There is something surprising about the Cogito: it is not merely trivially true like, “I think, therefore I have states of mind” or “I think, therefore there is a non-empty set of my thoughts”. What is it that is surprising? Not the claim that I have thoughts, and not the claim that I exist, but the claim that my existence follows from my having thoughts. I take it for granted that I think and that I exist, but I don’t take it for granted that these two facts are logically connected—the Cogito informs me of that connection. That is the point of the Cogito. It is the “therefore” in it that commands interest. It is surprising that the existence of a self should be implicit in acts of thinking—that such acts should require a thing to perform them. For could there not be acts without an actor? Compare the Corporea: “I breathe, therefore I have a body”. I know that I breathe and I know that I have a body, but it is surprising to be told that the former demonstrates the latter—that having a body is logically implicit in acts of breathing. That is, it is surprising that we can infer the existence of a thing that breathes from the mere fact of the existence of breaths. For could there not be events without objects? Descartes invites us to accept that we are thinking things (“substances”) based on the premise that we perform thinking acts—as someone might try to derive bodily things from bodily acts. But the inference in both cases is notoriously questionable: all we can derive logically from acts and events are acts and events, not things that are the subject of such acts and events. We might be committed to a metaphysical theory that recognizes only acts and events, with no objects in the picture, or we might believe in the metaphysical possibility of free-floating acts and events; in neither case will we see a logical connection between the existence of acts or events, on the one hand, and the existence of objects that perform or undergo these acts or events, on the other. We certainly won’t think that we can prove to a skeptic that there are things that think or breathe merely from the fact that there is thinking or breathing (hence Lichtenberg’s objection). Such a proof requires a substantive metaphysical assumption and is certainly not self-evident. So the interesting part of the Cogito is also the most questionable part. Such is philosophy.

            Now consider Hume’s anti-Cogito. Hume invites us to agree that we do not exist, or at least that we have no rational reason to suppose that we do (we might believe it instinctively). The argument for this is that we cannot find the self by looking within: we find only perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, not a self that has them. I know that I have thoughts because I can be conscious of my thoughts introspectively, but I cannot know that I exist by being conscious of myself introspectively—for I do not encounter myself in this way (nor in any other way).  [1] I have thoughts and yet I do not exist (or there is no reason to believe that I do). We might even put Hume’s argument in the form of a deduction: “I think, therefore I do not exist”.  [2] For it is the known existence of my thoughts that reveals by contrast that my self is unknowable: I am not the kind of object of knowledge that my thoughts are—they can be encountered and I cannot. Moreover, for Hume I am rendered redundant once thoughts are introduced: if I have a robust mental life, why do I need to be a thing that has this mental life—isn’t the mental life enough? According to Hume, the self contrasts with thoughts epistemologically, not being knowable as they are; and it is surplus to requirements. Thoughts are therefore not a reason to believe in the self, but a reason to doubt its existence. We can never know the self to exist in the way we know thoughts to exist—by being presented with the self. And there is no other way we could know the self to exist. Thoughts crowd out the self instead of ushering it in.

            Hume’s argument is also surprising. It is certainly surprising to be told that I do not exist, based on the premise that I can’t be encountered in introspection; but this is actually a bad argument—and I don’t think Hume is guilty of it (though many of his readers have been). For it does not follow from the fact that I cannot encounter Xthat X does not exist—that would be to infer an ontological conclusion from an epistemological premise. But Hume’s argument is surprising even without that familiar non sequitur, because it is surprising that the self does not possess the kind of accessibility that thoughts possess: we assume that thoughts can be encountered, and we assume likewise that the self can be, but Hume persuades us that the latter assumption is false. It is surprising to discover that something whose existence we take for granted (rightly so, in my view) is not knowable in the way we naively supposed. The surprise here is analogous to the surprise delivered by Hume’s argument about causation: we assume causation to exist (rightly so, in my view) but are surprised to discover that it cannot be encountered in the perception of causally related objects (because of the imperceptibility of necessary connection). The self similarly eludes encounter—and that is surprising. What Hume’s argument tells us (or purports to) is that we have no reason to believe in the self that is based on the known existence of thoughts, still less on direct experience of the self. Hence it is an anti-Cogito: “I think, but I cannot infer from this that I exist”.

