Objectifying the Fluid Mind

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Objectifying the Fluid Mind

I have argued that our ordinary language and thought about the mind involves an alien imposition or intrusion originating in our concepts of the external world.[1] Here I will expand on this viewpoint, detailing the types of imposition involved and the nature of that on which they are impositions. The second task is much more difficult than the first. In what ways, then, do we apply external-object concepts to mental reality, creating an impression of object-hood in the mind? There are several. First and foremost, we describe the mind as intentional: that is, directed at objects in the external world—trees, rocks, animals, etc. The mind is said to be of or about such objects, and this is held to be essential to its nature. It joins up with the objectual. It has objects built into its fabric. This can lead to the extreme view that the mind is composed of objects, or has no nature apart from its intentional objects (as in Sartre’s idea of consciousness as nothingness). And certainly, the idea of objectless consciousness verges on the self-contradictory. In addition, if we ask ourselves what is left over when the objects are removed, no answer is returned and we stammer in consternation. If there is anything left over, it is deeply mysterious and suspicious. Second, the body: we like to link our sensations with body parts—pain in the foot, itches on the scalp, pleasure in the palate, etc. So, we are thinking of sensations as inextricably tied to the body-object, which shapes their intrinsic character. Third, and connected with the intentionality point, we are apt to conceive the mind’s ability to focus and attend as a kind of pointing: it is directed at something, oriented towards it. This is a physical concept in that our notions of direction and pointing are physical notions; the mind only does these things metaphorically. How else are we supposed to think of such mental acts (and this phrase also is tacitly body-inspired)? Fourth, we are prone to think of memory as a “storehouse”—a kind of library, perhaps, or crammed attic. We have no other way to understand its ability to hold (note the word) items we are not currently conscious of. Then too, we have colorful talk of corners of the mind, depths of the mind, layers of it, mental compartments, modules, theaters, blank slates, slabs of marble, private spaces, zones of emptiness. All these locutions are tinged (saturated) with images of the external physical world. It can seem as if we are desparate to think of something to fill the descriptive void, so we come up with almost anything to remove the conceptual discomfort. Some of it is reasonable enough, even essential, but some seems like pure poetry. No doubt about it, we are apt to objectify the mind—beyond what the mental facts warrant. Some find this repugnant and seek to fashion a mental vocabulary that dispenses with objectual language, placing their money on a supposedly pure subjective language modelled on the blooming buzzing consciousness of an infant or some such. This tends not to amount to much and smuggles in the objectionable vocabulary. It’s all stabs in the dark, basically.

This takes us to the nub of the issue: what is the mind independently of its objectual entanglements? Even when those entanglements are legitimate, as in intentionality, we still have the question of what is mentally involved apart from the objects of the intentional act. What is this of-ness? What is the mind in its pure unadulterated essence? The question is heady and seemingly unanswerable, but I think I may have an answer of sorts. True, it calls for a drastic revision of our conceptual scheme, a complete revolution in human thought, a step into the intellectual abyss—but hey, nothing ventured nothing gained and all that. Actually, it is not quite as startling as it might sound once you get used to it. The answer is this: the mind is a fluid. I don’t mean water or gin or the nectar of the gods; I mean fluid in a more general sense. The OED (bible of the bibliophile) gives us this: “a substance that has no fixed shape and yields easily to external pressure; a gas or (especially) a liquid; able to flow easily; not settled or stable”. We could paraphrase this as “a dynamic, ever-changing process; not a fixed and rigid entity”. To be fluid (and hence a fluid) is to be not a discrete solid thing but a continuous malleable flowing stuff. A Cartesian dualist might well assert that the mind is an immaterial fluid in this capacious sense. We already speak of the “river of consciousness”; well, the mind is fluidic not static, continuous not discrete, a process not a fixed entity. You see how the initial shock wears off? The mind has a fluid mechanics not a solid-state mechanics. It flows and changes; it doesn’t stand still like a dumb rock. It has a fluid metaphysics not a static metaphysics. Granted, we don’t know what this mental fluid is, but we do know that it is fluid—that it obeys the laws of fluids. It is a shifting, formless, flowing, buoyant, bubbly, energetic, fascinating, fluent…not thing, but “something”. It can speed up, slow down, go quiet, rage, and change its shape as the occasion warrants. It moves silently and rapidly. Consciousness, in particular, is a fluid being, flowing this way and that, changing its shape (but it has no shape): now it is perceptually awake, now it is dreamily asleep. It is protean and animated. The mind minds; it isn’t a static object awaiting an outside force to arouse it. It is all action, hustling and bustling. Don’t we experience a wave of emotion, a torrent of thoughts, a rush of memory? Doesn’t our experience sometimes wash over us? Isn’t the will liquidly mercurial? Aren’t our intentional objects like things floating on the surface of our consciousness? Aren’t some things submerged in the roiling psyche? Freud had a hydrodynamics of the mind, and wasn’t he onto something there? Isn’t consciousness phenomenologically liquidy and gassy? Not like other fluid things, to be sure, but ontologically in the same class. Consciousness courses, gushes, and surges. Aren’t we flooded with the stuff?

