Nagel on Nagel

I would like to recommend Tom Nagel’s interview with Robert Kuhn on Closer to Truth, and not just because he is my close friend. You can easily find it on YouTube. He gives a clear, succinct, and convincing account of the thinking that led up to his beautiful work on subjective and objective. You will also be treated to his inimitable style of speech (I won’t attempt to characterize it—you should hear it for yourself). One of a kind. This is a historic piece of film and I applaud both parties for undertaking it.

Love Tennis

Yesterday I went to Salvador tennis center to play with my good friends Eddie and Rob. It was 4pm and not too hot. We alternated hitting two against one (not points, just hitting). Then Claudio showed up unexpectedly (he had been very busy in his restaurant recently, so we hadn’t seen much of him). A Cuban chef, a Cuban cigar manufacturer, a retired Swiss banker, a retired English philosopher; age range from 54 (Claudio) to 76 (Colin). So, now four of us were hitting together in perfect harmony—encouraging each other, laughing, whacking the ball, all playing well. This went on for a solid hour with no breaks, because we were all enjoying it so much. I thought: this the way life should be; this is the way human relationships should be. Love tennis. No hate, no rivalry, no racket smashing (no American). It was a far cry from politics (national and academic), Trump, cancellation, crap.

 Space, Time, and Reality

Metaphysically speaking, there are basically two kinds of fact: structural and dynamic, spatial and temporal. These are what nature is made of. Geometry deals with structure; physics (the science of motion) deals with dynamics. How they are related is a difficult question, but they are clearly real and fundamental. There is a deep dualism at the heart of things—space and time. We must understand these things in order to understand reality, but we may suffer from blind spots, biases, areas of ignorance. We may be cognitively thwarted or even cognitively closed; we may be subject to illusions regarding space and time. Some facts may be more spatial than temporal and vice versa, or they may be intertwined (e.g., growth). Historical facts are very temporal, while mathematical facts are hardly temporal at all. Some facts don’t need time to be facts, but some are time dependent. Concepts of shape and substance belong on the spatial side, while concepts of evolution and action belong on the temporal side. The concept of color is ambiguously both: spatial yet actively temporal.[1] We can ask, with respect to any sector of reality, whether it belongs on the structural side or the dynamic side, according as it is bound up with space or time—wholly or in part. A pre-Socratic may announce “All is form” or “All is flux” and we can debate the question concerning any particular domain.

I have argued elsewhere that the mind falls on the flux side: it is a kind of action or behavior, always changing, never static.[2] The brain, however, is (partly) defined by its structure—its geometry and anatomy. The mind has no geometry, as time does not. The brain is made of neurons, but the mind isn’t—though it depends upon neurons. The brain has an architecture, but the mind has about as much architecture as a shape-shifting cloud of gas (less in fact). The visual field may give you the illusion that the mind (consciousness) has a structure, but that is to confuse the act with the object; and it doesn’t apply to non-visual sensation. Geometry and consciousness have never been happy bedfellows or even vaguely chummy. The mind has the structure of time, to be sure, but that structure isn’t spatial structure (contrary to what some physicists like to say). What about meaning? Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is heavily imbued with geometrical notions and is markedly atemporal, while the Investigations is steeped in time and activity—abandoning the geometrical slant of the Tractatus. Some theorists of language like to talk about logical form and syntactic structure, but others prefer the idiom of speech acts, utterances, and performance (Chomsky has competence and performance—structure and activity). Language seems to straddle the two categories.

What about logic? Frege would see it as atemporal, eternal, fixed like a crystal; but woolier types would prefer to see it as a human product with a history. A formal language looks like a severe ornamental style (classical logic, classical architecture), while the vernacular bumbles along just getting by. Logic purports to capture the necessary structure of reality, yet it also is supposed to regulate the human practice of deduction. It has a foot in both camps, almost causing a painful split. Is it an abstract quasi-spatial structure (“logical space”) or an attempt to stabilize the mess of human discourse? It is the same with necessity: is it a fixed substantial thing (like a set of possible worlds) or is it a reflection of human linguistic conventions? Is it a structure or a squeeze (you must do this)? Is rule-following a momentary inner fact or a temporally extended practice? Is it hard or soft, rigid or plastic? Is it something we apprehend at a moment or something we do over time? Causality raises similar quandaries: is it a hard inflexible structural fact obtaining at the time of interaction or is it something distributed in time in the form of constant conjunctions? Is it a component of objective (spatial) reality or is it a reflection of our own nature as beings locked in time? Is it one damn thing after another or is it an unbreakable bond between spatially conjoined entities? Then there is the self: is there a solid kernel of the self, existing whole and entire at a given time, or is it just an extended temporal sequence of varying psychological stages. Is it like an atom in space or a process in time? Is space its natural home or is it time? What about existence itself: do existing things require time in order to exist? Could a tiger exist for just one second? Don’t things take time in order to exist? Geometrical forms may exist without benefit of time, but what about oceans or social movements? Which thing wears the existential pants—space or time, structure or history?

