Material Selves

The self and the mind: what are they? Are they material or immaterial? These questions are usually discussed separately: one under the heading “personal identity”, the other under the heading “the mind-body problem”. Thus, we discuss whether the self is the body and whether mental states are physical states. But these questions are surely connected—the nature of the self and the nature of the mind. The reference of “I” and the reference of “pain” must be connected questions. I will contend that they are connected to the point of identity, but this is not as obvious as you might think; it is a substantive philosophical thesis.

If the self is the body (the physical organism), are mental states necessarily physical states? And if mental states are physical states, must the self be identical to the body? Is there room for the idea that the physical self might have non-physical states? And if mental states are physical, could the self be non-physical, perhaps immaterial? To be concrete, if the human person is identical to the human physical organism, could his pains be other than C-fibers firing? And if his pains are his C-fibers firing, could he be something other than his physical body? Does materialism about the self entail materialism about the mind, and does materialism about the mind entail materialism about the self? Let’s take the second question first. Could an immaterial self have material attributes in the shape of mental states? It could clearly have immaterial non-physical attributes, but could it have material attributes? Wouldn’t this make it material? For such attributes would constitute it as material, would they not? You might think there is some wiggle room here, because the self has a body and itcould instantiate its mental physical attributes: wouldn’t the self then be immaterial but the mind be material? However, the reply to this is not hard to find: the self doesn’t have those physical attributes, the body does, these being distinct entities. The self is merely associated with a body that has physical attributes; it doesn’t have them (directly, intrinsically). If it had them, it would itself be material. So, the situation envisaged is not metaphysically possible: granted that the self has physical attributes, it must be physical—the body or brain. Materialism about the mind entails materialism about the self (the person, the subject, the “I”). You can’t be a Cartesian dualist about the self and a materialist about the self’s mind. The materiality of pain logically implies the materiality of the subject of pain: if my pains are material, so am I. I have to be my body or brain if my mental states are physical states. So, if I am not my body or brain, then my mental states cannot be physical states. The logical (metaphysical) connection between self and mind generates a possible refutation of materialism about the mind. If you don’t like materialism about the self, you can’t like materialism about the mind. You can’t have an identity theory of the mind and a non-identity theory of the self. You can’t be a physical reductionist about mental events and a non-reductionist about selves (given that such events occur inselves). This is a non-trivial result.

What about the other way round—can you be a reductive identity theorist about selves but a non-reductive duality theorist about minds? Could the self be a physical thing (the body or brain or the whole physical organism) and yet its mental states be irreducibly mental? Isn’t that combination of views actually held by some people? They don’t like immaterial egos lurking inside the body (as they would put it) but they are not freaked out by property dualism or some other non-materialist position. But again, this position is dubiously coherent: for how could immaterial properties inhere in a purely physical substance? Wouldn’t they stop it from being completely material? Of course they would, since they would constitute part of its nature and hence make it partly immaterial. You can’t be completely material and yet instantiate non-material properties. Here someone might invoke double aspect theories: the self has two aspects, one material, the other immaterial. Okay, fine, if you think this makes sense, but it doesn’t solve the problem, because the self is not then completely material—it has an immaterial aspect or nature or essence. And there is nothing yet to suggest that this is not basic to the ontology of selves—in which case they are not fundamentally physical. You can’t be a reductionist about selves and a dualist about minds, because selves have minds. Indeed, their minds are integral to their identity, at a time and through time. That’s how they are individuated. Thus, the choice is stark: either materialism about selves and minds or immaterialism about both. Persons and mental events must share their ontology. One can therefore argue against materialism about the mind by urging anti-materialism about the self and vice versa. It comes in a single package. (I am anti-materialist about both.) The two questions should not be debated separately.

What about identity through time? We are excessively familiar with all the thought experiments and empirical findings that adorn the study of personal identity, yet we don’t apply this apparatus to the mind: but are the questions really so distinct? Granted, mental events don’t persist through time (they occur over time), so we can’t ask what constitutes their identity through time; but can’t we ask the question about mental states? Do I have the same pain now that I had a minute ago? What constitutes this identity? States do persist through time, and presumably in virtue of something. A materialist will say that it consists in the persistence of an underlying physical state—the state of the nervous system has not changed (the C-fibers are still firing away). The pain, we might say, has survived, by dint of the continued existence of the brain state. But what if we consider a fission case? The C-fibers split apart, thus producing two nerve centers each realizing a pain. Has the original pain survived? There is some inclination to say yes: one pain has become two (just as in a split-brain personal identity case). But then, the survival of pains doesn’t require that the future pain be identical with the earlier pain—there can be pain survival without pain identity.[1] And we could mount the same argument about thoughts, emotions, etc. The personal identity literature could be redeployed in the area of the mind-body problem; and the diehard dualist will resist inferences drawn from brain physiology. He may even deny that pains can be divided, though C-fibers can be. The two subjects should not in any case be pursued separately (can minds survive without identity?). The subject of personal identity is just one subject in a class of similar subjects: we have the persistence of persons over time, the persistence of mental states over time, and the persistence of whole minds over time.[2]

