Episode 026: In Search of the Soul, part 1

I’ll be listening.

I’ve also got a question: my favourite podcasts so far have been the presuppositional/Plantinga series. In one of those, you outline this argument:

1) Knowledge entails warrant
2) Warrant entails proper function
3) Proper function entails theism
4) Therefore, knowledge entails theism

I’m having a particularly hard time grasping 2) here – that warrant entails proper function. I’m not quite sure I follow the argument. What’s a good reference for learning more about it? Should I get Plantinga’s book(s)?

Hey Kenny. My only fear is that someone who doesn’t share my conclusions will say “but that’s too simplified!” or “but what about this other argument…”. I think my overviews are fair, but they really are just overviews.

Hi there Glenn,

I’m really interested in the mind-body problem and enjoyed hearing your thoughts in part 1. I look forward to parts two to four. Two questions though…

(1) Does your refutation of the “brain-saw” argument for substance-dualism conflate the minds thoughts with mind itself?

(2) Also, it seems you hang your refutation of that point on the idea that the mind must be simple – but must it?

I know these are big questions, and I don’t really expect an answer, but its something to think about at least.

James,

I think that the only plausible sorts of things that thoughts could be are either mental properties or mental events (Fyi, I take them to be mental properties; I don’t believe in events).

If thoughts are taken to be mental properties, then your objection boils down to its just seeming like a material object is not the sort of thing that can have mental properties. If thoughts are taken to be mental events, then your objection boils down to the claim that it just seems like the sort of physical events that occur inside the brain aren’t the sorts of events that could be identical to mental events. In short, it seems to me that your objection reduces to the one that Glenn discussed about how it just seems impossible to us that material things are the sorts of things that could have mental properties or host mental events.

Now, I do have sympathy for that objection, much more than Glenn does. Glenn made the objection out to be little more than an argument from ignorance. But I think that there is more to it than that. It’s not just that we can’t see how it is that a material thing could have mental properties – we (or at least many of us) have a positive modal intuition that the nature of material things is such that it is impossible for them to have mental properties. That’s different and stronger than just not being able to see how it is that a material thing could think. I grant that I also can’t see how it is that an immaterial thing could think, but I have no modal intuitions to the effect that it is impossible that an immaterial thing could think as I do in the case of material things.

Hey guys, I not sure if I made myself clear. And I’m not speaking about how it works. I speaking of an objective, testable reality. That orange ball exists as a picture in my mind. Yet that picture is not public. Open up my head, and it can not be found. There is “something” here that is non-physical, yet very real.

Screensavers are information, and like software is immaterial – so I’m not sure if that example rightly fits the mind-body relationship.

Correct Glenn, but your Screensaver needs certain physical things (especially light) to be seen or realized. And your Screensaver is public.

If I am picturing my dear mother, you can not open up my head and view the same picture. Even if you could reproduce that picture (figuring what neurons do what) you can not see the original.

I believe that this is powerful, first person experience against physicalism. But I’m just a layman…

Glenn, like I said I’m a layman on these issues, so I don’t know if I can lay out a deductive argument that would satisfy you. I am pretty sure though, by experience, that thoughts are not physical (though they are probably physically caused). And that they are clearly not physical.

That is why I used the picture example – it is easy to understand and universal. Yes, you may be able to “reproduce” the picture of the orange ball on computer monitor (if you knew which part of the brain did what) but I’m asserting that you can not see the original.

That it is completely private and non-material. Non-public. So if physicalism is true, how can “anything” be non-public?

