On Mind-Brain Relations

 

 

Various relations between mental events and brain events have been (and could be) posited: correlation, causation, simultaneity, supervenience, spatial coincidence, composition, part-whole relations, and identity. It is fair to report that these relations are first found outside of the mind-brain relation and then applied to that relation; we don’t come up with them by considering the mind-brain relation itself. That is, they stem from the physical world not from the psychophysical world: we transfer them from their original home in the physical world to the special case of mind and brain. Hence analogies are often drawn between the psychophysical case and physical cases—for instance, “pain is C-fiber firing” is like “heat is molecular motion”. This is already suspicious, since we are not deriving the relations from direct inspection of the mind-brain nexus: we are not examining that nexus and concluding that a particular relation is the right one to characterize it. Rather, we are extrapolating the relation from elsewhere and postulating that it applies, not observing that it does. Thus there is a big difference between our knowledge in the two cases: we can experimentally establish that heat is molecular motion, for example, but not that pain is C-fiber firing. Or, to take a more transparent case, we can observe that Superman is Clark Kent simply by seeing Clark Kent change into his Superman clothes and fly off; but we can’t do anything comparable with the claim that mental events are identical to brain events—we can’t witness the transformation. Instead we postulate an identity; we don’t discover it. It is the same with all other ordinary identity statements: we empirically discover that these identities hold. So it is not a mere theory that a is identical to b; it is an established fact, known by empirical means. By contrast, the identity theory of mind and brain is a speculative theory, a bold conjecture, not something we have empirically established to be true. And similarly for other theories of the relation between mind and brain, such as that mental events are composed of physical events or are spatially coincident with them. True, we can empirically establish correlations, but the step to identity or composition is always a move away from observation—a philosophical theory rather than a piece of empirical science. We apply relations drawn from elsewhere, but we don’t carry over the methods that are generally used to assert their existence. Thus the theories remain controversial (but no one seriously disputes that Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus or that water consists of H2O). The justification for asserting the theories tends to be abstract and general—isn’t it more parsimonious to assume identity, and good to avoid the absurdities of dualism? It is never stated that we have simply discovered by observation that pain is the same as C-fiber firing—by looking at it from different angles or by using a microscope or by tracing it over time. We discovered that butterflies and caterpillars are the same organism by observing the chrysalis stage; we didn’t just posit the identity on the grounds of Occam’s razor or fear of butterfly-caterpillar dualism.

It would obviously be better to arrive at a theory of the mind-brain relation by examining the case directly. After all, it may be that physically based relations of the familiar kinds do not apply in this case—maybe there is a special kind of relation that connects the mental with the neural. So shouldn’t we concentrate our attention on the specifics of the mind-brain nexus and work from there? The trouble with this is that nothing suggests itself. We don’t get even a hint of what the relation might be by introspecting our pains and observing our brains; we find only correlations not a theory of the connection between the correlated entities. Maybe they are identical, but nothing in what we observe suggests as much; they don’t even seem similar. At least we can see that Hesperus and Phosphorus are both planets, and that Superman and Clark Kent are both men, but we can’t see that pain and C-fibers are both anything (except maybe events); there is not even a hint of the possibility of identity (or composition, etc.). If the relation is that of identity, this remains hidden from us, not something that reveals itself to diligent observation. Why? Why does the mind hide its true relation to the brain, and hide it so well? If it is true that pains are composed of strands of C-fiber, then why is it that nothing in our experience suggests that? Why can’t neuroscience prove it? Physics proved that heat is molecular motion, chemistry proved that water is H2O, biology proved that the heartbeat is a pumping muscle, and astronomy proved that Hesperus is Phosphorus; but neuroscience is incapable of proving that pain is identical to C-fiber firing. Is that perhaps because it isn’t? Does it bear some other relation to the correlated brain events, some relation we don’t know about, or can’t even imagine?

