The Concept of a Person

/0 Comments/in /by

                                                The Concept of a Person

 

 

I have come to the conclusion that the concept of a person, as philosophers employ that concept, is a bad concept. It leads to the formulation of bad questions that have no answers. The concept does not pick out any natural kind and is quite misleading. It should be abandoned as a concept in philosophy, except in a very restricted setting.

            What counts as a person? We typically apply the word to ordinary adult humans of sound mind, assuming a certain set of mental characteristics—intelligence, consciousness, self-reflection, self-governance, memory, etc. But what about children: when does a human child become a person? Is it at the age of sexual maturity, or when the child starts to walk and talk, or at birth, or in the third trimester, or at conception? Opinions differ radically. According to the standard Lockean definition, in terms of conscious self-reflection, persons must have advanced cognitive skills, so that personhood only begins when the mind reaches a certain level of sophistication—possibly around puberty or later, depending on the individual. So many human children are deemed non-persons—though they have human bodies, minds, language, and will. What about those suffering from various forms of mental deficit—are they persons? Is an autistic adult a person? Does Alzheimer’s destroy personhood? Does coma eliminate the person? Are you a person while asleep, or just before you die in your sleep? And is there a science of persons? Is this concept useful in biology, or psychology? Why do we have the concept? What does it do for us?

            We are apt to restrict the concept of a person to the human species—only humans are said to be persons. Our pets are not deemed persons, nor are our closest biological relatives. Would we call other hominids persons if they still existed—Neanderthals, Homo erectus, et al? Didn’t some people once deny that individuals of other races are persons? But are we just wrong to impose these restrictions—might we discover that gorillas, say, really are persons after all? What would such a discovery involve? Might their DNA make us accept that gorillas are persons, as it might make us accept that they belong to the same family that includes lemurs? Could their personhood be a scientific discovery? And if they are persons, what about other primates, other mammals, or even reptiles—might they too be persons for all we know? Is it that we know empirically that crocodiles are not persons, as we know they are not warm-blooded? Is that a scientific fact? Is it conceivable that turtles might turn out to be persons—but not the shark or the octopus? And when did the biological kind persons evolve? Might we stop calling ourselves persons if our mental faculties drop below a certain level (“we used to be persons but now we don’t measure up”)?

            There is a philosophical subject called “personal identity” in which we strive to find what constitutes the continued existence of a person. The subject involves many ingenious thought experiments, and it is difficult to come up with a satisfactory theory. Presumably the question is not supposed to include non-persons: we are not seeking the conditions of non-personal identity—the question is supposed to be exclusively about persons as such. So we are not interested in young children and members of other species, since they don’t count as persons. But the same thought experiments, and the same theories, can be applied to these non-persons too. A human child, say three-year-old Jill, persists through time, and we can ask what her persistence consists in—what makes this child Jill. Is it her body or brain or memories or consciousness or personality—or none of the above? We can envisage swapping her brain for Jack’s brain, or dividing her brain in two, or erasing her memories—the usual philosophical moves. Yet none of this is about personal identity, Jill not being a person (yet), as we may suppose. Or if you think human children do count as persons, even going as far back as the fetus, what about cats and dogs—what does their identity through time consist in? What makes Fido, Fido? We can swap Fido’s brain, zap his memories, tinker with his personality, and subject him to teletransportation—the philosophical works. Yet none of this concerns a question of personal identity—just canine identity: “Is it the same dog?” not “Is it the same person?” But surely these questions about non-persons are really the same as questions about the identity of persons—we have not got two philosophical problems here, one about persons and the other about non-persons. So the question of personal identity, as it is normally pursued, is not really a question about personal identity as such—that is a misnomer. The concept of a person is not the concept we need to pursue these kinds of questions: it is too restrictive.

            And quite possibly it makes the questions needlessly intractable, because the concept itself is so vague, messy, and unnatural. We can ask what constitutes identity of body, identity of mind, and identity of animal (dog or gorilla, say), but asking what constitutes the identity of a “person” is not a very well defined question, pending some clearer idea of what a person is. What question is left over when we have answered those other questions—in particular, when we have answered the question of what dog identity or human identity is? If we have a theory of human identity over time, don’t we have all we need? In other words, why not focus on species concepts and formulate the question that way? These are sortals in good standing, unlike the putative sortal “person”, which admits of so much indeterminacy. If we find we can settle questions of animal identity—dogs, turtles, humans—why bother with the supposed further question of personal identity? Maybe this just generates pseudo-questions that simply have no answer. We can also meaningfully inquire about the identity through time of minds—what makes me have the same mind today that I had yesterday or a year ago? The answer will specify my mental capacities, as well as certain kinds of psychological continuity; and the question posed may have a clear answer. But this will not satisfy the seeker after the secret of personal identity, which is construed as a question about another kind of entity entirely—the person. For why–that seeker will ask–couldn’t the same person have a different mind at different times, and why couldn’t different persons share the same mind? Such questions appear fanciful, but they are easily generated from the assumption that there is a substantial further issue about personal identity. However, if we simply stop asking that question—that is, stop going on about the supposed category of persons—we can still cover all the ground that really matters, viz. identity of body, animal, and mind. There is really no additional question in this neighborhood worth asking–so at least the skeptic about “personal identity” will contend. There is clearly a challenge here to explain what well-defined question remains once those other questions have been dealt with. The concept of a person is really quite a recent addition to our conceptual repertoire, but surely there were questions about our identity through time before it made its entrance.

