The
Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind
Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of Philosophy
University of California at Riverside
Riverside, CA
92521-0201
eschwitz at domain-
ucr.edu
February 19, 2014
The
Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind
Abstract:
Crazyism
about X is the view that something that it would be crazy to believe must be
among the core truths about X. In this
essay, I argue that crazyism is true of the
metaphysics of mind. A position is
“crazy” in the intended sense if it is contrary to common sense and we are not epistemically compelled to believe it. Crazyism can be
treated as the conjunction of two sub-theses: (1.) that something contrary to
common sense must be true and (2.) that whatever that true thing is, we are not epistemically
compelled to believe it. I defend the
first thesis on grounds of the probable incoherence of folk metaphysics, from
which it follows that any fully fleshed-out metaphysics will inevitably
conflict with some piece of that incoherent story. I defend the second thesis on three grounds:
peer disagreement, lack of a compelling method for resolving metaphysical
disputes about the mind, and the dubiousness of the general cosmological claims
with which metaphysical claims about the mind are entangled.
The
Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind[1]
i.
Bizarre
views are a hazard of metaphysics. The
metaphysician starts, seemingly, with some highly plausible initial commitments
or commonsense intuitions – that there is a prime number between 2 and 5, that
I could have had eggs for breakfast, that squeezing the clay statue would destroy
the statue but not the lump of clay. She
thinks long and hard about what, exactly, these claims imply. In the end, she finds herself positing a
realm of abstract Platonic entities, or the real existence of an infinite
number of possible worlds, or a huge population of spatiotemporally coincident
things on her mantelpiece. I believe
that there is not a single broad-ranging exploration
of the fundamental issues of metaphysics that doesn’t, by the end, entangle its
author in seeming absurdities. Rejection
of these seeming absurdities then becomes the commonsense starting point of a
new round of metaphysics, by other philosophers, which in turn generates a
complementary bestiary of metaphysical strangeness. Thus are philosophers happily employed.
I see three possible explanations of why
philosophical metaphysics is never thoroughly commonsensical:
First possible
explanation.
A thoroughly commonsensical metaphysics wouldn’t sell. It would be too boringly obvious,
perhaps. Or maybe it would lack a kind of
elegant serviceability or theoretical panache.
Or maybe it would conflict too sharply with what we think we know from
science. The problem with this
explanation is that there should be at least a small market for a thoroughly
commonsensical philosophy, even if that philosophy is gauche, tiresome, and
scientifically stale. Common sense might
not be quite as fun as Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence or Leibniz’s windowless
monads; it might not be as elegantly useful as Lewis’s possible worlds or as
scientifically current as __________ [insert ever-changing example]; but a
commonsensical metaphysics ought to be attractive to at least a certain portion
of philosophers. At least it ought to
command attention as a foil. It oughtn’t be so downmarket as to be
entirely invisible.
Second possible explanation. Metaphysics is very difficult. A thoroughly commonsensical metaphysics is
out there to be discovered; we simply haven’t found it yet. If all goes well, someday someone will piece
it all together, top to bottom, with no serious violence to common sense
anywhere in the system. I fear this is
wishful thinking against the evidence.
In the next several sections I will discuss the case of the metaphysics
of mind in particular.
Third possible explanation. Common sense is incoherent in matters of
metaphysics. Contradictions thus
inevitably flow from it, and no coherent metaphysical system can respect it
all. Although ordinary common sense
serves us fairly well in practical maneuvers through the social and physical
world, common sense has proven an unreliable guide in cosmology, probability
theory, microphysics, neuroscience, macroeconomics, evolutionary biology,
structural engineering, medicine, topology….
If, as it seems to, metaphysics more closely resembles these latter endeavors
than it resembles reaching practical judgments, we might excusably doubt the
dependability of common sense as a guide to metaphysics.[2] Undependability doesn’t imply incoherence, of
course. But it seems a natural next step
in this case, and it would tidily explain the historical fact at hand.
