Degrees of Mind and Body

We are accustomed to a sharp and rigid distinction between mind and body, between “the mental” and “the physical”. We also tend to think that these are absolute concepts: something is either one or the other with no degrees. One thing can’t be more mental than another, or more physical. These categories don’t admit of gradation; there is no sliding scale of mentality or physicality. But is this right? It seems to me that it is just another example of the human tendency to prefer discontinuity over continuity—to be uncomfortable with variations on a theme and happier with simple dichotomies. Actually, the mental and physical (mind and body) do come in degrees and things do vary in their status as mental or physical. This is in fact easy to prove and conceptually quite liberating.

As usual, the dictionary will put us on the right track (there is more philosophical wisdom in a good dictionary than in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason). For “mental” the OED gives us “relating to, done by, or occurring in the mind”: clearly, that admits of degree. Something could be more or less closely related to the mind, more or less distant from the mind, more or less done by the mind, and partially occurring in the mind. But we need to know what “the mind” is before these linguistic intuitions can be accorded conceptual (ontological) weight. For “mind” the OED has “the faculty of consciousness and thought” and “a person’s ability to think and reason; the intellect”. This is commendably definite and quite restrictive: the mind is equated with conscious reason, intellect, thought—not perception, emotion, sensation, or character. These things are thus not deemed “mental”, since they are not done by, or occur in, the intellect. Memory is not included, but we can suppose it closer to the mind, as so defined, than sense perception and bodily sensation. Character traits are quite far from the mind (intellect) and are therefore only weakly mental; perception and sensation more strongly so, emotion more strongly still, memory almost there. We have grades of mentality—a sliding scale. In humans, thoughts about thoughts, the intellect directed onto itself, might qualify as the most strongly mental; sensations in the bowel as the most weakly mental. It all depends on proximity to the intellect—similarity to what the intellect is or does. Thus, mentality comes in degrees—some things are more mental than others.

The story with “physical” is very similar. The OED gives us “relating to the body as opposed to the mind”, citing the phrase “a physical relationship”. Again, that can intuitively admit of degrees—things can be more less related to the body, more or less connected to it, or like it. But we need to know more about what exactly the body is before we can have a definite idea of what “physical” means. The dictionary obliges us with “the physical structure, including the bones, flesh, and organs, of a person or animal”, adding as “technical” “a material object”.  Clearly, things can be more or less similar to a body as so defined: trees, rocks, liquid water, clouds, volumes of air, regions of space. Some things are more body-like than others in the animal-body sense. Thus, some things are more “physical” than others—trees more than clouds. What about the technical sense? Here we need to move a bit towards physics itself. A material object is understood to be a discrete bounded solid thing located in three-dimensional space—as opposed to such things as heat, light, radiation, gravity, magnetism, and fields of force. It used, indeed, to be debated whether such items were really physical at all, given the paradigm supplied by the material object. Such debates presuppose a dichotomous attitude to nature—isn’t it better to say that physicality comes in degrees? Some things are more like material objects than others—with neutrinos and force fields at some distance from the paradigm (electrons and protons closer). Thus, physicality comes in degrees. Black holes (misnamed—they aren’t holes in anything) are frightfully physical, being of enormous mass and density, stars somewhat less so, oceans still less, air even less, empty space hardly physical at all. It is pointless to try to force some sort of dichotomy onto this sliding scale; better just to speak of degrees of physicality (body-hood). This spares us pointless verbal quibbles and pseudo-questions. The dichotomous use of “physical” belongs to an earlier stage of physics, i.e., Cartesian mechanism (the dichotomous use of “mental” is similarly rooted in the past, mainly religious, i.e., incorporeal soul versus material substance).

It would be nice if the two scales overlapped—if one graded smoothly into the other. Could the least physical thing also be the least mental? Could there be a borderline case? I think this has been supposed by some very free thinkers: thus, we hear talk of “energy fields” that are vaguely spiritual, light is supposed to be mindlike, the impalpably physical has been likened to the soul. Ghosts, if such there be, are thought to hover on the boundary between the mental and the physical. This would be intriguing if true, because it might give us a handle on the mind-body problem; but alas, it is just loose talk, metaphor, misty poetry. There is really nothing that qualifies as genuinely both mental and physical—though some things combine the two. Nothing is both like the animal body and also like the intellect—both flesh and bone and also thought and reason. True, actions can be described physically and mentally—as material movements of the body and as intentional. But this is because they are double-aspect things: the aspects are not midway between the mental and the physical. The movement isn’t like a thought and the intention isn’t like a limb. Still, this supposed middle ground is worth pondering as a conceptual possibility, because it offers the prospect of psychophysical linkage—intelligible emergence. There could perhaps be something, now unknown, that straddles the divide, something close enough to both paradigms. Anything like the intellect and also like the animal body would be a candidate for being the key to unlocking the mind-body problem.[1]

[1] One result of adopting a degree conception of the mental and physical is that we get different strengths of materialism. Suppose the conscious intellect were reducible to the gross anatomy of the brain: that would be an extremely strong form of materialism, because it would take the paradigm of the mental and reduce it to the paradigm of the physical. The strongly mental would reduce to the strongly material (I don’t think anyone has ever championed such a view). By contrast, it might be claimed that memory or unconscious belief is reducible to electrical properties of neurons—these both being relatively weak instances of the mental and physical. Or again, it might be held that character traits consist of energy fields (unknown to current physics) surrounding the pineal gland—where these are understood as quite remote from the usual paradigms. In other words, we can envisage different degrees of materialism, depending on what mental and physical phenomena we are considering.

