Colors and Powers Again

 

Locke distinguishes primary qualities from powers to produce sense impressions of them in perceivers, but he thinks that secondary qualities are “nothing else, but several powers in them, depending on these primary qualities…to produce several different ideas in us”.  [1] That is, he identifies colors with powers to produce states of mind: that is what a color is—a causal power of a certain sort. I am going to make two rather brutal criticisms of this doctrine. The first is that causal powers are invisible but colors are not. Suppose I see an object as square: that quality is visible to me, but the power to produce an impression of square is not so visible. I don’t see an object ashaving such a power—I simply see it as having the geometric property of being square. As Hume taught us, we have no sense impressions of causal powers—though objects have them. Powers are actually rather mysterious things involving potentiality, and they concern relations between objects and other objects (in this case objects and perceiving minds). They aren’t intrinsic manifest qualities; they are rather like modal properties such as being possibly square. They aren’t things the senses can resonate to. So Locke’s theory implies that colors are invisible! Nowhere does he acknowledge that consequence, and it is indeed startling: surely we want a theory of color to be consistent with the visibility of color. I suppose he could just accept the consequence, but it is a hard bullet to bite. Maybe colors have the power to produce impressions of themselves, as shapes do, but they are not identical to such powers. In fact, the power to produce sense impressions depends on certain forces that exist in objects, but forces are not perceptible: we don’t perceive electrical or gravitational forces, only their effects. Yet we see colors quite plainly: they are nothing like hidden powers or potentialities.

            Second, external physical objects are not the only things with such powers. Minds and brains have them too. Your mind has the power to produce ideas of secondary qualities in you, as it does when you hallucinate. In fact, it must have such powers if external objects are to elicit sense experiences in you; the external object alone cannot do this. The brain too must have the power to generate sense impressions, which it demonstrates all the time. But if colors are identical with such powers, then minds and brains are colored. They have these powers in virtue of possessing appropriate primary qualities, just like external objects, so they have the property Locke identifies with color: but they don’t have the very color that this power would entail. The mind isn’t red when it exercises the power to produce impressions of red, and neither is the brain. It is easy to see what is going wrong here: having the power to produce sense impressions is just too broad a condition to capture what color is. Couldn’t a super-scientist have such a power without having the colors that allegedly go with it? Nor will it help to limit the power to the surfaces of external objects, since they too could have such powers and not be colored: they might be little minds or brains. Having the power to elicit experiences of red will never add up to being red—merely to the ability to cause experiences thereof (almost anything can do that in the right circumstances). The condition is clearly far too weak.

            So the Lockean theory of color renders color (a) invisible and (b) a property of the mind-brain. As I say, brutal.

 

  [1] Essay, Book II, Chapter VIII, section 26.

 

 

Color and Causality

 

Color and causality don’t mix: causality doesn’t mention color and color is indifferent to causality. Shape is very different: shape always affects causal powers. Shape and causality are made for each other, while color and causality are complete strangers. This means that ordinary objects have two aspects—causal and non-causal. We know this from everyday perception: we see the way shape affects causality as objects interact, but we never see colors affecting objects causally. Objects don’t attract or repel each other in virtue of color; color doesn’t affect the laws of motion; objects don’t change the color of other objects in virtue of their color. This is why physics has no time for color; it simply isn’t a causal variable. Perhaps we can imagine a world in which color does exercise causal powers: objects move differently according to color; they have attractive and repulsive forces as a function of color; the color of one object can change the color of another if it gets close to that object. But this strikes us, rightly, as unintelligible: how could color exercise such causal influence (compare moral properties)? In any case, it isn’t so in our world; nor does this seem like an accidental fact about color. Color is epiphenomenal. This fuels projective views of color: the reason colors lack causal powers is that they are projected by the mind onto objects; they are not intrinsic to objects. Perceived color is a kind of illusion: colors don’t exist in objects but in the mind, and a distant mind can’t affect the causal powers of an object. If you experience a visual illusion, the properties attributed in the illusion won’t affect the causal powers of the object (the apparently bent stick in water won’t behave like a bent stick in its causal interactions). Nor does seeing-as affect the causal powers of an object according to the aspect seen. Color perception is like that, according to projectivism, so of course color is epiphenomenal: it isn’t even a constituent of external reality. But even a realist about color will concede that colors have no causal powers: they exist in objects but they make no causal difference to how objects behave. Figure, mass, and force make a causal contribution, but color is causally idle.