It is possible that we are thinking about this all wrong. We shouldn’t be hunting for relations drawn from outside our area of interest—the mind-brain connection—and then postulating that such relations capture that connection. We should instead focus on the case at hand and try to forge a theory of the psychophysical nexus that respects its special character. Don’t think, look! The problem is that nothing comes to mind: we look, but we don’t find. The psychophysical nexus just stares blankly back at us, elusive and enigmatic. Here the pain, there the brain: but where the linkage? There must be some sort of intimate relation, since the two are not just accidentally joined, but for the life of us we can’t figure out what it is. Let me introduce some neologisms: let’s say that the brain state “mentalizes” and the pain state “physicalizes”—that is, they each do something that leads to the other. This doesn’t tell us how they do these things, only that they do. Then the question is what these peculiar relations involve: what theory of them is correct? Pain is such that it physicalizes itself as C-fiber firing, and C-fiber firing is such that it mentalizes itself as pain: now the question is how that happens. A formidable question indeed, and one formulated by using a pair of murky neologisms; and yet it at least points us in the right direction—what is it to mentalize and physicalize? We know what it is for Phosphorus to “Hesperusize”—to follow the same path through space and time as Hesperus does—but what is it for C-fibers to mentalize (specifically painize)? That is the question; and we will not seek to answer it by borrowing concepts drawn from somewhere else. We need concepts tailored specifically to the case at hand. Whether we can find or devise such concepts is another matter. Mysterians remain doubtful: we simply have no viable way to infer the relation from the relata. There might be identity for all we know, but the usual paradigms of empirically discovered identities provide no guidance in this alien territory, being mere impositions from outside. All we can claim is that the relation must be close, intimate, and transparent (not brute). It must be such that it takes the enigma out of the connection, and makes it something other than a mere conjecture, backed by nothing but Occam’s razor and dualism-phobia. It must be like the empirical discoveries that underlie ordinary assertions of identity (“I saw Clark Kent put on his Superman clothes and then fly off”). As things stand, however, we have no clue about how to do any of this, but merely struggle with concepts borrowed from areas less intractable, as in “You know what identity is from the case of Hesperus and Phosphorus; well, mind and brain is just like that”. But it is not just like that because we can’t apply the methods used to establish the former identity to establish the latter (putative) identity. What I tend to believe is that the psychophysical nexus is nothing like the standard paradigms, just in a different league or galaxy; and that it is completely misguided to employ the usual types of relations in an effort to understand it. It is not so much that the identity theory, say, is false as that it provides no illumination at all, because the standard cases of identity are so far removed from the case at hand. We need a completely new way of thinking if we are to get anywhere in grasping the true nature of the mind-brain connection; and it is a real question whether this new way is available to us. What is certain is that we will never achieve it if we lazily rely on concepts designed for a quite different purpose. It is as if we are trying to understand electromagnetic phenomena solely on the basis of traditional mechanics instead of recognizing that something completely different is afoot, calling for a new conceptual apparatus.[1] The very idea of using concepts like identity and composition, explained by way of the standard paradigms, is hopelessly wide of the mark, signaling desperation rather than insight. We should forget all such paradigms and start afresh, always being aware that there is no guarantee of success. But failure is better than complacent illusion.[2]

 

[1] Actually this analogy understates the case, but you get my point. We don’t just need a paradigm shift but a complete conceptual reboot, a new mind almost.

[2] I can put the point very simply: it is no use trying to construct a theory of the psychophysical nexus by comparing it to cases in which nothing mental is involved. This is merely the triumph of wishful thinking over honest toil.

 

 

What is Nature?

 

What falls under the concept of nature and what does not? What does the concept include and what does it exclude? The OED defines “nature” as follows: “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, and the landscape, as opposed to humans or human creations”. The Cambridge Dictionary gives us: “all the animals, plants, rocks, etc. in the world and all the features, forces, and processes that happen or exist independently of people, such as weather, the sea, mountains, the production of young animals or plants, and growth”. Construed as analyses of the concept, or even as descriptions of the common use of the word “nature”, these attempts at definition leave much to be desired. First and most glaring, they exclude human beings from nature: human nature is not taken to be part of nature. This is totally arbitrary and flagrantly pre-Darwinian: didn’t we descend from apes, and aren’t apes part of nature? Even if you think humans contain a divine spark—an immortal soul—you surely accept that some aspects of human nature belong to nature (respiration, digestion). What would Martins think if they visited earth—that those funny-looking featherless bipeds are not part of nature? What then are they a part of? Second, the OED explicitly, and the Cambridge Dictionary implicitly, excludes minds from nature: it is the phenomena of the physical world that are said to constitute nature.[1] So minds are not deemed part of nature, even though the organisms that have them are. How is that defensible? Minds evolved, have a genetic basis, and function to aid survival—all the marks of life on earth: they are surely as much a part of nature as bodies. Third, the creations of humans are declared not to be part of nature either. What does this include? Dwellings, weapons, spoken language, culture, and roads would seem to be creations of humans—are they not parts of nature? Aren’t animal nests, hives, burrows, bowers, webs, and tools part of nature? But if so, why are human artifacts declared external to nature (not to mention footprints and prepared food)? Finally, there is no mention of things traditionally supposed outside of nature, particularly the supernatural. Presumably this is intended by implication, since God, angels, and ghosts are not usually thought of as “phenomena of the physical world”, but the point bears emphasis: the concept of nature is supposed to contrast with what is beyond nature—what transcends it, flouts its laws. Heaven is not a department of nature and God himself is not an inhabitant of nature; part of the meaning of “nature” is that these items are not elements of the entity denoted. Nature is what is not supernatural—what is of the earth, sublunary, tangible, non-miraculous, and perishable.