            Both Descartes’ Cogito and Hume’s anti-Cogito rank as paradigms of philosophy: they find (or claim to find) something surprising in even the most familiar and intimately known facts. This tendency to find the surprising in the commonplace is characteristic of philosophy. You can learn a lot about philosophy just by considering these two arguments.  [3]

 

  [1] Descartes’ argument can be read as conceding Hume’s main point (setting aside chronology), since Descartes never claims that we have direct conscious awareness of the self—hence it must be inferred from things of which we do have such awareness, viz. thoughts. From Hume’s point of view, however, no such argument could ever work, since selves and thoughts are “distinct existences”, so that one never logically implies the other.

  [2] I am here calling “Hume’s argument” an argument that many have derived from Hume—to the effect that there is no such thing as the self. In fact, I don’t think Hume argued this way, concluding only that we have no knowledgeof the self. But I am trying to avoid exegetical questions and focus in on a well-known line of thought.

  [3] The main purpose of this essay is pedagogical: setting Descartes’ argument and Hume’s argument side-by-side, contrasting and comparing. I think this would be a good way to begin an introductory philosophy course: two compelling lines of thought that lead in opposite directions.

                                               

 

 

Degrees of Determinism

 

 

People usually talk about determinism and indeterminism as if it were a binary affair. But there are different strengths of determinism and indeterminism, with some more plausible than others. Let me first define the strongest possible kind of determinism: if a cause from the actual world is repeated in a possible world, it will always produce an effect just like the one produced in the actual world. The cause necessitates the effect, in the strongest sense of necessity. Whenever causes recur there cannot be any variation in the effect produced. Duplicate causes produce duplicate effects as a matter of (metaphysical) necessity. We can compare this to the claim that nothing can follow a given number in the number series but the number that actually follows it (e.g. nothing can follow 3 but 4): a given number determines the number that follows it. Similarly, the premises of a valid argument determine the conclusion in the sense that in no possible world does anything else follow from those premises. We use the word “follow” in each of these cases and the determinist claim is that nothing can follow except what doesfollow. This is stronger than saying that in our universe like causes always produce like effects; it says that in every possible universe the sequence of events is the same as in our universe, given identity of causes. If one billiard ball hits another in our universe and brings about a certain effect, then an exactly alike cause in any possible world will produce an effect of the same type. We might call this “full-strength determinism”.

            But we can dilute this kind of determinism in different ways. We can replace talk of metaphysical necessity with talk of nomological necessity or we can limit determinism to our own universe while remaining agnostic about other possible universes. We can also introduce the notion of partial determinism understood as follows: the properties of the cause don’t fully determine the properties of the effect, but they do partially determine them. Given the cause, the effect must have a certain subset of the properties it has in other instances—though not all. The effect doesn’t have to be exactly alike in all cases involving the same cause (type not token), but it has to be alike in certain respects. Then we can have degrees of determinism fixed by how many properties have to be invariant across cases: is it most properties or many or a few? And which ones have to be invariant from case to case? For example, the impacting billiard ball might have to produce the same linear motion from case to case, but not the same spin or the same noise or the same displacement of air. Maybe some properties will be selected as always present in the effect while others are optional; or it may be held that no particular set of properties must be present. Thus full determinism is rejected but partial determinism is retained—the weakest kind being that at least some effect has to be produced though it may be very different from case to case (the billiard ball has to do something, but what it does is entirely up for grabs).

            Corresponding to degrees of determinism we have degrees of indeterminism. The indeterminist need not be committed to the very strongest form of indeterminism, namely there is no uniformity from case to case. If someone were to claim that nature possesses no uniformity at all, with like causes always producing unlike effects, we would reject that as empirically false: it is simply not the case that billiard ball collisions sometimes cause motion in the struck ball and sometimes cause it to change color and sometimes make it explode and sometimes turn it into an egg. None of this happens, so indeterminism of this kind is obviously false. Still, it is an apparently intelligible view—it might describe a logically possible world. But we can scale back from it as we did with determinism, limiting indeterminism to the possibility that some properties of the effect are not uniform from case to case.  For instance, the exact trajectories of particles may not be determined by the cause, but the cause cannot produce no motion at all or a change of color or an alteration of electric charge. That is, determinism might be partially true but not wholly true; thus indeterminism is only partially true. No one has ever claimed that our universe is subject to full-strength indeterminism; the claim has only been that indeterminism holds in certain limited domains (usually quantum physics and free will). Nor has anyone claimed that there are possible worlds that are subject to indeterminism in every respect: worlds in which identical causes always produce wildly varying effects—from balls moving to balls igniting to balls turning into eggs. I myself find the idea of such a world repugnant to reason—a mere fancy. In any case, it is not what people mean who advocate indeterminism. They typically mean something quite limited, a small breach in the general determinism of nature. They believe in local indeterminism not global indeterminism.