            So much is generally (though not universally) accepted, if not always with complete equanimity. Why are colors there if they make no causal impact? Are they really in objects at all? The point I want to make, however, has not, to my knowledge, been stated: namely that colors so understood make trouble for the causal theory of perception (or maybe the causal theory of perception makes trouble for colors). That theory says that perception requires three conditions to be met: (i) the object has the property, (ii) the perceiver has the impression of the object having the property, and (iii) the object’s having the property causes the impression that it does.  [1] There are refinements that need to be made, but it is generally accepted that the causal condition is at least a necessarycondition for veridical perception to occur. But colors have no causal powers, so how can they be seen? Colors can’t cause sense impressions in perceivers because they can’t cause anything: the color red, say, doesn’t cause sensations of red in perceivers by interacting with the rods and cones, since it has no causal powers. It is true that the surface of the object reflects light waves that cause disturbances in the receptor cells of the retina, but that is not what the color is—or else colors would have causal powers and be studied by physics. We can of course stipulate that “color” is to refer to such physical phenomena, but these phenomena are not colors-as-we-see-them—those things are causally inert. So colors in the ordinary sense cannot be the cause of impressions of color–yet we see them all the time. On the face of it, then, the causal theory of perception is false for colors, though not for shapes: you can see a property that does not cause you to see it. Colors are visual objects par excellence but they are not causes of visual sense impressions. If it were possible to see an object only as colored, then we would have the result that an object can be seen and yet have no causal contact with the perceiver. Or to shift to another type of secondary quality: if a piece of sodium chloride could be tasted only as salty, with no other quality perceived, then perception of an external physical object could occur in the complete absence of any causal contact with its manifest properties. For secondary qualities in general are causally impotent, and ex hypothesi they are the only ones being perceived in such a case. It would be logically possible to perceive all the objects of the external world and yet have no causal contact with those objects.

            Of course that is not the only possible response: someone might maintain that colors are not perceived precisely because they have no power to be perceived, as the causal theory implies. Instead they are hallucinated as a result of photon bombardments; they don’t really exist in objects at all. There is thus no veridical perception of color. If this is felt to be ad hoc and implausible, we could try a third approach: colors are invisible. They exist in objects and we have impressions of them, but they are not seen at all: what we have here is a case of veridical hallucination. The object is red and it looks red, but because of the lack of causal connection it can’t be perceived—so it’s literally invisible. I don’t know of anyone who has adopted this view, and one can understand why: to say that colors exist in objects, and that we have impressions of them, but we don’t really see them, is radically counter to common sense. We would need some motivation for this combination of claims that goes beyond simply observing that the perception of color is incompatible with the causal theory of perception. For the natural conclusion is that color perception refutes the causal theory of perception, since we can see properties that don’t cause us to see them. Or is it that they have a magic power to whisk causation into existence when and only when a visual system passes by? My own conclusion is that color perception is a straight counterexample to the causal theory, even as a theory of the necessary conditions of perception (there are well-known problems about its sufficiency). The intuitive idea behind the theory is simply wrong; the theory is at best partially true. The simple fact is that you can see the colors of objects without their causing you to do so.  [2]

 

  [1] See H.P. Grice, “The Causal Theory of Perception” (1961).

  [2] One might try to weaken the theory so as to require only that a suitably connected property be the cause of the sense impression not the color property itself—as it might be, the light waves correlated with the color. However, this runs into immediate problems such as fact that the seen color will not be caused by the color itself but by a distinct property, so why is the impression not a misperception of that property? And surely we don’t want to end up saying that the only true causes of sense impressions are basic physical properties, with the consequence that only such properties are really perceived.   

