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”.

 

 

Mind in World

 

I am going to describe a chain of reasoning that begins with commonsense premises and ends with a startling conclusion. It is prompted by some remarks of Berkeley concerning the instantiation of mental properties: “Now for an idea to exist in an unperceiving thing, is a manifest contradiction; for to have an idea is all one as to perceive: that therefore wherein color, figure, and the like qualities exist, must perceive them; hence it is clear there can be no unthinking substance or substratum of those ideas.”  [1] That is, if colors and the like are “ideas”, then what has them has to be a perceiving thing, since mental properties need a subject to inhere in. Let me reconstruct the argument as follows: Objects are colored; colors are mental properties; mental properties are had by psychological subjects; therefore objects are psychological subjects.  Alternatively, to possess mental properties is to have a mind, so if objects possess mental properties they must have a mind; but they do possess mental properties, in the form of color and other secondary qualities, so they have a mind. Thus every colored (etc.) object has a mind! You see what I mean about startling: the subjectivity of secondary qualities implies that objects possess minds, which means that minds are everywhere. And given that each object possesses many secondary qualities, objects have quite complex minds—consisting of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile qualities like heat and cold. We have here a rather sudden move from a platitudinous premise to an outrageous conclusion, the crucial link provided by the connection between the subjectivity of color and the possession of a mind: no mental instantiation without mentation, as we might say. As Berkeley would put it, the esse of an idea is percipi, and colors are ideas, so what has them has to be a perceiving thing.

            Of course an argument is only as good as its premises, and each of the premises in this argument has been contested: objects don’t really have colors, only items in the mind do; colors are not mental entities but physical ones; mental properties don’t need psychological subjects in order to be instantiated; the idea of minds or psychological subjects as entities is itself suspect. I won’t try to defend each of the premises in the argument, though I think they are all true, but I will try to articulate what lies behind them. There have been many attempts to deny that objects are really colored, locating colors instead in the mind of the perceiver; but they run afoul of a very stubborn intuition, namely that colors (etc.) are as much intrinsic properties of objects as figure and motion—that is certainly how they look. Some say we project them onto objects by a special kind of objectifying mental act, but there is no introspective evidence that such an act ever occurs (is it voluntary?); also this theory has trouble explaining the sense in which objects continue to have colors when not being perceived.  [2] Some try to reduce colors to wavelengths and the like, but this underestimates the difference between primary and secondary qualities; and we have a natural conviction that colors, sounds, tastes, etc. are mental in nature. Why we have this conviction is an interesting question, which I won’t go into, but it is robust and widely shared: it is simply how such qualities strike us, as with sensations of pain and indeed sensations of color. The third premise is where the argumentative work gets done—the link between mentality and mentation. That is the novelty of Berkeley’s observation: other philosophers of the period assumed that colors are mental but didn’t draw the conclusion that they need a psychological subject or mind in the object, or existing somehow alongside it. They perhaps assumed that the mind of the perceiver is the subject of the mental property that is color, since there must be one somewhere: the color is in the object in virtue of being perceived there by the human mind. All we get from the third premise is that there has to be a subject of some sort not that the subject is the object itself. The identity of the subject is so far left open.

            So that is the key premise that powers the argument. There are several options for making this premise come out true that fail to imply universal mentation. Berkeley’s own preference is that the needed subject is simply God: all ideas subsist in his mind—no ordinary object is ever the substance in which an idea inheres. Thus Berkeley infers theistic immaterialism from the third premise: spirits are the things that colors inhere in not material substances, God being the spirit in chief. Along the same lines someone might propose that there exists a cosmic mind pervading the universe, and this mind is the one in virtue of which objects are colored—the true subject of the mental qualities of color and the rest. Or we might just follow tradition and suppose that the human mind is the one that provides the necessary grounding for the mental properties in question—it is the thing that colors exist in when an object looks to be colored. Again, I won’t discuss these proposals in detail; it seems to me that there are obvious problems with each of them and that the natural theory is simply that the object itself is the subject of the mental properties it apparently instantiates. We surely don’t want to follow Berkeley in banishing material substance altogether and with it the belief that some properties are not intrinsically mental; and God seems like a rather heavy-handed way to deal with a problem more easily solved without assuming his existence and direct participation in perception. Similarly for the cosmic mind as the true subject of color, heat, taste, and so on: we don’t want to wheel in such heavy machinery if we can avoid it. As for the human mind, the obvious problem, insisted upon by Berkeley, is that objects remain colored when not being perceived by us, so it cannot be that the instantiation of color depends on our perceiving the object all the time, since we don’t (this is where God proves his metaphysical worth for Berkeley). We need a continuous perception to allow for the continuous existence of the secondary qualities even when unperceived by us or other perceiving organic creatures. Thus the natural theory is that the object itself contains a mind in which its qualities continuously inhere: the object is continuously red, say, because it continuously perceives itself as red. It has a mind that never sleeps.

