Brain Design and the Mind-Body Problem

If you look at any organ of an animal body, you will find two things: a function for the organ and a design suited to that function. The organ’s design enables it to perform its function. That’s how nature works and it is hard to see how it could not work that way. For example, teeth have the function of chewing up food (inter alia) and they are designed to be sharp and hard—perfectly suited for their job in life. The heart has the function of circulating the blood and it is designed as a pump. The stomach functions to digest food and it has a design that enables it to do so (digestive juices etc.). We never find an organ that lacks a function, or has one but is not designed to carry it out. That would be a funny way for nature to work, especially the part of it known as evolution (it would be very un-Darwinian). In the case of the brain, we can say that the function of the brain is to think or experience or produce consciousness—to be the organ of mind. It has other functions too, relating to bodily regulation (homeostasis etc.), but chief among its functions is its role in generating and controlling the mind. To be brief, I will say that the function of the brain (part of it anyway) is to think—where thinking has further functions in the animal’s life. This is what the brain is for—why it evolved in its present form to begin with. And clearly it performs this function, adequately or excellently; it is good at controlling and producing the mind. It is expert at the management of pain sensations, for example; it is not incompetent or badly put together for that purpose. Why? Because it was designed to do the job in question (by natural selection, as we now know). If we knew that the brain had been designed with that purpose in mind by an intelligent designer, we wouldn’t doubt the excellence of its design—at least as good as the design of the eye. Examining it, we would expect to find evidence of its design excellence—suitable parts, processes, engineering principles. We would expect to find a functioning mind machine (it might not be “physical”).[1] We would examine it and say, “Yes, exquisitely designed for its purpose—just look at the way the machine carries out its appointed task”. It would be like looking under the hood of a Rolls-Royce or inside a cell phone. We would not expect to find something structureless, amorphous, unsuited for its apparent function. We would expect a design-function fitsuch that you could infer the one from the other, or at least not to be surprised at the apparent lack of fit.

But that is exactly what we do not find: form and function seem miles apart. It’s a bit like opening up the head to find only a bucket of sand—what has this got to do with that? How do the biological cells we call neurons form a design that enables the brain to serve as the organ of consciousness? What has the anatomy of the neurons got to do with thought and feeling? They are much like other cells of the body, and they form a network that does not portend what they are supposedly designed to do. For a mind-machine, they seem spectacularly poorly designed—there is not a chance in hell that they could generate mind as we know it. So it appears anyway. Yet they must have a workable design, since the brain does in fact perform the function in question. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the mind-body problem: the problem of finding an intelligible relation between the mind and the body (brain). We might call it the “brain design problem” or just the “design problem”. And the problem is that we have absolutely no idea what the design might be—how the brain might be constructed so as to perform its function. What we see before us gives us no clue as to what this design might be, and indeed seems to preclude the brain from instantiating such a design. Let’s consider what kind of design might occur to us independently of knowing the actual contents of the head. First, we would suppose that a machine for a mind would have to be composed of similar things to the mind—things like thoughts and sensations. If you want to construct an entity that thinks, you had better start with thought-like components—not with chemicals (they don’t generally issue in thinking devices). So, the “brain” needs to consist of mind-like elements—but it doesn’t. What about mental processes? Processes like inference seem remote from brain processes: electro-chemical propagation along a neve fiber is nothing like logical inference—a conscious rational process. Belief formation is nothing like a pattern of neural excitation. The gap between the electro-chemical brain and the rational mind is enormous, so we can’t find the design of the latter in in the former. Nor will the idea of immateriality help: it’s hard to think of any design that could enable a machine, material or immaterial, to think and feel. Is the brain, then, not a machine, like the heart or the teeth or the kidneys, but something else entirely—which still has a design? But what could have a design and not be a machine in the intended sense? That is, what could have a structure and composition suited to achieve a certain end and yet have no design to that end? The brain must have a design that suits it to managing the mind, but that design is invisible and scarcely imaginable. On the face of it the brain is not designed to engender the mind—and yet it does. That is the mind-body problem—the invisible design problem.

