Dolphin Phenomenology

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Dolphin Phenomenology

Dolphins have a highly sophisticated echolocation sense as well as high intelligence (and amazing motor abilities).[1] They can spot the location of fish buried under sand on the sea floor using this sense. They insert their snouts in the appropriate place and dig out the fish. What is going on in their minds? That we don’t know, minds being what they are (they are not detectable even by echolocation). Evidently, dolphins construct a mental map of the terrain and store it in memory; this guides their actions. It is very tempting to think of this map in visual terms. Three theories suggest themselves: the dolphin’s echolocating mind contains only auditory sense data, or it contains only visual sense data, or it contains neither but a new kind of sense data not known to us. I want to suggest a fourth theory: it contains both auditory and visual sense data, but nothing radically new. More specifically, auditory sense data elicit visual images of the layout of the ocean floor and the position of the fish buried beneath it. They have a visual representation of the environment caused by the sounds they produce and hear. Their state of mind is like ours when we hear a sound and it prompts a visual image in us—for example, hearing the sound of a motor car and forming a visual image of a motor car. That is the nature of dolphin phenomenology; it is a combination of the auditory and visual.

Thus, it is a phenomenology familiar to us, if not in exactly the same form (we don’t use echolocation). Imagine walking through a room and hearing sounds emanating from behind things, these eliciting visual images of the hidden objects. You can see a certain amount of the room with your eyes, but you can also “see” things not with your eyes, but with the aid of your ears and your ability to form visual images based on auditory inputs. The dolphin mind has in it (limited) visual information about its environment conveyed by its eyes, auditory information conveyed by its ears (caused by itself or other sources), and visual information derived from images generated by the auditory information. The last is of particular interest because it involves cross-modal information processing: the dolphin’s brain can synthesize a visual map based on auditory inputs and add it to the visual map that derives from its eyes. It sees the surface with its eyes and the sub-surface (where the fish are hiding) with its ears, this being fed into a device for constructing a visual map of the sub-surface. In short, the phenomenology is both auditory and visual—with two layers of visual, one superimposed on the other. It really does see what its ears reveal, because it constructs a visual map (an image) of the sub-surface terrain. It visually images the underground fish, like X-ray vision. There is no third sense involved with different qualia. So, we do know what it’s like to be a dolphin—roughly, anyway. It’s like hearing the sound of a bird and picturing the bird in one’s mind’s eye. Dolphins are just really good at this.[2]

[1] My main source for this paper is a documentary by David Attenborough on sound in the animal world on Netflix, which I enthusiastically recommend.

[2] You might think the ear-caused visual representations are more in the nature of percepts than images, but I think it is unlikely that this is the case; the representations are really in the nature of mental images, though they could be very detailed and vivid. For the distinction, see my Mindsight.

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Identity and Causality

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Identity and Causality

It is generally supposed that an object cannot cause itself; causation only holds between distinct things. I will question this orthodoxy. The argument will take the form of nudging intuitions in the direction of the target thesis. The claim will be that every object causes itself (among other things); every object is an effect of itself (inter alia). The causal relation is (or can be) reflexive. I am both a cause and effect of myself. For any x, x causes x. First consider what Aristotle calls the material cause of a thing: the stuff that composes it. This is contemporaneous with the object composed, yet they are not identical objects (according to most views). I am caused (materially) by the cells in my body and the atoms in the cells: they produce me, constitute me, bring me into existence. We are not stretching the concept of cause very far in accepting Aristotle’s notion of material cause. There is more to causation than efficient causation by events spread out in time. We can also add causation by parts: a whole object can be said to be caused by its parts; together they produce or yield the object. The parts are the reason the whole exists, as the material of a thing is. But this doesn’t yet imply self-causation. How can we take the next step?

Propositions entail other propositions, but they also entail themselves—p implies p. So, entailment is compatible with identity; indeed, it might be viewed as the primary case of entailment. Propositions are self-entailing. But isn’t entailment a type of causation? It is productive, generative, a type of power; a proposition is a logical consequence of itself—a conclusion of which it is also the premise.[1] We could call entailment “logical causation”. The premise is sufficient for the conclusion; it guarantees the conclusion. Yet they are identical. But why not extend this way of thinking to objects? An object is sufficient for itself, a guarantor of itself, an upshot of itself. Like a proposition, it acts as a premise to itself as conclusion. If you know that x exists, you can infer that x exists: every object suffices necessarily for itself. Every object causes itself. It causes other things too, but among them is itself. It is a kind of limit case. Why not say this? Surely, it is reasonable to say that a property suffices for itself: if F is satisfied, then that property is satisfied. It will cause other properties to be satisfied, but it also causes itself to be satisfied—trivially, one might say. It is causally sufficient to satisfy the property of being red by being red—being red is enough to make a thing red, obviously. What is this “making” relation if not a type of causation? We don’t normally mention this case because it is so painfully obvious—it adds nothing to the conversation—but it is true nevertheless. If every object is trivially self-causing, we won’t have any need to assert that fact; but it is still a fact—as is the identity of every object with itself. Self-identity is a truism scarcely worth noting, and so is self-causation. If someone were to assert, “This table is a cause of itself”, we would reasonably (and sarcastically) respond, “So, what else is new?”

