Doomed

I’m getting the distinct impression that we’re doomed. I can feel it in my bones. First, philosophy in America is doomed; indeed, it is now more or less defunct (relative to earlier times). Once the older generation dies off in five to ten years we will be left with a desert of mediocrity and infighting, which will probably invite institutional elimination (no one will want to study it to start with). Second, democracy is doomed: it was never well thought out to begin with and has obvious structural weaknesses. Already it is fraying and fracturing (Trump, Brexit, China), and young people are no longer the hope for redemption (see Euphoriaand the general state of the Internet). Third, the human race is doomed by its stupidity and selfishness (climate change, nuclear war): there is no way the people of the world will make the sacrifices they need to in order to avert catastrophe. It’s only a matter of time till global warming leads to all-out war, not to mention the eruption of simmering conflicts. Fourth, the planet is doomed—at least many animal species are. The rate of species extinction is already alarming and will only increase; this will lead to ecological catastrophe on a grand scale. Some species will probably survive, but planet earth will be a much-reduced place. This to me will be the greatest tragedy. I see in human nature as it is manifesting itself today an unprecedented level of hysteria and foolishness, coupled with moral blindness and sheer greed. Once evil gets a grip it is hard to stop it, till the final collapse puts an end to everything. It takes a lot to create something, but destruction is easy.

Beliefs, Desires, and Actions

Consider actions in which the agent uses a piece of technology (in a broad sense) to achieve a desired goal: using a car to get to a certain place, using a cell phone to communicate, taking an umbrella out in the rain, using a hammer to knock in a nail. It is natural to analyze the psychological background of such actions as involving (a) a certain desire and (b) a belief about the means to achieving that desire. For instance, the agent wants to get to a certain place and believes that driving a car is the best means to achieve this goal. There is a combination of belief and desire at work, which leads to the performance of the action. Theorists of action have seen in this kind of case a general analysis of action: any action is caused and explained by the presence of an antecedent pair of a desire and a belief, where the belief specifies the means to be adopted to satisfy the desire. The desire alone will not prompt or predict the specific action performed—an accompanying belief is also required; nor will the belief alone suffice to elicit the action—an accompanying desire is required. A desire to stay dry will not prompt you to take an umbrella unless you believe that umbrellas keep you dry, and the belief that umbrellas keep you dry will not prompt you to take one unless you desire to stay dry (you might feel like getting soaked today). Thus there arises a certain doctrine about the psychological basis of action: any action requires the presence of a desire anda belief—both are necessary conditions (and together possibly sufficient) for an action to occur. This is supposed to be an interesting and unique fact about action and its explanation, suggesting a certain kind of “holism” about psychological explanation. Let’s call it the “Combination Thesis” (or “CT” for short): the thesis that all actions are consequences of a belief-desire pair acting in concert. Thus we arrive at something called “belief-desire psychology”, taken to be a general format for psychological explanation: any explanation of action requires the specification of a desire and an instrumental belief concerning how best to satisfy that desire. Action is the result of something cognitive and something appetitive operating together.