So can we do better? In fact the concept is difficult to define explicitly, ubiquitous as it is. One might even be tempted to wax family resemblance about it. But I think two points are relatively clear: (a) nature is not supernatural and (b) nature is not fictional. As to (b), fictional worlds don’t belong to the realm of nature: for it is at least a necessary condition of being in nature that the thing in question exists. Horses are in nature but unicorns are out, Shakespeare is in but Hamlet is out. You can’t be a part of nature unless you are real. Of course fiction itself can be part of nature—written texts, oral traditions, inner stories, dreams—but not the things fiction talks about. Putting these two points together, then, we can say that nature is what is real and not supernatural: intuitively, it is what exists here, in this world with us, alongside animals, plants, and rocks. It is not otherworldly or purely imaginary. But this still leaves a lot of latitude and unclarity. Are laws of nature part of nature (e.g. the law of entropy)? What if there is a soul in man and a vital spirit in animals? What if atoms don’t really exist? To these questions I think we should answer as follows. Laws of nature are part of nature, since they are inseparable from it, simply being very general. Even if humans and animals contain a part that is not of nature, they contain parts that are, so they do belong to nature (as well as to something outside of it perhaps). If indeed atoms are fictions, then they do not qualify as inhabitants of nature, since what is fictional is not part of nature. This third point should be emphasized: fictionalism about a class of entities is incompatible with counting them as parts of nature. According to Berkeley, material objects are not a part of nature, since matter is a philosopher’s fiction (though not tables, chairs, etc.). According to positivism, the unobservable entities of physics are “logical fictions” that don’t really exist, so they are not elements of nature. Nature might be composed solely of mental entities with nothing “physical” at all; nature is not by definition coterminous with the physical (whatever exactly that word means). Maybe nature consists entirely of consciousness in the manner of panpsychism. This is a matter of what your metaphysics happens to be not of the very meaning of “nature”. In Berkeley’s system nature consists of ideas in the minds of finite spirits and in the mind of the infinite spirit, with matter deemed fictional. For a materialist nature consists of matter as described by physics, while anything not of this kind lies outside of nature, possibly in an immaterial realm. The concept of nature is strictly neutral between these possibilities. That is why I defined it as what is non-fictional and non-supernatural.

The question that particularly interests me once we have these definitional issues out of the way is this: do logic and mathematics (and also ethics) lie within nature or outside of nature? I have never seen this question discussed, but I think most philosophers would be inclined not to include these domains within nature: for they are too abstract and ethereal (“non-empirical”) to belong with animals, plants, rocks, and landscapes (or even human organisms). Ethics, in particular, is not part of nature, being steeped in things called norms—you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”, and obligations are not natural entities like hearts, livers, and atoms. Now this decision might be grounded in fictionalism: if you believe that logic, mathematics, and ethics are all about fictional entities, then you won’t be inclined to include them in an inventory of the contents of nature. Nature abhors the non-existent. But that is not the majority view—so the question is where these areas fall according to other views. If we adopt subjectivism or psychologism about logic, mathematics, and ethics, then we assimilate them to the psychological—and then they belong to nature along with other psychological realities. Mathematics becomes a human creation, an artifact of sorts, and so falls within nature alongside other human artifacts, material and mental; and similarly for logic and ethics. The tough case is realism in these three areas: does Platonism or moral realism exclude mathematics, logic, and ethics from nature? I find myself inclined to dispute this—I tend to suppose that numbers and values are part of nature. I already think that nature includes human creations, including art, science, politics, and philosophy—these are all parts of nature, as that notion is properly understood—but I also think that other realities belong there too. They don’t belong with the supernatural (if such there be), despite their distinctive character; they belong with the rest of nature. They are part of what exists without any supernatural backing or miraculous infusion. Nature is what is real and not supernatural—and this description applies to logic, mathematics, and ethics (understood realistically). So the concept of nature has nothing intrinsically to do with the physical (again, whatever that means), nor indeed with the psychological—it includes even what has traditionally been regarded as “non-empirical” (a priori). Norms and numbers are thus as much part of nature as wings and mountains.[2] Where else would you locate them? Not in the fictional world (if you reject fictionalism) and not in the divine world (if you believe in such a thing), so nature seems the natural place to locate them. Why not locate them there—isn’t it just a prejudice to keep them outside of what we call nature? After all, they are closely intertwined with things already admitted to nature—the world of physics, the process of reasoning, and human action—so why insist on extruding them from the world of nature? Why try to make another world for them to live in? If this requires an expansion of the usual assumed extension of the concept, then so be it—we need to expand well beyond the dictionary definitions anyway. Hasn’t human thought already expanded the concept of nature well beyond its initial range by extending it to human and animal minds, so why stop at the logical, mathematical, and ethical? Let them in, you will feel better for it. For the notion of nature has acquired a strongly honorific connotation: it is good to be part of nature—a member of the naturalist’s club—and vaguely disreputable to linger at the gates unable to gain entrance. We need to be more inclusive with the concept of nature, less snooty and hidebound. So I suggest welcoming logic, mathematics, and ethics into the fold—they too can be proud members of the Nature Club (with all the perks attaching). We needn’t refashion them in order to make them eligible; they can come as they are, in all their glorious singularity. You can be as Platonist as you like and still be greeted as a fully paid up member. We can’t let you into the Nature Club if you are a figment or a deity—we have to keep up standards—but logic, mathematics, and ethics are neither, so they can be happily admitted. The expanding circle includes them without strain or solecism.[3] Mother nature has a wide embrace. Perhaps indeed with the passage of time these new members might be taken as exemplars of their class, not only members in good standing but respected and senior representatives of the Nature Club. They might be listed first in the roster of honorable members. Wouldn’t it be splendid if ethics were to become President of the Society of Nature? In the book of nature ethical norms might stand out for their authenticity, their natural claim to the title. If you want to know what nature is, you need look no further than ethics—though other items no doubt belong to nature too (e.g. atoms and squirrels).