If your intuitions are now moving in the desired direction, let me politely nudge them further. Can’t we say that type identity is compatible with causation? If an object replicates itself, producing an identical copy, doesn’t it cause the same type to exist elsewhere? True, there are two tokens, but doesn’t the type do the causal work? The type causes itself to appear elsewhere. When a cell divides, the new cells come to have the type they have in virtue of the type of the original cell, but now in a different place. The causal relation operates at the level of the type, and it is the same type in another location. The type is causing an identical type in another token. Types cause themselves to replicate. We say, “This type came to be because of that type”, referring to two token instances of the same type. Now consider identity through time: an object at one time causes itself to have certain properties at a later time—say, in the development of an organism (e.g., a butterfly). The object is causing a change in itself not in some distinct object: x at t1 causes x at t2 to be F. The causation is reflexive and cross-temporal. There is no conceptual problem about this. So, why not allow that an object can cause itself at a time? It can cause itself to be F at a time, to exist at a time, and to be itself at a time. To be sure, it can’t efficiently cause these effects, i.e., by being antecedent to itself, but not all causation is efficient causation. Once we loosen the concept up a bit, we can see our way clear to self-causation. I am the reason for my own being—not the sole reason, but a reason. I am me because of me: how could that fail to be true? I don’t go around excitedly announcing this to all and sundry, because it is insultingly obvious, but it is a metaphysical truth (like “numbers are objects” or “events happen”). It is puzzling that Aristotle never included this in his list of causes, but he could have—call it “identity causation”. Just as we say that every object is identical to itself, so we can say that every object causes itself. Neither proposition will make the evening news (“Scientists have discovered that not only is every object self-identical but every object is self-causing. For more on this over to…”).

The metaphysics of causation has long debated the extension of the concept cause, with narrow and wide interpretations proposed. For some reason, so-called efficient causation (isn’t all causation efficient?) has recently held pride of place, with Aristotle’s four types reduced to one. I am suggesting we up the tally to five. In time it may even seem to people as if this was the right place to start: the first and most obvious category of causation is that between an object and itself; everything else is an extension of that basic idea. We thus have identity cause, formal cause, material cause, teleological cause, and efficient cause—in that order. The most internal cause is identity cause: causation begins at home, as a relation between a thing and itself. And isn’t it nice to think of oneself as one’s own cause? I am literally a self-made man (and I did it my way).[2]

[1] See my “A New Metaphysics”, “Causal and Logical Relations”, and “Because”.

[2] It is customary to think of one’s parents as the proximate cause of one’s existence, but on the present conception there is another link in the causal chain (or structure)—you yourself. And notice that you are indubitably sufficient for your own existence, but nothing else is—the causal chain might have been interrupted at any point before your glorious self popped into being. Only you guarantee you. Granted you are the product of other things too, but at least you play a causal role in bringing about your existence. Everything, in fact, is a self-caused cause—and effect.

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Is Logic Revisable?

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Is Logic Revisable?

What does this question mean? Does it mean to ask whether our current logical systems are in principle revisable? Or is it asking whether logical reality itself is revisable? Presumably not the latter: truth (reality, facts) isn’t revisable, only beliefs are. Unless we mean to be asking whether logical reality can be changed—how and by what? The question is bizarre. Can we change the laws of nature? Unlikely, to say the least. No, it must be the first thing that is meant—logical beliefs. Could our logical beliefs be false? If that is a skeptical question, the answer depends on the cogency of skepticism, and its scope. Could you be stuck in a dream in which you accept false logical propositions? That sounds possible—you might be dreaming that certain logical propositions are true but they aren’t. Or you might be logically insane. How can we rule these skeptical possibilities out? Nothing is immune to skeptical doubt, arguably. The question doesn’t seem peculiar to logic and is not particularly interesting.

