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.)

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”.    

Zombie Worlds

Is a purely physical world possible? Our world contains mental attributes, but suppose we strip them completely away, so that nothing mental remains: will the world that is left be purely physical? I don’t mean will it actually lack all mental attributes—by hypothesis it will; I mean will it lack even the potential for mentality. Will it be nomologically impossible for mental attributes to exist in this denuded world? Some people believe that our world contains hidden mental attributes, down to the level of atoms—our friends the panpsychists. Suppose we strip these away too—are we then left with a zombie world without even the potential for consciousness? If we think of the hidden psychic attributes as fundamental independent properties of matter, like gravity and electricity, then it should be possible to imagine them away, leaving nothing even potentially mental in the world. We preserve just ordinary material entities and the basic physical forces (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force), with no mental dimension at all: have we not created a zombie world in which even the potential for  mentality has been eliminated?

            According to traditional forms of dualism, we should have. We have removed any Cartesian mental substances, any irreducible mental properties, and any proto-mental properties of the panpsychist type. This should then be a world in which minds cannot arise (without infusing it afresh from the outside)—a permanent and principled zombie world. The raw materials for the emergence of mind are just not present, so the world will remain without mind forever and necessarily. Thus a zombie world is conceivable—a world without even the possibility of mind. Our world is not a zombie world, since evidently it can produce mentality, but we can modify it in such a way as to remove mentality from the picture altogether—or so it might be thought.

            Yet it seems to me that it is really not clear that such a thing is possible. It is not clear to me that a world with only the usual particles, planets, and stars, with the usual physical forces, could not produce a world with mentality (indeed, I think our world is just such a world). In a world like this complex life could arise, and this life could involve brains like ours—physical duplicates of our brains. So prima facie the potential for mind exists in a world meeting the description given. Granted, we have no idea how this might come about, but ignorance is not the same as logical or nomological impossibility. What we have to recognize is that we just don’t know enough about the nature of the basic entities and forces to rule out the possibility of mind arising from them. This is not because there is some additional mental ingredient to matter—an independent mental dimension to things—as panpsychism supposes. For we have removed by stipulation all such mental ingredients in our thought experiment. It is because the basic physical entities and forces operating in the world might themselves contain the potential to produce mind (as they contain, surprisingly, the potential to produce life). We cannot rule this out a priori, and it seems to be the way things have to be. That is, it might be that a purely physical universe is never “purely physical”—it always contains the potential for mind. Just as there could not be zombie brains—mindless physical duplicates of our brains—so there could not be zombie universes—physical universes incapable of producing minds. Maybe any universe containing gravity and electromagnetism will have the resources to generate mind. That is what appears to be the case about our universe, putting aside dualist theories—even though we admittedly cannot make sense of it. The idea of a zombie universe is thus a fantasy, a trick of the imagination. A physical universe is always (potentially) a mental universe.

            How much of our physical universe can we strip away and still leave the possibility of mind? Now that is an interesting question, and a difficult one to answer. What if we removed electricity and magnetism, leaving only gravity (plus the strong and weak force)? Gravity would still give us motion, but would it give us mind? Is motion somehow sufficient for mind (behaviorists would say so)? Or what if we abolished gravity and left only electromagnetism? We would still have motion, and brains could still be powered by electricity, which seems to have something to do with mental processes. Maybe gravity is not necessary for mentality but electricity is. But what if we eliminated both—what if we got rid of forces altogether? Assuming such a thing to be coherent, we would have left only bits of matter with various modes of extension—with no motion and no change of any kind. Would mind still be possible under these austere conditions? That does seem inconceivable—so forces of some sort appear necessary for mind to exist. There really could be a mindless zombie world if forces and motion were removed.

However, it is far from clear that a world with the same possibilities of motion as our world could be a genuine zombie world. Maybe motion itself contains the resources to produce mind, if only we understood it better. But then there must be more to motion than meets the eye (or the human intellect). Past thinkers found motion exceedingly perplexing, even supposing that it called for divine intervention; maybe they were onto something. We have a highly etiolated and abstract conception of motion in current physics, and hence of the forces that produce it, but it is possible that it possesses a much richer nature than we imagine. In fact, it is difficult to make sense of mentality in a physical universe such as ours without some such supposition. We should be agnostic about what aspects of physical reality are irrelevant to the production of mind. A lot more might be relevant than we tend, in our ignorance, to suppose. Can we really rule out any aspects of physical reality as contributing to the existence of mind? Mass, motion, geometry, space, charge, gravity, and atomicity—all might be necessary preconditions of mind. If so, removing mentality from the world would be removing everything physical from it. What we call “the physical” might be much closer to what we call “the mental” than we tend to suppose.  [1]

  [1] Need I add that these thoughts are at the very edge of human knowledge and human intelligibility? To call them speculative is understating it.

Word and Subject

The advent of language on our planet changed the natural history of consciousness. Before language existed animal consciousness was confined to sensation, perception, memory, emotion, and will—extensive but not exhaustive features of mind. What went through an animal’s mind was limited by these forms of basic consciousness—sights and sounds, smells and tastes, fear and contentment: but no words went through any animal’s mind—consciousness was a language-free zone. Consciousness may have been rich and vivid but it was not a verbal cacophony. Then language evolved, quite recently (less than 200,000 years ago by most estimates). Before long human consciousness was alive with words—with inner babble. Just think of how much of your waking life is consumed by words: you talk to yourself all day long. Human consciousness is silent soliloquy.  [1] When you see a person walking quietly down the street you can be sure she is talking to herself a mile a minute. This is an interesting natural fact: the way language has colonized consciousness, transforming it. We still have the old forms of consciousness, but we also have this new form—linguistic consciousness. No doubt it is accompanied by an extensive linguistic unconscious, but the point I want to focus on is the presence of language to everyday human consciousness. What it is like to be a modern human is largely constituted by our consciousness of language. It is an inescapable part of what we are—we are verbal souls.