There are other terms that vie with “nature” for its inclusive exclusiveness such as “the universe”, “the cosmos”, “Creation”, “the world”, “reality”. To belong to the extension of these terms is a mark of distinction, distancing you from the merely fictional and (dubiously) divine. But we can hope to bring logic, mathematics, and ethics under such umbrella terms along with “nature”, thereby securing them ontological respectability. Norms and numbers are thus constituents of the universe, elements of Creation, inhabitants of the cosmos, creatures of the actual world, as real as anything—yet they are what they are and not another thing. They shouldn’t be left out in the wilderness, shunned even by the fictional and supernatural; they should be accepted as bona fide parts of nature. Let’s not multiply worlds unnecessarily. If it turns out that there is no supernatural world, then there will only be the natural world left (fictional worlds not being real), and that world is capacious enough to include those hitherto excluded members.[4]

 

Colin M

[1] How the editors of the OED would define “physical” in this context is left unclear, and the difficulties are notorious. Is gravity physical (Newton declared it “occult”)? What about parental behavior in animals? Perhaps they merely mean “non-psychological” (not that the concept of the psychological is free of difficulty).

[2] What applies to numbers applies equally (if not more so) to geometric forms: they too belong to nature, as do space and time. On the other hand, in addition to fictional worlds, nonsense worlds also fail to belong to nature: mome raths and borogroves are not parts of nature, even if non-fictionally meant. Are merely possible worlds part of nature? That’s a tough one, which I leave for homework.

[3] There seems to be a natural (though regrettable) human tendency to restrict honorific concepts more narrowly than is reasonable—witness the concepts person, right, true, physical, reason, rational, and others. The concept of nature belongs to this list: people have a tendency to restrict it to certain preferred examples or exaggerate certain alleged paradigms (mountains, rivers, pretty birds). When people say they are “nature lovers” this is primarily what they have in mind, so that mathematics, logic, and ethics don’t get a look in. Truly enlightened nature lovers, however, adopt a more inclusive stance.

[4] Is philosophical ethics part of nature? Is moral realism as a theory part of nature? Is Platonism as a doctrine part of nature? The answer to all three questions is yes, since they are aspects or expressions of human nature (language and belief being part of human nature). Secularism leads naturally to the hegemony of nature. The less real the supernatural seems to you the less likely you will be to compare exceptional cases to it; thus nature swallows up the real in proportion as it replaces the supernatural. In the days when the supernatural seemed everywhere it was easy to assign mathematics, logic, and ethics to a place at least adjacent to the supernatural realm; but once that world was eclipsed these areas needed a new home–and nature seems the natural place to put them. Reality thus merges with nature in a secular age.