Here is another interpretation: could there be another reality in which our logical laws don’t hold (though they do in our reality)? Do they hold in a fictional world, say? We can certainly imagine stories in which contradictory things happen. But this doesn’t seem very interesting, since it has no bearing our current logical knowledge. That logic doesn’t hold in logically impossible worlds is hardly news. We have to be talking about our actual world if the question is to have any bite. The simple answer to our title question is that our current systems are fallible, subject to Cartesian doubt like everything else, but that there is no sense in the idea of a revisable logical reality. If the law of non-contradiction is part of logical reality, then it isn’t revisable; but if we just mean our logical beliefs, then this belief will be open to doubt. This is just a special case of general skepticism.

However, there is one possible source of doubt that has more localized force, which I have never seen mentioned. This is that the very notion of entailment cannot be made sense of.[1] Entailment applies in any viable logical system, so if it makes no sense, then logic will totter. This would imply that no logic could be correct, because it uses an indefensible concept. Logic would be revisable in the sense that it could be revised out of existence. This wouldn’t be the claim merely that we can’t know if one proposition (or fact) entails another; it would be the stronger ontological claim that the relation in question does not and could not exist. If that were so, then even “p entails p” would fail, on account of the meaninglessness of “entails”. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not so hard to construct a case for: entailment is not easy to make sense of. What is it for one proposition to entail another (even itself)? The relation seems both internal and external at the same time: the logically connected propositions are generally distinct and yet stand in a necessary internal relation. How can that be—how can distinct things stand in necessary internal relations? Entailment seems contradictory! How can the proposition that p entail the proposition that p or q, where q is an unrelated proposition? It seems magical, contrary to reason. Similarly for all other standard entailments. How is it possible to extract one proposition from another (which doesn’t contain it)? The alleged logical relation makes no metaphysical sense. Induction has a problem because it tries to move from one proposition about the past to another about the future, but deduction has a similar problem—the problem of getting from a proposition to its logical consequences. It seems like inferring cats from dogs, or numbers from pebbles. Only propositional identity can do that. What bridges the gap, and how can one proposition be implicit in another? Why couldn’t it be that pentails q up to time time t, but then ceases to? Skeptical paradox threatens and logic begins to lose its metaphysical footing. Just as meaning can be revised out of existence, so logic could be—the whole idea of deduction falls apart.

The dialectic here is familiar and hence the range of options available. One possibility is to fall back on mysterianism: it is a mystery how entailment works, but it palpably does. It doesn’t fail of existence, but our understanding of it falls short. We must not infer non-existence from unintelligibility (to us). Logic itself doesn’t collapse, though we can’t properly understand its central concept. Logical mysterianism is then the indicated position. This seems hard to take, given the epistemic transparency of logical reasoning; but the same might be said of other fundamental aspects of reality—space and time, matter, causation. It just turns out that we are in the same epistemic position with respect to logic as we are elsewhere. We mistake the self-evidence of logical laws for their intelligibility—but the former doesn’t entail the latter. The fact is that we have no good theory of logical knowledge—no logical epistemology. The whole process of recognizing logical truth is riddled with mystery; it is one aspect of the problem of a priori knowledge, which goes back to Plato. Entailment is an inscrutable relation, begging for impatient elimination. Mysterianism allows us to resist this response. Either that or logic gets revised into oblivion by the entailment skeptic (anti-realist).[2]

[1] See my “The Problem of Deduction” and “Knowledge of Entailment”. I am applying these points to the question of the revisability of logic.

[2] I myself believe that the problem of logic (the mind-logic problem) is a lot harder than has been acknowledged historically. Even the rationalists had little positive to say about it. Logic is metaphysically baffling: what it is, how it relates to the rest of nature, how minds grasp it—all very difficult. No wonder it has had mystical associations. We love logic, but we don’t see very far into it. Logic has been around forever, but has been reluctant to yield up its secrets. Most philosophy of logic is laughably reductive. Wittgenstein was infatuated with pure logic when he was young, but hostile to it in middle age (too “sublime”). He came to think it produces intellectual monsters. I think logic is like bacteria: invisible but everywhere (and vital to life). If causation is the cement of the universe, then logic is its scaffolding (or skeleton).

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Hand Fish

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Hand fish

I was watching a truly splendid documentary on the oceans last night on Netflix, produced by the Obamas and narrated by Barack Obama. I thoroughly recommend it. Barack does an excellent job, though not quite at the level of David Attenborough and Morgan Freeman (otherwise known as the Voices of Nature).  Anyway, I was much struck by an animal I had never heard of before: the spotted hand fish. It likes to crawl along the ocean floor on fins that look remarkably like hands (of course, our hands evolved from fins). I saw no use of these hands for grasping purposes, still less tool use, but digital separation was there. But one felt a strong impression of intelligence in this little fish, which was confirmed by its stratagems for repelling a sea star bent on eating its eggs. At one point it lured this formidable predator away by offering its own body for consumption, only to give it the slip and return to its unharmed eggs—smart! Surely those proto-hands played some role in the evolutionary development of the hand fish brain. Why don’t more fish have hands? Why isn’t manual prehension the norm in the fish world? Think of the benefits! It was all grist to the mill for my own work on the hand and human evolution (see Prehension, 2017). Apparently, this unique species is in danger of extinction in the wild. I hope some marine biologist is studying its prehensile capabilities. The octopus’s tentacles clearly afford tremendous grasping potential; this rare fish has a similar adaptation. I am surprised not to have heard of it before. Barack gave a rousing account of its efforts to thwart the sea star, showing great ingenuity and persistence. It won by sheer brain power against a much larger adversary. The octopus, hand fish, and human all belong to a special natural zoological kind—hand animals.

