structured in a certain way; the mind is these neurons in action. The heart pumps; the brain mentates. The mind isn’t a collection of events or states or faculties or particulars or programs, but a collection of actions. When a brain perceives, say, it behaves in a certain way, and that’s what perception is. Seeing is the occipital cortex doing its thing; it is an agent. This means it has a goal: it acts so as to achieve something, namely enable the organism to function and survive (by means of vision)—the same as all organs of the body. The mind is the brain’s mode of action, its mechanics if you like. The machinery of the brain is the mind—what the brain uses to get things done, achieve its purposes. The heart uses a muscle; the brain uses a mind. The mind is the muscle of the brain. The mind was born to behave in a certain way; its essence is behavioral. But this doesn’t imply that it is physical; for all we have said, it might be quite immaterial. Descartes could agree that the essence of mind is effective goal-directed (but immaterial) behavior. That is its biological nature. It was naturally selected because it acts or functions in a certain way—better than non-mind presumably. Zombies don’t do as well as sentient creatures. The ontological category of mind is BEHAVIOR, according to the mental behaviorist. Neurons are said to have “action potentials”; the same could be said of perceptions, thoughts, and so on. The mind is the brain in operation mentally: the brain behaves in a mental fashion, as the body behaves in a physical fashion.

Consciousness is thus a type of behavior, though not a physical type. People speak of consciousness as like a river; that is not far off the mark, because it is a dynamic affair (not like a lake or glacier). Consciousness is always on the move, restless, active, energetic. Consciousness is like the brain raising its hand (or raising a multitude of hands–it is very busy). The mind is always moving, going from town to town. When the mind stops moving it ceases to exist; its essence is activity. It isn’t a thing, a substance, but a performance. The brain is a substance, but the mind is an activity of this substance—not another substance existing alongside the brain. Thus, it has no extension and no mass—anymore than the act of raising your hand does. It belongs to a different ontological category altogether. No doubt it is a very special sort of activity—a complete mystery in fact—but that is its mode of being. The mind minds—verb, not noun. We say, “I don’t mind” or “Do you mind?”, adopting a verbal form, and that is what the mind does generally—it minds. We can even adverbially modify mental verbs: people can think quickly, imagine vividly, emote wildly, hurt terribly. The activities can vary in their manner of acting. Notice too that we don’t say that pain is correlated with C-fibers but with C-fibers firing—the action not the physical thing. And the brain is enormously active, evidently a pre-condition of having a mind. Having a mind is having large reservoirs of action potential, so it needs a brain equal to these energy needs. All in all, the mind is thoroughly performative and dynamic, a powerhouse of derring-do. We can add to this the fact that the mind is often conceived as dispositional: to believe something is to be disposed to be triggered by suitable stimuli to do something. It is behavior waiting to happen, dying to happen. It isn’t to be lazy and half-asleep, still less dead. It is to be alive and kicking and raring to go, like a sprinter in the blocks. It isn’t just action but prompt and energetic action (think of the visual system). The mind is fast. It isn’t like stationary exhibits in a museum but buzzing bees in a hive. The mind is neurons galloping at top speed—not a blank slate or a chunk of marble or a library.

Phenomenological behaviorism has implications for the mind-body problem: that problem is explaining how the brain is able to behave mentally. Not how it can be correlated with static particulars, but how it contrives to execute the kinds of mental actions it does. What is it like to behave mentally like a bat? We know how the brain executes its physical actions, i.e., transmitting nerve impulses, but we don’t know how it acts consciously: how are physical brain acts related to conscious mental acts? How does the brain do that? How does one kind of action give rise to the other kind? This reformulation doesn’t make the problem any easier, but it better respects the ontology of mind. And it raises a new question: could there be a mental something that was entirely static, or as static as a physical body? Is it metaphysically necessary that anything mental is perpetually active? Can there be such a thing as a passive and inert pain? Could there be a self that lounged indolently about, or does it go out of existence when the switch is turned off? Is memory necessarily active? Is it an effort to keep believing something? Is the mind necessarily frenetic?[1]

[1] Has anyone ever held the behavioral theory of mind in the sense here explained? Not explicitly (that I know of), but strains of it exist here and there, especially in the phenomenological tradition (process philosophy?). This seems strange because it has been recognized that the mind is active by nature and essentially, so its ontology must be deed-like. Perhaps it’s because mental acts are not generally intentional—many are reflexive—but intention is not essential to action, as with bodily organs. The theory seems quite intuitive and natural once formulated, so it’s a puzzle why it has remained invisible. It might be said to be tacitly presupposed in standard discussions. Yet substance ontology has a strong grip on the mind, forcing itself into places it doesn’t belong. I only thought of the behavioral theory of the mind recently, perhaps because I was so opposed to the physical kind of behaviorism. Then too, it does sound a bit funny to say that pain is an action (of the brain). The mind as brain behavior—will we get used to the idea? The concept of mind: the concept of the brain acting thus-and-so phenomenologically.