            It is suspicious that we don’t have a term corresponding to “person” for other species. Some well-meaning people suggest that we should extend the concept to other species, because of their psychological similarities to us; but that seems rather forced and stipulative. What is odd is that we don’t have a more general concept of which person is a special case, given that we recognize that animals have minds as well as bodies. We think Fido is the same dog from day to day, as we think Bill is the same human from day to day; but we don’t have a term corresponding to “person” to add to our description in the case of Fido. There is a natural kind here that subsumes both Bill and Fido, and which resembles the concept of a person, but we don’t actually have a word that does this job—hence we have to say bluntly that Fido is a non-person. We might try using “psychological subject” or “ego” or “self”, but these don’t capture the notion of a non-human but person-like being (a “quasi-person”?). What this suggests to me is that the concept of a person is not really a natural kind concept at all—it is not intended to capture significant natural traits of things. It has a completely different function. That is why we don’t have a more capacious notion of a person, despite recognizing similarities between ourselves and other species, and indeed between adult humans and juvenile humans (as well as others). The job of the word “person” is not to capture the nature of a certain kind of thing; rather, it is to enforce a certain kind of division—to stipulate a certain kind of exclusion. It is intentionally invidious.

            Locke remarked that “person” is a forensic term, i.e. a term of the law. Let me rather say that it is a political and legal term, as is the concept expressed. To classify an individual as a “person” is to grant him or her certain rights—legal, political, moral. A person is precisely someone who possesses, or is deemed to possess, these rights—a right-holder. It is like calling someone a “gentleman” as opposed to a “commoner”: the point is to indicate how such a one is to be treated, not to get at some natural essence. We don’t refuse to call children and animals persons because we think they differ fundamentally from us in their objective nature; we do it because we are marking them out as beyond the normative sphere to which normal human adults belong—the sphere of responsibility, legal obligation, ownership, and so on. True, there are real differences that underlie this kind of forensic distinction, but the term “person” is employed to abstract away from these and focus on matters of law and politics. We declarea young human a person upon the attainment of a certain position in society, as we might stipulate a gorilla to be a person if gorillas come to be accorded legal rights comparable to those applicable to adult humans. It is not that we discover these creatures to be persons by observation or analysis—though we may discover relevant facts about their minds or bodies. The term “person” is a kind of honorific or status term, intended to signify belonging—it connotes legal and political standing. It is like “citizen” or “aristocrat” or “star” or “lady”. It is not the concept of a certain kind of natural entity.

            If this is right, we can see what is going wrong with the philosopher’s use of the concept of a person. It is not a concept designed for, or useful in, metaphysical or scientific contexts, but in political or legal contexts. There is no such question therefore as the “nature of persons” or “personal identity through time”–though there are real questions about the nature of animals and their minds and about the identity through time of animals and their minds. We can certainly ask about minds of different levels of complexity, up to and including the Lockean conception of a self-reflective conscious being that can “consider itself as itself”. But this should not be interpreted as a division into “persons” and “non-persons”: there are just too many grades of animal (and human) mindedness for that dichotomy to be realistic. There is no such ontological subject as persons—at least as that concept is normally understood by philosophers. The kind “normal adult human with legal rights and obligations” is not a metaphysical kind, as philosophers have attempted to make it.   Philosophers have extracted the concept of a person from its natural forensic context and tried to press it into metaphysical service, by asking questions about a supposed ontological category. The failure to make much progress with these questions is an indication that this appropriation was misconceived. Let us then drop the concept of a person from metaphysics and return it to its proper place in law and politics. We can still discuss the nature of animals, humans included, and ask about the identity through time of these entities—recognizing that they are essentially embodied minds—but we will not do so under the rubric “persons” or “personal identity”. There are no persons, as philosophers have employed the concept, primitive or non-primitive, basic or non-basic, analyzable or unanalyzable.

 

Colin McGinn

Share

Why Thoughts Cannot be Chemical Events

/0 Comments/in /by

 

 

 

Why Thoughts Cannot be Chemical Events

 

 

The usual kinds of theoretical identity exhibit a common feature: we can give a compositional analysis of the thing being identified in terms of what it is being identified with. Thus in the case of “water is H2O” we can analyze water as composed of two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen: these are the constituents of water. This is chemical compositional analysis. If water could not be analyzed in this way, it would be false to say that water is H2O. Similarly for “heat is molecular motion”: heat can be analyzed as composed of rapidly moving molecules. Likewise for “light is a stream of photons/pattern of electromagnetic waves”: light is composed of such constituents. In all these cases there is a kind of hidden structure to the thing in question and it reduces to that structure by compositional analysis. The structure may not be obvious, the constituents may be remote from common sense, but the thing in question is in fact made up of these constituents in that structure. It certainly does not have a compositional analysis that differs from that with which it is identified. The analysis is what grounds the claim of identity, so the identity cannot hold without the analysis holding. Often the analysis reveals the phenomenon to be more complex than we might have supposed; but there is no doubt that the phenomenon is to be analyzed in that way. It has turned out that water, heat, and light have such-and-such a compositional analysis. If someone tried to claim that heat is light, say, it would suffice to point out that these two phenomena have quite different sorts of composition: heat is composed of molecules in motion, light is composed of photons or electromagnetic waves. Since these are not the same, nor can heat and light be the same.