I have not tried to settle these issues, merely to articulate them. But I would like to make a general point, namely that we have a tendency to get carried away by space. We are biased in its favor, cognitively, temperamentally. For we are dominated by our senses and material needs: we can picture spatial structures, but we can’t picture time—and therefore history. We can picture how things look at a given time, but we can’t picture their temporal relations, because we have no mental image of time. We see things in space, but we don’t see the time in which they exist; time causes no sense-data in us. We can think about it abstractly, but we have no concrete image of it—and imagination matters conceptually (pace Wittgenstein). We therefore suffer from a kind of illusion to the effect that time is less real than space. Accordingly, we fail to grasp when a given reality has a strongly temporal nature—as with (arguably) the mind. It is like failing to recognize the reality of evolution because of the time scale involved and the difficulty of picturing biological change. Time makes greater demands on our cognitive resources than space and spatial things. This is why geometry has always been the paradigm of human knowledge and not psychology. We are not good with temporal reality (I’d give us a B). If we can spatialize something, we can believe in it; but temporalizing something leaves us cognitively lost. We “get” the structure of the solar system, but the big bang seems like magic, or deeply dubious. Yet time is as real as space, and it penetrates being to an equal degree. We should be temporal realists, despite our impoverished grasp of time.[3]

[1] See my “Are Colors Actions?”.

[2] See my “Phenomenological Behaviorism”.

[3] Anti-realism about time is far more popular than anti-realism about space: the future is unreal, and so is the past, and the present is fleeting; but who doubts that space exists? We can see it and feel it (in spatial objects), but time is invisible and impalpable. Anything closely associated with time, like the mind, is therefore subject to similar anti-realism. If the mind is the brain in time, i.e., in action, then it will strike us as flimsy and dubious. Yet it is immediately given; consciousness and time are inseparable. A course on the philosophy of time would include a section on the mind.

Phenomenological Behaviorism

It wasn’t a bad idea to say that behavior belongs at the center of psychology. But what kind of behavior? The concept is not pellucid, as to intension or extension. Here are some synonyms: action, act, performance, response, reaction, deed, thing done, operation, conduct, deportment, movement. In psychology the term is generally used to denote actions of the body—physical behavior. This is because of the desire to align psychology with physics, the science of matter in motion. There is no necessary connection to concepts like desire or intention or goal. It is a materialistic conception of behavior. The concept may be applied to whole bodies or parts of bodies such as hearts or lungs or kidneys—the behavior of the heart, say, is a pumping motion. Planets move though space and so do human bodies. But this is not the only legitimate use of the concept; we can speak also of mental behavior. Here people refer to acts of perception, memory, belief formation, reasoning, imagination, calculation, trying or attempting. According to some theorists, all intentional bodily action involves mental acts of trying—these are the so-called basic actions. In any case, there are mental actions as well as physical actions; the concept does not exclude acts of mind. It would be possible to be a mental behaviorist: psychology is about mental behavior (as well as physical behavior). It isn’t primarily about mental structure or composition or substance, but about deeds-in-the-head—what used to be called mentation. The mind mentates—acts, behaves. Psychology is therefore awash in mental verbs. That is the mind’s ontology—its mode of being. It’s not passive and static but active and dynamic. If you want to know what kind of ontology the mind has, you can’t do better than say it consists of mental behavior—internal performances. You might then go on to report that you favor phenomenological behavior—conscious acts of inner mentation. You thus combine behaviorism with phenomenology—mentalistic behaviorism. You might even think that outer behavior is peripheral to the subject of psychology; that science is really the science of the inner mental act. The outer physical act belongs to physiology—limbs, muscles, motion through space. You are a kind of Wundt-Watson hybrid and proud of it.