If so, we have an answer to our earlier question: we objectify what is really fluidic. That is obviously a bad idea on the face of it: fluids aren’t solid objects. Clearly, our folk fluid mechanics of consciousness is primitive, so we supplement it with more familiar concepts drawn from elsewhere. Thus, we get the mish-mash that now exists in our conceptions of mind: an intuitive sense of fluidity combined with a forced imposition of solidity. We are trying to solidify a fluid, to put it crudely. We are imposing an ontological scheme onto a reality that spurns it in its inner nature. We are not going with the flow but contradicting it. We are like people trying to describe colors by shapes. We are trying to reduce the fluidic to the static. And then there is the fact that the mind isn’t even spatial (as we experience it), so we are committing a double category mistake. That’s okay for practical purposes, but we should at least fess up to it. The brain doesn’t operate by principles of fluid mechanics (more electromagnetics), but the mind is all fluidity.[2] No doubt it needs its own mechanics; it won’t do to treat it as just like water. In any case, this picture enables us to give some kind of answer to the question that troubles us, viz. what the mind intrinsically is beyond its habitual description in objectual terms. I heartily agree that this picture is highly speculative, not to say fanciful, but (as Popper says) science proceeds by constructing imaginative theories that are then subject to falsifying test; you can’t just extract theories from the available data. And the more falsifiable the better. In this spirit, I claim that the fluid theory of consciousness (“fluidism”) has not yet been falsified.[3]

[1] See my “Concepts of Mind”.

[2] If we had opened up the human head and found an elaborate hydraulic system, instead of a solid brain made of chunky neurons, we would no doubt have been more disposed towards a hydraulic conception of the mind. As it is, we have only a vague introspective sense of the fluidity of mind; but it is stronger than any sense of the solidity of mind. The river analogy does not strike us as wildly wide of the mark; we don’t say “Oh no, the mind is nothing like a river; it’s more like a pile of dominoes or Stone Henge”.

[3] I actually think Popper’s methodology applies better to philosophical problems than scientific ones, precisely because in philosophy the data are so exiguous. There is a greater role for imagination in philosophy than in science, and philosophy is largely a critical discipline–that’s how it proceeds. Someone comes up with a wildly ambitious theory from nowhere and then other people attack it like a pack of rabid dogs. We call this “philosophy”.

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The Anatomy of Concepts

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The Anatomy of Concepts

According to empirical rationalism, concepts have a dual architecture, consisting of both an innate component and an acquired component. They are part instinctual and part experiential, part genes and part history. Here I will offer a more detailed account of how they are structured, introducing some technical terms.[1] First, the innate component: it isn’t yet a concept but only a precursor of one, a kind of template or blueprint. I will call it a character, meaning by that what biologists mean, i.e., a heritable feature of an organism (morphological, behavioral, or biochemical). But I also want the reader to keep in mind David Kaplan’s concept of character in his study of indexicality, roughly the meaning of a context-dependent word (“I”, “here”, “now”, “that”, etc.). So, we can say that every concept has an innately fixed character, genetically programmed. This character is potentially a concept, but it requires a triggering condition in order to reach that status, typically a sense experience. When this happens, the character becomes expressed in the form of some sort of conscious experience, say seeing red or thinking a “red” thought. Before that it was merely latent.