 

Object Mentalism and Philosophy

 

What impact would the truth of object mentalism have on the philosophical landscape? For expository reasons I shall speak as if it is true, though we could also conjure a possible world in which it is stipulated to be true and consider philosophy as it exists in that world. So: suppose that all objects (except perhaps the very small) have mental properties in the form of secondary qualities and also contain a perceiving subject, and let’s limit ourselves mainly to speaking of colors. Red objects, say, have the mental property of being red and they also perceive this property in themselves. Then the first consequence we can draw is that there are two sorts of mind, which I will call the internal mind and the external mind. There is the internal mind generated by the brain, which is private and imperceptible, not open for all to see. But there is also the external mind that is perceptible on the very surface of objects, since colors are perceptible. It is true that the perceiving of red by a red object is not likewise perceptible, and it may not much resemble what seeing red is like for us; but there is no denying that if colors are mental properties then we can perceive mental properties in objects. This was tacitly accepted by philosophers of the modern period who distinguished primary and secondary qualities, though I don’t recall any of them noting it explicitly. Someone who believes that color is a projection of inner mental states, and that we see color, is committed to the view that we can see mental states—though the mental states are really possessed by the perceiving subject not the object out there in the world. Once we add that the perceiver is actually the object itself we have the result that the mind of the object is a perceived mind. And note that the brain is a perceptible object, so it has two minds: the internal mind we are familiar with by introspection, containing perceptions of color among much else, and another mind corresponding to its own secondary qualities—color, taste, smell, etc. The brain perceives itself with this mind, though our internal mind has no access to it. Other objects (including other bodily organs) have an external mind but not the internal mind we know from introspection. They do have their own type of internal mind, however, constituted by perceiving their sensible qualities, but this mind lacks much of what brain-based internal minds routinely possess. Still, the object does have a mind that is partly public and easily perceived: the concept of the mental is thus not inherently the concept of a private sphere.

            Secondly, we now have an extra mind-body problem: how does the mind of an object relate to the “body” of an object? Specifically, how does color relate to the physical properties of an object? Here we can envisage the usual options: perhaps the color is merely projected from elsewhere so that it doesn’t exist in the object at all (compare the idea that the mind is just a “stance” we can choose to adopt); or it is identical to the properties of light discoverable by science (type or token identity theory); or property dualism is true, with or without supervenience; or substance dualism is true and there are really two objects there, the bearer of primary qualities and the bearer of secondary qualities, one material and the other immaterial; or perhaps talk of color is just so much prescientific gibberish destined to be eliminated from our world view. It is noteworthy that these options so closely mirror the positions familiar from discussions of the mind-body problem for the internal mind, suggesting that objects do indeed have a kind of mind. Presumably consciousness in some form will be involved in the workings of the external mind, though it may be a form of consciousness alien to us—I picture it as a kind of low-grade murmuring. This consciousness must have emerged from properties of matter that precede the existence of consciousness as it exists in the form of color etc., since it is doubtful that elementary particles and associated forces possess such qualities.  [1] So there will be a hard problem about external conscious minds too, and possibly an irresoluble mystery. In any case, there is a mind-body problem under object mentalism, very similar to the traditional mind-body problem.

            Third, our concept of mind is put under strain by the doctrine of object mentalism. The concept we possess is clearly shaped by our own specific form of mind—the conscious adult human mind we know by introspection. As soon as we venture beyond this, as we clearly must, we run into difficulties, since not all minds conform to this paradigm (for us). What about the unconscious mind, or the minds of animals zoologically remote from us, or the minds of aliens, or the enteric mind, or the mini-minds of the panpsychist? The concept of matter is not dissimilar: it no doubt originates in middle sized dry goods but we find it necessary to extend it to types of matter not normally encountered by us—the very small, the quantum-theoretic, forces and fields, dark matter, etc. The concept quickly runs out of descriptive or intelligible content—yet we keep on extending it. Applying the concept of mind to objects of all kinds, as the object mentalist does, certainly runs the risk of over-extending it, but we need some concept with which to register certain clear similarities and differences. It then becomes a pointless verbal question whether our words “mind” and “mental” properly fit the facts we are trying to capture (similarly for the word “physical” in trying to capture the facts uncovered by physics). We might decide to devise two concepts of mind in order to aid clarity and avoid confusion: the internal mind and the external mind, the subjective mind and the objective mind. Our vocabulary is limited and clearly inadequate, but we have enough to group things together intelligibly enough. In our own tradition terminology has shifted from “spirit” and “soul” to “mind” and “self” under pressure from various cultural and intellectual developments; the same thing could happen in the future if object mentalism gains a foothold.  [2]