We should note that none of the standard positions on the mind-body problem even addresses the problem as so-conceived. Dualism says nothing about the design of the immaterial substance supposedly at the root of the mind, and a fortiori about the brain as correlated with the mind. Materialism simply proposes an identity or reduction without enquiring into design features of the material brain: it says that pain is C-fiber firing, but it doesn’t tell us how C-fiber is designed so as to enable it to function as pain, phenomenologically speaking? You could be a sand materialist holding that mental phenomena are identical to collocations of sand—but what is it about sand that suits it to function mentally? This point applies to both token and type identity theories–they are simply silent on the design question. Functionalism might claim at least to address the question by suggesting that mental states are holistic causal roles and brains are designed to manifest such causal roles (interconnected neurons arranged in net-like structures—“neural nets”). But the causal roles being invoked here are as different as chalk and cheese, and anyway the mind is not reducible to causal roles. The classical answers to the mind-body problem are simply sidestepping the really difficult problem, namely what kind of design the brain has that enables it to discharge its allotted function. As far as I can see, only the brain presents such a problem—no other organ in nature is similarly inscrutable. Even DNA has a design that makes its functions intelligible (embryogenesis, heredity). The brain is unique in having a function that defies explanation in terms of its design. Whether made by evolution or intelligent design, we draw a blank trying to elucidate its design features qua mind-machine. Please don’t say that computers are designed to have minds in virtue of their informational-computational properties: such properties are a far cry from the conscious mind as we know it, as has often been pointed out. The plain fact is that don’t know the mind-making design of the brain, and may never know.

Is there any way out of the mysterious-design predicament? Yes, if you have prodigious bullet-biting proclivities: you could say that the mind does not have any properties that fail to be designed for in the brain as currently conceived. The brain has an electro-chemical design, suiting it to bodily regulation and the like, and there is really no more to the mind than that—anything else is illusion, myth, fantasy. That is, you could go eliminative. No thanks, I say. Or you might try to pump up the brain with unusual fancy properties—as with panpsychism. You might try saying that the brain incorporates postulated micro-mental properties that are built into a design plan that can in principle produce the mind as we know it. This would require a type of design that has hitherto been unspecified, and of course it presupposes panpsychist metaphysics. The point I am making is that any such hypothesis must face the design question: how do you design a machine (an organ) that can exploit micro-mental properties in a device that performs mental functions? This is a condition of adequacy on purported solutions to the mind-body problem: it must fill the design gap. It can’t just be ontological (monism, dualism, etc.); it must be design-specific. You can’t solve the blood circulation problem by simply declaring that the organ responsible is the heart (that organ); you have to say that the heart circulates the blood by being a pump. Similarly, you can’t solve the mind-body problem by declaring that the mind simply is the brain; you have to say what it is about the brain that enables it to generate a mind—it does so by being a what? Here is where things get difficult, vertiginous, truly mysterious. For nothing comes to mind: not an extended substance, not a biological entity, not an electro-chemical factory, not an information-processing plant, not a home for stray particles of mentality, not a steam room of peculiar vapors. The brain doesn’t have the design of anything we know or can conceive; it must therefore have a very special kind of design that is hidden from us. This fact in itself is hard to get one’s mind around. How could the brain be so special? This is the hard heart of the mind-body problem—what gives the brain this remarkable power.[2]

[1] The OED defines “machine” as “a structure of any kind, material or immaterial; something constructed”, and also “the human or animal frame”; there is no commitment to a mechanical-physical conception of machine. The same goes for the word “machinery”: it too has a very elastic use. So, there is nothing question-begging about describing the brain as a machine for managing the mind. The intuitive idea is that of a system of coordinated elements that functions effectively to give rise to the mind and its operations—the skeleton (“frame”) of the mind, as it were. Its nuts and bolts, its basic plan, its deep architecture.

[2] When I talked about property P in “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” I tacitly assumed that P is a design property—it is designed to do a certain job. Being a pump is the property P for the heart, but we have nothing analogous for the brain and consciousness. Yet it must be there on pain of postulating miracles. Nature works by containing designs—of molecules, cells, organs, bodies, minds. We need a design metaphysics.

How Well Understood is Motion?