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The Non-Cognitive Mind

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The Non-Cognitive Mind

The so-called cognitive mind is said to be subject to the representational theory of mind (RTM).[1] This theory has a number of elements chief among which is that thoughts have compositional structure—roughly, their conceptual content mirrors the compositionality of language. That means that they have propositional content—the kind of content that sentences have. The general idea is that minds have different compartments, not all of which are subject to RTM. These don’t get discussed much, and are seldom even specified. But they exist and stand in contrast to the cognitive mind. Strictly, this latter mind excludes perception, because perceptual impressions are not structured like sentences; their content is not conceptually compositional (e.g., you don’t see that not all sugar is white or smell that milk doesn’t smell like roses, but you can think these things). So, the non-cognitive mind consists of everything else: sensations, emotions, needs, desires, images, after-images, personality traits, volitions, experiential memories. These mental goings-on are not deemed compositional in the indicated sense—not propositionally productive. Thus, RTM doesn’t apply to them. They may interact with the cognitive mind and even be infiltrated by it, but their essence (“architecture”) is different, markedly so. They must fall under some other theory; one wouldn’t want to adopt a linguistic theory of their nature—a language of emotion, say, comparable to a language of thought (LOT). Emotions exist way down the phylogenetic scale, well below the sophistications of logico-grammatical thought. This means that the vast majority of minds on planet Earth are not cognitive minds—most animal minds; and adult human minds are also largely non-cognitive. So, RTM is not a theory of mind but a theory of one part of the human mind, and quite a limited part at that. Most of psychology is concerned with non-cognitive mental phenomena; in fact, for most of evolutionary history there were no cognitive minds, and hence no compositional mental representations. RTM is a rather specialized subject, not representative of the mind in general. Cognitive science, so conceived, is rightly so called; it concerns only a narrowly defined aspect of the mind. If you want a name for the broader field, you might have to speak of “mental science” or “cognitive and non-cognitive science”. It would be conceded, indeed insisted upon, that RTM is not the right framework for discussing most minds and large sectors of the human mind. In scope we might compare it to the study of sensations or emotions or mental images—one part of the total subject matter of psychology.

But what is the right theory of the non-cognitive mind? What is the essential nature of the non-cognitive? Is it just a motley or can we unify it theoretically? Here we are apt to fall silent—nothing springs to mind. The cognitive mind is unified under the heading “representational”, but what label captures the non-cognitive mind? Fill in the blank in “the…mind”. This is not an easy question and our standard vocabulary is not up to the task, but I have a proposal. We naturally think of the items in my list as effects of something—stimuli (internal and external), triggers, prompts, pressures, elicitors. The mind is affected thus and so—caused to assume a certain color or shape (here our vocabulary runs out of steam). A visual sensation is elicited, an emotion is prompted, a desire is evoked, a visual image is brought to mind. This is the mind as receptive not pro-active: what is imposed upon us not initiated by us. It is reflexive not free—stimulus-dependent. Thought can go anywhere, belief is flexible to a fault; but much of our mental life follows fixed patterns, invariant laws of production. Accordingly, we could speak of “the affective mind”, with the word “affective” stripped of its narrowly emotional meaning. Clearly, the word is chosen to describe emotions because emotions are generally the result of impingements (sometimes internal); I am generalizing it to a wider range of mental phenomena. If we want to maintain verbal parity with “the representational mind”, we could speak of “the affectational mind” and swallow the neologism; in fact, I recommend this term as the label we need to accord the non-cognitive mind its nomenclatural due. Abbreviating, we get “ATM” to be set beside “RTM”. Then we can inquire into the proper form of the ATM: what is distinctive of this part of the mind (or type of mind) by contrast with RTM? We know it is not propositionally compositional, but what is it positively? Here we quickly draw a blank: we can try saying consciousness, but that will include conscious thoughts too; or we could appeal to old standbys like privacy, intentionality, privileged access, etc. I think the best structural feature to fasten onto is that these aspects of mind have an analogue character: they come in degrees and correlate with other quantities such as stimulus strength. There is a psychophysics associated with them—proportional mental responses to varying physical stimuli. The stronger the stimulus the more intense the response: the brighter the light the brighter the visual sensation, the emptier the stomach the more intense the hunger, the scarier the danger the greater the fear, etc. Thoughts are not like that; they don’t vary in intensity in correlation with an external stimulus or situation. Their subjective intentionality is not a function of the parameters of the eliciting stimulus; it is different in kind from the intentionality of thought. Their compositionality (and atomicity) is not of the propositional-grammatical type; it is more primitive, being possessed by all animal minds. It isn’t advanced intentionality. Their content is more phenomenal than propositional, visceral not cerebral. The affective mind is not about words or word-like mental representations.