            Fourth, in respect to metaphysics we now have a new option to play with: we have not just materialism, idealism, and dualism, but also a new type of generalized mentalism. This mentalism recognizes mind in many more places than alternative views, as various forms of panpsychism also do, by attributing it to ordinary objects in virtue of their secondary qualities; but it doesn’t descend into out-and-out idealism (though it is consistent with that and might be so extended). We could call it “modest idealism”. It certainly has an affinity with Berkeley’s position and relies on some of his insights; it diverges in not bringing in God and not applying itself to primary qualities. Mind turns out to be much less localized than we supposed, much more a general fact of nature; or rather, matter has less hegemony than we have been schooled to think. In fact, there is really no such thing as matter under the object mentalism conception—that is, a substance quite devoid of all subjectivity (this was Berkeley’s definition of matter or “corporeal substance””). Descartes was wrong to carve out an ontological realm from which mind has been completely expunged, in which secondary qualities are assigned to the perceiving mind of humans and other animals. Once these qualities are attributed to objects themselves the moderns’ conception of matter loses application, just as Berkeley argues. This destroys dualism as much as materialism, since there is nothing for pure matter to be. What we have is an inextricable combination of “mental” and “physical” qualities found instantiated together: that is the nature of concrete reality. The opposition between matter as wholly non-mental and mind as contrasted with this material realm collapses. We have been in the grip of the idea that objective reality consists of pure material substance with nothing mental about it, while all along the obvious existence of objects possessing secondary qualities has contradicted that idea. It is our conception of matter that has been at fault—and by “our” I don’t mean the human race but assorted theoreticians with various intellectual and scientific agendas, Descartes being chief among them. Mechanism is the ultimate culprit—the attempt to carve out a conception of reality that leaves mind behind. This is that desiccated, abstract, conjectured, mathematical, merely extended, insensate substance that was supposed to form the subject matter of physics; but there is no such substance, since objects are really colored (etc.). Nor is this a problem for physics as a science; physics simply deals with certain aspects of objects. It is a problem, however, for a certain philosophy of physics—one in which external reality is completely devoid of anything recognizably mental. There is no such thing as that and hence no such thing as Cartesian matter. The metaphysical picture bequeathed to us by seventeenth century thought is fundamentally flawed (according to object mentalism), and in just the way Berkeley diagnosed (his own positive theory is another matter). Matter in that sense is a myth.  [3]

            Finally, the opposition between mind and world has to be rethought. The mind is certainly not “in the head” if objects have minds too; and objects are not “in the world” if that means they lack all mentality. We can see mind in the world, and the world can see its own mind: mind is “out there”. Our internal mind may or may not be “in the head” but the external mind certainly isn’t—though it might be in its own head (if it had one). We have to reformulate the whole way we talk if object mentalism is true, because of its opposition between mind and world: we need to know what kind of mind is at issue, since one kind of mind is literally part of the world. The internal mind is really just one type of mind existing in the midst of innumerable other minds. How these two types of mind are related then remains an outstanding question; and we can’t just assume that the internal mind is fundamental. Maybe that has been our mistake all along. Maybe the world began with external minds and gradually worked up to internal minds, themselves very various.  [4]

 

Colin McGinn                     

  [1] There could be a form of panpsychism that claims that elementary particles have “proto color” from which arises color-as-we-perceive-it; so electrons and so on would not be completely devoid of color, after all.  

  [2] Have we not discovered, as history has worn on, that our initial concept of mind was hopelessly anthropocentric and parochial? Some people didn’t even think animals have minds! Hindsight recommends keeping an open mind about the extension of the predicate “mind”. 

  [3] I would recommend a close reading of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713) for a critique of seventeenth century conceptions of matter.