Not very. It seems to be generally assumed that we have motion under intellectual control, even if once it was quite a mystery. Physics has tamed it. Consciousness is still untamed, it is agreed, but motion is a bright spot in our understanding of nature. But I think the truth is that we have stopped worrying about what we don’t understand about motion; we just accept the gaps in our knowledge as inevitable. We are de facto motion mysterians. I don’t believe the debate about the relativity or absoluteness of motion was ever satisfactorily resolved; instead, a general positivism has been invoked. So, this basic question about motion remains unsettled. But do we have adequate predictive theories about motion—do we know the laws of motion? We must distinguish three natural kinds of motion: inanimate motion, animate motion, and intelligent motion. By the first I mean the kind of motion studied by Galileo and Newton—what is sometimes called “impressed motion”: bodies moving through space under the influence of a force–planets, projectiles, whole galaxies. Here the problem is that we don’t really understand gravity (and the same goes for the so-called electromagnetic force): for we don’t know the mechanism of gravity. It acts over space but apparently without employing any sort of medium or intelligible machinery. If you depress the gas pedal in your car, a mechanism is activated that converts this into a means of acceleration—what we call an engine. If there were no such engine, but just empty space, we would be rightly baffled—how could the pedal alone have such momentous effects? But that’s exactly what happens with gravity—massive effects but no mediating mechanism, just empty space. Hence the postulation of an ether to act as some sort of vaporous mechanism. This is an old story that I will not belabor. It is as pressing and baffling now as it ever was (despite Einstein’s invocation of “curved space” and such curiosities). And why should matter give rise to this force (ditto the electromagnetic force)? It just seems pasted on, superadded (like icing on a cake). What have extension, solidity, and mass got to do with an attractive force? Couldn’t matter exist and give rise to no such force? Isn’t this at least conceivable? Evidently, gravity exists, whatever it is exactly, but we don’t know how it comes to exist (rather like consciousness, in fact). So, we don’t know how massive bodies produce motion in other bodies, often separated by great distances. We know the laws, but we don’t know the means (as Newton notoriously admitted). And what is a force anyway? It isn’t matter but it isn’t empty space either, but something in between—invisible, impalpable, ghostly. No wonder some physicists (e.g., Hertz) have tried to dispense with forces—they just aren’t physical. But all motion is supposed to depend on them. We are hardly swimming in a sea of transparency here; we are wallowing in a murky pool of obscurity. But we have wallowed in it long enough not to notice anymore. And all this is before we get to the puzzles of quantum theory, in which the very idea of a moving object comes into question, along with its position in space. Inanimate motion is thus not a safe space for intellectual comprehension, despite the scientific advances of the last few centuries. In point of fact, we don’t really know why or how the universe moves at all, as opposed to sitting still all the time; it just does, powered by forces that seem inexplicable. You could be forgiven for supposing that motion is just one giant mystery at the heart of the universe (the position of our intellectual ancestors).

Then we have the motion of organisms. These motions are not even recognized in physical theories of inanimate motion; they go beyond anything that existed before life evolved (straight lines, ellipses). They are naturally conceived as self-generated not impressed from outside; they are functional, goal-directed. This applies even to plants and single-celled organisms. Such motions appear emergent, not prefigured in the simple motions of planets and projectiles. They have internal causes of some sort, but we don’t really have a science of how these causes lead to the motions we observe: we don’t have laws of animate motion comparable to the laws of inanimate motion. There is no Principia Biologica to be set beside Newton’s great book. There are no mathematical equations of organic motion. Still less do we have a science of intelligent motion—rational, deliberate, creative motion. The motions involved in language use, say, do not follow from Newton’s laws of motion—or not in any way we can use. The mind produces motion, but not in the way material bodies do. We call this type of motion “behavior” to distinguish it from inanimate motion, thereby acknowledging a difference of natural kind—motion under the force of intelligence, so to speak. You can’t predict the motion of human bodies from Newton’s laws, though they apply to the particles that compose human bodies; rational creative motion is an emergent type of motion. It has no precursor in the inanimate world; it calls for its own mode of understanding—the kind we call psychological. If the laws of behavior could be subsumed under the laws of physics, psychology would be a lot easier—but, notoriously, they are not. Therefore, the motions of life-forms are not reducible to the motions of falling bodies, planets, etc.