The conscious expression occurs in a context—a life history—which typically involves a causal transaction, like a physical stimulus. The character thus finds expression in a context. The context is not innate, so that the concept has an acquired component as well as an innate component. As a result of these factors, the concept comes to have a reference, i.e., a real-world correlate, say the property of being square. Thus, the character combines with the context to generate an expression that has a reference. The genes find themselves in an environmental context that leads them to be expressed in a mental state that has a reference in the external world. All this is involved in the formation of a concept out of an innate component and an empirical component—the inborn and the historically contingent. The two mesh together to produce a mental item that refers to something determinate. This is the basic form of an empirical rationalist theory: a dual component theory that borrows from both the empiricist and the rationalist traditions. A conscious conceptual thought is the upshot of these interacting factors, one located in the genes, the other in the environment. Concepts are Janus-faced and hybrid—all of them. They are partly Descartes and partly Locke, intimately joined. There is no such thing as a purely empiricist concept or a purely rationalist concept. The apparatus sketched here provides us with a coherent account of their manner of combination.[2]

[1] This paper follows on from and supplements my “Quasi-Empiricism”.

[2] It doesn’t purport to solve mysteries regarding the mental operations sketched; it merely provides a format for thinking about the structure and natural history of concepts conceived in the hybrid way indicated.

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My Novels

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My Novels

How should my novels be interpreted? I wrote them, so I should know. There are two: Bad Patches and The Space Trap. The first title suggests both bad patches in a life and bad patches in a person—and their interplay. The second title might suggest a science fiction story, but actually refers to the fact that we are trapped in space existentially. David Green is the anti-hero of BP and Alan Swift is the protagonist of ST. Green is unripe, Swift is fast-moving. Dave is a coarse foul-mouthed would-be artist on the make; Alan is a mild-mannered insurance clerk with a wife and family. BP is about the tension between art and morality; ST is about the tension between home and abroad. The characters are trapped in these tensions, riven by them. The first is a punk existentialist novel, the second a domestic drama set on two continents. The first is first-person narrated, the second third-person. Both are comedies with nasty bits. The author puts them through it, chuckling in the background. Neither character is remotely like him. It would be hard to say that either character is very likable, especially the artist (pungent is the best you could say of him). Alan is a bit of a blank slate in search of an identity; he has a punishing imaginative life. He seems on the brink of fading away. Dave is very in-your-face.

What are the literary antecedents to these tales of modern man? BP looks back to Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Grey) and James Joyce (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and before them Plato. It drastically updates these works, and even surpasses Martin Amis for grimy yob characters. The reader is drawn into reading about Dave’s “adventures” in 1980s London—he or she feels the lure of art, even when morally transgressive. In the case of ST, the obvious references are to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Homer’s Odyssey: the contrast between domestic life and the life of Elsewhere. Alan is both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, full of fear. His imaginary self leads another life altogether. He escapes from Holloway (geddit?) to New York and a new identity, only to be forced back home. We don’t know what will befall him. Dave Green ends his story bored and restless after seeking security and love. Neither escapes the tension in which they are enmeshed.   