            This raises a question that should receive more attention: if extreme indeterminism is out of the question, why is partial indeterminism deemed acceptable? If nature can be non-uniform in one area, why can’t it be non-uniform in all areas? If it makes sense here, why doesn’t it make sense everywhere? People who say that quantum mechanics shows that the world is not deterministic are speaking sloppily, since all they mean is that certainproperties of quantum effects are not always preserved in the presence of the same cause. But many properties arepreserved, so determinism is true with respect to those properties. No one has ever given any reason for supposing that nothing is determined by the cause, so that any kind of effect can follow the same cause; and such a claim is both factually false and dubiously intelligible. To repeat: it is not true that there is radical variation from case to case, with identical causes generating wildly different effects; and if we try to imagine a world like that, we get something that tests credulity. How could a billiard ball turn another billiard ball into an egg or a thought or a singing nun? Such things are impossible! But if they are impossible, why is it not impossible for the same cause to produce a slightly different effect? If they are impossible because determinism is a condition of possibility, then why can there be even minor violations of determinism? It is as if the indeterminist implicitly understands that his startling doctrine can only be pushed so far before it collapses into absurdity, so he declines to consider pushing it further. We end up with the view that only a very limited indeterminism could be true, on pain of leaving all reality behind. It can only occur in small pockets of the universe. Mostly things are deterministic.

To me this suggests that we should do our best to find alternative explanations of observable phenomena, accepting even local indeterminism with great reluctance. In the case of free will, we should not rush to embrace indeterminism without asking ourselves what we would think of more extreme forms of indeterminism; we should work to develop a view of free will that avoids anything like this.  [1] In the case of quantum mechanics, who knows what to say, but we should be cautious about adopting indeterminism even in this restricted domain—given that we would never accept it more globally. No one thinks, for instance, that the unpredictability of the weather is a good reason to accept meteorological indeterminism; and anyone who thinks it is should be asked whether they think the world is subject to indeterminism through and through. How much of an indeterminist are you are you willing to be? I myself am inclined to accept full-strength determinism, as strong as logical and mathematical determinism (though it is hard to see how that position could be proved); but no sane person is willing to accept the correspondingly strong form of indeterminism (nothing is determined). My point has been that local indeterminism is the same kind of thing as the global kind: if it is intelligible in one place, it ought to be intelligible everywhere. And why should it be true of only certain things and not others? Shouldn’t nature be uniformly indeterminist if it is indeterminist at all? It would be strange if nature were only partially governed by laws, with some parts lawful and others lawless: for example, protons fall under laws but electrons don’t. Could cats be law-governed but not dogs? Could particles and people be subject to indeterminism but nothing else? What makes these things so exceptional? And anyway particles and people are somewhat deterministic even according to indeterminist views—so why aren’t they wholly so? Local indeterminism is an anomalous position given that we must accept that determinism is the general rule.  [2]

 

  [1] I think that free will entails determinism, so I have no motivation to invoke indeterminism here. It would be nice to show that quantum mechanics likewise entails determinism (!) and is not merely compatible with it.

  [2] The belief in miracles also involves a curious confinement: they happen locally and sporadically, not universally. It is as if people need to believe that nature is not wholly natural—there are pockets of the supernatural in nature. Similarly, the belief in indeterminism is apt to be confined to certain areas, as if the rule of determinism has to have exceptions. The issues are connected inasmuch as miracles will involve breaches of determinism and indeterminism has the look of a miracle (is that the psychological basis of the attraction of indeterminism?). Indeterminism excites our sense of wonder while determinism reminds us of the inescapability of the daily grind.  