What I have said so far is familiar enough (and familiarly disputed), but what I am about to say ought to strike you as bizarre, because I want to ask whether they are any analogues of the laws of motion in the case of the mind. Are there any highly general laws of nature that govern both material motions and mental “motions”? I am thinking primarily of Newton’s three laws of motion: does the mind follow laws that resemble these laws without being examples of them? If so, Newton’s laws could be seen as special cases of more general laws. The law of inertia is the easiest to generalize to the mind: just as a moving body will continue moving uniformly unless subjected to an outside force, so the mind will continue in its present condition unless affected by an outside influence. The mind doesn’t spontaneously change of its own accord but as a result of impinging causes. Nature stays the same unless caused to change; it doesn’t change of its own volition. A mountain will stay a mountain unless acted on from outside, and a mind will stay the same mind unless caused to deviate from its present state. Things don’t change for no reason—they are naturally inert. It is not, say, in the very nature of a belief to change over time without anything making it change. The mind changes only because it is forced to change not because it feels like changing. Left to its own devices, nature is lazy, stuck in its ways. But what about Newton’s second law—that force equals mass times acceleration? On the face of it no such analogue is possible, because the mind is not a moving object to begin with. The brain moves through space and may accelerate or decelerate; it may strike another object and exert a force on it (you could use brains as projectiles). It also contains motions of chemicals and electrical impulses. But minds don’t fly about the place, hitting other objects, causing damage; motion is alien to their nature (except derivatively on the body and brain). True, but they may have properties like motion as it features in the second law—they may have similar types of effect, exert forces of an analogous kind. Consider problem-solving. Think of this as a power of the mind: the ability to solve problems, practical and theoretical. It is analogous to a physical force. Are there, then, analogues of mass and acceleration? Mass is quantity of matter, so isn’t there such a thing as quantity of mind—largeness, capaciousness? The brain certainly admits of such description, and its dimensions correspond to degrees of intelligence and sophistication; don’t some animals have larger minds than others? The bigger the mind, the better it is at problem-solving; the greater the mental mass, the greater the mental force exerted on a problem (say, how to achieve a desired end). But that isn’t all: there is also the amount of mental activity and the speed of such activity. Some individuals and species are quicker of mind than others; they solve problems more quickly. We can then say that larger quicker minds exert more problem-solving force—as more massive faster projectiles exert more impact force.[1] If the mind were an immaterial substance, we could say that the quantity of mental stuff, along with its internal activity, contributes to (determines) its problem-solving capacity. Or again, the bigger and faster the brain, the more mental force it can exert. The mind doesn’t move through physical space, but it does something analogous—it cuts through intellectual space. In brief, mental force equals mental size (“mass”) times mental quickness (“velocity”). Generalizing, we have the following law: power equals quantity times activity. Intuitively, the more stuff there is of a certain kind and the more active (lively) it is, the more it can do. Big active things do more than small inactive things. Suns can do more than planets gravity-wise, and geniuses can do more than the average man problem-solving-wise. Impact is a function of size and activity-level. You can’t do much if you are small and inert, like a speck of dust; but you can do a lot if you are large and energetic, like a star or a human brain. Accordingly, there is a general principle (I won’t say law) that covers matter and mind—things that move and things that don’t move. Likewise, hot objects (including fires) can have more impact (do more harm) than cold objects, especially if they are large. Otherwise put, big energetic things have greater impact than small low-energy things—and that includes big energetic minds. This makes Newton’s second law an instance of a more general principle. It doesn’t make gravitational phenomena any more intelligible, but it does suggest a more general content to the law; indeed, it gives it something like an a priori status. As to Newton’s third law, I don’t see any clear analogue in the case of the mind—what kind of mental reaction would follow every action of mind? That law has no a priori component that I can discern and seems limited to the case of physical impact.

Does anything else in nature literally move apart from material bodies? And do we understand such motion? Space doesn’t move, unless we decide to reduce it to systems of bodies. Does time move? It doesn’t move through time, though we do speak of it in metaphors of movement—as if it has a forward momentum and a direction. Clocks move and are easily confused with time itself. Do fields of force move? Apparently not, though they may be propagated through space. Numbers don’t move (try pushing the number 2 aside). Does music move? We do speak of musical “movements” and music is connected to dance. Lawyers make motions, as do debaters. There are social movements. A person may move (“jump”) from one subject to another, or be “immovable” and “stuck in his ways”. A philosopher may make argumentative “moves”. Locutions of motion are common and natural. This doesn’t mean we understand motion very well, or at all; it merely means that we know it exists (like consciousness). The whole topic of movement strikes me as conceptually underexplored. Zeno went so far as to deny its existence, on conceptual grounds; he found motion paradoxical not merely poorly understood. The concept itself is far from clear, as witness the debate between absolutists and relativists. It is taken very much for granted. It seems to me quite puzzling and problematic: what is it exactly, where does it come from, what is its explanation, from whence does our knowledge of it derive (the senses or the intellect)? The concept of matter is by no means straightforward, and neither is the concept of space; but these enter into our concept of motion, along with force and time. We really have quite a superficial grasp of the nature of motion. We have a practical grasp of motion, as do other animals, which suffices for evolutionary purposes; but from a theoretical point of view, we are pretty much in the dark (Newton threw only a partial light on the subject).[2]