Now that we have mapped out the geography, we can begin to investigate the geology. Which came first, which is more basic, how does the layering look? Clearly, the affective mind preceded the cognitive mind; logically structured thought appeared late in evolutionary history (and is still in its early stages). Sensation and emotion are more ancient. Somehow thought evolved from these beginnings, abetted by language in advanced species (we don’t know how). In the mental strata diagram, the non-cognitive mind is a deeper layer, forming the foundation of the cognitive mind. In it are fossils of earlier phases of life on Earth (e.g., temperature receptors, predator fears, etc.). Language is nowhere in sight and belongs in the upper layers. What part of the mind do we understand the best? Some might say we understand the cognitive part better than the non-cognitive part, because RTM is a well-developed explanatory theory. But this is to ignore all the mysteries entrained by that theory, and it assumes that RTM is a good theory within its domain.[2] In the bad old days of Pavlovian behaviorism people thought that the non-cognitive part of the mind was pretty much all tied up—it’s all just conditioned and unconditioned reflexes. Now we know better, what with the emergence of consciousness from the shadows and a greater respect for the inner. The truth appears to be that there are now scratches on the surface of both minds, but we still have a long road ahead of us (which might end in a town called Nowhere). At least we have a clearer idea of what we don’t understand. I would say this: it would be strange if we had a good theory of the cognitive mind but a poor theory of the non-cognitive mind; for the one depends on the other and interacts with it. More plausible is the suspicion that RTM is not as good as it sets out to be—less penetrating, more cobbled together. Isn’t it more likely that both aspects of mind are equally cloaked in mystery? My suspicion is that RTM carries a kind of spurious appeal, because it borrows from the study of language: we have a pretty decent idea of the structure of language (syntax) and some ideas about its pragmatics, so we apply this to thought in hopes of instant illumination (any light is welcome on a dark night). But actually, thought is quite remote from language and precedes it handily. RTM is really based on a loose analogy between thought and language not on any direct insights into thought as such (we can’t see it and hear it). If so, the two domains are on a par intelligibility-wise. The things we call “concepts” remain as elusive as ever (notice that Chomsky never bought into Fodor’s theory of cognition and had little to say about thought itself). A representational theory of language seems warranted (but see below), so we naturally transfer it to what language expresses, viz. thought. But this sleight of hand should not go unremarked; it is too clever by half. The linguistic model is all too tempting—a quick and easy fix for a big problem. I see the appeal, but I don’t commend the capitulation. The linguistic turn in cognitive psychology (LOT and its gang) is liable to be a turn into the wilderness, or just a trip around the parking lot. In any case, it is not clear that RTM is a step ahead of whatever we have to say about the affective mind (not a great deal, alas). What are these strange things—concepts, thoughts, beliefs? What is their inner nature?

I want to sketch a possible view of the thought-language interface that strikes me as having some plausibility (indeed to be obviously correct on reflection). It is simple: an ordinary natural language is a formal system with a determinate syntax; we are born with it coded into our genes (some mutation gave rise to it a couple of hundred thousand years ago). But it has no intrinsic reference; words in it (the lexicon) don’t have reference intrinsically—this is conferred on it by speakers in virtue of their thoughts. Thoughts do have reference intrinsically, but words don’t. Thoughts also have compositional structure in a way analogous to language. Thus, we can’t explain thought-reference in terms of word-reference; that gets things the wrong way round. It is an illusion to suppose that thought refers via language (internal or external); that would be circular. We are mistaking an effect (language) for a cause (thought). Thoughts are indeed about things, but not in virtue of being linguistic; language refers only because the thoughts of speakers do. If this is right, then RTM is a kind of pseudo-theory—not false exactly but misconceived. This resolves the puzzle of how cognitive psychology seems to be in better shape than non-cognitive psychology; it really isn’t, but it can give that appearance. Actually, the representational theory of language (RTL) is wrong, because language is not inherently referential; only thoughts have reference built into them. Language refers parasitically.

