Bernard Williams and Me
Bernard Williams and Me
One day, over twenty years ago, I ran into Bernard Williams in the corridor at NYU. He remarked: “The thing about you, Colin, is that you think you’ve either solved the problems of philosophy or they can’t be solved at all”. I paused for less than a second and replied, “I believe you’re right”. I assume his point was that this is a rather self-confident attitude, perhaps not entirely justified by the facts. But I think, on mature reflection, that it was perfectly reasonable, and not for “narcissistic” reasons. In the case of the mind-body problem, I had at that time been thinking about it for over thirty years and was well-versed in all the standard theories, as would be any half-way competent philosopher; and I had no idea what such a solution would look like. I also knew personally all the top philosophers of the time, and they had no idea either (though some may have thought they did). It was phenomenally unlikely that I, or any of them, would come up with the correct theory any time soon, and there were principled reasons for urging pessimism. It is perfectly rational to believe that no one living will come up with the solution. Is it rational to believe that someone not now living will come with it? But what will they have that we don’t? On the other hand, there are philosophical insights that have been gained in recent times, and I have as much access to them as anyone else; so, what I believe about the relevant questions is likely to be correct, or at least eminently defensible. Bernard was wrong if he thought that I mistakenly believed myself to have come up with these insights—that is demonstrably false. But I share them, like numerous others. The essential point is that no one I know (including myself) is anywhere near solving the mind-body problem, so it is not absurd for me to hold that the problem is not within sight of a solution. It is not that there is anyone X such that X can be counted on to solve the problem. Even the great Saul Kripke, who might be thought a plausible value of “X”, declared the problem “wide open and extremely confusing”. So, Bernard was quite right about my attitude, but it wasn’t all that silly. It isn’t as if Saul qualified his remark by saying, “But I hear Colin McGinn is working on the problem, so perhaps we will get a solution in a week or two”. That would be ridiculous. In this we see the true nature of philosophical problems. It isn’t like Watson and Crick and DNA or the Higgs boson or Darwin’s theory of evolution.
He spoke as though you simply declared philosophical problems insoluble as opposed to offering sophisticated arguments in defense of that position.
That’s true.
Argument: We don’t understand causal connections with regard to physical objects – e.g., electrons bonding with protons, billiard balls following Newton’s Laws, and gravity causing planets to revolve around the sun. All of our scientific “understanding” seems to be nothing more than knowledge of physical laws, some deterministic, some probabilistic. But because the laws are not other objects out there causing the objects to interact with each other as they do, it’s not clear that laws *explain* – i.e., provide understanding – so much as summarize or describe (and predict) the regularities we observe. We still don’t know why or how these regularities obtain rather than alternative, conceivable regularities.
If I’m right about this, then the mind-body problem is arguably no more difficult than the body-body problem. We just can’t understand causal connections at any level, whether it’s an object causing motion in another object or an object causing consciousness. The causal connections in both cases are equally mysterious.
It is certainly on the cards that other problems could be as hard as the mind-body problem, or even harder (I have an essay on this). The mind-body problem is not really a problem about causation but emergence. There could be bundles of mystery wrapped up in one problem.