            Here you shrilly protest: “But it is absurd to suppose that ordinary colored objects perceive colors in the way we do!” The force of this protest depends on the final five words of it: for we need not assume that the object perceives red in the way we do. Minds come in many grades and types across the animal kingdom, from the simple and primitive to the complex and sophisticated. When an insect sees color, say, this might be very different from the way mammals like us do. Extrapolating, we might suppose that colored objects perceive color in a way very different even from the perceptions of lowly insects. To borrow a term from the panpsychist literature, they have proto perception of color, not full-blooded human-like perception of it. Indeed, we might view the position being described as a form of macro-panpsychism: observable objects have minds in much the same way panpsychists have envisaged elementary particles having minds—inchoately, dimly, darkly. We might have no clear idea of this form of perception, viewed from the inside, but it is theoretically possible. Then we can say that colored objects have minds in whatever way inorganic things have minds, which might be quite alien to us. We might not know what it is like to perceive red for a red object, but that is neither here nor there so far as the reality of such perception is concerned. We have to keep a broad mind when it comes to the variety of minds (bats, Martians, atoms, and pillar boxes). And it seems that some enlargement of the domain of mind is required by the simple fact of objects having secondary qualities, by the argument cited.

            It may help to ease the reader’s qualms if I remark a structural parallel between the minds I am postulating and more conventional minds. Objects have two sorts of property corresponding to the primary and secondary quality distinction, only one of which requires the existence of a psychological subject. Similarly brains have two sorts of property conventionally designated mental and physical, only one of which requires the existence of a psychological subject. Thus both objects and brains have a psychophysical nature, having both a mental aspect and a non-mental aspect. And just as we can describe different sorts of theory of the relation between these aspects for things with brains, so we can describe different sorts of theory for the two aspects of objects. We can envisage property dualism, materialist reduction, eliminative materialism, and even substance dualism (objects contain immaterial souls as the bearers of their secondary qualities). We have a mind-body problem for virtually everything, because mentally constituted secondary qualities are everywhere. Might it be that objects already exhibited the basic form of a psychophysical being long before any organic such beings came along? Could this be the basis for the advent of animal minds—not micro mentality, as in panpsychism, but macro mentality, as in colored, hot, tasty objects? What is clear is that there is a lot more mentality in nature than we bargained for, under the current hypothesis. In Berkeley’s system there is nothing but mentality; in this system it is everywhere the secondary qualities are. To repeat: colors are “ideas”, and ideas need minds, and minds in the colored objects are the best hypothesis. Colors are mind-dependent, but the minds they depend on reside in the objects of perception not in the human perceiver. It would be very strange to suppose that ideas in human minds depend for their existence on other minds existing at some remove from them; in the same way it would be strange if the ideas existing in material objects depended for their existence on minds extraneous to them (such as human minds) instead of on minds located inside those objects. Common sense tells us that objects are colored and that colors are mental, and it is not contrary to common sense to infer that those properties need a subject to inhere in—thus crediting them with a psychological subject of some sort. Hence we get mind in world.

            Querulously you enquire whether these minds are conscious, and if so what it is like to have this consciousness. Here the answer is as above: consciousness comes in many grades and types, and it may be that the consciousness of red objects is of a primitive and (for us) unimaginable type. It may be a step down from the consciousness of even the simplest conscious organism—deeply proto, inscrutably dim and dark. Who knows? As to what it’s like, we can’t leap to the conclusion that it is like seeing something red: for this is about what it’s like to be red not to experience red; and it may be that having the property of being red is not accompanied by the phenomenology of seeing red. The object perceives red but it may not perceive that property by having the experience of seeing red (you can perceive a hippopotamus without it seeming to you to be a hippopotamus). Still, maybe the phenomenology is just its seeming to the object that it sees a red thing, in which case red objects have experiences as of red (nature is phenomenologically parsimonious). The important point is that it has to seem to something that things are a certain way, since the esse of “ideas” is percipi: red objects have to perceive their color in a certain way, whatever that way is. So they need a way to sense their own ideas (subjective qualities)—just we need a way to sense our own pains or color sensations. Red is to red things as pain is to things in pain. And let it not be forgotten that ordinary objects are extremely complex and in many ways mysterious: all those atoms and their constituents and the mysterious forces governing them. It is not beyond their powers to allow room for mental properties to be instantiated by the objects they compose. But it must be admitted that we need a radical revision of our view of nature if we are to take on the kind of metaphysical picture I am describing: we need to accept that mind is everywhere and right on the surface of things (not lurking imperceptibly in the particles that constitute matter, as in micro panpsychism). One surprising result of this is that some mental properties are not imperceptible and private but perceptible and public: for we can sense the secondary qualities of things with our eyes and ears and mouths. Here the mind is fully open to view, not hidden inside an opaque shell. So mind is not just literally all around us in the inorganic world but also plainly visible in the perceptible properties of things—we can see “ideas”. Whenever you see a red object or taste sugar you are literally seeing or tasting a mind, because you are sensing a mental attribute that is backed by a mental substance (i.e. thing that perceives in some modality). There are many more minds than we thought and they are a lot more knowable than we ever suspected. There is mind in the world, and it lies right before our eyes.  [3]

 

  [1] Principles of Human Knowledge, section 7.