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Quasi-Empiricism

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Quasi-Empiricism

Let’s go boldly into the dark belly of the whale, where the mysteries are as thick as whale blubber. We will strain to see, but we may come back with some nuggets of gold. No one knows the origin of concepts, or their inner nature, or even their appearance (do they ever actually appear?); but we have our theories, which contain elements of truth. These theories have names: empiricism and rationalism (or nativism).[1] It is generally agreed that neither theory is sufficient by itself: ideas are not simply copies of impressions, but involve substantial transformations, indeed metamorphoses; and innate concepts need an eliciting stimulus, a sensory trigger. These are not minor amendments: the mind has to operate on sensory input to produce anything worthy of the name “concept”, converting a perceptual sow’s ear into a conceptual silk purse; and innate concepts (if that is the right word) will not graduate to the level of thought-constituent without substantial input from the senses. A percept is not a concept, and neither is an innate schema (let’s call it that). It is really a mystery how empiricism could be true, and equally a mystery how rationalism could be true. In fact, they both look incapable of being true, being species of miracle. Thinking isn’t perceiving, and neither is it some sort of genetically determined configuration in the embryonic brain. Concepts aren’t residues of fleeting perceptual encounters, and neither are they brute instincts like a tendency towards diabetes. They are more than either of those things. A concept is a constituent of a thought or it is nothing—a mere potentiality. We might as well say that concepts are innate in perceived objects (or impressions thereof), or that they are acquired from the genome—both of which are baffling pronouncements. Is whale blubber innate in the ocean or is it acquired from the ocean? Well, neither, or both, though it is tied to the ocean (that’s where the plankton live). Causality is not the same as constitution: concepts are somehow caused by objects via perception, according to empiricism; and they are also somehow caused by the genes via heredity, according to rationalism. But they are not reducible to either: objects don’t think, and neither does DNA. Causal chains, yes; constitution, no. It’s a whale’s belly in there.

What is strange is that no one has ever offered to fuse the two theories. Why not correct the deficiencies of empiricism and rationalism by amalgamating them? Each provides a necessary condition for concept existence, but only together do they provide a sufficient condition (plus a dose of mysterious blubber). We thus obtain what I am calling quasi-empiricism and quasi-rationalism. A concept is a combination of a sensory element and an innate element; it has a kind of double identity. For example, the concept square results from a combination of perceptions of square things and a genetic structure encoding squareness (in some way we don’t understand). The former interacts with the latter to produce a thought-constituent, helped by the cognitive system. Experience working on instinct gives thought. Not that any of this is well understood, or at all understood, but it is an evident fact. The innate schema doesn’t miraculously unfold over time of its own accord, but is elicited and shaped by input from the senses; while the experience is massaged by the innate structure to give what we recognize as a concept. Instinct and experience work together to produce thought: a thought is made of these two interacting elements. It’s not either-or but both-together. We thus have a grand synthesis of empiricism and rationalism. To be concrete, a concept like red has both an innate genetic component and an acquired experiential component; it is a synthesis of the two. A concept like even number likewise synthesizes innate endowment and sense experience (such as calculating experience with numbers). Both empiricism and rationalism are true, though without their exclusivity. That old dichotomy was a mistake. All thought has roots in the genes and in the perceived environment, the endogenous and the exogenous. Hence, quasi-empiricism and quasi-rationalism. We have no name for this composite theory, so we need to coin one; I will call it “empirical rationalism” for want of a better name—or “emp-rat”. In its most extreme form empirical rationalism holds that all concepts are both innate and acquired, non-sensory and sensory. Structurally, the theory is like Frege’s theory of sense and reference: a two-factor theory, a dual component theory.[2] It follows from it that all thought and knowledge (conceptual knowledge) is a combination of the senses and instinct—the passing show and the original position. All cognition is a gene-environment double act; none comes exclusively from the genes or exclusively from the environment. The traditional opposition between reason and sense-experience is therefore bogus. The innate shapes the acquired and simultaneously relies on the acquired. A concept is the upshot of both working harmoniously together. Epistemology is a tango performed by the genes and the sense organs. Each needs the other and the result is thought as we know it.