                                               

 

 

Dark Mind

 

 

Dark matter pre-dates its detection by billions of years: hence its name. It is dark precisely in the sense that it does not emit or reflect light—it doesn’t interact with electromagnetic radiation at all. It is detectable only by means of remote gravitational effects. It is nowhere to be seen, though it constitutes most of the universe’s matter. Dark matter is to be distinguished from invisible matter—the kind that is too small to see (even with a microscope) or too distant to transmit light to planet Earth. Invisible matter is ordinary matter consisting of protons and neutrons (“baryonic matter”) and it interacts with light, whereas dark matter is another kind of matter entirely. A black hole is not made of dark matter, though it is necessarily invisible, because it is ordinary matter (though highly condensed) and does interact with light. Both types of matter contrast with visible matter, which is the kind that emits light signals that reach our eyes or telescopes. We could say that the universe contains three sorts of matter: visible, invisible, and anti-visible. There is the visible, the contingently invisible, and the necessarily invisible. It is in the nature of dark matter not to be visible, an aspect of its physical make-up, unlike the matter of galaxies too far away to be detectable by means of emitted light. Dark matter cannot be known by electromagnetic means; it actively prohibits visual revelation. It is intrinsically un-seeable.

            Yet it is matter in the ordinary sense (though not in the ordinary way). It has mass, a particulate structure (though of unidentified particles), extension in space, gravitational effects, and impenetrability. It really is matter, despite being undetectable via light. Thus it lacks an epistemic property possessed by both visible and invisible matter: they can be known in a certain way and it cannot. We might say that it is a contingent property of matter that it is knowable via light—some matter is not knowable in this way.  [1] It is true to say that dark matter is invisible, like invisible non-dark matter, but it is strongly invisible—invisible by nature not circumstance. For humans it belongs at the lowest rung of accessibility, though it is no less real for that—or less material. Clearly it would be wrong to define matter in terms of visibility: that would be to conflate epistemology with ontology. The right thing to say is that some matter is positively opposed to exposure: it wears a cloak of invisibility (or has internalized such a cloak). There is nothing magical or “unempirical” about dark matter; it is just matter that refuses to engage with our best means of knowing about the physical world. And why should the physical world feel the need to oblige our epistemic faculties? It is just an accident that a proportion of it interacts with light in the way that our eyes can exploit—it might all have been dark. What we have discovered is that certain astronomical anomalies require the postulation of this kind of invisible matter; thus we need additional matter over and above the matter previously recognized. The material universe is more extensive than we thought, and some parts of it are less accessible than others. The universe contains a hidden subterranean region; not all of it can have a light shone on it. Indeed, humans might never have detected dark matter (as it was not detected for the whole of human history until the twentieth century); it might have lurked in darkness forever, cloaked in the obscurity that is its wont. Its telltale signs are few and slender (and still rejected by some theorists); yet its existence is robust. We just happen to be perceptually cut off from it.

            But this is not an essay about astronomy: it is an essay about the mind. For what I wish to suggest is that a comparable tripartite division may obtain with respect to the mind: that there is a conscious mind, an unconscious mind, and a dark mind. The dark mind is aptly characterized as an anti-conscious mind: it actively resists conscious accessibility. It is in its nature not to be available to conscious scrutiny. It is unconscious by necessity. As it were, it refuses to interact with conscious light. It is not even the kind of thing that could be conscious. Yet it is fully and completely mental. Let me state the view with maximum ferocity: there exists a part of the mind that has all the usual characteristics of the mental and yet it is necessarily not conscious. By the usual characteristics I mean: intentionality, phenomenology, combinatorial fecundity, and functionality. It might be an alien type of mind, not sharing its specific features with our conscious mind, yet it is indisputably a type of mind (not just brain circuits or some sort of computational-functional system). It is like dark matter in being both a type of mind in good standing and yet cut off from awareness: it is a type of mind that is opposed to consciousness. The dark mind might be composed of elements hitherto unidentified, operating by different principles from those of the conscious mind: but it is a type of mind nonetheless. It is just that consciousness is not its medium, its lifeblood, its sine qua non. We are never conscious of it and never can be.

            Thus I distinguish the anti-conscious from the unconscious, as astronomers distinguish the anti-visible (dark) from the merely invisible. We may speak of the “ordinary” unconscious and populate it according to predilection: presumably it contains dormant memories, banks of cognitive machinery, and maybe a soupcon of Freud. These all belong in the invisible category as opposed to the dark (or strongly invisible): they could become conscious, or they are the kind of thing that might be. I don’t want to get caught up in the metaphysics of the unconscious here, or in specific issues about what kinds of unconscious exist, so let me just say that memories are the kind of thing that belong to the unconscious in the ordinary sense: they can be conscious and are not designed to elude consciousness. In fact, they pop into consciousness all the time—there is nothing dark about memories, even if some may be beyond recall (cf. those distant lightless galaxies). In the case of Freudian theory, the matter is not so straightforward, because of the mechanism of repression; but it was supposed that repression could be reversed and the repressed materials brought to consciousness. Also the Freudian unconscious mind seems remarkably like a conscious mind that has slipped coyly behind a curtain. This mind is not anti-conscious in that it is entirely removed from consciousness, existing separately from it in a realm of its own, not even interfacing with consciousness. What I am talking about is a mind that exists completely below the radar and has probably existed in this way for millions of years (ever since Mind came along in the course of evolution). It pays no heed to consciousness and consciousness pays no heed to it (but see below). Its darkness is total. It revels in its inaccessibility.

