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.

Dear professor Colin McGinn,

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.