On the first explanation, we could
easily enough invent a thoroughly commonsensical metaphysical system if we
wanted one, but we don’t want one. On
the second explanation, we do want one, or enough of us do, but we haven’t yet
managed to construct it. On the third
explanation, we can’t have one. I hope
you’ll agree with me that the third has at least some prima facie merit.
Common sense might be culturally
variable. So whose common sense do I
take to be at issue in this argument? I
suspect it doesn’t matter. All
metaphysical systems in the philosophical canon, I’m inclined to think,
conflict both with the common sense of their milieu and with current Western
common sense. Eternal recurrence,
windowless monads, and the real existence of an infinitude
of possible worlds were never part of any society’s common sense.
Some readers will disagree about the
existence of the phenomenon I aim to explain; they will think that there is a
thoroughly commonsensical metaphysics on the market. To some extent, I’m simply taking as a
premise that there is none, and I’m inviting you to agree based on your own
reading of historical and contemporary metaphysics. Maybe the premise will appeal better, though,
if I highlight its intended scope. It
concerns only broad-ranging explorations of fundamental metaphysical issues,
especially the issues where seeming absurdities congregate: mind and body,
causation, identity, the catalogue of entities that really exist. Some skating treatments and some deep
treatments of narrow issues might dodge the charge.
Who might count as a thoroughly
commonsensical metaphysician? Aristotle,
I’ve sometimes heard. Or
Scottish “common sense” philosopher Thomas Reid. Or G.E. Moore, famous for
his “Defence of Common Sense” (1925). Or “ordinary language”
philosopher P.F. Strawson. Or Wittgenstein. But
Aristotle didn’t envision himself as developing a commonsensical view: In the
introduction to the Metaphysics
Aristotle says that the conclusions of sophisticated inquiries such as his own
will often seem “wonderful” to the untutored and contrary to their initial
opinions (4th c. BCE/1928); and Aristotle generally conceives his
project as in part to distinguish the true from the false in common
opinion. Moore, though fierce in
wielding common sense against his foes, seems unable to preserve all
commonsense commitments when he develops his positive views in detail, for
example in his waffling about “sense data” (1922, 1953, 1957). Strawson struggles similarly, especially in
his 1985 book, where he can find no satisfactory commonsense account of mental
causation. Wittgenstein does not clearly
commit to a detailed metaphysical system.
Reid I will discuss briefly in section vi.
The argument of this section is an
empirical explanatory or “abductive” argument. The empirical fact to be explained is that
all metaphysical systems defy common sense.
An attractive possible explanation of this fact, I submit, is that
common sense is incoherent on matters metaphysical, so that no self-consistent
and detailed metaphysical system can satisfy all commonsense constraints.
It doesn’t follow that we must abandon
appeals to common sense in metaphysics.
Perhaps we could abandon common sense if we had some clearly superior
tool to use instead – but we don’t. Or
so I will argue in sections ix and x.
ii.
Let’s
call a position bizarre if it’s
contrary to common sense. And let’s say
that a position is contrary to common sense just in case most people without
specialized training on the issue confidently, but perhaps implicitly, believe
it to be false. This usage traces back
to Cicero, who calls principles that ordinary people assume to be obvious “sensus communis” and who describes
violation of common sense as the orator’s “worst possible fault” – presumably
because the orator’s views will then be regarded as ridiculous by his intended
audience (1st c. BCE/2001, p. 60, De Oratore
I.ii.12). Common sense is what it seems
ridiculous to deny.
To call a position bizarre is not
necessarily to repudiate it. The truth
is sometimes strange. Relativity theory
is bizarre. Various bizarre things are
true about the infinite. Common sense
errs, and we can be justified in thinking so.
Despite the limitations of common sense,
we are not ordinarily justified in believing bizarre things without compelling
evidence. In the matters it traverses,
common sense serves as an epistemic starting point that we reject only with
sufficient warrant. To believe something
bizarre on thin grounds – for example, to think that the world was created five
minutes ago, or that you are constantly cycling through different immaterial
souls (assuming you have no special warrant for these views) – seems
crazy. I stipulate, then, the following
technical definition of a crazy
position: A position is crazy if it’s bizarre and we are not epistemically compelled to believe it.