I propose to question this widely held picture. I think it arises from overgeneralizing one sort of example of action—the kind that involves means-end reasoning. In particular, I think that some actions occur without any instrumental belief and some occur without any desire (in a natural sense of “desire”). That is, there are one-factoractions—just a belief or a desire operating on its own. The Combination Thesis is false, except in a limited range of cases; it is not fundamental to action as such. Let us consider a very simple kind of action: flexing one’s index finger. Suppose an agent has a desire to flex his index finger and does so: what means-end belief accompanies this action? On the face of it, none: he didn’t believe that a certain device was a good means to bring about the desired result. The agent didn’t think that contracting certain muscles in his forearm would be a good means to flex his finger—he simply did it. And even if such a thought had entered his head (maybe he specializes in hand physiology), there would be the question of whether thataction needed a belief about means for it to be performed (say, initiating efferent nerve impulses from the brain). No, the action simply resulted from a desire, with no means-end belief involved (no technology is being exploited). It is the same for swallowing, breathing, walking, swimming, etc. You don’t believe that swallowing is a good way to get food into your stomach when you eat, or that putting one foot in front of the other is a good way to walk—any more than animals do. You just do it. It is absurdly intellectualist to suppose otherwise. It is not as if you have an array of options available for getting food inside you, such as inserting it through your navel, and you choose one of them as the best means in the circumstances. Chewing and swallowing are just nature’s way of getting fed, not a cunning plan you have devised for achieving satiation.[1]You have a desire for food, so you do what comes naturally, as you do when inhaling oxygen into your lungs. In general, movements of the body (often called “basic actions”) are not preceded by means-end reasoning: a person never moves her body by reasoning about the best means of doing so. That is, basic actions are not subject to CT. Raising my arm is not something I need an instrumental belief to perform. If I want to raise it, I raise it, without consulting possible means. Thus the explanation of a basic action has the form, “Xdid Abecause he desired to do A”. It is the same for adult humans, infant humans, and most animals: basic movement is caused by a desire not by a desire-belief combination. There is simply no need for belief: the mind and body are just wired (innately or by learning) to translate desire into action. The right thing to say is that where there is means-end reasoning there is a belief corresponding to the means that combines with a desire, but in more basic cases there is no such belief, since there are no such means. A specific feature one kind of action has been overgeneralized to apply to all action. Indeed, whenever CT does hold there is always a basic action for which it does not hold, i.e. a movement of the body. This is even clearer for purely mental action such as calculating in the head: if I add two numbers in my head, I don’t have an instrumental belief about how best to get the result I want. I want the answer and I’m wired to get it (I know arithmetic); I don’t need any superintending belief about the best means of getting it. Another way to put the point: in tactical practical reasoning agents have instrumental beliefs, but most action is not of a tactical kind. What psychologists call sensory-motor activity is generally not tactical or instrumental or belief-driven; it is automatic, programmed, not thought out.

But is desire always necessary for action? It depends what you mean by “desire”, which tends to be a philosopher’s term of art (sometimes glossed as “pro-attitude”). It seems right to say that the agent needs to view the action favorably (certainly not unfavorably), but there are ways of doing that that are not really cases of desire. Suppose you believe that you have a certain desire but you don’t really have it (you have been brainwashed into the belief): won’t you still be inclined to do the thing in question? Then your action will be motivated by a belief abouta desire, but not by that desire—you apply to medical school, say, because you have been brought up to believe that medicine is your calling (in fact, it’s opera). This would be a case in which you act on a belief without the corresponding desire, though you can be said to view the action favorably. And isn’t it generally true that desires influence actions only if they are recognizedin some way? How could desires of which you are completely ignorant figure as causes of action (even unconscious desires need to be recognized by the unconscious executor)? Their existence has to be registered or acknowledged. So something like belief has to be added to them to produce action; and then we have the question how much the belief contributes to motivational force. This gets pretty messy, psychologically. The neat picture of the pristine desire and its helpful belief companion starts to seem too simplistic. Motivation has (or can have) a more complex and variable structure.  You can do something simply because you have a sudden urge to do it, and you can also do something because you believe you desire to (though you don’t)—in either case you lack one of the components postulated by CT. So there are now three types of case to consider: (i) belief and desire in combination, (ii) desire alone, and (iii) belief alone. Some theorists have argued that moral motivation consists of nothing but a moral belief; we need not take a stand on that issue to accept that beliefs aboutdesire can play a motivational role. Being under the impression that you have a certain desire can act as a prompt to action, whether you have that desire or not. Maybe the only general thing we can say is that the action has to look desirable to you—there is something to be said in favor of doing it. This can take the form either of desire plus belief, or simply desire, or believed desire (or maybe just belief that the action would be morally good). Animal action will largely consist of the second category; agents with advanced practical reasoning will do a good deal of the first kind; the third kind will be restricted to those individuals deluded or confused about what it is they really want. There is no psychological structure common to all cases. The psychology of action is not monolithic.