            It is the same story with other sorts of identity, such as those that apply to physiological processes. Suppose we identify digestion with a complex sequence of stages of food breakdown and absorption: “Digestion is the process that begins with food being taken into the mouth, then chewed, then swallowed, then entering the stomach, and so on.” We have analyzed digestion into its component parts and explained how those parts aid the process. That process was largely hidden, but science has revealed it, and we can now state the appropriate identity, which is underpinned by physiological compositional analysis. Similarly for breathing and gestation: we can say what breathing is by talking about the lungs and their action, oxygen and the blood, thus providing a compositional analysis; and we can say what gestation is by describing the processes of embryological development. We spell out the underlying complexity that constitutes respiration and gestation: this is what those processes are composed of. We suspect a hidden structure to something for which we have a mere label, and science tells us just what that hidden structure is. If someone were to try to claim that respiration is identical to gestation, it would suffice to point out that these two processes are composed quite differently—with the lungs involved in one case and the womb in the other.

            But now how does it work in the case of thoughts and the brain? The identity theorist claims that a thought is identical to a chemical event in the brain: my thinking that it is about to rain is identical to a batch of chemicals crossing a synaptic cleft or some such. Thoughts are identical to their chemical correlates—actual molecules moving and combining. When we observe brain chemistry we are observing thoughts: this is what thoughts have turned out to be. Science has discovered the hidden structure of thoughts, and it is the structure of chemicals in the brain. The correct compositional analysis of thoughts is in terms of chemical constituents and their interactions. The trouble with this familiar picture is that thoughts do not appear to have any such chemical compositional analysis. They do have a compositional analysis, in terms of their conceptual constituents, but this is not a chemicalanalysis: the constituents of thoughts comprise concepts of different kinds standing in the relation of predication and other logical relations, not chemicals that form compounds and travel across ion channels. So it is hard to see how the former can be identified with the latter. It is like trying to identify heat with light or respiration with gestation: wrong compositional analysis.

Suppose we had an identity theory of sentences: when someone hears a sentence in his mind this event is identical to a chemical event in his brain. The trouble with this theory is that while the sentence does have a compositional analysis, in terms of nouns, verbs, prepositions, modifiers, and so on, this structure is not the same as a structure of chemicals in the brain. We can’t map the sentence structure onto a structure of chemicals shuttling around between neurons. Consider that molecules break down into atoms and that atoms break down into protons and electrons: that is the compositional analysis of a molecular event. But nouns and verbs don’t break down into atoms and elementary particles—they don’t have any such compositional analysis. So sentences (uttering or hearing them) cannot be identified with chemical events. Chemical events may—and no doubt must—correlate with sentences and thoughts, but we can’t claim that the latter can be compositionally analyzed by reference to the former.  [1] By contrast, the standard examples of theoretical identity do involve clear instances of compositional analysis. Water consists of H2O in a way that the thought that it’s about to rain does not consist of a collection of chemical events. The structure of thought is not molecular structure.

            It is, however, very plausible to suppose that physiology reduces to chemistry. The physiological processes of the body—digestion, respiration, gestation, and so on—do consist of molecular processes. The body is composed of chemicals, and these chemicals provide a compositional analysis of all the processes that occur in the body. This is something we have discovered; it is certainly not obvious (there might have been a “vital force”). Molecules have the power, by joining and separating, and by energy exchanges, to produce the full range of physiological processes. Chemistry may not be alchemy, but it can achieve some remarkable transformations. We can take an activity of the body and dissect it into its chemical components, thereby achieving full explanation. There is no “explanatory gap” between physiology and chemistry, no “hard problem”, no “mysterious link”. The body really does have a chemical compositional analysis (that, ultimately, is how it is possible). Thus we can endorse “chemicalism” about the body. And that includes the brain: it too is an organ consisting of a collocation of molecules. Nerve transmission reduces to activities of molecules. The body really is a complicated molecular machine, a vast chemical factory, because molecules are versatile and productive things, capable of elaborate feats of construction and energy transfer. The body is composed of cells and the cells are composed of complex molecular structures—so it all comes down to chemistry. Thus it is reasonable to propound various kinds of theoretical identity with respect to physiology, which are entirely analogous to the identities propounded in physics and chemistry itself (such as the identification of the elements with atoms of varying atomic number). Given that chemistry is reducible to atomic physics, we then reach the conclusion that the body is indeed a physical thing—by no means a trivial result.

            But psychology does not reduce to chemistry—which is interesting because it surely depends on chemistry. Thoughts don’t have a chemical compositional analysis, unlike events of digestion or respiration—even though they are, in some sense, grounded in chemicals. We cannot be “chemicalists” about thoughts. We thus reach the conclusion that the mind is not the body: for the body is subject to “chemicalism” but the mind is not—therefore the mind is not the body. If the mind were the body, the mind would have a chemical compositional analysis; but as it doesn’t, it isn’t. Nevertheless, chemicals are, in some sense, the machinery of thought—what make thought possible, give it efficacy, embody it. We have given various technical-sounding names to this vital relation, none of them very illuminating: “supervenience”, “realization”, “emergence”, “grounding”, “hardware”, “substrate”, and so on. The connection is real enough—there is no thought without a chemical basis—but it is completely opaque. My aim has been to articulate one reason why thoughts cannot be chemical events. The fundamental point is the asymmetry between standard theoretical identifications and putative psychochemical identifications, in respect of compositional analysis.