            What concerns me is the existential condition this places us in (“existential linguistics”). Sartre said that we are always conscious of our freedom and that this conditions our entire outlook; I am noting that we are always conscious of our nature as speakers (inner and outer). Freedom produces anxiety, according to Sartre: what does language produce? What does all that talking do to us? I suggest that it robs us of peacefulness: the incessant inner monologue is just so frantic and frenzied (I am putting aside intermittent external speech). We never get a moment’s respite from our inner voice (sometimes from outer voices). Only in sleep do we fully escape language, and even then dreams can be verbally laden. It is just very hard to turn the inner voice off. Sometimes we can be distracted from it or slow its activity, but it is always waiting to stride back in and buttonhole us. Animals can live in relative peace, seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing—they are not troubled by that urgent voice within (and often the inner voice is not saying soothing things). They have, or can have, a tranquil consciousness, but in linguistic beings like us there is a continuous assault on tranquility. It takes effort to quiet this voice (meditation, sport, sex): the inner speaker demands to be heard. And the sheer rapidity of inner speech adds to its hectic phenomenology: so many words coming so quickly. If you had to hear that much speech coming through your ears, it would drive you mad. There is nothing calming about human linguistic consciousness—there is something here that we feel the need to escape. That “little voice in the head” is seldom a source of peace and is never ignorable. A break from it would be nice.

            In addition human language is complex, a formidable formal object, however naturally it may slip off the inner tongue. Processing it calls for substantial mental resources: the brain must be hyperactive in order to service the furious stream of speech. Accordingly, we do not experience ourselves as linguistically simple. Just consider the complexities of grammar and the extent of vocabulary: the bigger your vocabulary the more voluble your inner speech is apt to become. All that choice, subtlety, and nuance—it’s psychologically challenging. Thus we experience ourselves as complex and intricate entities:  for we possess a language faculty of endless potential and elaborate architecture, consciously so. It’s not like having a pleasant feeling of satiation in the stomach area. Animals are not subjected to this weight of complexity; their inner lives are simple and straightforward in comparison.  [2] And it’s not that there exists some noble savage deep in the jungle untroubled by internal chatter: all humans are subjected to the barrage of language—its unrelenting presence to consciousness. Language by its nature occupies our consciousness to an extraordinary degree. It consumes our attention and shapes our experience. And it just won’t shut up. We can’t choose to turn it off for a few hours, thus regaining our pre-linguistic animal past; it is importunate to a fault. You can close your eyes and block up your ears, but you can’t cut yourself off from inner speech—it just keep jabbering away, with or without your consent. And it is not always scintillating, that inner voice, often merely obsessive and distressing. It can lead to insomnia, depression, maybe even madness.  [3]

            But there is a third aspect to word consciousness that is at least as powerful as the first two: inner language has made us much more introspective than we would otherwise be. It has caused us to be inwardly directed, precisely because inner speech is inner. Attending to the voice within makes us less attentive to other things—such as what is going on around us or other people. We have a tendency to listen too closely to the inner voice and not look around us (consider the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker). There are two sides to this inwardness. First, we simply focus more on the inside than on the outside: we are inward-looking beings, intent on what passes through our own consciousness. Animals don’t have this source of inner interest to compete with outer awareness, but we are pensive and self-obsessed by nature—constantly listening to our inner verbal performances. Language makes us live inside our heads. The other aspect is epistemic: the inner voice has too much influence over our beliefs and attitudes. What it chooses to ramble on about, obsess over, and insist upon has an inordinate role in shaping our view of the world; and it makes us particularly prone to wishful thinking, paranoia, and delusion. Inner speech is a kind of self-generated propaganda, biased and self-serving; and it is with us always. We need the fresh air of external input—from the world or other voices. The inner voice is just too persuasive, too silver-tongued. Surely an enormous proportion of the world’s problems stem from this aspect of word consciousness: we are too in thrall to what our inner voice is telling us–so proximately and persistently. Thus we are abnormally inner-directed and irrationally swayed, because of the words that filter constantly through our minds. Language has done this to us. In language users the natural history of consciousness has reached a distinctive stage: it pullulates with a torrent of verbiage. Words, words, words. No doubt this has its advantages, but it is a question whether it is conducive to wellbeing. There is something unique it is like to be human—to have a verbally saturated consciousness—but it has its downside. Language has reconfigured consciousness and we have to live with the result.  [4]

Colin McGinn 

  [1] This is not a trivial consequence of having a language, since one can imagine beings equipped with language who consign it to the periphery of awareness, using it only rarely and quite able to interrupt it.  But in humans language has taken over the premises: it is apt to fill every waking moment and sometimes seems to have a will of its own. We are condemned to language (to use a Sartrean idiom).

  [2] I am not saying that faculties like vision or even digestion are simple, but they are not evidently complex in the way language is: language displays its complexity on its face—as is obvious when trying to learn a second language. No doubt this is (partly) why we tend to place ourselves above animals in the league of sophistication.

  [3] Disorders of internal speech ought to be a psychiatric subject in its own right—a malady to which animals are not subject. There cannot be voices in the head if there is no language for them to speak.

  [4] Remember that evolution doesn’t care if pain causes unhappiness so long as it aids in survival. Language might be a good survival tool while bringing a measure of discontent or disquiet in its wake (it might also bring some consolations—poetry, jokes, conviviality). Is part of the appeal of music its ability to displace the inner voice?