 

 

Action, Reaction, and Reflex

 

 

Analytical philosophy of action typically begins by distinguishing between mere reflexes and intentional actions. The blink reflex and the patellar reflex involve bodily movements with no psychological intermediaries, while bodily movements like directing traffic are prompted by beliefs and desires. The philosopher then declares that he or she is interested in the latter not the former—they are not really actions at all. The thought is that reflexes are elicited by external stimuli in a mechanical manner—no deliberation, no choice, and no freedom—while intentional actions are psychologically produced and do involve deliberation, choice, and freedom. Putting it in terms of causation, reflex behavior is caused by external non-mental stimuli while intentional action (action proper) is caused by internal mental states like belief and desire. The philosophy of action is then held to concern itself with the latter type of behavior. Maybe reflex behavior is grudgingly allowed to count as action in a colloquial sense (“reflex action” is not contradictory), but it is not deemed to be action in the proper philosophical sense—and so it does not belong to the philosophy of action.

But there is another category of behavior that fails to fit neatly into this dichotomy, which is seldom if ever discussed. I mean what we can call reactive behavior: reactions, in short. There are spontaneous actions that are performed without any prompting stimulus—stimulus-free actions in one terminology—and there are actions that result from an external occurrence.[1] For example, there are reactive acts of speech such as responding to a question or accepting an invitation, as there are reactions like rushing to help someone in distress, or flaring up at an insult, or holding up your hand to protect your face, or laughing at a joke, or slamming on the brakes when a car suddenly stops in front of you. The action would not have occurred but for the impinging stimulus, and it is appropriate to that stimulus; it is not spontaneous and stimulus-independent. Yet it is not a reflex: it has psychological antecedents, and is not a matter of a mere reflex arc. The agent perceives that something is happening and reacts to it, presumably motivated by some sort of desire; and it is possible to train oneself not to so react, unlike with genuine reflexes. People say, “I didn’t think, I just reacted”, thus distinguishing the case from fully voluntary free deliberative action; but they don’t suppose that the action was brought about purely from a mechanical external stimulus. The stimulus may have made the agent angry or fearful or amused, and this is what led to the reaction in question. So the external stimulus led to an internal mental state that was necessary for the reaction to occur. What we have here is something intermediate between the standard categories of intentional action and mere reflex, which has not been much explored. It fits into neither category; specifically, it doesn’t fit the paradigm of the spontaneous action prompted by belief and desire. An explanation of a reaction will not then mirror the explanation of a spontaneous action: it will refer not merely to internal belief and desire (if indeed it does this at all) but also to an eliciting external state of affairs. “Why did you raise your hand to your face?” “Because I was about to get hit in the face by a ball.” No doubt you desired not to get hit in the face, and no doubt you saw the ball coming; but it is also true that your action was a reaction to a stimulus. This was a stimulus-controlled non-reflex action: a hybrid, an intermediate case.[2]

As always the dictionary (OED) proves useful. For “action” we find: “the process of doing something to achieve an aim”. For “react” we find: “respond to something in particular way”; for “reaction” we have: “an instance of reacting to or against something”. For “reflex” we have: “an action performed without conscious thought as a response to a stimulus”. From these definitions we see how reactions sit between actions and reflexes, conceptually speaking. Note that reactions are not said to “achieve an aim”, presumably because they can be unwise and counterproductive: they may go against the agent’s interests and considered judgment. The agent may regret and lament their occurrence (“Sorry, m’ lord, I just lashed out when he insulted my mother”; compare, “I didn’t mean to kick the dog but someone tapped my knee with a hammer”). Note too that there is no hesitation in describing a reflex as an action, just an action performed without conscious thought. The reason this raises no eyebrows is that reflex behavior is purposive: it is precisely not like merely mechanical causation such as we find in the physical world. The eyelid blinks in order to protect the eye; the knee jerks upward because the tendon is designed so as to aid balance, the jerk being a side effect of that. By contrast, rivers don’t erode banks so as to widen rivers, and meteors don’t cause craters in order to pockmark the earth’s surface. The right thing to say, clearly, is that there are three types of action: reflex action, reactive action, and spontaneous action. All are unambiguously action, but there are three distinct types of action. The philosophy of action should concern itself with all three types, noting their similarities and differences; focusing exclusively on spontaneous action is a mistake. In particular, the case of reactive action needs to be brought to the fore. What should we say about crying or salivating? Are these reactions instances of action? They can be controlled to some degree, yet they seem close to involuntary reflex actions. What about biting and swallowing in response to food in the mouth? Is the response of turning down a Nobel Prize a case of reaction to a stimulus? Does all reaction involve desire—for example, screaming when hurt? How does belief feature in reactive action?