Suppose someone suggests that action is what is caused by need, so that to explain an action we must specify what need it serves. This theorist is perhaps impressed by the actions of certain animal species of a somewhat primitive type. The natural response would be that this is too simple, too parochial: not every action is prompted by a biological need, and actions sometimes require practical reasoning involving instrumental belief. The need theory applies to some cases but certainly not to all. Well, belief-desire psychology, as currently understood, is rather like that: it fits some cases well enough, but it is too uniform and simple. There are a variety of different kinds of motivational state, ranging across a wide spectrum. In some ways the theory is too complex (because of basic actions) while in others it is not complex enough (because of cases like false beliefs about one’s desires). Thus reasons for action are of different types, not always resolving into the two-factor model of CT. Pluralism about reasons is the indicated position.[2]

Colin McGinn

[1]Sub-intentional actions, such as rolling one’s tongue around one’s mouth or tapping one’s foot nervously, seem particularly unsuitable to the belief-desire treatment: what instrumental belief do I have when my tongue is rolling around pointlessly? Just as the heart has no instrumental belief when performing the act of pumping blood, so many of our more automatic actions are free of cognitive supervision.

[2]All reasons may be causes, but the causes can vary as to type. Desires themselves can come in many types, from the moral to the animalistic. Nor is there less variety in the concept of belief. It is variety all the way down.

Subjectivity and Symbolism

Mechanism in physics was a unified theory of the physical world, positing only bodies in space and contact causation. Newton’s mechanics undermined this unity by postulating action at a distance, thus introducing another kind of causation. Electromagnetic theory undermined it further. Things don’t always operate by impact and reaction. In the case of psychology mechanism took the form of behaviorism, specifically stimulus-response psychology: the stimulus makes its impact and the response is the elicited reaction. The organism is just another body in space being pushed around by impinging forces. The reflex is the perfect exemplification of this theoretical framework: stimulus strikes body, body reacts (e.g. the patellar reflex). The discovery of conditioned reflexes held out the prospect of extending this basic mechanistic model to all behavior—psychology is thus the study of environmental impacts and the resulting motions of bodies. This too is a unified theory, employing a single conceptual apparatus to characterize everything the mind does and is. It is a unified theory that lasted much longer than the mechanism that was undermined by Newton and Clerk Maxwell. Mechanism about the mind persisted long after mechanism about the body had met its demise. Mechanism in physics replaced mysterious teleological conceptions of physical action (Aristotle), while mechanism in psychology replaced mysterious dualist conceptions of the mind (Descartes): but the former kind of mechanism succumbed to the mysteries inherent in Newton’s discoveries, while the latter kind soldiered on.

There were always rumblings against psychological mechanism, despite its dominance during much of the twentieth century; but the rumblings reached a crescendo during the latter part of the century. For convenience I am going to locate these dissenting voices in the persons of Thomas Nagel and Jerry Fodor; and I am going to summarize their contributions in two words—“subjectivity” and “symbolism”. By now this is a very familiar story, so I won’t spell things out. In brief: Nagel drew attention to consciousness, deploying the phrase “what it is like”, and insisting that there is more to the mind than physiology; Fodor likewise resisted physical reductionism and argued that the mind works symbolically, coining the phrase “the language of thought”, and suggesting that the mind is a computational system. Sensations are the paradigms of the subjective; thoughts are the paradigms of the symbolic. Some scuffles ensued regarding the scope of these basic categories, mainly having to do with whether everything symbolic is also subjective, and vice versa; but a consensus emerged that the mind has both sorts of property. It felta certain way and it representeda certain way. Thus people described conscious experience as consisting of qualia while thought processes were described as consisting of symbols: phenomenology and syntax, respectively. Two approaches to the mind thus came into prominence (one might cite Husserl and Chomsky as the father figures of these developments—or going back further, Brentano and Turing). One approach emphasized the first-person perspective, introspection, and lived experience; the other emphasized language (natural and formal), grammar, and symbolic processing.