The old dichotomy runs through all subsequent epistemology, as each side stakes out its territory. But the epistemologists never thought to compromise and reach an agreement (like Catholics and Protestants). Ideology hardened. A dogma of empiricism was that nothing is innate; a dogma of rationalism was that the rational mind is free of sensory taint. But lurking beneath this ideological schism was the uncomfortable truth that sense experience alone is impotent to produce conceptual thought and instinct alone is similarly impotent. Sensation needs to be restructured, re-imagined, reconstituted; while innate programs need to be linked to the sensory systems and brought online. Abstraction won’t do to generate concepts from object-perceptions, and elicitation by experience does not do justice to the degree of transformation wrought on those innate genetic schemas (whatever they are). Both are mere potentiality without the other to fill them out. The concept red is a hybrid, and so is the concept two. It would not be alien to this viewpoint to admit degrees of empiricism and rationalism: the concept red might be more sensory than the concept two. Different types of concepts could combine the innate and the perceived in different ways and to different degrees, but all would involve a mixture of some sort. The essence of empirical rationalism is that all concepts are a bit of both, of necessity; concepts can’t live without both sources of sustenance. And notice that the theory goes right down to basic concepts: there are no purely sensory concepts and no purely ratiocinative concepts. The conceptual mind is simultaneously full of the genetic past and also of the sensory present (as well as the sensory past). “I think, therefore I have an innate genetic form and an acquired sensory history.” We can deduce, from the nature of thought, that thinkers are both innately programmed and open to experience. There are no blank slates and no experiential shut-ins—on pain of not being able to think at all. In concepts the innate and the acquired merge indissolubly together.[3]

[1] See my Inborn Knowledge (2015) for a discussion of empiricism and nativism.

[2] Some readers may recall my old paper “The Structure of Content” (1982), which develops a bipartite theory of meaning and content of a different sort. The basic general principle is that two things are better than one.

[3] It is true that people have recognized that organisms and organs are the result of both factors, but they have drawn the line at concepts for some reason—here they are purists. My position is that we can extend the usual nature-nurture, instinct-history, analysis to concepts. Everything cognitive is both.

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Concepts of Mind

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Concepts of Mind

We have concepts of mind, but where do they come from? According to a hallowed tradition, they come from the mind itself, or rather our perception of it. Just as we get our concepts of external objects from external objects (in both senses of “object”), so we get our concepts of internal objects from internal objects. The cause is the same as the object (in the “intentional object” sense). This view seems so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, but there have been dissenters: Wittgenstein for one, eliminative materialists for another (you can’t get the concepts from the objects if the objects don’t exist—non-existent objects don’t cause anything). And indeed, there is something funny about the idea: for we don’t see or otherwise sense our own minds (or the minds of others); nor can we point to them in acts of ostensive definition. They are not laid out in space, displayed for us to attend to and perform mental operations upon (comparing, abstracting). Such operations are already obscure enough, we hardly need any more obscurity. Nor is it clear what the content of such putative concepts is—states, processes, events, dispositions, etc.?[1] Animals and young children seem not to have them. They seem distinctly fishy, though hard to dispense with; they certainly have a function. We feel that they don’t really do justice to what they purport to denote—as if the mind itself lies at some distance from them. They are more labels than descriptive devices, not really vehicles of intimate knowledge. They don’t enable us to grasp what they refer to, though it certainly seems to be something. Altogether, a bit of a conundrum. Really not like beetles in a box, but then again what else might they be? There is a kind of gap between concept and object, word and thing. The suit doesn’t fit the figure; it is shapeless and the trousers are too short. Our mental language is lacking in lucidity. Its ontology is peculiar—unlike our ontology of the external world (the world of solid substances in space). If it came directly from the mind itself, surely it would be less perplexing, more apt and revealing. So, maybe it doesn’t come from the mind, real though the mind is. Our mental concepts might be about the mind but not derived from it. They might be imposed on the mind rather than extracted from it.