It has often been pointed out that actions can be purely mental, as when you calculate in your head. Is the same true for reactions and reflexes? The answer is affirmative: you can react to an insult by plotting to get your revenge, or promise yourself not to visit places where temptation may lead you to act in ways you later regret; and surely the elicitation of pain or visual sensation is a matter of reflex (though these are not strictly actions). The mental analogue of reflex action would be automatically judging that something is so simply because you have seen it to be so: immediate and unthinking, yet active. Animals may be more prone to such purely mental reflexes than we are, what with our advanced rationality. So the subject of mental action needs to reckon with all three types of mental action not just the spontaneous kind. There are responsive mental actions as well as stimulus-free mental actions. Weakness of will too can apply to reactive actions as well as to the spontaneous kind: indeed, reactions more often involve doing things against our better judgment. And this can hold for mental as well as bodily actions. Linguistic actions can also fall into the three categories, whether bodily or mental. Much linguistic behavior is reactive—not like the standard case of making an assertion out of the blue. Conversation is precisely reactive verbal behavior: answering questions, responding relevantly, filling in silences. And verbal reaction can occur purely in the head: responding verbally to perceived events in one’s own mind, keeping on topic in one’s internal soliloquies. It is a question whether any verbal behavior may be aptly described as reflexive, whether internal or external: are speech acts ever mechanically elicited by a stimulus “without any conscious thought”? Perhaps infants do this for a while by uttering words at the mere sight of a stimulating object (“Dada!”), and some aphasics are prone to uncontrolled verbal output when a stimulus is presented. Are there words we can’t help saying inwardly when something agreeable or disagreeable happens? Verbal behavior is not generally of a reflexive nature, but there may be outlying examples of it where reflexes kick in. Could such reflexes be conditioned in subjects? In any case, verbal behavior is often reactive—in which case we should speak of “speech reactions” as well as “speech acts”.

Now an interesting question suggests itself: reactions are a type of action, but are actions a type of reaction? I don’t mean a reaction to an external stimulus, since that is clearly not true, but are those the only kind of stimuli there are? What about internal stimuli? Certainly we can react to states of our own body, as when we scratch an itch or moan in pain; and obviously you can respond to a medical problem by seeking professional help. But is there anything internal that actions in general might be construed as a response to? Indeed there is: desire. Organisms have needs, say for food and sex, and these get expressed as desires accompanied by sensations such as feelings of hunger. All this takes place outside of the organism’s volitional faculty, but it feeds into that faculty. We might speak of this as the internal environment, the desire landscape–and the animal can react to this environment. It can react by trying to modify the internal environment, by meeting the needs expressed therein. This is where action comes in: action responds to the stimulus provided by the internal environment of need and desire along with accompanying sensations (some highly disagreeable). Thus action is reaction to desire. It is a response to desire, an engagement with it, an interaction with it. In principle, an experimenter could intervene to modify the internal psychological environment in order to control the animal’s behavior, as the external environment can be so manipulated.[3] Theoretically, the cases are on a par: behavior is a response to environmental variables, both outer and inner. So spontaneous action (so-called) is really a type of reaction to a stimulus—the internal stimulus of desire. If so, the basic concept of action theory is reaction: all action is a response to something—there is no such thing as completely spontaneous action. It is true that actions can be stimulus-free with respect to external stimuli, but these actions are always stimulus-bound with respect to internal stimuli (so no support to behaviorism here). Or perhaps we should not use the word “bound” because there is some looseness in the stimulus-response connection (unlike the case of reflex); rather, the action is stimulus-directed (influenced, regulated). Just as I might decline to react in a certain way to an impinging contingency, so I might decline to act on a desire that is pressing its claim to expression; still, when I do act on such stimuli it is because of them that I do so. The action is always stimulus-triggered when it is triggered; it is not a reaction to nothing. Accordingly, the philosophy of action is the philosophy of reaction. To put it differently, the will is a reactive faculty.

If we follow this line of reasoning, we can see an element of truth in the behaviorist’s view of the mind: not indeed the doctrine that the mind is external behavior, nor yet the theory that all learning is conditioning, nor even the idea that there are predictive laws of behavior—but the thought that the mind is essentially a reactive being. The organism must react to its environment in order to survive, and that environment includes its own internal state—thus feeding behavior results from both internal hunger and the presence of external food material. The mind must orchestrate these interactions, reacting appropriately to the prevailing conditions: it must adapt itself tothem. Thus in a certain sense it is true to say that psychology is stimulus-response psychology: that granule of truth was then distorted and exaggerated by the behaviorist school. But that misguided school was at least partly grounded on an idea that it is not intuitively wide of the mark, viz. the mind is essentially a reactive organ (like other organs). The mind is a responsive thing, acting in relation to things, taking the measure of things (external or internal). If the essence of life is adaptive reaction, then the mind is one aspect of this biological principle. Action then is like a reply to a question.[4]

 

Colin

[1] Psychologists often speak of avoidance behavior and approach behavior, thus registering the reactive nature of much behavior; other forms of behavior make no reference to any object in relation to which the organism is acting in these ways, such as singing or playing football. Reactive behavior, which is stimulus-driven, is thus classified into two types, according as it involves attraction to the stimulus or avoidance of it. Not all reactive behavior falls into these two types, however, as with responding angrily to an insult.