What, then, is your metaphysics of mind, your mental ontology? I suggest the following: the mind consists of behavior of the brain. The brain is made of neurons and structured in a certain way; the mind is these neurons in action. The heart pumps; the brain mentates. The mind isn’t a collection of events or states or faculties or particulars or programs, but a collection of actions. When a brain perceives, say, it behaves in a certain way, and that’s what perception is. Seeing is the occipital cortex doing its thing; it is an agent. This means it has a goal: it acts so as to achieve something, namely enable the organism to function and survive (by means of vision)—the same as all organs of the body. The mind is the brain’s mode of action, its mechanics if you like. The machinery of the brain is the mind—what the brain uses to get things done, achieve its purposes. The heart uses a muscle; the brain uses a mind. The mind is the muscle of the brain. The mind was born to behave in a certain way; its essence is behavioral. But this doesn’t imply that it is physical; for all we have said, it might be quite immaterial. Descartes could agree that the essence of mind is effective goal-directed (but immaterial) behavior. That is its biological nature. It was naturally selected because it acts or functions in a certain way—better than non-mind presumably. Zombies don’t do as well as sentient creatures. The ontological category of mind is BEHAVIOR, according to the mental behaviorist. Neurons are said to have “action potentials”; the same could be said of perceptions, thoughts, and so on. The mind is the brain in operation mentally: the brain behaves in a mental fashion, as the body behaves in a physical fashion.

Consciousness is thus a type of behavior, though not a physical type. People speak of consciousness as like a river; that is not far off the mark, because it is a dynamic affair (not like a lake or glacier). Consciousness is always on the move, restless, active, energetic. Consciousness is like the brain raising its hand (or raising a multitude of hands–it is very busy). The mind is always moving, going from town to town. When the mind stops moving it ceases to exist; its essence is activity. It isn’t a thing, a substance, but a performance. The brain is a substance, but the mind is an activity of this substance—not another substance existing alongside the brain. Thus, it has no extension and no mass—anymore than the act of raising your hand does. It belongs to a different ontological category altogether. No doubt it is a very special sort of activity—a complete mystery in fact—but that is its mode of being. The mind minds—verb, not noun. We say, “I don’t mind” or “Do you mind?”, adopting a verbal form, and that is what the mind does generally—it minds. We can even adverbially modify mental verbs: people can think quickly, imagine vividly, emote wildly, hurt terribly. The activities can vary in their manner of acting. Notice too that we don’t say that pain is correlated with C-fibers but with C-fibers firing—the action not the physical thing. And the brain is enormously active, evidently a pre-condition of having a mind. Having a mind is having large reservoirs of action potential, so it needs a brain equal to these energy needs. All in all, the mind is thoroughly performative and dynamic, a powerhouse of derring-do. We can add to this the fact that the mind is often conceived as dispositional: to believe something is to be disposed to be triggered by suitable stimuli to do something. It is behavior waiting to happen, dying to happen. It isn’t to be lazy and half-asleep, still less dead. It is to be alive and kicking and raring to go, like a sprinter in the blocks. It isn’t just action but prompt and energetic action (think of the visual system). The mind is fast. It isn’t like stationary exhibits in a museum but buzzing bees in a hive. The mind is neurons galloping at top speed—not a blank slate or a chunk of marble or a library.

Phenomenological behaviorism has implications for the mind-body problem: that problem is explaining how the brain is able to behave mentally. Not how it can be correlated with static particulars, but how it contrives to execute the kinds of mental actions it does. What is it like to behave mentally like a bat? We know how the brain executes its physical actions, i.e., transmitting nerve impulses, but we don’t know how it acts consciously: how are physical brain acts related to conscious mental acts? How does the brain do that? How does one kind of action give rise to the other kind? This reformulation doesn’t make the problem any easier, but it better respects the ontology of mind. And it raises a new question: could there be a mental something that was entirely static, or as static as a physical body? Is it metaphysically necessary that anything mental is perpetually active? Can there be such a thing as a passive and inert pain? Could there be a self that lounged indolently about, or does it go out of existence when the switch is turned off? Is memory necessarily active? Is it an effort to keep believing something? Is the mind necessarily frenetic?[1]

[1] Has anyone ever held the behavioral theory of mind in the sense here explained? Not explicitly (that I know of), but strains of it exist here and there, especially in the phenomenological tradition (process philosophy?). This seems strange because it has been recognized that the mind is active by nature and essentially, so its ontology must be deed-like. Perhaps it’s because mental acts are not generally intentional—many are reflexive—but intention is not essential to action, as with bodily organs. The theory seems quite intuitive and natural once formulated, so it’s a puzzle why it has remained invisible. It might be said to be tacitly presupposed in standard discussions. Yet substance ontology has a strong grip on the mind, forcing itself into places it doesn’t belong. I only thought of the behavioral theory of the mind recently, perhaps because I was so opposed to the physical kind of behaviorism. Then too, it does sound a bit funny to say that pain is an action (of the brain). The mind as brain behavior—will we get used to the idea? The concept of mind: the concept of the brain acting thus-and-so phenomenologically.