            No doubt there are ways in which one might try to wriggle out of the argument, which are quite familiar. It might be claimed that thoughts really do have a chemical analysis, contrary to initial impressions, because we can assign their conceptual analysis to the appearances and insist that chemistry tells us their hidden real essence—as we can assign the superficial properties of water to their appearances to the human senses. The obvious reply to this is that the conceptual structure of thought is not just a dispensable superficial appearance but is the very essence of thought. Or we could dispense with thoughts altogether and just talk chemistry. Or we could protest that it’s all just a matter of “intuition” and hence methodologically suspect. Or we could question the whole idea of compositional analysis. What is clear is that there is a significant difference between standard scientific identities and the claim that thoughts are identical to chemical events, concerning the question of compositional analysis. The difference is at its most telling in the contrast between physiology and psychology in respect of chemistry. Physiology really is a branch of chemistry, but psychology is apparently not. Accordingly, thoughts are not physiological processes.  [2]

 

Colin McGinn 

                

  [1] If we adopt the language of thought theory, we can easily convert the argument from language to thought: given that inner sentences are not chemical events, thoughts cannot be either. Thoughts cannot have a chemical compositional analysis if the sentences that constitute them do not. 

  [2] We can claim that thoughts are biological processes in the sense that they are aspects of organisms that evolved by natural selection, but it doesn’t follow that they are physiological processes, like respiration and digestion. No physiological process in the brain can be a thought, on pain of reducing thinking to chemistry.

Share

Turing Tests

/0 Comments/in /by

                                                            Turing Tests

 

 

The classic Turing test involves a robot that passes for a conscious thinking human being. The examiner spends time with the robot, asking questions, interacting, and the question is whether it presents a convincing enough appearance of intelligence and consciousness. It is like an audition for playing the part of a normal human being. Structurally, however, the Turing test exemplifies something more general, and it is instructive to spell out what it is.

Consider the Turing* test: can we construct a virtual world that passes for a real world? An engineer is making a machine that will feed inputs into the brain and produce an impression of a world of ordinary material objects; the question is whether this virtual world can convince a tester that it is real. The tester can experiment on this virtual world, moving around, varying the angles, using different senses, and if after some suitable time he cannot distinguish the virtual from the real, we can declare that the machine passes the Turing* test. It can produce a convincing simulacrum of a real world—as a robotics engineer might produce a convincing simulacrum of a conscious intelligence.

            We could also envisage a Turing** test that concerns producing artificial plant life: can we make an object that resembles a naturally occurring plant enough to convince someone that it is really a biological plant? And we can have subdivisions of such questions: can we artificially simulate a virus, a bat, a cactus, or an octopus? The question is not specific to robots and minds at all: it is about the power to mimic naturally occurring objects by artificial contrivance. Can we make an artificial F, for arbitrary F?

            Here is an interesting question of the general type—call it the super-Turing test: Can we create a virtual world that contains robots that pass the classic Turing test? That is, we first have to create a virtual world of bodies, as in the Turing* test, and then we have to ensure that those virtual bodies behave in ways that perfectly mimic human bodies—so that they will pass the Turing test. Thus virtual robots may pass the super-Turing test, and hence be declared by testers to be conscious thinking beings. The tester has been fooled into believing he is surrounded by conscious thinking beings when he is really living in a virtual world of imaginary robots.

            Suppose the virtual robots do pass the super-Turing test test: are they then really conscious? But how can a merely virtual being be conscious, as opposed to seeming so? Are people in your dreams conscious? Clearly not—though they pass a kind of super-Turing test. Passing the Turing test is not logically sufficient to qualify as conscious, because passing the super-Turing test is not sufficient. Passing the test is enough to convince someone that there is a real thing of the type in question, if they don’t know the actual nature of thing; but that is a question about evidence and belief, not about what is metaphysically possible. Anything can pass a Turing-type test for being an F but still not be an F, since appearing to be an F is never logically sufficient for being an F. In other words, there is always skepticism to reckon with.

 

Share

Transspeciesism

/0 Comments/in /by

 

                                                            Transspeciesism

 

 

Western society has grown extremely tolerant of a large variety of what we might call “life-ways”—ways in which people desire to live, by choice or genetic destiny. Unmarried parents, interracial marriage, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transvestites—all are now regarded as legitimate life-ways, to be respected and protected. It is hard to think of any life-way that is now generally regarded as “deviant”—unless it is coercive or demonstrably harmful to others (pedophilia, zoophilia). So are there no more liberal social causes? Is there no group left that is wrongly shunned and deplored  (at least by intelligent people)? Are we finally fully enlightened?