[2] A good example from literature occurs in Melville’s Billy Budd. The evil Claggart falsely accuses Billy of mutiny in front of Captain Vere and the Captain asks Billy to respond to the accusation. However, Billy suffers from a speech impediment in situations of injustice like this and can say nothing in reply. Melville writes: “The next instant, quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night, his right arm shot out, and Claggart dropped to the deck”. Clearly Billy’s action was reactive, but notice also that Melville compares it to an inanimate event and describes the action as if it were disengaged from Billy’s rational faculties—his arm “shot out”. This is precisely the kind of action I have in mind. (Despite the circumstances, Billy Budd pays for his arm’s reactive action with his life.)

[3] Compare increasing the intensity of an external stimulus with increasing the intensity of an internal stimulus: if the stimulus is unpleasant (as in those unethical experiments using electric shock or food deprivation), the animal’s behavior will be modified accordingly, as it reacts to the variation in the stimulus. The cases are entirely parallel.

[4] The contrary view, which emphasizes the spontaneity of action, might be said to compare action in general to the speech act of assertion—a type of speech act that is not characteristically a response to anything. According to the reactive view, by contrast, perception poses questions to the motor system, to which it must reply appropriately; and desires pose questions too, along the lines of “Won’t you act on me, please?” Call this the “interrogative model” of action just to have a fancy name. Then the interrogative model proposes that all action consists of reaction—a response to a questioning stimulus. More literally, it views all action—spontaneous, reactive, and reflex—as having a stimulus-response structure (sans behaviorism, of course).

 

 

Agnosticism

 

The word “agnostic” was coined by Thomas Huxley in 1869. I am concerned here with what state of mind is denoted by this word not with whether agnosticism is the correct position. I think it is commonly assumed that it denotes a state of mind that is neither belief nor disbelief: we can believe in God or disbelieve in God, and thus be either theists or atheists, but in addition we can be in a state of suspended belief on the question, and thus be agnostics. There is belief, disbelief, and a kind of neutral belief—undecided belief, null belief, belief that hovers but will not land. It is sometimes thought that agnosticism is vaguely disreputable or weak-minded, as if the agnostic is someone who hasn’t got the guts to form firm beliefs. He or she hasn’t the courage to form a belief, the stakes being quite high, so chooses to dwell in a twilight zone of non-commitment. This presupposes that there is such a thing as suspended belief—a state of mind in which no definite belief is formed. It seems to me that this is the wrong way to describe the agnostic’s state of mind: the agnostic has just as firm a belief as anyone else with respect to God’s existence, viz. that there are no rational grounds for preferring theism over atheism or vice versa. The agnostic may be quite certain that this is so, as committed as any ardent believer or disbeliever—she cannot be accused of being wishy-washy on the question. She has considered the question and formed the belief that no belief either way is rational. She has a meta-belief that is as committed as any: a belief about belief. So there is no third state of belief corresponding to agnosticism—no semi-belief or uncommitted belief or suspended belief. There is simply belief. In fact, there is really only one kind of belief, namely belief: the theist believes in God, the atheist believes there is no God, and the agnostic believes that no belief on the question is rational. That’s it—no subdivisions of belief exist of the kind commonly supposed. The state of mind of any of these three categories of person is simply a state of belief; nothing further needs to be added.[1]

The OED agrees, defining “agnostic” as follows: “a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God”. That is, the agnostic has a belief about religious (or irreligious) belief, namely that it is not rationally warranted. There is no quasi belief or halfhearted belief or state of aporia. The definition, however, is lacking in another way: it is wrong. The agnostic need not believe that nothing is known of the nature of God, or even of God’s existence; he may accept that we know that if God exists he is omniscient, or even that God has possible existence (either in the epistemic or metaphysical sense of “possible”). What the agnostic contends is that such knowledge is not sufficient to tip the balance of argument in the direction of God’s actual existence. To think there are considerations on both sides of an argument, making it impossible to pick sides, is not to suppose that nothing can be reasonably asserted on either side. And clearly the agnostic can allow that the question of God’s existence might one day be decided; it is just that we don’t have the evidence now to justify either theism or atheism. The essence of the position is simply that nothing rationally justifies one belief over the other, not that we are condemned to complete ignorance of God’s existence or nature. Furthermore, the definition limits agnosticism to the religious sphere, but it is possible to be an agnostic about many things. You can be an agnostic about whether William Shakespeare wrote the plays customarily attributed to him, or whether Jupiter has five moons, or whether the earth is flat, or whether Roger Federer will retire within two years. You simply hold that the evidence you have doesn’t settle the matter one way or the other. There is nothing pusillanimous about holding this position, nor does it betoken a special state of mind of non-belief: it is a straightforward belief about what it is rational to believe in the circumstances. Perhaps this is why no special word existed for this state of mind before Huxley coined it—because there is no special state of mind involved (the “agnostic stance”). It is just one belief among others.