Stuart, sorry I missed your post earlier. Here are my thoughts on your two comments:

a) The brain saw argument says nothing about whether there is any distinction between the mind and its thoughts. It is a response to a well defined dualist claim, namely the claim that the mind is simple and therefore not physical. The dualist argument is we are not conscious of separate mental events in our experience, but rather we experience them all together as one unified perceptual state. It is possible that the dualist who makes this argument is conflating thoughts with mind, and perhaps you could critique dualists for that reason. I don’t think they are making that mistake, because I think they are talking about a centre of consciousness and not merely a bundle of unrelated thoughts. But what the brain saw argument shows is that how many centres of consciousness exist can actually be affected by physical changes to the brain.

b) It is not I who insists that the mind is simple. In fact that is the dualist claim that I am responding to. If the mind is a single non physical entity, then it is simple, and likewise if it is simple, then it makes sense to think of it as non physical (since physical things are divisible). I voiced my agreement with Kant, saying that a unity of consciousness does not imply simplicity, and I also used the brain saw argument, which used empirical evidence to suggest that the mind is not so simple after all.

James, I think you’re saying things that I replied to earlier, so it looks like there’s no progress for us to make.

James, I guess that’s really what the podcast series is about. 😉

Unlike a dualist, I think thoughts are caused physically. They are physical events. The thing that I am thinking about is not in my head, so if you cracked my head open you would not see it. What you would see is my thought producing organ, which is physical.

Asking if a thought is physical is a bit like asking if speech is physical. Thought is what my brain does.

I think, Kenny, that it’s an intuition that was once bolstered by ignorance. People had that inkling, plus they didn’t know a lot about the way the brain works, so the soul stepped in. It was intuitively satisfying, and it also provided an end to the road of trying to figure it out by inserting a mystery. Naturally, there’s no intuition that something mysterious could not do this or that, because it’s mysterious! Who knows what it could do or not do?

I think the intuition about what the brain can and cannot do is fading, just because the brain does so much and we have become aware of the very close connection between the brain and thought. I welcome this fading, as I think it prompts us to get back into thinking about it.

James, you asked if “thoughts” were physical. I replied by saying that this is like asking whether or not”speech” is physical. I said that because thoughts are events, like speech. Speech isn’t a physical object, it’s something that we do, just like thinking.

Public vs non-public is not relevant, because that’s only a question of whether other people can observe something. This is clearly not a determining factor in whether or not something is physical, and it is most definitely not “evidence” for their non-physical status. If you’re prepared to grant that thoughts are caused by physical processes, then as far as I’m concerned you’ve accepted that they are physical, and the dualist argument from thought does not agree with you (since that argument assumes that matter cannot think).

A side note Glenn. If it is turtles all the way down then I believe that position destroys human rationality. How, for instance, would the immaterial content of a proposition, effect the physical process?

Hey Glenn,

I think that I’ll probably let you have the final word after this, since both of us will soon be doing little more than pounding the table. But I don’t think you can explain away the intuition I am speaking of by saying that it is just born of ignorance about how the brain works. In fact, I think that the more detail in which one imagines the physical processes occurring in the brain, the stronger the intuition is likely to become. I have heard one relatively prominent physicalist philosopher that I am acquainted with say that learning in great detail about how the brain works made the sort of intuition that I am speaking of stronger, rather than weaker, for him (of course, in his case, it is an intuition that he discards).

Suppose you are right – that it is natural to think that we won’t have the corresponding intuition concerning the soul because the soul is mysterious. Fine. That doesn’t hurt the argument. Perhaps we don’t have many intuitions about immaterial things because we don’t understand them very well. But we do have an intuition that material things can’t think. And insofar as that intuition provides us with prima facie warrant for thinking believing that material things can’t think, it (via a relatively straight forward inference) affords us with prima facie warrant for the belief that thinking things are immaterial.

I don’t think the charge of dodging attempts to explain thought is on target against this argument. The argument, in its strongest form, doesn’t turn on any claims about explanation or lack thereof; it turns on an intuition of impossibility. As a parallel, suppose I am a pretty staunch Pythagorean and I insist that in fact, at bottom, everything, including human thinkers, are composed of abstract numbers. You point out to me that you believe that this can’t possibly be true, because it seems clear to you that there are phenomena in the world that simply can’t be reduced to facts about abstract numbers. I charge that you are just making an argument from ignorance; you can’t see how it is that everything can be explained in terms of facts about numbers, so you conclude that we have to posit more than numbers to explain the world. Clearly, it seems that I have missed out on the force of your argument if I were to say that. But I don’t see how your response to the dualist’s argument that we are discussing is relevantly different than the Pythagorean response I just described.