I certainly find it difficult to think of any outstanding cases. But this is an alarming thought, because that is what people would have said before the recent liberations. We should always be careful before declaring complete moral clarity. Are there any unusual (statistically) life-ways that remain to be defended? Can we conceive of any that might need defending from irrational persecution? Genetic engineering offers some promising problem cases, at least in principle. Presumably no one would object to sex changes that proceed genetically rather than surgically—assuming they found sex change in principle acceptable. If a person desiring to change sexes could undergo a genetic overhaul that brought about the desired transformation, we would find this a tolerable way to implement the desire in question. But what should we say about other genetic possibilities?

Consider a person who desires to change sex and race: say, a white man who wants to become a black woman. We need not enquire into his reasons—that is not our business. What we know is that he has a deep-seated and carefully considered desire to makes the change in question. Let us suppose that there is a safe and reliable way to make the necessary physiological alterations (something about stem cells and gene splicing). We can suppose too that he has the support of his family and friends. He comes out of the procedure a much-changed man and lives happily ever after, never regretting his decision for a moment. Is there anything here we can reasonably object to? Not that I can see. He did no one any harm, he made himself happy, and he provided employment to some dedicated health professionals. It was his choice—what he really wanted.

But let’s take this a step further—let’s suppose a person wants to change species. Again, we needn’t go into the motivation for such a desire; we can assume that it is sincere and carefully considered. Suppose I deeply want to become an elephant: is that okay? We can stipulate that it is a safe and reliable procedure; we can even stipulate that it is reversible, so that I can return to being human if the elephant thing doesn’t work out for me. Imagine that the doctors can also guarantee my safety while an elephant, so I take no risks by making the change. So far as I can see, there is no good objection to my making this life choice—it is just part of my freedom to live as I see fit. So “transspeciesists” should not be hindered or deplored or persecuted or discriminated against. If a person wishes to become a monkey so that she can marry a monkey, I can see no objection of principle—once she is fully informed of the facts about what she proposes. Presumably, if a human becomes a member of another species, then the chances of mating with other members of that species are high, and I can see no reason why this should be prohibited or even disapproved of. If people decide they want to take transspecies vacations, becoming of another species for a limited time, that seems perfectly permissible—certainly, it cannot be condemned for being “unnatural” (compare transsexuals). It is just one life choice among many that can be made.

Yet I suspect that many people, otherwise quite liberal, will recoil at the idea of elective transspeciesism. They may ask what we would say if the entire human population decided they wanted to go transpeciesist? What if people decided to opt out of humanity altogether and join other species? They might keep remnants of their old human mental life, while being able to fly like a bird (as a bird). This is like the question of what to say if everyone decides to go female. The result would be human extinction obviously. That may be a pity, but I see no objection in each individual case. If Bill wants to be a shark, that’s his business. If Mary fancies life as a butterfly, that’s her choice. If Tom wants to be a bat so that he can know what it is like, that’s entirely his affair. It’s a matter of individual freedom, just like the other cases with which we are now familiar. We don’t have to deal with it as a pressing concern, because of the present lack of the requisite technology, but the future may well hold this very possibility, as genetic science progresses. If some terrible disease afflicts humans in the future, and the only way to avoid it is by changing species, then it may well seem like the natural and right thing to do. In any case, it belongs in the palette of human possibilities. Of course, forcing people to change species is wrong, but what is wrong with letting people decide their own species identity? We certainly can’t object that it is not what God intended (maybe it is just what he intended), or else we have to ban other kinds of transformative life choice. So transspeciesism should be put on the list of permissible life-ways. If I decide I want to become a female panther, say, that is my own personal business, and no one can object. Come to think of it…

 

Share

Polyamory and Identity

/0 Comments/in /by

                                   

 

 

Polyamory and Identity

 

 

Suppose I take myself to be in love with a single person but in reality there are two people that are the recipients of my affection. What I think to be one person is really a pair of identical twins; they have just never disclosed this fact to me. I am polyamorous de re but not de dicto (I might even deplore polyamory). But suppose that one day I discover the true state of affairs, much to my surprise and dismay. What should I do? How should I feel? I could decide to stop loving both of them, perhaps because I disapprove of polyamory; but then I would have to reject a person I genuinely love—two of them in fact. I could decide to keep one and reject the other, but on what basis could I make this decision? They are indiscernible to me, holding equal places in my heart. It would be irrational and unfair to prefer one to the other. So I seem left with the option of keeping both: allowing de re polyamory to become de dicto polyamory. It is difficult to see how I could be criticized for this decision, and I myself may come to be reconciled to it as time passes. So long as my two loves desire it too, polyamory seems the way to go.

            For another case, suppose that I take myself to be in love with a single person but this person likes to adopt a different persona at different times. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays she likes to present herself in a certain way (hair, personality, even bodily appearance), while on the other days she adopts a different mode of presentation. I am happy with this arrangement since it provides some welcome variety in the relationship. But it turns out that again there are really two people involved—I have been fooled. What should I do? I don’t want to reject both, since both are beloved. Should I reject one? This time I am not faced with the problem of indiscernible loves: and I might actually prefer one to the other. After diligent reflection I decide that I do prefer one to the other, so at least I have a basis for discrimination. But that doesn’t settle the matter because I do genuinely love both (and both love me). Again, it would be unfair to reject the marginally less beloved one, and I would certainly miss her. So I decide to keep both. All I really have to do is judge that two people are involved where once I thought there was one; otherwise I just keep feeling the same way. It is hard to see how I could be criticized for this decision. True, they shouldn’t have deceived me, but perhaps they had their reasons.