I return to the question of the non-cognitive mind. Some of the mind is propositional and some of it is not. We need a theory of both. We can’t give a cognitive theory of the non-cognitive part, and anyway it is doubtful that we have a theory of the cognitive part (only a kind of theory-imposter). The non-cognitive part seems no easier to understand than the cognitive part, though no harder either. We should not insist on a sharp bipartite division, as if you could do one and not do the other. The mind is more unified than that picture allows. “Cognitive science” is a bad label.[3]

[1] See the many works of J.A. Fodor, its chief architect and promoter (as well as comedian).

[2] See my “Fodor’s RTM”.

[3] It is an interesting question why this label caught on: what is “cognitive” being contrasted with? Overtly, with “behavioral”—we are (at last) doing internal psychology (“intervening variables”). But is there also a hint of snobbery vis-à-vis the non-cognitive parts of mind? Are we looking down on the other parts of the mind, especially the emotional? Is Freud lurking in the background somewhere with his lurid sexual psychology (“erotic science”)? We just don’t hear much about the psychology of the passions these days—it’s all computations and ratiocinations. I would like to see a serious emotional science alongside the cognitive kind. Fear psychology would be a good place to start. What is the role of mental images in the generation of fear? How do phobias develop? What is the nature of emotional intentionality? We need a Fodor of the feelings, a Chomsky of the sentiments.

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Fodor’s RTM

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Fodor’s RTM

Here is a telling passage in Hume Variations written by my old friend and fellow mysterian Jerry Fodor: “For a number of interlocking reasons, it remains fully plausible that cognitive processes are constituted by causal interactions among mental representations, that is, among semantically evaluable particulars. Either that, or we really are entirely in the dark” (35: my italics). He seems to be vividly aware that mystery is lying in wait for us if RTM doesn’t pan out—as if we are saved from the darkness only by the skin of our teeth, because nothing else even comes close. This is a somber thought: it might turn out that what he calls “the cognitive mind” is a complete dead-end mystery (for us anyway). This strikes me as a reasonable assessment, because RTM is the only thing we have going for us (not behaviorism or connectionism or eliminativism). Fortunately, the theory has a lot to be said in its favor and not much against it. The point I want to make is that the mind is still a mystery even if we know RTM to be true, because all of its central claims involve mysteries—though it is perfectly true (and known to be so), as far as it goes. It’s not just that either RTM is true or the mind is shrouded in darkness, but that RTM is true and it is shrouded in darkness; or better, such light as the theory throws exists against a background of impenetrable darkness. Indeed, the truth of RTM entails that the mind is mysterious, precisely because of its essential tenets. And this fact is embarrassingly obvious. I don’t think Jerry would disagree.[1]

What are the central tenets of RTM? Fodor summarizes them in chapter 6 of HV and I will summarize his summary. According to RTM, perceptions, images, concepts, thoughts, and words are mental particulars (tokens not types); they are events not dispositions; they stand in causal relations to each other and to the external world and behavior; and they are compositional, semantically evaluable, and atomistic (they divide into the simple and complex). As Fodor sees it, Hume was basically right: the mind consists of “ideas” that satisfy this list of properties—event-like particulars, standing in causal relations, with compositional structure (“syntax”), semantic properties (especially reference), and consisting of mental atoms arranged into mental molecules (“mental chemistry”). The mind represents things by means of a structured system of combinable elements, some of which are simple and atomic. The mind is thus real and active, like the physical world, and it is structured analogously to the physical world. It is a kind of complicated semantic machine—a meaningful mechanism. It combines the concretely causal and the literally representational. Thoughts, in particular, are both causally efficacious and intentional (in the Brentano sense).

All right, there you have it, clear as a bell and intuitively appealing to a fault. What more could you ask of a theory? Where’s the trouble? The trouble (if “trouble” is the right word) is that we don’t know what any of it means; we don’t know what we are talking about. Not that this is any refutation of the theory; it is merely to point out its limitations as an explanatory scheme (I use the word advisedly). For, first: what are these “mental representations”? They are “ideas” or “concepts”: but what are these? They are not sense impressions, phenomenal constituents of consciousness, and they are not brain states (for all the anti-reductive reasons Fodor and others have given). So, what is their ontology, their metaphysics, and their epistemology? What the Dickens are they? Not mental pictures, to be sure, not sounds in your head, not scribbles on mental paper. We have no idea what they are, frankly. The OED unhelpfully volunteers the following definition of “concept”: “an abstract idea”, “an idea or mental picture of a group or class of objects, formed by combining all their aspects”. None of this is right, as the word is used in philosophy and psychology. We generally just get the hang of the way the word is used and then follow the crowd. This is why concepts are so variously understood by theorists. We can just about understand the idea of a mental particular (token event), but its ontological category remans obscure. There is even controversy about whether concepts are best understood as dispositions (abilities) or occurrent events (parts of processes). We are unclear as to whether there is anything it is like to have them. They are mysterious entities (certainly not images, which themselves are not devoid of mystery). And if we decided to go brain-reductive, we would run the risk of losing their essential characteristics (neurons as such don’t do what concepts do).