  [4] Maybe it wasn’t that human minds created color, taste, etc. but that these qualities created human minds: the ultimate source of human and animal minds is not primary qualities of matter but secondary qualities. It’s worth pondering. 

Secondary Qualities and Possible Worlds

 

 

Consider a possible world in which all objects have minds, indeed selves: every physical object is a subject of consciousness. In this world every object has a brain, though the brains might not be very like the brains we are familiar with. Thus trees, rivers, mountains, post boxes, and pebbles all have minds. More precisely, everything that looks like these familiar objects has both a mind and a brain. What is on those minds? Let’s suppose that they are occupied about their own appearance: they perceive the very qualities they instantiate, and maybe nothing else. For example, red objects perceive themselves to be red—as well as any other quality they possess (they taste, smell, hear, and feel themselves too). We humans are aware of many of our own perceptible properties—well, the objects in my possible world are like that too. We can suppose they have this awareness through something like proprioception: they don’t see their own color with a pair of eyes; rather, they sense it inwardly. Our brains could have done the same: they could have made us sense our own color without the need to deploy our eyes, as they make us sense our own bodily posture and movement.    [1] So the objects in my world have a kind of primitive inward awareness of their perceptible qualities: what we see with our senses they sense inwardly with their own organ of awareness—we see an object as red and the red object also perceives its own redness. The set-up is rather like our mental states: others are aware of them by sense perception and inference, and we also are aware of them by introspection. Sensible qualities likewise have a kind of dual epistemology in the world described: they are perceived by other beings and they are perceived by the object with the quality. This seems like a possible world.

            There is a question about the nature of these qualities: are they mental or physical or perhaps some third thing? Let’s assume they are mental in some way (we could stipulate it): then the objects in question are sensing their own mental states when they sense their own qualities—they are like us inwardly sensing our aches and pains or sensations of color. An object has the mental quality of being red and it is aware of having this quality. This may be deemed problematic on the ground that colors (etc.) are public properties perceptible by suitable perceivers but mental states are not so perceptible. So there is no possible world in which colors are both mental and perceptible. This doesn’t rule out the possible world I first described, since we could drop the assumption that colors are mental; but it is worth noting that even the world in which colors are mental and perceptible is a possible world. For it is not a necessary truth that mental properties are imperceptible: so there could be a world in which colors are (a) mental, (b) perceptible, and (c) sensed by the object that possesses them. This world would match the description I have suggested for the actual world: our objects instantiate perceptible public qualities that are also sensed by the object that has them and which are mental.    [2] What I am saying, then, is that this is a logically possible world: it contains no contradiction or other conceptual incoherence. The question is not whether it is intelligible but whether it is true. In my possible world I have simply stipulated that the objects have minds and brains that enable them to sense their own perceptible qualities, whereas in the actual world that is very much the question at issue. For now I am only concerned with a theoretical possibility, i.e. whether there is a possible world in which the described set-up exists: and it seems that there is such a world. The objects need not be like ours internally: they could have a far more complex and brain-like interior—they might, indeed, house little brains very like ours that are hooked up to their outward qualities. In this world nature is uniform in the sense that every object, organic or inorganic, has a dual nature, being both mental and physical, both a perceiver and an object perceived. The philosophers in this world might have a dispute about what is true in their world, with one sect insisting on the mindedness of ordinary objects and another sect stoutly denying this (despite being aware of that little brain-like structure in objects). The former group thinks that their preferred hypothesis gives the best overall account of things, while the latter group is resistant to the very idea that ordinary objects could have minds (which by stipulation they do).