The result of these innovations is not a unified theory; it is a disunified theory.[1]The general assumption is that the mind has two aspects, or consists of two sorts of faculty, or is made of two sorts of thing. True, it is subjective in some parts of its being; but also true, it is symbolic in other parts of its being. A theory of mind must therefore recognize a fundamental duality in what the mind is and how it operates. Metaphors have arisen to capture this duality: on the one hand, the stream or river of consciousness,[2]the mosaic of qualia, the theater of the mind; on the other hand, the mind as a computer, thought as inner speech, reasoning as calculating. It is not supposed that qualia are units of computation, and it is not supposed that words in the language of thought are qualitative contents of consciousness. The ontology is quite different, as is the role assigned to the entities postulated. One might say that subjectivity is an analogue phenomenon while symbolism is a digital phenomenon—continuous versus discrete, fluid versus segmented. The chief characteristics of mental symbolism are infinite productivity and syntactic concatenation, while the chief characteristics of mental subjectivity are not described in this way but are thought of a kind of flowing or pulsating (those metaphors!). Feelings don’t combine like words to generate an infinite array of syntactically structured strings, but neither do mental symbols afford a rich subjective life. These ontologies exist side by side, but they don’t interpenetrate—they don’t integrate. There is no unified theory of the subjective and the symbolic. [3]

Here we may be reminded of the current situation in physics, and indeed I think the comparison is apt. The theory of gravitation and the theory of elementary particles form different theories that are not unified or integrated. Indeed, the two theories operate with very different principles and laws. Yet the macro world and the micro world are not separate disjoint worlds; they overlap. What we have is a unified reality and a fragmentation of theory—not a happy state of affairs. There are some who detect actual tensions between the two theories, if not outright contradiction. Similarly, we have two theories of the mind, also not integrated or unified, and apparently about different things. For example, we can approach a given conscious thought in two ways: as a subjective state of consciousness imbued with a characteristic phenomenology, or as a symbolic structure functioning in a computational process (mostly unconscious). Yet we are looking at the same thing—just as a macroscopic object is the same thing as a congeries of microscopic objects. Surely there must be some way to bring these two descriptions together. But where is it to be found? Ideally we would be able to take a subjective description and derive from it a symbolic description, or vice versa—we would see these descriptions as aspects of a single reality. But there is a chasm between them, a dualism withinthe mind. What have qualia and symbols got to do with each other? Couldn’t you have one without the other? Is one more basic? What makes a symbol have a subjective character, and what makes qualia have symbolic properties? The two seem to stare at each other across a vast divide. It is not as if we have a computational theory of subjectivity or a phenomenological theory of symbolism—whatever either of those things might be.[4]The quantum world looks alien to the gravitational world and the subjective world looks alien to the symbolic world, but these worlds must be parts of a seamless whole in some way. In particular, an adequate theory in psychology would integrate the subjective and symbolic perspectives.

I am not saying it can’t be done; I am only saying that we don’t presently know how. The concepts are lacking; the theory is fugitive. At least mechanism avoided this kind of theoretical disunity. Starting with the idea of a reflex (innate and hardwired) behaviorism tried to generalize to cover all aspects of the mind, employing a single conceptual apparatus. That was a dismal failure—an absurd leap of faith. But the apparatus that replaced it is radically bifurcated and dubiously connected; we don’t even know how far the subjective and the symbolic overlap. It would be different if the two theories dealt with different components of the mind—say, subjective theory with sensations and symbolic theory with thought—but that is far from being the case, since sensations occur in perceptual and cognitive processes and thought is imbued with subjectivity. Subjectivity and symbolism exist in the mind in intimate and inextricable connection. So there really oughtto be a unifying theory, but we don’t have any idea of what it might look like. What would be nice is some explanation for how mental symbols are necessarily infused with subjectivity. Spoken symbols have the phenomenology associated with their sensory modality (mostly hearing), but symbols in the language of thought are not sensed in any way, so their phenomenological aspect must have some other source. Granted that the language of thought is innate, is it that the phenomenology of thought is coded into the genetic basis of its lexicon and syntax? The mind reels. Consciousness and computation are not separate aspects of the mind, existing is isolation from each other. A mind (a human mind) is a conscious symbolizer: it symbolizes in the mode of consciousness (as well as unconsciously). Its nature is subjective symbolism or symbolic subjectivity.