  [2] This is why we call color blindness a form a blindness: it is a lack of sensitivity to what is objectively there not just a failure to project what other people project. The idea that a red object ceases to be red when I shut my eyes is surely preposterous, and it doesn’t matter if the entire human race shuts its eyes. This kind of point makes trouble for dispositional theories of color and other theories that make color dependent on the human perceiver.

  [3] One might ask why objects have minds in the way suggested: it can hardly be because minds are an evolutionary adaptation for them with all sorts of benefits for survival. No answer to this question appears forthcoming, but then we don’t know why objects have many of the properties they do either—they just do. That’s just the way the universe is made (theists might suggest that God gave us secondary qualities to add to life’s rich pageant). Physics doesn’t care about secondary qualities (perhaps it should), but physics is not the measure of the real. In effect, sentient beings came into a world already inhabited by sentient beings, though of another order.

 

Is Matter Intelligible?

 

Matter has long been felt to be problematic. Berkeley thought it unintelligible, mainly on account of its causal inertness. Russell found it suspiciously akin to old-fashioned substance, replacing it with events and neutral (i.e. mental) stuff. The positivists suspected it of the crime of metaphysics and declared it meaningless. It is certainly not a perceptual given: we have no sense impression of matter. Please don’t say matter is what composes the objects of perception: that could be anything as far as perception is concerned—sense data, immaterial souls, God’s body. Matter is a postulate, a theoretical entity. As such it demands explication: what is it? Several ideas have suggested themselves: solidity is one, extension another. There are obvious problems with solidity: it is a dispositional not a categorical concept; it is not clear that all matter is solid; it is questionable whether only matter is solid (impenetrable)—what about minds and selves? Thus extension has tended to be the default position, following Descartes: the mind is not extended but matter always is (even if not invariably solid). This is the essence of matter, what makes it stand apart. The idea is encouraged by the phenomenology of perception, especially vision: for we see the world as composed of segmented objects of varying shapes and sizes—matter is simply the stuff that has these spatially defined properties. The mind doesn’t strike us this way, as extended in space, as consisting of variously shaped discrete objects. And extension is intelligible, as intelligible as geometry, so matter can be intelligibly defined. Moreover, this definition of matter fits nicely with mechanism as a causal thesis: objects cause changes in other objects by making contact at their boundaries (and not otherwise)—their extension is what fixes their sphere of operation. Extended bodies move about and collide with other extended bodies; and that’s how the world works, causally speaking. Matter, then, is the ideal stuff to constitute the subject matter of physics, because its essence—extension—is integral to causation. The natural world is made up of extended things interacting by contact causation. Notice that objects need well-defined boundaries for this conception to work; they need surfaces and geometric figure. They need to be as they appear in perception, more or less. The theoretical postulate must mirror perceptual phenomenology.