P.S. Yes James, that’s me; good to hear from you.

Trustker

“I propose that I can “see” your thoughts if I have the proper equipment (just like I require the proper equipment – ears – in order to hear your speech). After all, scientists are already in the beginning stages of being able to read minds. (Google that for yourself; here’s just one article that I found a second ago.)”

That is completely untrue. All scientists can do is to correlate. As we map the brain we can tell which parts of the brain does what. In other words – you may know that when neurons A,B and C are firing that I am picturing a orange ball (of course I first have to tell you when I’m picturing an orange ball so that you can later correlate that activity). But what you can not do is see “my” orange ball. You may be able to reproduce an orange ball on a computer screen when those particular neurons fire – but again, that is not viewing, it is reproducing.

So thinking is decidedly not like screen savers or speech. And until I’m proven wrong I have no rational reason to give up my position.

James: Regarding your suggested argument from mental causation, I’ll come to that in part three of the series, so I’ll set that aside for now.

As for how a thought could by physical yet non public, it may be as follows: Certain physical states of affairs might be public yet difficult to interpret. Examining the chips on a motherboard might not yield the video image that it is generating, just because it’s hard to see what that configuration points to. Ditto for the brain. Examining the physical processes going on can give us a rough idea about some things (e.g. “he is processing emotion”), but beyond that it is murky and difficult.

As I’ve indicated, I think that so much of the force of dualist arguments in this area boil down to the fact that it’s murky and dificult, so people breathe an intellectual sigh of relief by giving up on investigation and appealing to something-I-know-not-what that somehow just has the ability to think without requiring an explanation. I wonder, for example, if you could explain how an immaterial soul generates a mental image.

I don’t believe that there are such things as mental images (I think that we engage in various mental activities, including activities like imaging red applely, but I hold that, strictly speaking, there are no such things as mental images of red apples and the like). So I won’t find any argument for dualism that has a premise that there are such entities as mental images convincing.

But, Glenn, I don’t see why you think that the dualist owes any explanation. I think that Plantinga was right when he said that asking how the soul manages to think is a bit like asking how an electron has charge – for all we know, it’s just a basic fact about souls that they think, and there simply is no further explanation to be had. A certain kind of materialist may well, in fact, want to say the same thing about how it is that certain material systems come to think (all though this move strikes me as far less plausible when made on the part of the materialist) – perhaps they will want to say that it’s just a brute metaphysical fact that physical systems with a certain functional arrangement come to have mental properties.

I tend to think that all this focus on explanation is a bit of a red herring. It seems plausible to me that mental phenomena may well be, in interesting ways, sui generis – they certainly seem to be radically different from other kinds of phenomena that we know of. Furthermore, I think that taking mental phenomena to be sui generis is even more plausible give theism (I doubt that there is any deeper explanation of how it is that God manages to think; given theism, I think it is plausible that thought is a basic, fundamental feature reality).

James, if you’re entitled to not have “a clue” as you say, then I think my half clue, murky though it may be, isn’t looking so bad. And as for the question you repeated, as I said in my last post, that will be covered in part three of the series.

Okay Glenn, fair enough on the point about explanation.

FYI, I don’t take thoughts to be events; I take them to be universals – mental properties. At least I do insofar as I am still a realist about properties. I’ve been finding myself, of late, becoming increasingly sympathetic to a kind of nominalistic fictionalism about properties. My nominalist-leaning-self would say that, strictly speaking, there are no such entities as thoughts (that apparent quantification over them is fictionalist quantification), though, of course, there are thinking things.

All the above is just an aside, though; it doesn’t have anything directly to do with your podcast. Although, I do think that things get muddled in philosophy of mind at times because philosophers of mind talk as if it is clear that there are entities of a certain sort (thoughts, brain states, qualia, etc.) and that it is clear what they are, when in many cases I think that neither is, in fact, very clear.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed the discussion but I’m signing off for now. I’m looking forward to the next podcasts!