            Here is a third case. My wife travels a lot for work, so I don’t see as much of her as I would like (suppose she feels the same way about me). We hit on an ingenious solution: she undergoes brain bisection and relocation of the two halves of her brain in separate bodies—that way when one half is traveling the other stays home. Maybe the bodies are indiscernible; maybe they are not. Granted that the resulting individuals are two in number, I am now in love with two people. I have entered a polyamorous state. Suppose that my wife (wives) and I are happy with the new arrangement and have no wish to return to the old monogamous state. It is hard to see how we could be criticized for our actions and feelings. If you think there is an undesirable asymmetry in our romantic entanglements, feel free to embellish the story so that I also undergo brain bisection and become two people; then each of us has two romantic partners where once we had one. This works for us, allowing us to provide ceaseless companionship to each other, as well as enhancing the family finances (maybe our children also benefit from having four parents). If this kind of thing became the norm, then elective polyamory would no doubt become socially acceptable. If the birth rate dipped too low it might even be encouraged (or mandated) by the government as a way of expanding the population. A religion might spring up extolling the virtues of this type of extended family. It is a way of doubling the love. It might even reduce the rate of divorce.  [1]

            These reflections should serve to lessen the taboo on polyamory.

 

  [1] Polyamory has nothing to do with promiscuity; indeed, its existence might well militate against that form of sexual life. Adultery will be less of a problem in a society in which brain-bisected plural marriage is normal. (Of course, there is no logical reason why brain bisection could not create even more romantic partners.)

Share

Possible Minds

/0 Comments/in /by

                                               

 

 

 

Possible Minds

 

 

It is fair to say that today much of Freudian theory is not generally regarded as true (though it was believed to be true for most of the twentieth century–ardently so). Nevertheless, I think it would be accepted even by Freud’s contemporary critics (including myself) that his theory might have been true—its truth was at least an epistemic possibility. Moreover, his theory describes a metaphysical possibility: there really could be a mind that satisfies all of Freud’s basic tenets—there is a possible world in which people have Freudian minds. They don’t in the actual world, as we now think, but in a possible world people really might function in the way Freud claimed (Oedipus complex, repression, phallic symbols, jokes, slips of the tongue, etc)—he didn’t describe a metaphysical impossibility. So let us suppose we visit such a world: how should we conceive the minds of the people there?

            I mean to be speaking of what Freud called meta-psychology and also the philosophy of mind: specifically, with respect to the question of the unconscious. Freud argues that given his clinical findings, and hence the truth of his psychological theories, we are compelled to regard the unconscious as robustly real and robustly mental.  [1] For example, if we repress our memories and emotions, then the result will be an unconscious mental state—just as mental as a conscious state. This mental state will have all the characteristics of conscious mental states save their consciousness, i.e. availability to introspective knowledge. The mind will consist of two mental systems, conscious and unconscious, but both equally aspects of mind—endowed with intentionality, phenomenology, and functionality (causal and teleological). It turns out that Freud was mistaken in many of his theories of the human mind, but in the possible world we are considering his counterpart is completely right about the minds of thosepeople. Thus Freud’s argument for the psychological reality of the unconscious—its existence and nature—applies to the minds of the possible people in question. There could be such people and, if there were, they would have a vibrant and undeniably mental unconscious. The conscious mind would just be a part of their mind, and possibly a late arrival on the mental scene, with the unconscious mind established earlier in evolutionary history. Accordingly, the philosophy of mind in this world would have to recognize the full reality of the mental unconscious. It would be wrong to limit it to the conscious mind, as if that is all there is to psychology; the study of the unconscious would have a place of equal importance to the subject. This means, among other things, that the mind-body problem spans both parts of the mind; it is not specifically a problem about consciousness. Consciousness adds something extra to the picture, but the unconscious also raises difficult questions about its relation to the body. In this possible world theorists would feel the need to include the unconscious along with the conscious.

            However, this is not our world, as we now know.  [2] Still, something like Freud’s position holds: we do have an unconscious, even if it is not exactly as Freud described. Most obviously we have unconscious memories: so the general form of Freud’s position still stands. The many systematic interactions between the conscious and the unconscious encourage the idea that the unconscious is a robust mental system existing alongside the conscious and in no whit less real than it. Freudian theory makes this kind of conclusion vivid, but much the same is true under less extravagant conceptions of the unconscious. Those possible minds have an undeniably mental unconscious, so our actual minds should follow the same general principles, even if they are not quite as Freud described. We could even push this line of reasoning further by stipulating a psychology in which the reality of the unconscious is even more undeniable: in a possible world in which this psychology is realized it would be right to adopt a strongly realist attitude toward the unconscious. For example, suppose people were mainly motivated by monetary greed (surely more realistic than Freud’s sexual theory) but that they officially followed a religion that explicitly forbade such acquisitiveness; then we might expect powerful repression of all pecuniary desires with all sorts of odd side-effects. Suppose these people dreamt of nothing but making money and spending it, that they constantly told jokes about money, and that money-related neurosis was prevalent in their society. Suppose also that as children conscious acquisitiveness was natural and universal, before repression set in: all pecuniary desires and emotions are then ruthlessly suppressed, only to leak out in all manner of strange psychological phenomena. Wouldn’t we have overwhelming reason to suppose that these people have an unconscious mind brimming with thoughts of money, desire for money, and money-related emotions—that their unconscious mind is money-obsessed? They are not aware of these unconscious mental states, by hypothesis, but they exist nonetheless.