Miami and Me

When I moved to the University of Miami in 2006 the plan was to improve the standing of the philosophy department. The hope was to “do a Rutgers”, where I had worked for the previous sixteen years. Peter Klein, the chief architect of Rutgers’ success, had been approached by the university to become chairman and spearhead of the philosophy department. He declined the offer, though gave the university some sage advice, but I decided to go. Optimism was in the air. The university was prepared to put some money into it. The same thing had happened at Rutgers and in a few years we were on an upward trajectory, though not without concerted effort and university support. In Miami the graduate program was faltering and in danger of cancellation; we had trouble attracting students capable of finishing the program, let alone obtain academic employment. It started quite well, but then the financial crisis of 2008 hit and the money dried up—no more expensive appointments. This really put the kibosh on the whole endeavor. Nevertheless, we struggled to improve the department and had some success. Our ranking made some modest gains, though nothing like Rutgers.

I was keen to initiate changes that might accelerate the process and not be expensive. This called for some creative thinking. It occurred to me that it might be good to associate the department with some promising intellectual movement, like Vienna and logical positivism. Could the Miami philosophy department gain a reputation for innovation and a distinctive philosophical approach? This might give us some good publicity and make us stand out from the crowd, despite our modest size and lowly status in the profession. I also wanted to improve our graduate placement record and put some effort into enhancing student excellence (hence the “Genius Project”). At this time, I was teaching and writing about conceptual analysis in philosophy, which resulted in my book Truth by Analysis. It seemed that several colleagues were of like mind and I conceived the idea of the “Miami Analysts”—a group (a “circle”) of philosophers wedded to analysis as the proper method in philosophy (but a new and improved version of this traditional approach). I discussed it with them and brought it up in a department meeting; there was some enthusiasm, but not everyone liked the idea. I thought it would create “buzz”. I also had the idea of forming a “Center for Bio-Philosophy”, which would seek to integrate philosophy and biology in new ways (this was part of my work on the hand that led to my book Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity). This was all part of the effort to put the department on the map—which is what appointing me was supposed to help achieve. I still think these were promising ideas, though I wasn’t too sanguine about cooperation from other members of the department, who seemed content with mediocrity and invisibility. I was trying to give the department some sort of cache, some intellectual sparkle.

All this came to an abrupt end in 2012. I am not at liberty to discuss why this happened, and to this day I am not clear why it did (administrations work in mysterious ways). I am now banned from campus in perpetuity (again, don’t ask me why). The future that could have been was summarily destroyed. I have not seen my erstwhile colleagues for many years, except for Ed Erwin who died a few years ago. I don’t know the state of the department and the graduate program. I am somewhat surprised it still exists. I have noticed that the department’s ranking has sunk even lower, but I don’t know anything about the internal dynamics of the department. It does seem to me that the attrition of senior members of the department will leave it in less than stellar shape. Meanwhile, down the road, I continue my philosophical work, which does nothing to enhance the reputation of the department, since I am no longer there and not even allowed on campus. Does any of this seem good, sensible, wise? Is anyone glad this is the way things turned out? And why do I hear nothing from my old colleagues and friends in the department? I would be perfectly willing to help them, but there is a marked lack of interest in that—where once it was the whole point. Isn’t this all pretty ridiculous? So much for the Miami Analysts.

Deportation

I keep hearing people say that deporting violent criminals from other countries is a good idea that we should all accept. It is not, and the reasons are obvious. There are two questions: should we deport criminals already convicted and serving time, and should we deport criminals not yet convicted but with a history of violence. The first question is easily answered: no, because it is better to keep them in prison than release them into another country. If we do the latter, they are set free with little to no punishment; this is no deterrent to would-be foreign-born criminals. Also, they are then enabled to reenter the country, illegally, and commit more crimes. Also, they can commit crimes against Americans from their base in another country—as foreign crime gangs do. As to the latter question, we have the uncomfortable fact that we would be punishing people not convicted of any crime without due process, as well as the other objections; we don’t want to go down that road. What if it was suggested that we simply execute violent criminals from elsewhere and those we think may commit serious crimes in the future? I doubt that even the most hardline anti-crime types would be willing to go that far. Deporting criminals is actually being soft on crime and inviting further criminal activity. The best procedure is just to subject them to the usual judicial process we apply to home-grown criminals. Of course, we should do our best not to admit them into the country to begin with. It sounds tough to “kick out the illegal alien criminals”, but on reflection it is not smart.