Second, what is this causality we speak of so casually? Is it anything like physical causality of the billiard ball stripe? Since we don’t know what concepts are, we are in the dark about the causal relations involved: one thought causes another, but how? Does it involve propinquity, contact, energy transfer, instantaneity, mass, electro-magnetism? The word “cause” is here being used in a completely hand-waving manner. Are there strict laws that back singular causal relations concerning thoughts? We are relying on a completely schematic conception of causality here, not something whose naturalistic credentials can be taken for granted. We can’t just assume the causation is identical to neural causation. This is another mystery to be added to the growing pile. And is “event” sufficiently clear as not to raise mysterian hackles? Even this is not without its conundrums: for events require things (substances) to act as their host, but what mental thing (or substance) is there to perform this role?[2] The brain, the self, the soul? None of the above. In fact, the whole ontology of events and their underlying substances has dubious application to the mind—what thing does a mental event occur in? We call thoughts events by analogy with physical events, but the analogy is loose at best, misleading at worst. Do we want our best theory of the mind to be dependent on an idea so poorly defined? What would Hume say about such a cavalier announcement? Thinking is event causation—really? Tell me more, if you have more to tell.

All this is before we get to the real meat and potatoes of RTM. Concepts are supposed to have intentionality, compositionality, and atomicity: do we know what these things are? Do we know what implements them, analyzes them, naturalizes them? Aren’t they complete mysteries, mere figures of speech? We have theories of intentionality—pictorial, descriptive, causal, teleological—but none of these commands universal assent, or even grudging respect. The puzzles of sense and reference apply in full force (identity statements, existential statements, etc.), and the whole idea of reference is anathema to some. Reference may not be as mysterious as consciousness, but it comes pretty close (Fodor would not disagree). This is an old story. Reference is like dark matter: we know it exists, but we have no idea what it is. Compositionality is less often noted for its puzzling nature; it is lazily supposed to be just the familiar part-whole relation. But (as Fodor himself points out) it isn’t just mereological composition; we need the idea of what the linguists call “constituent structure”. We need the analogue for thought of grammar in language—phrase-structure, in a word. We need an account of the compositionality of sentences like “John and Mary like Jack and Susan just fine”, parsed in the natural way. We need to naturalize syntax, propositional form, generative grammar. Good luck with that! Do we even know what predication is? Is it in any way physical (whatever that means)? Is it a type of qualia? Is it like things sticking together to form wholes? It is none of these. Compositional structure, in this sense, is an unexplained fact of nature, a kind of weird mental attraction. Chomsky has been trying for years to provide even an adequate description of it for English. Thoughts evidently have it, but we don’t know how (not by psychological laws of association, for sure). How is one concept “tied” to another? It isn’t just next to it in space and time. And then there is atomicity: here we have a physical model, but our understanding doesn’t go any deeper. What are these atomic conceptual simples and how do they add up to conceptual complexes? They are not elements of sense impressions, points in visual space; then what are they? They are postulated on theoretical grounds, not encountered in introspection, but no one knows what they are exactly. Their very existence remains debatable. You can’t see them under a microscope, like little wriggling organisms. The concept of atom here is more metaphor than solid science (or received philosophy). What are the constitutive primitives of thought, and how do they join together to form whole thoughts? We have no idea; and yet thoughts exist in close proximity to our epistemic faculties—and we still don’t know what they are. Nor do we have any idea about their creation (their etiology, as Fodor likes to say): where do the mental atoms come from—presented scenes or inherited genes? Do we pick them up perceptually from the passing scene, or are they borne by the genes in our DNA? How could they arise from either? More mystery.