One needn’t, of course, be clinically
insane to accept crazy views, and not all crazy views are as crazy as the two
just mentioned. Many philosophers and
some scientists embrace positions contrary to common sense and for which the
evidence is less than compelling. In
fact, to convert a position from crazy to merely bizarre might be the highest
form of academic success. Einstein,
Darwin, and Copernicus (or maybe Kepler) all managed
the conversion – and in the case at least of Copernicus common sense eventually
relented. Intellectual risk-takers
nurture the crazy and see what marvels bloom.
The culture of contemporary Anglophone academia, perhaps especially
philosophy, overproduces craziness like a plant produces seeds.
Crazyism
about a topic, then, is the view that something crazy must be among the core
truths about that topic. Crazyism can be justified when we have good reason to
believe that one among several bizarre views must be true about the topic in
question but where the balance of evidence leaves no individual view decisively
supported over all the others. We might
find ourselves rationally compelled to believe that either T1,
T2, T3, or T4 must be true, where each of the T’s is crazy.
Crazyism
might be justified in interpreting quantum mechanics. The “many worlds” interpretation, for
example, seems to sharply conflict with ordinary common sense. And it also seems that the balance of
evidence does not compellingly favor this view over all competitors. Thus, the view is crazy in the sense
defined. If the same
holds for all viable interpretations
of quantum mechanics, then crazyism would be warranted
in that domain.[3]
I will argue below that crazyism is warranted in the metaphysics of mind. I will argue that any well developed
materialist metaphysics will be crazy, in the intended sense of the term. I will argue the same for any well developed
dualist metaphysics. And the same for
idealism (well developed or not). And
the same for positions that reject all three of these views or aim to reconcile
or compromise among them. But some
metaphysical theory of this sort must be true – that is, either some form of materialism, dualism, or idealism must be true or some sort of rejection or compromise
approach must be true. So something
crazy must be among the core truths in the metaphysics of mind.
iii.
To
be crazy, a position must be both bizarre and uncompelled by the evidence. Let’s consider bizarreness first, and let’s
consider materialism first.
The materialist (or “physicalist”)
position is difficult to characterize precisely.[4] This might be a problem for the view – though
if so, I’m inclined to think that it’s just a manifestation of a more general
problem that I’ll discuss in section x.
As a working approximation, let’s characterize materialism as the view
that everything in the universe is composed of, or reducible to, or most
fundamentally, material stuff, where “material stuff” means things like
elements of the periodic table and the various particles or waves or fields
that interact with or combine to form such elements, whatever those particles,
waves, or fields might be, as long as they are spatial and not intrinsically
mental. The two historically most
important competitor positions are idealism and substance dualism, both of
which assert the existence of an immaterial soul.
Materialism per se might be bizarre. People
have a widespread, and maybe developmentally and cross-culturally deep,
tendency to believe that they are more than just material stuff.[5] Not all unpopular views violate common sense,
however, by my definition of “common sense” above. It depends how confidently the opposing view
is held; and that’s a bit difficult to assess in this case.
However, my thesis not that materialism per se is bizarre, but rather the weaker
thesis that any well-developed
materialist view – any view developed in enough detail to commit on
specific metaphysical issues about, for example, mental causation and the
distribution of consciousness among actual and hypothetical systems – will
inevitably be bizarre.
I offer four considerations in support
of this claim.
Antecedent
plausibility. As
noted above, traditional commonsense folk opinion has proven radically wrong
about central issues in physics, biology, and cosmology. On broad inductive grounds, scientifically
inspired materialists ought to be entirely unsurprised if there are similarly
sharp conflicts between commonsense opinion and the best materialist theories
of consciousness. It seems likely that
folk opinion about the nature of mentality will have mostly been shaped by
evolutionary and social pressures ill-tuned to the metaphysical truth about
cases outside the usual run of daily life, such as pathological, science
fiction, and phylogenetically remote cases. Materialists have reason to suspect serious
shortcomings in the folk psychological materials from which commonsense
judgments must ultimately be constructed.