But where else might our mental concepts come from? God can’t help us, because he would have done a better job of constructing them (among other things). Call this “the origin problem of mental concepts”. I have a solution to this problem, but you are not going to like it—I don’t like it myself (except in a perverse way). It is this: we get our mental concepts from the external world. Locke thought that we get our concepts of the external world from the external world and that we get our concepts of the internal world from the internal world (by good old-fashioned “abstraction”); I say we get our concepts of the internal world from the external world. “Nonsense!” you reply, and I sympathize; it is a kind of nonsense—for our mental language (and its concepts) is a kind of nonsense. We think of the mind by analogy with our concepts of the external world (not a novel thought)—that is, we transfer our external concepts to the mind. But, you reply, we don’t get our concept of belief, say, by first attributing it to external reality and then directing it inward—we don’t think rocks think! True enough, though anthropomorphism is not uncommon. But don’t take me too woodenly: the idea is that we modify our raw perceptions so as to produce an analogue concept, which we then happily employ inwardly. Remember that our concepts of external things are not just a matter of copying or peeling off or attenuating; an elaborate creative act is performed to derive the concept from the percept (which is quite mysterious).[2] So, we can allow that perception of external objects serves as (indispensable) input to the creation of a kind of sub-concept applicable to the mind. Belief, say, is a state of an object that has a complex structure—like a bridge or tree or animal body. We have beliefs in the way an external object has a property—as an animal has an anatomy or a crystal a shape. We don’t gaze at the inner object and veridically read off its nature; rather, we use our prior acquaintance with external objects to furnish us with a passable representation of our inner world (notice the same move in that last phrase). A pain is like a bolt of lightning or a bloody accident or a loud noise: it has their ontological form. We conceive the inner on the model of the outer. Thus, we derive our mental concepts from our physical concepts—though we don’t reduce the mental to the physical. Our concept-generation module works hard on perceptions of physical things to produce our mental concepts, as we like to call them. These concepts are tacitly physical in origin. The concept of the self (“I”) is derived (at least in part) from our concepts of bodies, including our own, not from direct introspection of the self as an inner object. The reason for this is that we have no alternative: it can’t be done by means of some alleged inner perception-plus-abstraction procedure. What we have here is a case of conceptual transfer or transformation, akin to grammatical transformations or biological transformations. I don’t doubt that the human imagination, a highly creative faculty, plays a part in this; we imagine the mind as a kind of inner landscape—but we don’t perceive it that way. We conceive the mind imaginatively on the model of the external world (“imagining-as”).

Think of it this way: we have become used to the idea that the mind projects itself onto external things, as when we call external objects “red” based on an antecedent use of “red” for sensations; well, what I am suggesting is the inverse of this—introjecting the outer onto the inner. We can describe the external world using terms originally designed to describe the internal world, and we can also do the converse. Our mental language is a kind of transposition of our physical language, suitably processed and modified; it isn’t independently created by direct methods (the same might be said of our mathematical language). We are exploiting our conceptual derivation apparatus. This explains the ill-fitting character of our mental concepts, the sense of inadequacy or remoteness. We are playing the wrong language-game, but we have no other, and it works well enough in everyday life. Language and thought did not initially evolve so as to enable us to describe our inner life, but rather to negotiate the external world. It later enabled us to talk about our mind by building on what existed previously (like all evolutionary adaptations). Naturally, it isn’t a perfect fit, but then it doesn’t have bespoke origins; the wonder is that it works at all. Of course, we simultaneously described the external world in mentalistic terms, so our conceptual reach was never sharply confined; we freely mixed the two. Our psychological conceptual scheme is a make-do on-the-job cobbled-together construction, not an ideal language laid down by some perfection-loving deity. But we take it for granted and have learned to live with it. It is like the work of a child genius.[3]

[1] See my “Ontology of Mind” and other works.

[2] See my “Quasi-Empiricism”.

[3] It is always salutary to take an evolutionary diachronic perspective on the mind and not adopt an oversimplified synchronic perspective.  Human language and the human conceptual scheme are cumulative affairs with a history, some parts older than other parts. We adapt the old to the new.