Because

Because is an interesting word. According to the Shorter OED, it was originally two words by and cause, after the old French par cause de (by reason of). To say “p because q” is to say “p by cause q”, where “cause” means “reason”. The Concise OED gives “for the reason that; since”. Roget’s Thesaurus gives us “on account of”, “in view of”, “on the grounds that”, “thanks to”, among others. Thus, “because” can be used to state the relation between premises and conclusion in a logical argument: if p entails q, q is true because of p—and hence “by cause” of p.  In other words, the because relation is a causal relation: premises are causal because they are one term of a because relation. The because relation coincides with (is identical to) a causal relation, as these words were originally meant—and as they still mean now. All uses of “because” are causal uses, i.e., specify reasons for something. There is no non-causal “because”: the logical use of “because” is a causal use—just look at the word. To be because of something is to be by cause of that thing. Semantically, then, reasons are causes. This is intuitively correct, since causes are productive, consequential, generative—as premises in an argument are. They bring things forth, make them the case, engender them. Some premises, especially in inductive arguments, are what we call evidence, and evidence produces generalizations and theories. All this talk should be taken literally and not dismissed on account of philosophical prejudices—as that all causes are physical events (or some kind of event). This is to say that logic is a causal science—a science of productive reasons. Grammar is similar: it too is a type of cause—productive, generative, fecund. Sentences have the grammatical form they do in virtue of the rules of grammar—“by cause of” these rules. Logic and grammar are indeed causally efficacious par excellence, given their power to produce infinitely many consequences. One might be forgiven for suggesting that logico-grammatical causation is the conceptually fundamental kind of causation. It certainly involves reasons, and that concept seems to belong originally to the rational realm—what is sometimes called the “space of reasons”. The concept of reasons has been extended to the non-mental non-rational world, and hence brought the concept of cause along with it. Maybe our ancestors took a while until they were ready to extend these notions outside the rational mind and apply them to brute unthinking nature—a form of anthropomorphic projection. In any case, these notions have a perfectly proper home in the characterization of logical and grammatical relations. One can imagine someone insisting that only these relations are correctly described as causal, the rest of nature being governed by mere constant conjunction or some such. No merely physical phenomenon can be the reasonthat something happens! Rocks don’t have reasons.

These reflections should prompt us to reconsider causal theories as they have been proposed in recent analytical philosophy. What is meant by “causal” in these theories? This question is typically avoided (or dodged) in presentations of the theories in question. We are supposed to know what is intended. Thus, we have the causal theory of perception, of memory, of knowledge, of reference, of action, of emotion. The general idea is that these concepts have causal definitions: the essence of the concept is captured by a causal condition. For example, the essence of perception consists in causation of an internal sense experience by an external object. The point I want to make is that such theories can be readily reformulated using the “because” locution and allied locutions. Instead of saying “A caused B” we can say “B because of A”: for example, the sense experience occurred because of the external object (not, say, because of a hallucinogenic drug). This comes to the same thing, does it not? And then we could paraphrase that as “The reason the experience occurred was the existence of the external object (not some drug)”. The heart of the theory (right or wrong) is preserved under these reformulations. The same goes for the other causal theories: causes become reasons—the reason for the belief in the case of knowledge is the fact believed, not an irrational whim. This enables us to see our way clear to including the causal theory of entailment (logical implication) with the other causal theories. All are causal in the broad sense I have been adumbrating. And note that I don’t mean a causal theory of inference, i.e., mental acts of a certain sort; I mean logical implication itself. It is quite obvious that chains of inference occurring in a human mind are causally connected, but it is quite another thing to claim that logical implication is causal, since it is not psychological and episodic. Still, it sustains the use of “because”, because premises are reasons for conclusions: it is because Socrates is a man and all men are mortal that Socrates is mortal. It is owing to those facts, by dint of them, in virtue of their existence. When a conclusion follows from a set of premises, it is a consequence of them, an “effect” of them—a resultant, an end-product, an outcome. It is thanks to the premises that the conclusion holds. It is true that there may be subvarieties of causation applicable in the different cases, but they are all united under the broad concept of cause, as this is ordinarily understood. The causation relevant to perception is not the same as that applicable to knowledge, but the concept of causation is flexible enough to include both; fundamentally, it is just the notion of dependence, derivation, determination. Causation is about lines of descent: what hinges on what, what gives rise to what. It isn’t necessarily about energy transfer or mechanistic contact or action-at-a-distance or a primitive inexplicable oomph. It’s about how things hang together in relations of subordination. It’s about what precedes and controls, what is prior and productive.[1]

[1] The reason people haven’t appreciated this is that they have been fixated on certain putative paradigms—never the best way to get the full measure of a concept (or type of fact). This comes from a desire to make the abstract and general into the concrete and particular. Many metaphysical concepts suffer from this problem, or we suffer from it in our grasp of such concepts.