Leibniz’s
mill and Crick’s oscillations. Leibniz asks the reader to imagine entering
into a thinking machine as though one were entering a mill. Looking around, he says, one will only see
parts pushing each other – nothing to explain perceptual experience (1714/1989,
p. 215 [§ 17]). Frank Jackson’s (1986)
“Mary” and the “zombies” of Robert Kirk (1974) and David Chalmers (1996) draw
on a similar thought: Something in us appears to rebel against the idea,
central to materialism, that particular motions or configurations of particular
bits of material stuff could ever give rise to, or explain, or constitute,
full-color conscious experience without the addition of something extra. And the more particular the materialist’s commitments,
it seems, the stiffer the resistance. Francis Crick (1994) equates human
consciousness with synchronized 40-hertz oscillations in the subset of neurons
corresponding to an attended object.
Nicholas Humphrey (1992, 2011) equates consciousness with reentrant
feedback loops in an animal’s sensory system.
Both Crick and Humphrey report that popular audiences vigorously resist
their views. Common sense fights them
hard; their views are not just tepidly
unintuitive. When a theorist commits to
a particular materialist account – this
material process is what consciousness comes down to! – doing so seems to
vividly reveal the inescapable bizarreness of materialist theorizing about the
mind.
Mad
pain, Martian pain, or the denial of local supervenience. There are several issues on which materialist
views are, I think, forced to select among commitments any one of which
violates common sense. Lewis sets up one
such issue in his classic “Mad pain and Martian pain” (1980). Simple versions of materialism appear to
imply that to be in pain is either just to be in a particular brain state or,
alternatively, to be in a state that plays a particular causal or functional
role relating the system’s inputs and outputs (views often associated with
Smart 1959 and Putnam 1965 respectively).
But reflection reveals both options to have bizarre implications. If pain requires being in a particular brain
state, then no being constructed very differently than us – no hypothetical
Martian, for example, who operates by internal hydraulics rather than by
neurons with axons and dendrites – could experience pain, no matter how
pain-like her outward behavioral patterns.
However, if pain, instead, requires being in a particular functional
role, then no being, no “mad man”, could experience pain that was caused in
unusual ways (say, by moderate exercise on an empty stomach) and in turn caused
unusual reactions (say, finger-snapping and concentration on mathematics). Also on the second view (a point not
emphasized by Lewis), any weirdly constructed system – maybe made out of beer
cans and windmills (Searle 1984) or out of people trading messages in China
(Block 1978/2007) – could experience pain if it instantiates the right types of
transition states between its inputs and its outward behavior. In this way, the simplest materialist
theories seem to compel a choice between competing bizarrenesses.
Lewis offers an escape: To be in pain is
to be in a state that plays the functional role of pain for the right population.
That state might be one particular type of brain state for human beings,
and a very different type of interior state for hydraulic Martians; and “mad”
cases might be cases in which that state is realized in that individual but
doesn’t play its usual functional role.
More generally, to be in pain on Lewis’s account and most subsequent
materialist accounts is to be in a physical state that normally plays a certain causal role, where “normally” can be understood
in various ways, e.g., with reference to a population or with reference to the
developmental or evolutionary history of the organism (Dretske
1995; Tye 1995, 2009). On this option,
pain no longer supervenes locally: Whether one is in pain depends on how one’s
current biophysical configuration is seated in the broader universe, e.g., on who else is in your group or on events in the past. But now new bizarrnesses
blossom forth. If pain depends on the
past, then you and I might be molecule-for-molecule identical with each other
now, screaming and writhing equally, equally cursing our maker, but because of
differences in personal or evolutionary history, you’re in pain and I’m not. If pain depends, instead, on what is
currently normal for your species or group, that could
change with selective genocide or a speciation event beyond your ken. Strange forms of anesthesia! The issue thus appears to present a trilemma for the materialist: either accept neural
chauvinism (no Martian pain), accept flat-footed functionalism (beer can pain
and no mad pain), or deny local supervenience
(anesthesia by speciation or genocide). Even
if some materialist view can evade all three horns, it seems a reasonable conjecture
that no well developed materialist view can simultaneously respect all our
commonsense judgments about this cluster of issues.[6]
Group
consciousness.