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A Dutchman

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Dear professor Colin McGinn,

First of all I want to say ‘Thank You‘ for having written such insightfull and brain-teasing (pun intended;-) books and articles on mind, soul, body & their possible interactions!
I’ve tried to contradict TN, most recently during a holiday in France this summer, but alas, my arguments thus far didn’t hold so I’m afraid I will remain, at least for the time being, an adherent of sorts…
Fortunately, a former teacher of mine (and now colleague, the two of us being on the brink of retirement together), Jan Bransen of Nijmegen University, already mentioned you with lots of approval some thirty years ago, so I’m not the only Dutchman who came under your spell;-).
Secondly, I feel urged to express my fierce indignation over the CA some people tried to play on you! Leaving a person at the mercy (sic) of social media that will never be cleansed nor wiped away should, in my opinion, be most severely punished – to begin with, it has nothing to do whatsoever with your acumen and esprit de finesse as a philosopher.
So again: many thanks, kind regards and best wishes:
Mart van der Hiele
[MA (Latin&Greek languages, Leyden University), BA (phil/theol); currently teaching at Hendrik Pierson College, Zetten, The Netherlands, Department of Classics. I’m especially fond of the Ancient sceptics, and along the track I came across a certain C. McGinn, which I don’t regret in the least;-]
You will not find an American willing to say this.
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Letter from Robert K.

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Colin:
I love the piece. I took the liberty of appending a healthy portion of it to your Landscape entry, lengthening what was already the longest entry. I think it is important to stress your position, particularly your current way of thinking, because your “mysterianism” is a core contribution to the M-B Problem, and it has been misconstrued by some who don’t understand and misapplied by others who have an agenda.
As always, any and all edits welcome.
Warm regards,
Robert

 

Great, Robert. You really do understand it. I don’t know why others don’t—I suspect they just don’t want to.

Have you ever wondered how Chalmers ever got anywhere? He has nothing original to say and keeps saying it.

Colin

 

On Jul 18, 2026, at 6:09 AM, Colin <cmg124@aol.com> wrote:
<Problems of Consciousness.docx>
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Problems of Consciousness

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Problems of Consciousness

Think back to the time when we had very little knowledge of the brain, but substantial knowledge of consciousness and the mind generally. We didn’t even know that the brain is the organ of the body responsible for the mind, or that any bodily organ is (it might emanate from an astral plane or some such). It is a mystery which bodily part is bound up with the mind. Is it the heart or the stomach or the brain? Then it is discovered that the brain is the organ in question, whatever that mysterious organ is. We gradually begin to unravel the brain mystery: the brain consists of cells called “neurons” (they could have been called “quarks”) that have a distinctive structure (nucleus, dendrites, axons), visible under a microscope. We even discover the nerve impulse and begin to figure out how it works (electrochemical processes of inhibition and excitation). Another mystery solved, or partially solved. So, now we know what implements conscious processes in the brain: we know what underlies mental phenomena, as well as which organ is responsible. We are beginning to map the correlates of consciousness in the brain. Good progress so far; we might reasonably hope that other remaining mysteries will be solved, especially given the progress we are making in understanding the physiology of other organs of the body.

But other mysteries remain that call for even more strenuous intellectual efforts: for example, why does consciousness exist? What does it do for its possessor in furthering its life prospects? Here we may turn to the idea of behavioral complexity or flexibility or adaptability: the mind is what enables animals to behave in intelligent complex ways. Then the question becomes how the brain enables this property of mind. Admittedly, this is a steeper problem—even a full-blown mystery. But some genius comes up with a promising idea: the brain consists of an enormous number of these neuron thingummies and they communicate with each other. Other organs may also have enormous numbers of constituent cells, but they don’t talk to each other the way neurons do—they don’t transmit information across the entire organ (think of the corpus callosum). Complex intelligent behavior is based in the complex communicative processes of the brain. Now this is admitted not to remove all perplexity about consciousness in relation to behavior, but it looks like a feasible explanation of one aspect of consciousness. We know why consciousness exists, given that it allows for adaptive complexity; and the brain is what confers this power on it. The powers of the mind are rooted in the powers of the brain as a multicellular holistic rapid-fire processor of information, or so our genius assures us (and it sounds plausible enough). If we go on to ask why all this behavioral fancy footwork, we can appeal to evolutionary theory—complexity aids survival. Thus, we have solved many mysteries of consciousness (as well as the unconscious); in particular, we have solved the problem of the means by which the mind exerts its remarkable behavioral powers. It looks as if we have got consciousness under good explanatory control—as good as the heart, lungs, stomach, etc. Those old mysteries have now disappeared.