[1] You might wonder whether mental quickness and mental size are independent variables, as velocity and mass are. The brain is certainly a place of both size and quickness; indeed, a big brain is ipso facto slower just in virtue of the fact that it takes longer for a nerve impulse to traverse a large brain than a small one (say, an elephant brain versus an ant brain). Bird brains seem extremely quick but are not large. I think it is perfectly conceivable that a mind should have a large capacity but be relatively slow moving (I believe I have known people like that). Likewise, a mind could be quick but narrow in scope. Psychological quickness and size are not invariably correlated.

[2] There is an irony in this because motion is often trumpeted as one of science’s great triumphs—and so it is, up to a point. But not all mysteries and puzzles have been dispelled, as the thinkers of the renaissance recognized. Motion is still intellectually challenging, if not defeating. Positivism is just a way of sweeping the problems under the rug. Philosophers, in particular, should not regard it as a paradigm of transparency. It is closer to consciousness than we tend to suppose.

Skateboard Update

I have been skateboarding for 45 days, doing it nearly every day for about half an hour (following tennis practice). I now own three boards. I can say that I’ve got the hang of it. The cruising and steering part isn’t that difficult, but the push-off part takes some work. You have to learn to balance on your leading foot and not distribute your weight over both feet (I use my right foot to lead and my left to push). This is scary at first. You also need to lean slightly forward so as not to thrust the board forward underneath you, causing you to fall backwards. The skill comes gradually. The leading foot must be right in the center of the board or it will veer to the left or right, because the steering mechanism results from the tilt of the board as your feet press down. You push with your trailing foot close to the board in order to generate good power. Once you have this skill down the activity becomes quite enjoyable—I look forward to going every day. People smile and say hello to me (Latin people). I like the floating feeling. I like the feel of the board beneath my feet. I recommend it for older people. As I approach my 75^th birthday, I’m glad I became a skateboarder.

I was playing tennis with Eddy the other day and I noticed something strange: I was moving faster around the court (I have never been slow). I was puzzled: why the increase in foot speed? Then I realized: it’s the skateboarding! Obviously, you need to develop leg strength (and balance) in order to skateboard, and this had carried over to my tennis movement. Thanks to the miracle of transfer of training, skateboarding had improved my tennis—not something I ever expected. The athletic world is a Unity (“sport monism”). In addition to this, I experienced a phenomenological shift in my arms: for the first time I felt that my left arm was acting as the main hitting arm on my two-handed backhand, not just playing a supporting role to my right arm. I have been working on this systematically over the last year and it happened quite abruptly: the left arm came into its own, accepted responsibility, took the reins. As I have described before, my knife throwing played a large role in this sinistral ascendancy, and now it had finally broken though. So, knife throwing (among other things) had helped my tennis stroke—another example of transfer of training. You have to smile. The CNS is an amazing thing. Who would have thought that skateboarding and knife throwing would be such a help to tennis playing? Has all this also helped with philosophy? I’m morally certain it has, though I have no direct evidence.