It would be bizarre, I hope you’ll agree, to
suppose that the United States has a stream of conscious experience over and
above the conscious experiences of the people who compose it. Yet it is unclear by what materialist
standard the United States, considered as a concrete entity with people as some
or all of its parts, lacks consciousness. The subparts of the United States (people and
groups of people) are massively informationally
interconnected and mutually dependent, including in incredibly fancy self-regulating
feedback loops. The United States
gathers, stores, and manipulates information, at the group level, as a result
of these interconnections, seeming to represent its internal and external
conditions, including in complex ways that transcend the understanding of any
single individual. Using those
informational representations, the United States responds, (semi-)intelligently
and self-protectively, in a coordinated way, to opportunities and threats. The United States shows skillful attunement to
environmental inputs in warring and spying on other nations, refining and
updating its representations and action patterns over a long history. These are the kinds of capacities and
structures that materialists typically regard as the heart of mentality. Nations do all these things via the behavior
of their subparts, of course; but on materialist views individual people also
do what they do via the behavior of their subparts. A planet-sized alien who squints might see
individual members of the United States as so many buzzing pieces of a somewhat
diffuse body consuming bananas and automobiles, invading Iraq, exuding waste.
Even if the United States lacks a little
something needed for consciousness, it seems we ought at least hypothetically
be able to change that thing, and so generate a stream of experience. We presumably needn’t go nearly as far as
Block does in his famous “Chinese nation” example (1978/2007) – an example in
which the country of China implements the exact functional structure of someone’s
mind for an hour – unless we suppose, bizarrely, that consciousness is only
possible among beings with almost exactly our psychology at the finest level of
functional detail. If we are willing to
attribute consciousness to relatively unsophisticated beings (frogs? rabbits?),
it seems that the United States acts with as much coordination and
intelligence, if on a larger scale.
In Schwitzgebel (forthcoming), I explore
this issue in detail. If we accept, with
most materialists, and with at least one strand of common sense, that oddly
formed aliens could be conscious, then we should also accept that group
entities could in principle be conscious.
If we also accept, with most materialists and with common sense, that
rabbits are conscious, we should accept that even relatively dumb group
entities could be conscious. And
finally, the United States would seem to be a relatively dumb group entity of
the relevant sort, if standard materialist criteria are applied without bias. What blinds us to this fact, I suspect, is
mainly morphological prejudice against spatially distributed entities and
against large entities whose mechanisms we can see (one materialist diagnosis
of people’s reaction to Leibniz’s mill, discussed above). The materialist can try to dodge this conclusion
in several ways – for example, she could deny that conscious entities can have
other conscious entities as parts or she could assert that consciousness
requires specific architectural constraints that the U.S. does not satisfy –
but such attempted escapes always seem to bring different bizarre consequences
in their train.
I don’t expect to convince you, in this
brief presentation, that the United States is literally phenomenally
conscious. I don’t draw that conclusion
myself, though I do regard it as an open possibility. What I do hope seems plausible is this: Any
well-developed materialist view of consciousness will probably have to commit
to the literal phenomenal consciousness of groups of people under some conditions jarring to common sense
– unless, alternatively, the view is bizarrely restrictive about the conditions
under which consciousness can arise (e.g., denying the possibility of rabbit or
alien consciousness). Materialists have
not yet really begun to explore this nest of issues, but once they do so, it
seems unrealistically optimistic to hope that sharp violations of common sense
can be entirely avoided.[7]
The literal group-level consciousness of
the United States, anesthesia by genocide, beer-can pain – those are the kind
of strikingly weird bizarrenesses I have in mind. I have expanded upon these points because I
believe materialism is often presented in a sketchy way that masks the bizarre
theoretical choices that are swiftly forced upon the thoughtful materialist. Even if I have failed in my choice of
specific examples, I hope that the general point is still plausible on broad,
inductive grounds, and in light of our knowledge of the kinds of factors that
presumably shape nonspecialists’ opinions about the
metaphysics of mind. The more we learn
about cosmology, microphysics, mathematics, and other such foundational
matters, both cosmic and a priori, the grosser the violations of common sense
seem to become. The materialist should
expect no lesser weirdness from the metaphysics of mind.
iv.