The point is that the mere fact of unconsciousness is not enough of a reason to doubt the psychological reality of the unconscious in the presence of strong circumstantial evidence for its existence. Being unconscious is not itself a count against the psychological reality of those states; it all depends on what the surrounding evidence looks like. And if there are possible minds in which the unconscious exists in full gleaming armor, so to speak, then we ought to be open to the possibility that our actual minds harbor just such a lusty and strapping unconscious. The metaphysical possibility of a full-blown unconscious mind should soften us up to the thought that we too are similarly endowed. Our own unconscious may not be as spectacular as those postulated (or it may be!), but it is the same kind of thing.  [3]

 

  [1] See his careful and well-argued paper “The Unconscious” (1915). He is well aware that he needs to argue that the contents of the unconscious are mental in nature, not merely physical or functional; he even sees the need to rebut the idea that the so-called unconscious is another locus of consciousness existing alongside the more familiar consciousness.

  [2] I haven’t argued for this here, assuming it to be widely accepted: who now believes in Freud’s theory of psychosexual development? Does anyone still think that trains are phallic symbols?

  [3] In fact, I think that we have many separate unconscious minds, each richly endowed (see “The Disunity of Unconsciousness”), but it is important to see that the unconscious is psychologically real even under more conservative views of its scope. Even ordinary memory requires us to accept a robust unconscious mental reality.

Share

A Picture of Mind

/0 Comments/in /by

 

 

A Picture of Mind

 

 

How in the most general terms should we characterize the mind, animal or human? If the body has a respiratory system, a digestive system, and a reproductive system, what systems does the mind have? How does it divide up? What is its fundamental structure? I suggest the following tripartite picture: intelligence, desire, and will. These are the basic compartments of the mind: cognition, conation, and volition. Cognition includes the senses and what is traditionally called Reason; conation includes need, appetite, and wish; volition includes action, decision, and intention. I would say, further, that intelligence is manifested in the form of knowledge, desire is manifested in the form of emotion, and will is manifested in the form of action. What knowledge is to intelligence emotion is to desire and action is to will. We know, feel, and act, and these are expressions of our intelligence, desire, and will. We have desires and we act on them in the light of what we know. The mind is designed to produce action based on knowledge in the satisfaction of desire. No doubt evolution produced this three-component structure as the best solution to survival requirements. The components must of course be coordinated, so they interact in various ways; but they are separate regions of what we indiscriminately call the mind. Also, they have many sub-components: many types of knowledge, from linguistic to ethical, physical to psychological; many types of desire, from sexual to food-directed, ethical to prudential; and many types of action, from mental to bodily, reflexive to considered, novel to routine. So there are modules within modules, faculties within faculties; in fact, the basic compartments are more like repositories of faculties and modules than faculties and modules. If we picture each compartment as a tree, each faculty within it is a branch of the tree–the sum total of trunk and branch (and leaves) being the tree. The many modules of mind can be viewed as clustering into three large groups, which I am calling intelligence, desire, and will. There is much heterogeneity within each group, as well as across groups, but we can still recognize the larger grouping—a fundamental similarity of mental faculties (compare the components of the respiratory and digestive systems of the body). If I were to draw a diagram, it would contain three large boxes with arrows connecting them and many dots within each box.

            This picture is not like certain traditional pictures that seek to impose uniformity on the mind. The behaviorist views the mind as a single block of dispositions to behavior, triggered by external stimuli, as in the standard S-R model; if there is a black box mediating stimulus and response, it is a matter of conditioned connections. The empiricist picture views the mind as an array of sensations (ideas, impressions, sense-data) corresponding to perception and “inner sense”, with desires also giving rise to internal impressions. The cognitive scientist is apt to view the mind as a uniform set of computations or mental programs with no fundamental distinction drawn between the cognitive and the affective. But the tripartite picture insists that we are dealing with three very different sorts of mental reality—knowing, feeling, and doing. None of these is a special case of the other; each must be treated separately. Nor are we saying that the mind is an unruly collection of various elements with no overarching general categories, a mere set of family resemblances, an irreducible plurality. There is a strict and principled distinction between the three compartments, despite their obvious interactions. Knowledge is not emotion and emotion is not action. We really do contain three distinct types of mental entity; in the Table of Elements for the mind there are three columns. When people say things like, “In the beginning was the deed” they risk overlooking distinctions—as do rampant empiricists or gushing sentimentalists (in the philosophical sense). Knowledge and perception are not paradigms, but neither are desire and emotion or will and action.  Nor is the mind a dualism of reason and emotion, or action and contemplation, or desire and reflective thought; it is a trinity of intelligence (knowledge), desire (emotion), and will (action). Any adequate psychology must begin from this recognition, as must any adequate philosophy of mind. That includes recognizing that will is not to be assimilated to desire: to desire or need something is not to will it or act so as to obtain it. The will is the servant of desire and need, but it is not a type of desire or need. The will must respect the promptings of intelligence as it goes about its practical business, since it must accept the reality of the objective world, whereas desire knows no such realism.  [1]Traditional thinkers were quite right to distinguish volition from appetite and ponder the freedom of the will (desire is not subject to free choice any more than knowledge is). Psychology thus consists of three parts: cognitive psychology, affective psychology, and volitive psychology (to revive an old-fashioned term). Where psychologists speak of the “motor system” and seek to elucidate its workings, we do better to recognize the whole volitional system of which mere bodily movement is a part—practical reasoning, decision-making, intention, and action. This is far from the behaviorist’s preferred ontology.