Here is an objection: what about someone who is just too lazy or poorly positioned to form beliefs on the matter at hand? If you ask his opinion on whether the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, he will throw up his hands and say he has no idea and doesn’t much care. He is, he tells you, agnostic on the question. It isn’t that he thinks that there is no evidence that favors one answer over another, or that the matter cannot be rationally decided. He just thinks that he, in his contingent ignorance, must remain agnostic. Two points can be made. First, he does believe that he has no evidence that would enable him to decide the matter, and this is what his professed agnosticism consists in. It is not that he is in a wavering and woolly state of mind; he will tell you that he is quite sure that he doesn’t know either way. He is not even inclined to favor one answer over the other. There are many questions like this, on which we feel ourselves uninformed and unable to offer an opinion, or we just haven’t thought about it. This is simple ignorance not considered judgment about the rational status of a debate. That is why (and this is the second point) we don’t normally call such a state “agnosticism”: it is not a considered opinion got by weighing all available evidence. It is just an admission of ignorance. The agnostic about religion is not saying that he has never considered the question of God’s existence and is hopelessly ill informed about it, as if the next thing you say might tip him in one direction or the other. So the case of the ignorant non-believer is not a counterexample to the general characterization of agnosticism being proposed. Agnosticism is always principled not casual.

This analysis is confirmed by what would otherwise be puzzling: there is no analogue of agnosticism for desire or intention. We can desire something or desire its opposite, but we can’t be in a neutral state of desire agnosticism. We can believe that nothing favors one desire over another (a peach or a plum), but we can’t have some sort of intermediate desire analogous to suspended belief. What would that desire be? Similarly, I can intend to go to the movies or I can intend to stay home, but I can’t intend something mysteriously between the two—as if I have a kind of indeterminate intention. If belief were capable of this kind of indeterminacy, we would expect that desire and intention would be; but they aren’t, so we should question that account of agnosticism. The only kind of agnosticism there is consists simply in the belief that nothing decides the question—not some kind of non-committal belief or wavering desire or indeterminate intention. It is of course possible to suspend belief (or disbelief), as we like to say, but the agnostic is not someone who is suspending his belief in God or suspending his belief in the absence of God; he has no such belief to suspend. He simply believes that nothing favors one belief over the other. It is also true that someone could be quite neutral on a question simply because it has never entered his head to consider it, so that he doesn’t have the belief that the jury is still out; but again, that is not the position of the agnostic (or else animals and little children would be agnostics). The agnostic doesn’t lack a belief; he has a belief, which is what his agnosticism consists in. The agnostic is a believer, just as the theist is, or the atheist. He indeed takes himself to be a more rational believer than the other two, not to be someone with a problem about believing—a chronic hesitator or belief-a-phobe. The agnostic is a firm believer in belief.  He takes himself to knowthat belief in God is irrational, just as belief in the absence of God is also irrational. There is nothing peculiar about his belief system, as if he has trouble forming beliefs. To put it differently, the agnostic is a person who believes that faith is not the right way to form beliefs; and there is nothing more to it than that.[2]

 

Colin

[1] It would be wrong to model agnosticism on a reluctance to say whether one is a theist or an atheist: there is indeed a third way between saying that God exists and saying that God does not exist, i.e. saying nothing (perhaps for fear of courting unpopularity). But being an agnostic is not a reluctance to form a belief; it is just a type of belief, whether one is happy to express it or not.

[2] To put it in the usual analytic style, the meta-belief is necessary and sufficient to qualify someone as an agnostic. The sufficiency part is important: there is no more to agnosticism than holding such a belief—no more psychologically speaking. The necessity part tells us that agnosticism is always an explicit reflective position, never just a matter of ratiocinative indolence (a community of unreflective people who have never thought about God’ existence and have no opinions on the subject cannot be described as community of agnostics). The agnostic is someone who actively rejects both theism and atheism—he firmly and positively believes both positions to be irrational. (By the way, I am myself an atheist not an agnostic.)