Returning to the topic of materialism, I should say a few words about the eliminative view of selves or minds. Can we be eliminativists about one but not the other? It is not as easy as it sounds. Would it be possible to eliminate the mind but keep the self (“pain” doesn’t refer but “I” does)? Evidently not: what is a self without a mind to keep it company? There are no zombie selves. There can be organisms without minds but none of these qualifies as a self (still less a person). The I cannot exist as a psychologically bare physical particular; at a minimum it requires a primitive consciousness. But many people seem to think that they can get rid of the self and retain the mind in all its glory, as a kind of selfless heap of mentality. It is quite true that there is no need to go full Cartesian about the self, still less immortal-soulish, but how can mental states be thought to inhere in nothing, or in mere bodily tissue? Instead of saying “I believe in ghosts” should we say “There is nothing that believes in ghosts, but there are beliefs in ghosts in this vicinity” or “This bodily tissue believes in ghosts”? Really? Beliefs need believers, and believers are not (non-self) bits of tissue. Nor are they replaceable by brains: I don’t allude indirectly to my brain when I say “I”, even though my brain is necessary for saying anything. What the “I” is is a difficult question, but it isn’t dispensable in favor of my brain or some segment of it. The self emerges from the brain in some mysterious fashion, but it isn’t reducible to a chunk of brain, or nothing at all. No, if you want to hang onto the mind, you have to accept the self along with it; and if you want to preserve the self, you have to accept the mind. You can’t eliminate one but hold fast to the other. The mind and the self are too closely intertwined to be forced apart; nor is there any good reason to do so. There are no thinkers without thoughts or thoughts without thinkers—even if this is hard to understand.[3]

[1] There can be a pain Parfit as well as a person Parfit.

[2] We also have questions about the persistence of raindrops, plants, and statues over time: can there be survival without identity in these cases too? I leave these aside here, having discussed them elsewhere.

[3] Of course, this is the purest common sense, but it is amazing how ready people are to abandon it on the flimsiest of grounds. It is really quite obvious that materialism about the self and materialism about the mind are logically connected doctrines. Once again mysteries lead to ontological panic or mayhem. There is a mind-body problem about the self, as there is a mind-body problem about the mind (and about its contents). Is there something it’s like to be a self?

I couldn’t agree more, Colin (and thanks for the shout-out). As we know, academic fields have their own cultural mores, and the norm that real psychology = experiments (or occasionally computer simulations) is strong. I think it’s gotten worse: when I was an undergrad, every department had a course in history of psychology and a course in “mathematical psychology,” a fading subfield. These courses are rare today.

Hope all’s well,

Steve

From: Colin <cmg124@aol.com>
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2025 7:22 AM
To: Thomas Nagel <nagelhollander@cs.com>; Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>; Pinker, Steven <pinker@wjh.harvard.edu>; Richard Dawkins <richard.dawkins1@icloud.com>; Rebecca Goldstein <rebegolds@gmail.com>; Michael Ayers <michael.ayers35@gmail.com>; Simon Blackburn <swb24@cam.ac.uk>; Stephen Neale <sneale@gc.cuny.edu>; Ken Levy <klevy@lsu.edu>; Keith McGinn <keithmcginn@talktalk.net>; Robert Lawrence Kuhn <rlkuhn@icloud.com>; Peter Ludlow <peterjludlow@gmail.com>
Subject:

How To Be a Psychologist

In my years as a psychology student no one ever suggested I read William James’s The Principles of Psychology. No doubt this was because it was deemed old-fashioned and far too philosophical. In those days great emphasis was placed on doing experiments. You couldn’t be a serious psychologist unless you spent most of your time in the lab experimenting. You couldn’t be a “theoretical psychologist”. Chomsky was frowned upon because of his lack of experimental results (has he ever done an experiment?). I might have remained a psychologist but for this attitude. Don’t get me wrong: I liked doing experiments (as a philosopher I miss them), but I didn’t think purely theoretical work was out of the question. This is an odd attitude and I still don’t understand it. In physics you can be an experimental physicist or a theoretical physicist—there is a recognized division of labor. Some people are better at one than the other. In biology it is much the same: Richard Dawkins is more of a theoretical biologist than an experimental biologist (or even field biologist). It’s probably the same in chemistry. What I actually believe is that in psychology students should take a philosophy of psychology course as well, because the subject is deep in philosophical questions. But there is a marked hostility in psychology towards philosophy, no doubt through fear of not being recognized as a proper science. Steven Pinker has good philosophical awareness, but he is the exception. Some of the courses I took were dreadfully boring (psychological testing, industrial psychology); I would much rather have done some philosophy of mind or language. As it is, when I did my M.A. on innate ideas, I had to basically invent cognitive science, much to the consternation of my teachers; fortunately, the head of department, John Cohen, had a more enlightened attitude and let me do what I wanted. Otherwise, I would not have found a supervisor. Experiments are fine, but they are not the be-all and end-all. Somebody has to do the dirty work of making theoretical sense of empirical results.[1]

[1] It obviously still annoys me that the intellectual philistinism I encountered caused me to change subjects, though I admit I had a deeper interest in the full range of philosophical questions. Ideally, I would have done both (with a side-interest in marine biology). I did used to lecture to psychology students. Today I tend to describe myself as a philosopher-psychologist.