            Are there any features common to the three psychological domains? Indeed there are: it is clear that a combinatorial logic applies to each of them, and that the conscious and the unconscious play their part in each. Language is obviously combinatorial, but so is thought, which means that knowledge is too. The rules of combination need not be the same, but each faculty consists of a finite set of primitive elements and a finite list of rules for conjoining them—whether perceptual primitives, or linguistic, or conceptual. Intelligence in general relies upon the creativity permitted by quasi-grammatical combination—the formation of complex entities from simpler ones according to rules. But this basic property applies also to desire and action: desires have logical and constituent structure, which enables them to proliferate indefinitely (the desires of man have no end); and so do actions because of means-end reasoning and action-plan embedding (consider building a house). Our possible actions are endless, though finitely based, just as our desires are unlimited despite our finiteness. Thus we might say that creativity is a general property of mind, applicable in all its operations. Psychology will seek to articulate the creativity in question, attempting to identify primitives and the rules that apply to them. Affective psychology is no exception: emotions too are complex inner occurrences with constituent structure (think of a feeling of wistful ennui on a fine summer’s day). Similarly, each compartment of the mind divides into a conscious part and an unconscious part—the part we see and the part that eludes us. There is conscious knowledge and conscious emotion and conscious willing—none of these faculties is wholly unconscious—but side by side with consciousness we have the unconscious processes that underlie consciousness. I won’t defend this position here but merely point out that the same basic division exists across the mind’s principal components. So we have two psychological universals despite the deep differences in the psychological realities to which they apply: the presence of combinatorial structure, and the division into conscious and unconscious. Perhaps too we can add the presence of a self that has these aspects: I think and I feel and I act. Of course, the question of the nature of the self is much debated, especially its psychological robustness, but it seems true to say that the mind contains some sort of capacity to think I-thoughts with respect to each compartment that composes it. Not that this in any way compromises the heterogeneity of the components, any more than the previous two points do, but it does indicate a principle of integration or coordination that we should acknowledge. I am a knower, a feeler, and an actor—I subsume these three categories without being one rather than another. The I is not exclusively one of them but the totality of them (so it is not, for instance, the agent of Reason alone). This allows us to speak of unification with respect to the aspects of mind. Thus generative capacity, a conscious/unconscious divide, and selfhood all work to confer an overarching unity on the mind conceived as a collection of separate sui generis systems. The trinity is not absolute, nor unbridgeable; there are common features (the body is not dissimilar). If we think of the mind as made up of distinct buildings, the buildings are unique to themselves, but bricks and mortar are used to construct each of them. The process of evolution has employed generative mechanisms in the design of each of the mind’s compartments, as well as a conscious/unconscious division of labor and an overarching agency we call the self, while ensuring that the architecture varies from one compartment to another—rather as a church is one thing, a home another, and a prison a third. Function and form vary from one compartment to another, though some common principles are applicable universally.

            The fundamental problem in designing an organism is that an organism exists in a real and possibly threatening world in which it must act to preserve itself. The way to solve this problem is to install a faculty for being informed about the world, a set of motivating inner states that reflect the organism’s needs, and a capacity to act effectively in the world. Thus it is that organisms come to possess intelligence, desire, and will—the basic prerequisites for survival. The large-scale composition of the mind results from the existential predicament of an evolved organism. The study of mind should reflect this threefold structure.  [2]

 

Colin McGinn              

    

 

  [1] Recent philosophy of action has tended to downplay the distinctness of desire and will, as in belief-desire psychology, but really we need to make a firm distinction between desire and decision. The concept of intention is not the concept of a certain type of desire, as it might be the strongest desire of the agent at the time in question. The faculty of will is not to be assimilated to mere desire: it involves a distinctive type of reasoning and must respect the facts, as they are known to the agent. Intention is no more desire (or emotion) than thought is perception.

  [2] I have said little here about the general nature of the three sorts of capacity I have identified, presuming some prior understanding, but if I were to sum up what distinguishes the capacities I would say this: knowledge is a truth-oriented state, desire is a well-being oriented state, and will is a survival-oriented state. Knowledge seeks to get the world right (to fit it), desire reflects the inner needs of the organism (mental and physical), and will strives to make reality serve the organism’s urge to live. These are different jobs and the capacities involved operate accordingly. For example, one can choose to act but not to know (or believe), and one can desire the impossible but not intend the impossible. Knowledge, desire, and intention have different “logics”.    

Share

Archive Complete

/0 Comments/in /by

That should do it for uploading my unpublished work (for the moment). There may be some duplications when I couldn’t keep track of what was already up there. Now I don’t need to worry if I pop off tomorrow! 

Share