            But now there is a problem: his name is Isaac Newton. Here we need to understand just how upsetting Newton was to Cartesian mechanistic physics; indeed I am going to suggest (following others) that Newton destroyed the concept of matter, by rendering it unintelligible. And not just Newton: the pioneers of electromagnetism drove the point home even more powerfully (James Clerk Maxwell has a lot to answer for). The problem, famously, has to do with action at a distance—causal powers exercised over empty space. There was already a problem about space: space has extension like matter, but space isn’t material. Descartes solved it by declaring space to be a form of matter, and relative views of space appeared to allow room for this type of maneuver (not to mention more modern views of space); so this objection looked to be surmountable, if disquieting. But the new problem was far more troubling because it questioned the foundations of mechanism. Objects no longer interact by contact at their boundaries: their mode of extension does not confine their causal powers. Bodies can influence other bodies that lie far beyond their boundaries and never make contact with them. That looks to spell the demise of mechanism (but see below), but it also throws into question the whole idea of material extension. For where now do bodies begin and end? What is the extension of the Sun, say? We already know that the Sun is in fiery flux at its surface and that it sends out particles of light across space, thus enlarging its sphere of operations; but with Newton we need to accept that it projects a force across space that has an impact on other bodies. Why isn’t this force part of the Sun? Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there (imagine it appearing as colored in some way). Similarly, we now know that bodies exert electromagnetic force that projects beyond their surfaces (though diminishing quickly)—or do these forces really just enlarge the surfaces? Under mechanism we don’t need to worry about these questions, because bodies have no effects that go beyond their mode of extension; but with gravity and electromagnetism we have to reckon with effects that reach beyond what we are naturally inclined to call their boundaries.  [1] This idea comes to seem arbitrary and hidebound: modern physics suggests that objects are not as confined in one place as we thought, and that their physics extends beyond what we can perceive as boundaries. Thus there were suggestions that bodies should be viewed as spread out in space according to their causal powers: the Sun is everywhere it exerts an influence! The gravitational and electromagnetic fields are parts of the object itself (as the earth’s atmosphere is part of the earth). This has the advantage of salvaging something of mechanism, because now we can say that objects exert causal power via the fields that surround (constitute) them: the fields “touch” remote (i.e. proximate to the fields) objects. We don’t think of the forces as extrinsic to the extended object, which makes things look causally occult; we think of the object as including the forces via the fields. In fact, we drop the idea of spatially enclosed objects with definite shapes and sizes hovering at some distance from each other, replacing it with the idea of spatially distributed fields with no clear boundaries and shapes. That is, we give up the idea of extension as a theoretically relevant property, as it was under pre-Newtonian Cartesian physics. In effect, this is the physics we find today, in which the concept of extension plays no significant role, not as classically defined anyway. The geometry is quite different, as is the picture of underlying reality. Perceptual phenomenology is no longer taken for granted as a guide to the objective nature of the physical world.

            But this destroys the concept of matter. Matter is no longer a useful and viable concept for describing the world of physical interactions: it isn’t part of the physics of gravity and electromagnetism. The only (halfway) intelligible definition of matter, as extension, no longer applies to the subject matter of physics: there isn’t any matter in that sense (as there isn’t any phlogiston or entelechy). We can certainly allow for the “physical reality” of fields and forces, but these are not to be characterized in terms of classical extension, and hence are not “matter”; they are invisible unbounded spheres of influence of a rather elusive character. We have no commonsense ontology for fields and forces, as we do for extended objects under mechanism; physics has left our ordinary notions of material things behind. The object you see when you look at a cup, with its neat boundaries and definite shape, is not the object described by physics, which radiates out across space in virtue of its gravitational and electromagnetic powers. Just think of a simple magnet: its physical reality is not confined to the spot in space where the magnet appears to be. The reality consists of a rather mysterious force that acts on remote objects (remote according to ordinary perception, not remote from the point of view of the field of force involved). There is no matter in the sense ventured by traditional physics, simply because the commonsense notion of extension turns out not to apply to the physical world. Descartes was well aware that he was offering a theoretical edifice into which physical phenomena could be placed, but with later physics it turned out that this edifice had no application. Physics is not “the science of matter” in any intelligible sense, because there is none. Nor could there be once the reality of gravitational and electromagnetic forces is recognized. The concept derives from pre-scientific ideas rooted in the common sense associated with human perception; it is not part of the “absolute conception” propounded by physics. We could even say that the perception of extension in objects is a kind of sensory illusion—there is no such thing out there. It arises because fields and forces are invisible and because we have a biological need to segment the world into localized packets. We thus think that reality objectively comprises extended objects with clear boundaries, but that is projection encouraged by illusion. The world of Newton and Clerk Maxwell, not to mention quantum physics, is very different, better imagined as a kind of sea of overlapping fields and forces. It isn’t spherical billiard balls striking each other in the way the manifest image suggests; it’s shapeless fields of force invisibly distributed over space flowing into each other. Currents and smears, not nuggets and chunks:  there is no matter to be found anywhere.  [2]

 

Colin McGinn          

  [1] There is a subsidiary worry about gravity and matter if we define matter in terms of extension, namely that gravity does not vary with extension. It isn’t that the bigger or more spherical an object is the greater its gravitational attraction, yet the essence of matter is said to be extension. This is awkward for Descartes and the mechanists because the key property of matter (viz. extension) is not responsible for its most conspicuous effect (viz. gravity). Instead gravity is a function of mass, which is not definable in terms of extension. Instead mass is “quantity of matter”, which leaves us where we started: is mass the “quantity of extended things”? This difficulty might induce us to switch our definition of matter from extension to mass, but that too has problems, as Descartes was no doubt aware, which is why he doesn’t propose it. Definitions in terms of inertia are dispositional not categorical, and why should minds and selves not have inertia? And what about extended stuff that has no inertial mass? Mass by itself cannot define a workable notion of matter.

  [2] The idea that according to modern physics there is no matter in the universe is not of course original to me; in fact, it is a commonplace of popular science. What I have done here is spell out the reasoning behind this verdict, with special reference to the concept of extension. Without this concept the word “matter” has no definite meaning, signifying something like “the stuff the world is made of”—whatever the nature of that stuff might be.