Evolution of Reflexes

The reflex was one of the best ideas that Evolution ever had (second perhaps to articulated bodies). What could be better than an unlearned rapid response action to a threatening stimulus? It’s like having a lightning-fast gunslinger ready to get the organism out of trouble. You don’t have to wait ten minutes before your withdrawal response kicks in. The OED defines “reflex” thus: “an action performed without conscious thought as a response to a stimulus”. The reflex allows the organism to act adaptively (and hence survive) without having to think about it. Speed is of the essence: the organism needs to act quickly and efficiently—the quicker the better (this confers competitive advantage).[1] Bacteria were there first with their flagellar reflexes to chemical and temperature variables. Plants have similar mechanisms built in, though not so rapid—as with the tropisms (the plant doesn’t have to decide to face the sun). It is as if we have intelligence without brains. The smart reflex response is stereotyped, automatic, unlearned, appropriate, economical, and sudden (in the animal case). It can also be modulated in more advanced creatures so as to achieve a degree of fine-tuning. There is nothing unintelligent about it. No wonder, then, that the reflex, evolved so long ago, is still with us today, only now in multifarious forms: patellar, blink, tickle, startle, orienting, salivating, arousal, perspiring, withdrawal, vomiting, defecating, and more. The nervous system (including spinal cord) is a veritable reflex factory performing all sorts of useful functions. Most of our actions are reflex actions (think of digestion, respiration, bodily repair)—it’s all done for us independently of our will. Imagine if you had to figure it all out for yourself! We can’t make machines that duplicate it. The reflex is one of evolution’s great success stories, not to be taken for granted. It could have been used in a Paley-style argument for the existence of God—such exquisite design! There could be a cult worshipping the god of reflexes. And it extends across the animal kingdom, uniting us with our brothers and sisters in reflexology. It was Descartes who originally formulated the concept in Treatise on Man (1664). Darwin could easily have used it to prove evolutionary descent—look at our kinship-in-reflex with other species. The genes clearly invest a lot of capital in reflex creation: survival depends on it. The better the reflex the more the procreation. The reflex rules.

Nor is it limited to the body. The brain is clearly full of reflex action—that’s what the neurons do. They don’t pause to think; they react reflexively. But so does the mind proper: perception is a reflex action—the physical stimulus elicits a mental percept reflexively. It is fast, reliable, unlearned, involuntary, encapsulated, unwilled, automatic (no thinking necessary). The process is largely unconscious—no conscious thought is required. Even the birds and the bees can do it, despite their little brains. No intellection necessary. This is psychophysical reflex action, like pain production (our most trying reflex). And the reflex can also proceed from the inside to the outside, as the animal reacts reflexively to what it experiences: the frog flicks out its tongue having spotted the fly, the human infant winces and writhes with pain (reflexes are especially important to the not-too-brilliant neonate). This too is programmed by the genes—part of the animal’s hardwiring. Reflexes are instinctual, innate, God-given (as it were). In addition, there are intra-mental reflexes, as when a perception triggers an emotion, or a memory triggers a thought (vide Proust), or a word triggers another word (word association). The mind too is rife with reflexes—not surprisingly, given their evolutionary success. This is no doubt an extension of the original machinery: the mind comes to do what the body already does. The one evolved from the other. It didn’t spring into existence ab initio but built on what was already in place. Physical reflexes led to mental reflexes, mediated by the reflexive brain. In time, conditioned reflexes came to be, but they depend on prior unconditioned reflexes (salivation to a bell presupposes salivation to food). We can perhaps imagine a creature devoid of reflexes—it has to figure it all out and act on the basis of conscious reasoning—but that is far from being the actual situation here on planet Earth (or any planet where Darwinian evolution occurs).

I now want to suggest something heretical (so far it has all been banality). It is this: all action (mental or physical) is reflexive. I don’t mean that there is no such thing as conscious thought, or that conscious thought plays no role in the determination of action; I mean that conscious thought is itself reflexive, or is composed of reflexes. Reasoning, in particular, consists of reflexes—it is typically a string of them. This is most easily seen in the case of perception-based belief formation: the animal reflexively believes what its senses suggest. It doesn’t think about it; it just does it. It is genetically programmed to do it as a matter of instinct. It believes what it sees, reflexively; it can’t help itself. The response is automatic and fixed not a matter for contemplation. This is as it should be, because it is vital to the animal’s interests that it act quickly and decisively. It is the same with induction: the animal extrapolates from what it has observed to what it has not observed—immediately, automatically. There is no conscious thought about induction being a valid rule of inference. The general belief is formed reflexively not reflectively—just like other reflexes (compare Hume on inductive belief). Inductive reasoning is a useful adaptation to have (as well as being intrinsically reasonable, it goes without saying). And we can say the same about deductive reasoning: modus ponens, say, is a reflexive mode of reasoning—the mind just does it, without thinking (logicians think about it). Ditto for other logical rules. Logical reasoning consists of a series of reflexes (of course, it is not made correct by these reflexes). Hypothesis formation is no different: we and other animals have an instinct for it—and we typically do it rapidly and automatically, without pondering its justification. Thus, conscious thought consists of mental reflexes—reflexive transitions. And the same thing is true of intentional action: it too consists of reflexes. Beliefs and desires trigger intentions, which trigger actions.[2] No conscious thought is required to enact the transitions; we must not intellectualize the process, as if there are conscious thoughts about its justifiability—any more than the blink reflex is backed by thoughts concerning the inadvisability of letting projectiles hit your eyeball. Such thoughts are no doubt true, but you don’t need to have them for the reflex to do its work. The reflex spares you that responsibility—that’s the beauty of reflexes. You can thus engage in conscious thought without having to engage in conscious thought about your conscious thought.