            The first thing I want to say about such a mind is that it is conceptually possible; it contains no contradiction. There could be a mind that is completely cut off from consciousness. Just as there can be an unconscious mind, so there can be a necessarily unconscious mind—unconscious by nature or design, not by contingent circumstance. The second thing I want to say is that such a mind is not incompatible with what we know of psychology, both the commonsense kind and the scientific kind. The third thing is that it wouldn’t be all that surprising if such a mind exists: for brains are complex and ancient organs with many a crevice and chamber, and it may well be that long ago they hatched mental attributes that never ascended to the level of consciousness. Maybe the human brain is a hotbed of minds that hover below the radar (“junk minds”, like junk DNA): there could be all sorts of mental reality thrown up by the brain that never see the light of day. Isn’t it strange that some parts of the brain produce mind and some do not? Well, maybe more parts do than we realize, given the limited reach of consciousness. What if our brain houses remnants of mind descended from the brains of our ancestors, from fish to ape? The brain is a wondrous organ still largely unplumbed and it may cater to minds both light and dark.

            Now someone may object that there is a difference between dark mind and dark matter, namely that there is no evidence for dark mind, but there is for dark matter. Admittedly the evidence for the existence of dark matter is remote and disputable (if now generally accepted), but at least there is some evidence for it: dark matter makes sense of a number of astronomical puzzles that nothing else seems to. It can seem like an extravagant hypothesis in view of the odd anomalies it is wheeled in to explain, what with the vast expansion of matter postulated in the universe, but at least the hypothesis has a firm basis in observable reality—what can dark mind point to of comparable evidential value? In order to answer this question we need to ask if there are any areas of perplexity in psychology comparable to those in astronomy before dark matter was introduced: where does psychology, commonsense and other, draw a theoretical blank? And would dark mind do anything to resolve such puzzles? Notice that, even if there were no evidence, that would not refute the hypothesis—it would just put it beyond the reach of empirical test. And it would not be surprising if dark mind had no observational support, given the nature of the hypothesis. We might simply never know whether we harbor a dark mind (or minds). Such a mind might exist undetectably.

            But I think there is one promising area to look at—or look at again: dreams. It is hard to discuss this subject without feeling the looming figure of Freud, but it may be that though he had many things wrong about dreams he had some things right. Maybe he had the general architecture right but not the specific furniture. I have no intention of venturing into the murky territory of dream interpretation; I will just say dogmatically that Freud was right to postulate a parallel mental system responsible (at least in part) for dream content. To put it in astronomical terms, dreams are an observational anomaly that calls for additional mental machinery. This is because they cannot be explained by means of standard psychological processes. Again, I will not defend this assertion, though I think it is evidently correct; my point is that if it is true then we have a reason to postulate a dark mind. Not just a mind that happens to be unconscious, or which resembles our conscious mind in all but its consciousness, but a mind that is resolutely unconscious and decidedly peculiar—fundamentally alien. It is irrational, associative, unrealistic, anxiety-ridden, bizarre, nonsensical, hysterical, infantile, grotesque, and probably insane. It bears little resemblance to anything of which we are conscious. We can infer some of its properties from dream content, but we cannot be directly aware of it. Just as we know that dark matter consists of particles but can’t specify what they are, so we know that dark mind consists of mental elements of some kind (and principles of assembling them) without being able specify what they are. Dark particles might be a bit like visible particles, but crucially different in other respects (no interaction with light); and the constituents of dark mind might be a bit like the constituents of the conscious mind, but also crucially different (no interaction with introspective awareness). The mind that gives rise to dreams is not a mind like any of which we are conscious. It exists inside us but it never enters consciousness in its primal form. Dreams are symptoms of this mind but not the thing itself.