I have no suggestions to make about how to integrate these two aspects of mentality; I merely wish to point out the lacuna. As in physics, we live in an era of theoretical fragmentation with respect to the mind, following upon the heady unity promised by a general mechanism. Perhaps the future will bring the kind of theoretical unity that made mechanism so attractive to our ancestors, perhaps not.

Colin McGinn

[1]Functionalism undertook to demonstrate theoretical unity across everything that dwells in the mind, but it succumbed to an onslaught of objections, which I won’t repeat.

[2]Also consciousness as like a mysterious flame or a translucent rainbow or a type of veil or a genie drawn from a lamp or a shimmering force-field over the brain or steam from an engine—and no doubt others.

[3]It is worth noting that psychophysics has never been a symbolic theory, any more than reflexology has been. The law-governed dependence of sensation intensity on stimulus intensity is not a computational process—the sensory systems don’t deducesensation intensity from stimulus intensity. Rather, there are psychophysical reflexes underlying the laws of psychophysics. We have no tendency to invoke a “language of sensation” to explain the facts of psychophysics.

[4]No one writes papers entitled “The Logical Form of Consciousness” or “A Subjectivist Theory of Universal Grammar”. Those sound like category mistakes.

Conceptions of God

According to orthodox Christian theology, God plays three main roles: he is the creator of the universe; he acts as moral judge; and he is our divine benefactor. These roles are combined in a single entity, though they are different roles. There would be no contradiction in the roles being possessed by distinct entities. Creating the universe requires one sort of capacity, meting out justice another, and caring about human welfare another. In normal human life such roles are assigned to different people. But God is multi-talented: he can perform all three. There is some tension between the role of judge and the role of benefactor: if God decides to punish us (justly) by sending us to hell, he is not acting as our benefactor; and benefactors are not ipso factoagents of justice. He cares about us, but apparently not enough to spare us the flames of hell. A theology that invoked distinct individuals to play these roles would be more intelligible. Yet we have become accustomed to monotheism. True, God is sometimes divided into sub-gods, as with the Holy Trinity (God the father, God the son, and God the holy ghost): but it is supposed that these are somehow aspects of a single entity. How can we be sure of this? Whether there is any god is a commonly asked question, but what about the question of the cardinality of gods? Why exactly do we posit a single god?

This raises the issue of the criterion of identity for gods. Different tribes can worship different gods, and the ancient Greeks worshipped many gods, so it is not as if the concept of God logically implies unity; so why do we amalgamate the three roles I mentioned into a single being? What are the groundsfor asserting identity? Has anyone ever seen the being that performs these roles and observed that they proceed from a single source? Is there any deduction from them to the identity of their bearer? Clearly not: it looks like a dogma. Presumably there are many different types of divine ontology in logical space: three gods, twenty-seven gods, an infinity of gods. Yet we have settled on the single-god ontology (with possible subdivisions). But how are gods to be counted? We know how to count apples and humans, but how do we count gods? In Greek mythology the implicit criterion is in terms of role performed (the god of love, etc.), but in Christian theology that principle is abandoned. What is put in its place? Nothing, so far as I can see. Why exactly don’t we entertain the proposition that three different beings perform the jobs of creator, judge, and benefactor? Why not a divine committee? It can’t be because the members of the committee might disagree, because that can be ruled out by means of an omniscience clause. Is it an affront to the dignity of a god that there should exist other gods? But why is it less dignified to exist alongside other gods than to exist alone? God could certainly create other gods, being omnipotent, so why does he practice divine solipsism? He created Jesus, and angels too, so why not another god like him? Why not propose a theology in which monotheism is relaxed? Why the obsession with singularity? After all, we pray to our benefactor for help, but not to the creator of the universe, still less our stern moral judge. Don’t the three roles naturally call for different entities to perform them? Holiness need not be confined to a single individual. Isn’t the idea of a single god a holdover from the days of monarchy (there was never more than one king)? Doesn’t modern democracy fit better with a divine collective—a kind of supernatural cabinet? Isn’t there something cultish about a single unique super-being? What about checks and balances, distribution of powers, division of labor? What about an executive god, a legislative god, and a god of welfare? Isn’t there at least a possible world in which godliness is thus divided? Is it not an epistemic possibility that God is not one but many? How can we rule out discovering at the pearly gates that there is more than one god? Couldn’t we discover that God has more than one child, contrary to what we now tend to believe? Monotheism hardly seems like a certain and necessary truth. We should keep an open mind on the question.