But one mystery still stands stubbornly out—the how mystery. How does the brain, in all its holistic informational complexity, produce consciousness? How do those blessed little neurons, numerous and talkative as they are, give rise to (conjure up) the rich pageantry of conscious experience? How does the cheap plonk of the brain get transformed into the exotic cocktail of the mind? Gee, that’s a tough one (much head scratching ensues). In other words, the adamantine core of the mind-body problem has not been solved. We know the which, the what, the when, the means, the why, and the to-what-end—but we don’t know the how. Isn’t that odd? All that impressive mystery-solving and yet no progress with this mystery! Shouldn’t we have solved the how-problem long ago? Thus, we are faced with a meta-mystery: the mystery of why the how problem is so mysterious. It makes one think that nature can’t really be behaving very mysteriously with respect to this problem; the mystery is not a de re metaphysical mystery, but a human-intellect mystery, i.e., a function of our peculiar mental set-up. It’s a blind-spot, a scotoma, an area of cognitive paralysis, a mote of dirt in the mind’s eye. It’s the work of the Devil not God. It’s a bug in the human cognitive system not a sign of the miraculous. The mystery is boring, considered objectively. This is my positive solution to the philosophical mind-body problem: it’s an artifact of our biological nature as finite flawed limited creatures—like back pain or the appendix or the vagus nerve. It’s not a symptom of our intrinsic amazingness. Consciousness is no more objectively amazing than fur or teeth; indeed, less so, because the lack of knowledge in this area serves no discernable purpose. We just happen to be dumb about the how-problem of consciousness, that’s all, though not so dumb about the other problems of consciousness. It isn’t deep or profound or earth-shattering. It isn’t as if the neuron is coated with invisible other-worldly glitter. The brain is as dull as the liver sub specie aeternitatus. The severity of a problem has nothing intrinsically to do with its ontology, but everything to do with its cognitive psychology. No doubt the brain is more than we currently suppose, but that more is not a step into the Land of Oz. Nature is natural, tautologically so. The mechanism (I use the word advisedly) that explains how the brain produces consciousness is not one of those with which we are already familiar: the lungs extracting oxygen, the stomach exuding acid, the kidneys filtering, the bowels pulverizing, the hand squeezing. But it is not in principle of a different metaphysical order; after all, it has only neurons to work with. So, let’s not go all gooey and dualistic over it, godly and spiritual. The consciousness of a frog is no less natural than its moistness or warty skin. But we are damned if we can see it that way. The problem lies in the eye of the beholder.

To sum up: consciousness is mostly not mysterious (anymore), and what remains a mystery cannot be inherently and objectively any different. It is, however, a mystery why it is a mystery; the existence of the mystery is itself a puzzle. It seems to have something to do with our means of acquiring knowledge of empirical reality, i.e., by the senses plus some rules of inference. But knowledge is quite mysterious too, so we lack a clear explanation of the existence of the how-mystery of consciousness. We know the mystery is there, but we are ignorant about what leads to it. We thus suffer from a meta-mystery. Many things about the conscious mind are not mysterious, or not totally mysterious, but one thing is—and that fact is something of a mystery. We have the how-mystery and the mystery of that mystery.[1]

[1] What if the mind-brain relation were not a mystery at all, like the stomach-digestion relation, but that one organ of the body was deeply mysterious to us because of some quirk in our cognitive psychology, say the lungs? Wouldn’t that seem extraordinary? But the mystery would be skin-deep, so to speak, given that the lungs work in the way we know they do. It would be misguided to adopt a dualist metaphysics of the lungs, regarding them as proof of God’s existence. The lungs and the brain are biological products, no matter how hard they may be to understand (in some respects). The case is rather like trying to understand a non-human language with a human brain, or see a color outside of the normal human range with human eyes.

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