            Now the question is whether the described metaphysically possible world is also an epistemic possibility for our own world. Can we be certain that our objects lack a mind of their own? I think few will assert that we can: it is an epistemic possibility that all objects have a touch of mind in them. We need not suppose that this mental nature is just like ours, or that of any terrestrial species; it could be quite alien to us, yet still a type of mentality. We must not be parochial about the scope of the mental. Thus, if we have come to the conclusion that colors are mental and hence need a subject to perceive them, we should not be deterred by the objection that colored objects don’t have minds like ours. Our inability to imagine such minds is no objection to the claim that they exist. What about behavior: do objects behave as if they have minds? Again, the question is not easily resolved: organisms as we know them are of many types with very different types of behavior, so we can’t take human behavior as the measure of mentality. A panpsychist will certainly not be moved by the observation that particles don’t behave like humans (or even frogs). There are some who maintain that the physical world is fundamentally mental, but they don’t claim that everything behaves like an animal with a mind. If we have already adopted such a view, we will not be so resistant to supposing that sensible qualities are all mental, and that objects sense their own qualities. True, we have added subjects of awareness to states or events of awareness, but this too is not a radical move once the mentality of matter has been accepted (I am not saying that it should be). We are simply supposing that colored objects are aware of their color; and how could they not be if they are composed of mental states? If red is a mental quality, and all mental qualities need a subject, then we have the result that red objects are psychological subjects. There exist metaphysical outlooks that are quite hospitable to the kind of view I am outlining. But even sans those outlooks we can make sense of the idea that objects possess some sort of subject that perceives their own qualities. It may be a very attenuated type of subject, and its perceptions might be far removed from ours, but it is possible (in both senses) that objects possess such attributes. And if secondary qualities are really mental in some way, then they need some such thing in order to be instantiated. The point I have been making is just that the resulting picture is perfectly feasible as a metaphysical possibility, and can also claim to be an epistemic possibility with respect to our world (it cannot be definitively ruled out). The question then becomes one of overall plausibility and the viability of competing views. My own position is that the view needs to be added to the range of options for consideration and cannot be easily excluded. It is at the least interesting—rather in the way that Berkeley’s view is interesting (which stimulated the present view). Berkeley located the ground of all existence in the infinite spirit that is God; the present view more modestly supposes that all objects have “spirits” within them that perceive the properties they instantiate. Berkeley made room for two types of spirit, the finite spirits of humans and other animals and the infinite spirit of God; the present view allows for the existence of more basic spirits existing in sensible objects. The panpsychist will not be repelled by the very idea of such an expansion, and the view in question is a lot more modest than the panpsychist view (if we allow that some objects lack secondary qualities, e.g. electrons). In any case, the view needs to be evaluated on its merits, its initial strangeness notwithstanding. To me what is compelling is the thought that mental qualities need mental subjects, and colors (etc.) are mental qualities. I think many people (my earlier self included) vaguely assume that colors are mental in some way and that they are possessed by external objects but fail to reckon with the point (insisted upon by Berkeley and later rediscovered by Frege) that mental properties need a subject—that their esse is percipi.    [3] Something has to give once this point is taken in, and one possibility is that the object itself is the source of the needed percipi. We can imagine thinkers that accept that animals have mental and physical attributes but never reflect that the former need a subject, and are indeed naturally opposed to the idea of such a thing; then some radical comes along who argues that the esse of mental properties is percipi, thus forcing an ontological expansion on her colleagues. People have selves inside them too! They aren’t just collections of mental attributes; they need something to perceive these attributes. Well, something like that dialectic can be envisaged for ordinary objects and their qualities, once we accept that they have mental as well as physical attributes. That was the orthodox view among modern philosophers who distinguished primary from secondary qualities; it was Berkeley who pointed out that mental properties (“ideas”) need mental subjects. This changes everything.    [4]

 

Colin McGinn                            

    [1] Let me note that the human body has secondary qualities and hence needs a psychological subject to sense these qualities, given that they are mental. This means that we have more than one mind lurking within us: the regular conscious mind and the mind that exists in the body as the perceiving subject of its secondary qualities. But the proliferation of minds is by now something of a commonplace: the unconscious mind (or several such), the enteric mind, the two hemispheric minds, maybe a bunch of panpsychic minds. Even the conscious mind might consist of several sub-minds, as with modularity. The notion that we have just a single mind seems like a relic of the indivisible immortal soul.

    [2] See my “Mind in World” and “Color and Object”.

    [3] Of course, the standard assumption is that the subject in question is the human subject, but once this assumption is critically examined its inadequacies quickly reveal themselves (particularly the problem of how colors can exist unperceived).

    [4] The point is by no means trivial and has been rejected by many philosophers who think we can get by with mental qualities alone—the “bundle theory”.