You might object: what about deliberate drawn-out rational thought, say about where to go on vacation or whom to marry? Is that reflexive? It is true that there is no immediate movement from question to answer—you don’t automatically think “the south of France” once the question has occurred to you. You think about it, do some research, ask a friend. But all this input itself acts on you reflexively: each new piece of information triggers a belief, perhaps a desire, from which you hope to draw a conclusion. Then you finally decide, based on everything you know and want. But that transition is itself by way of being a reflex, because we are also programmed to act on the basis of the totality of our knowledge (and desire). We decide reflexively but holistically. Every component of the reasoning was reflexive, and the final outcome was itself a form of reflex—the reflex of doing what we think all things considered is the best (not that we formulate that principle explicitly). You can sometimes see an animal doing this as it pauses on the threshold—“Should I go out there or not?”—but its action is the automatic upshot of a survey of reasons for and against. Its final action is reflexively prompted by the totality of relevant facts (whether it’s raining, how cold it is, whether any danger lurks). Even the most reflective act is made up of pieces of reflexive action. Indeed, without such reflexes it is hard to see how we would think or do anything at all. We need primitive instinctual mental moves—intellectual reflexes, in effect. There is no such thing as purely non-reflexive thought and intentional action, as there is no such thing as non-reflexive bodily action. It is true that conscious thought can substitute for reflex action in certain cases, but when that happens it is just one sort of reflex standing in for another—as when you consciously close your eyelid with your hand for fear of incoming missiles (because your normal blink reflex has been abolished somehow). The contrast between reflexive behavior and so-called non-reflexive behavior has been greatly exaggerated, indeed misconceived. There is no such thing as completely non-reflexive behavior. That is not surprising given the evolutionary history. What we really have are successive modifications of the original plan—the initial simple primordial reflex. There is no sharp divide in this respect between the body and the mind. Descartes’ contrast between the instinctual reflexive body and the rational non-reflexive mind is erroneous. Reason is reflexive too.[3]

[1] There are short- and long-latency reflexes, depending on the number of neurons involved, but as a rule all reflexes are very fast—as fast as the nerve impulse can make them (nerves exist in order to implement fast reflexes).

[2] There are two marks of the reflex: it is not something chosen, and it is not something you can train yourself out of. You don’t choose to blink your eye when something approaches it (you can’t choose not to blink either), and you can’t learn not to blink by diligent effort. By these tests logical reasoning is reflexive: you don’t choose to reason by modus ponens or conjunction elimination (you can’t help it), and you can’t train yourself not to reason thus.

[3] I hope it is clear that no form of reductionist psychologism is intended by this paper. I am discussing the psychology of logic not its metaphysics and epistemology (justification, warrant). My point is that primitive logical transitions (inferences) are to be understood as corresponding to mental reflexes—logical validity is tracked by reflexes of the mind (“reflexism”). This is as it should be, since evolution has a general interest in the truth (though not a dogmatic interest). I would also say that moral reasoning is reflexive at its foundations: we reflexively (and rightly) think that pain is bad and pleasure good. We don’t learn this or reason it out; it isn’t a conclusion we have laboriously come to. It is the same with our disgust reactions—we reflexively recoil from the disgusting stimulus. It isn’t a matter of cultural indoctrination (though the disgust reaction can be modified and modulated by culture, as can many reflexes). Logical reasoning has the same basic psychological structure: inbuilt, hardwired, automatic, non-negotiable, involuntary, unreflective, immutable, elemental, given not chosen. It is part of our biological nature, a product of evolution with ancient roots. It is not, however, true in virtue of such biological facts. It is true in virtue of…but that’s another story.