Wittgenstein on Propositions

The Tractatus is a hymn to propositions. It is all about propositions. Wittgenstein is an unabashed propositional realist: propositions exist outside human minds, capture the structure of the world, have a hidden real essence, determine determinate meaning, divide up the space of logical possibilities, are isomorphic with facts. They are logical pictures, articulate and crystalline. I could cite many quotations, but the following two will suffice to give the flavor: “A proposition shows its sense. A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says thatthey do so stand” (4.022); “A proposition must restrict reality to two alternatives: yes and no. In order to do that, it must describe reality completely. A proposition constructs a world with the help of a logical scaffolding, so that one can actually see from the proposition how everything stands logically if it is true. One can draw inferences from a false proposition” (4.023) Wittgenstein doesn’t argue for this kind of realism, as opposed to other possible views; he simply assumes it as self-evident. For him, propositions are basic constituents of reality, sharp as a knife, clear as daylight. And they are with us always.[1]

But the Investigations will have none of this: we could describe that book as advocating an eliminative view of propositions in the sense accepted in the Tractatus. There are simply no such things as propositions as there expounded. The book is then about what happens if you reject propositional realism. This theme is not announced as such, but it emerges clearly as we proceed. Again, I will quote selectively; you need to read the whole text to get the message. In section 92 we read: “This finds expression in questions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought…For they see in the essence, not something that already lies open to view and becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we see when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out”. Section 93 elaborates: “One person might say “A proposition is the most ordinary thing in the world” and another: “A proposition—that’s something very queer!”—And the latter is unable simply to look and see how propositions really work. The forms that we use in expressing ourselves about propositions and thought stand in his way. Why do we say a proposition is something remarkable? On the one hand, because of the enormous importance attaching to it. (And that is correct). On the other hand this, together with a misunderstanding of the logic of language, seduces us into thinking that something extraordinary, something unique, must be achieved by propositions. A misunderstanding makes it look to us as if a proposition did something queer.” This we are told leads to the “subliming of our whole account of logic” by “sending us in pursuit of chimeras” (94). Clearly, the ontology of propositions advanced in the Tractatus is being abandoned root and branch in the Investigations. There are no such entities.

Exegetically, this prompts an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s text that bears thinking about: for what happens to our theory of language if we reject propositions as so construed? The answer is that the job performed by propositions is now left in other hands—particularly rule-governed use. On the old model, propositions determined or forced a use (see section 140 on “force”). But if there are no such things, it looks as if nothingforces a use. All the sections on rule-following revolve around this question: if propositions don’t determine a use, what does—and can anything? For it seems that nothing but propositions could—no propositions no meaning, constant and secure; hence no correct use. Future use used to be fixed by the hidden internal structure of propositions, but they have gone by the wayside, leaving nothing substantial—just use up to a certain time; an extended series of uses not a specific proposition existing at a given moment; and a flux of mental happenings not a logical object. Language totters (to paraphrase Frege). The argument isn’t about “facts” in general, as in Kripke’s interpretation, but about propositional facts in particular, which are now said to be the result of misunderstandings. We have hypostatized propositions, but they alone can provide the kind of foundation for use that we hanker after; so, we have to give up this hankering and stick to the surface. There is really no foundation, no explanation, no analysis, no philosophy. And this means there is no logic either—not as the Tractatus understands logic (and other people shared). Of course, it is notoriously obscure what the later Wittgenstein wants to put in its place—hence the intimations of skepticism. But the reasons for this revisionary approach are clear enough: the rejection of propositions as traditionally conceived (we can still talk about speech acts). Propositions were once everything; now they are nothing—mere chimeras. It isn’t just that Wittgenstein came to reject the picture theory of propositions; he also rejected propositions themselves. That, as they say, was the turning point, the crux. The beloved propositions of the Tractatus were too queer to tolerate, even though rejecting them opened up an abyss.[2]

[1] The Notebooks 1914-1916 are even more proposition-centered: “The proposition is a measure of the world” (p.41), “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition” (p.39), etc.

[2] This might even have a bearing on the private language argument. If there were such a thing as the proposition that I am in pain, perhaps in the form of a picture, what is to stop me from grasping it, irrespective of whether other people can observe my pain and correct me? But if there is no such proposition, we need to fall back on community correction and validation, because that is all that’s left.