So, RTM looks nice descriptively, a lot nicer than a lot of other theories; and it gives every appearance of being true. But it doesn’t provide much relief from the surrounding darkness. Everything it tells us is subject to mysterian critique; not in the sense that it is thereby falsified, but in the sense that it is not a fully intelligible theory (in Chomsky’s sense). It doesn’t make the mental world an intelligible place (compare gravity). Other theories at least purport to do that—materialism, behaviorism, classical empiricist psychology—but RTM by itself merely sets up a series of difficult questions. Fine, but let’s not fool ourselves (I’m not sure Fodor appreciated how deep the questions go, though he was an avowed mysterian). Cognitive science, as we have it, may not rest on a mistake, but it does rest on a mystery, or cluster of mysteries. The true theory of mind, according to Fodor, is actually the most mysterious theory. That shouldn’t deter us from accepting it, but it should give us pause about how much we have achieved. The more plausible it gets the more mysterious it appears (isn’t that always the way?).[3]           

[1] See my “Fodor on Mystery”. He remarks that the problems of concepts, intentionality, and thought “really are deeply mysterious”.

[2] See my “Ontology of Mind”, “Mind and Substance”, and “Language, Self, and Substance”.

[3] Oversimplification, or sheer blind ignorance, will always make our theories of the world look more intelligible than they deserve to be; the more realistic they become, the harder they are to understand. RTM is quite a sophisticated theory (or theory-sketch), so it advertises its lacunas more visibly. It is really a sign of theoretical advance when a theory starts to reveal its hidden mysteries—as in quantum theory, and even gravitation theory (as every student of Newton knows). We are beginning to see how complex the cognitive mind is (not to mention the non-cognitive mind); the underlying mysteries are thus more apt to pop out. I think that Fodor really saw his own theory as so much whistling in the dark—though whistling the right tune at least. We might really have absolutely no idea what is going on in the mind when a person, as we say, thinks. Just ask yourself what a thought is exactly.

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Do Bats Know What it is Like to be Human?

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Do Bats Know What it is Like to be Human?

One answer would be that we don’t know whether they do or can know what it’s like to be human, because of the problem of bat other minds. That is a boring answer and, I think, incorrect; in any case, I will ignore it. We know enough about bat minds to know whether or not they know what it’s like to be human. And I believe the simple answer is that they do know. This is because we don’t have any senses they don’t have. They have one sense we don’t have (echolocation), but we don’t have a sense they don’t have. Their senses may not be as acute as ours (e.g., sight), but they have the basic phenomenology associated with our five senses; they are not totally in the dark about what it’s like to be human from a sensory point of view. Someone might say bats can’t have such knowledge, because their cognitive abilities are too limited to know anything of the kind. They don’t even know what it’s like to be a mouse. Again, this answer is boring and, I think, incorrect: they know what’s it’s like to be them, and other animals share that subjectivity to a sufficient degree to ground knowledge of other animal minds. Bats know what it is like to see and hear (etc.) generally. Basically, all mammals know what it is like to be a mammal, so long as their sense modalities overlap. They know each other’s mode of sensory consciousness. Indeed, the same point applies to reptiles and birds, fish and octopuses. So, perhaps surprisingly, animals have good knowledge of what it’s like to be most other animals, including humans. Even mice know what it’s like to be human!

But that point only applies to sensory consciousness, and it is not the only kind. What about what may be called a priori consciousness—logical, mathematical, ethical, philosophical? Assuming that bats don’t have that kind of consciousness, do they know what it’s like to be human? I think not. In fact, I am doubtful that any animal knows what human a priori consciousness is like, even our closest relatives. Of course, if they have a kind of closeted a priori mental life, then they can know what it’s like to be us; but there is no evidence for this and it seems clearly false. So, there is a large part of what it’s like to be human that bats and other animals don’t and can’t know.  Nor can humans who lack rational faculties, say because of brain abnormality. Human intelligence (of an advanced kind) is not knowable by animals in general; they don’t know what it’s like to have the kind of intelligence we have. We can know what it’s like to have bat intelligence, but they can’t know what it’s like to have human intelligence—though they do know what it’s like to have human sensations. If a bat were to write a paper called “What is it Like to be Human?”, the answer would have to be “We don’t know”, or “We know some but not all”. The topic of animal knowledge of other minds is a neglected area, but part of psychological zoology. I am just laying the groundwork here.[1]

[1] I think we know exactly what it’s like to be a dinosaur, sensorily and intellectually, and I think they know what it’s like to be a human sensorily—but not intellectually. We humans are distinctive in having a developed a priori form of consciousness. It is like having another sense.

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A Fortiori

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A Fortiori

I noticed with mounting irritation that Jerry Fodor keeps using the Latin phrase “a fortiori” to mean “it follows that” in Hume Variations. It doesn’t mean that; it means “with stronger reason” (look it up). The correct construction is “it follows a fortiori that p”. You can’t say “a fortiori a fortiori”—as if that meant “it follows with stronger reason”. Moreover, no one ever corrected him, including copy-editors. Does no one know what “a fortiori” means? It reminds me of people who use the phrase “craven cowards”: “craven” means “cowardly”. These are not difficult points. We all make mistakes, but really come on.

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