            But now the question is how the dark mind can intrude upon the conscious dreaming mind: how dark can it be if it so intrudes? It can be as dark as dark matter is: for intruding upon consciousness is not the same thing as being an object of consciousness. Dark mind could affect the course of dreams without it being possible for us to be conscious of this mind. Dark mind acts as the cause of an observable phenomenon (dreams) without disclosing itself to observation: it operates invisibly, like dark matter. It can even be anti-observable and still have observable effects—it just lacks observational effects (i.e. it doesn’t cause observations of itself). Dark matter causes gravitational effects that can be seen, but it cannot be seen—it cannot produce observations of itself by means of light transmission. Evidently in dreams something alien intrudes upon our conscious life—something not present in waking consciousness—and it is possible that this is the (or a) dark mind buried deep within the brain. It never surfaces as a mental reality in its own right, but it produces perturbations in other more accessible parts of the mind. To use a physical metaphor: it bends the light of consciousness without itself being conscious. Or again: there is a leakage from the dark mind into the luminous mind. That could be so even if dark mind is vigorously anti-conscious.

            Once we bring in dreams other sorts of mental pathology might be considered. Are mental illnesses in general caused by the dark mind not being sufficiently sealed off from consciousness and bringing disorder to it? It’s not the brain as such that figures in the etiology of psychopathology, but something distinctively mental, and possibly disruptive. Of course, this is totally speculative, but it illustrates how a dark layer of psychological reality might have empirically observable effects that betray its existence. The general form of the inference is familiar from psychoanalysis: what I am adding is the idea that the unconscious layer might be strongly unconscious (as well as alien)—that it might be intrinsically incapable of conscious access. The Freudian unconscious is made of once-conscious material that has been repressed, and is thought to be potentially accessible to consciousness; but the anti-conscious mind is conceived as inherently beyond the scope of consciousness—despite being genuinely mental. Just as dark matter can’t be seen in principle, so dark mind can’t in principle be introspected or otherwise made conscious: yet both may robustly exist and be capable of influencing the observable course of events.

If there were literally a light of consciousness, we could say that dark mind can’t interact with this light. There would then be two kinds of mind–the luminous mind and the non-luminous mind—and they would be differently composed. Their different kinds of composition would explain their different relations to luminosity—they would be composed of different “particles”. Maybe dark mind is made up of very primitive mental components forged in the early evolution of mentality, long since superseded by more sophisticated mental components; nevertheless it survives covertly in the “mental universe”, occasionally making its presence felt. (Might dark matter have been formed in the cosmos before luminous matter was formed and be more primitive than it is?) If it preceded consciousness, it would not be surprising if it were inaccessible to consciousness—if it shunned consciousness by its very nature. Still, it might impinge on consciousness, possibly distorting and troubling it, without being integrated with it. Dark matter can speed up visible matter because of its gravitational heft; maybe dark mind can “speed up” consciousness, or at least jumble it up. It can cause the conscious mind to go haywire. Who knows? Something does and we really don’t have any better explanation.

            Is dark mind mysterious? No doubt it is: but so is dark matter (without being magical). We know very little about it, if anything. In particular, we don’t know why it’s dark—what causes it to be dark. We know it doesn’t interact with conscious awareness, save indirectly, but we don’t know why this is (we don’t know much about consciousness either). There seem to be strata of the mind that are more or less proximate to the conscious mind, with the anti-conscious mind at the lowest level and the unconscious mind one level up. The lowest level is moreunconscious than the other levels (and each level may contain different types of non-conscious mentality). Dark mind, like dark matter, is particularly elusive, given its limited interactions with other things; both are easy to miss, though they may be quite extensive. Here, as elsewhere, we must not let epistemology dictate ontology. Just because the dark mind is not accessible to consciousness and barely evident in daily life is not a reason to deny its existence: it might exist and it might play a significant role in human mental life (and perhaps that of other animals). I picture it as a seething cacophony of ill-coordinated elements, prone to conflation, horribly irrational, egocentric, vaguely reptilian, and clearly simian. The sexual is just one aspect of its makeup (pace Freud): it is also obsessed with locomotion and bodily functions (inter alia). Quite possibly it is prone to synaesthesia. But maybe that picture reflects only how the dark mind is refracted through the dream mind, not its intrinsic character. Maybe it is actually quite far removed from anything we can experience or easily conceive, possibly consisting of relics and fragments of bygone minds, both ontogenetic and phylogenetic. It might be dark in many ways.

 

Colin McGinn

 

  [1] This is not to say that dark matter cannot be perceived in other ways: presumably it can be touched and heard, and maybe tasted and smelled. But light is the standard way we know about the properties of distant objects.