We have a certain conception of God, though it tends to be hazy and undefined: he exists outside space and time and is not as other mortal beings. He stands apart from us in a special realm of his own, imperceptible, immaterial, and incorruptible. He doesn’t walk the streets or travel on the subway like the rest of us. Why do we think like this? What led us to conceive of god in this removed and elusive way? Suppose you had read the tales of Sherlock Holmes and took them to be reports of actual events. That is, you mistakenly think that Holmes is real not fictional. You think Arthur Conan Doyle combed police records and discovered an amazing detective who lives on Baker Street, has a friend named Dr. Watson, etc. You become fascinated by this remarkable man and want to meet him, not realizing that his fictional status precludes such a thing. Given this, you might haunt Baker Street in the hope of sighting him and making his acquaintance. However, diligent research and ceaseless surveillance fail to turn up the famous detective—he is nowhere to be found. Nor, you discover, has anyone else ever seen him. You might draw the conclusion that your initial assumption was wrong: Holmes is fictional not factual. But suppose you are too far-gone for that, too emotionally invested, so you persist in your initial belief. How then to explain the great detective’s absence from the scene? Is he just remarkably adept at eluding detection, slipping in and out of his residence on Baker Street without ever being observed by anyone? No, that is too implausible—no one could be thatelusive and yet dwell on planet earth. So you come up with a radical hypothesis (indeed a strong conviction), namely that Holmes is not as other men—he is not a concrete earth-dwelling being at all. He actually lives (if that is the word) elsewhere, in a special realm reserved only for superlatively gifted detectives—and indeed there was always something otherworldly about him. He is, you might say, a…god. That is, he is a special type of being that lives in a special place outside space and time, though he contrives to intervene in worldly affairs. Admittedly, this belief requires some reinterpreting of the Doyle texts, but it is not beyond the powers of human imagination to conceive. The reason Holmes is never seen about the place is that he is not a mortal being at all.

Clearly, this explanation, though intelligible, is not correct. You started with the false assumption that Holmes is non-fictional and then erected your theory to explain his lack of earthly presence, while you should have reconsidered your belief that he is a real person. You believed that a fictional character was real and then invented a wacky theory to explain his lack of presence in the empirical world. Couldn’t something like this be true of our conception of God? We read a text about a fictional entity and believe that entity is real (we are told as children that it is), but then we are perplexed by his absence from the observable world, so we invent a theory to explain this disparity. What elsecould explain why a real entity isn’t evident in the observable world? It’s because this entity is not ofthis world, but of another world. There are two possible explanations of God’s absence from the empirical world: (a) he is a fictional character and so doesn’t exist in reality, and (b) he isn’t a fictional character and exists in a special unobservable realm. If our transcendent conception of God arose in the way the transcendent conception of Sherlock Holmes arose, then we can see how we came to conceive God in the way we did—it is a natural response to his lack of empirical presence. I am not claiming that this ishow it arose, only that ifit did our manner of conceiving God would be explained. That is, if there is no God—he is a fictional character—and yet we believe in his existence, it is natural that we should conceive of him in the transcendent way we do. Believing in the reality of fictional entities is apt to generate wacky theories about their whereabouts. If I believe in unicorns but find that none ever reveal themselves, I might form the theory that unicorns exist elsewhere—in a special unicorn meadow far far away. It is no accident that Santa Claus is supposed to live at the North Pole, because if he lived in Neasden it would be a puzzle why no one ever spots him. The North Pole is sufficiently far removed that inquisitive children can be palmed off with the information that he lives far way, so that’s why he is never spotted around town. Fictional entities that are objects of belief need special places to exist that are hard to access—unicorn-land, the North Pole, heaven. No one is going to believe that a mythical being exists if he said to live around the corner. Mythical beings that are believed to exist must be supposed to live where their non-existence can’t be detected.

Colin McGinn