One
alternative to materialism is dualism, the view that people are not wholly
material entities but rather possess immaterial souls in addition to their
material bodies. (By “dualism”,
unqualified, I mean substance
dualism, which posits an immaterial soul.
“Property dualism” I will discuss briefly below.) Although dualism has merits as a first pass
at a commonsense metaphysics of mind, from the 17th century to the
present, the greatest philosophers of the Western world have universally found
themselves forced into bizarre views when attempting to articulate the
metaphysics of immateriality. I regard
this history as significant empirical evidence that a well developed
metaphysics of substance dualism will unavoidably be bizarre.
Attempts at commonsense dualism founder,
it seems, on at least two broad issues: the causal powers of the immaterial
mind and the class of beings with immaterial minds. I assume readers are broadly familiar with
dualism’s troubled history on these matters.
How can the immaterial soul affect a material world? Do only human beings have immaterial souls,
or do non-human animals also have them – and if the latter, how do we avoid the
slippery slope to panpsychism?
Let’s briefly consider two dualists
whose views are sometimes thought to be close to common sense: Reid and
Descartes.
Reid’s explicit and philosophically
motivated commitment to common sense often leads him to refrain from advancing
detailed metaphysical views – which is of course no harm to my thesis. However, in accord with my thesis, on those
occasions where Reid does develop views on the metaphysics of dualism, he
appears unable to sustain his commitment to common sense. On the scope of mentality, Reid is either
silent or embraces panpsychism: He attributes
immaterial souls to vegetables (esp. in 1774-1778/1995, 3.X), but it’s unclear
whether Reid thinks such immateriality is sufficient for mentality (leading to a
view of mentality as radically abundant) or not (in which case Reid did not
develop a criterion of non-human mentality and so his view is not “well
developed” in the relevant sense). On
causal powers, Reid regards material events as causally epiphenomenal: Only
immaterial beings have genuine causal power.
Physical objects cannot produce motion or change, or even to cohere into
shapes, without the regular intervention of immaterial beings (1774-1778/1995; 1788/2010). Reid recognizes that this view conflicts with
the commonsense opinions of ordinary people – though he says this mistake of
the “vulgar” does them no harm (see 1788/2010, IV.3). Despite his general commitment to common
sense, Reid explicitly acknowledges that on some issues human understanding is
weak and common sense errs (see also 1785/2002, I.1).
Descartes advocates an interactionist approach to the causal powers of the soul,
according to which activities of the soul can influence the brain. Although this view is perhaps somewhat less
jarring to common sense than some of the other options, it does suggest an odd and
seemingly unscientific view of the behavior of neurons; it requires some
contortions to explain how the rational, non-embodied processes of the
immaterial soul can be hijacked by drugs and alcohol;[8] and
on Descartes’ view, non-human animals have no more thought or sensory
experience than does a cleverly made automaton (1649/1991). Descartes’s
opponents imagined Descartes flinging a cat out a window while asserting that
animals are mere machines – an image intended to illustrate the metaphysical
craziness of Descartes, his radical departure from common sense.
v.
The
third historically important position is idealism, the view that there is no
material world at all but only a world of minds or spirits, in interaction with
each other or with God, or wholly solipsistic.
As most idealists acknowledge, idealism is not the ordinary view of
non-philosophers (e.g., Berkeley 1710-1713/1965, PHK §4). No one, it seems, is born an idealist. They are convinced, against common sense, by
metaphysical arguments or by an unusual religious or meditative experience. Idealism also inherits the bizarre choices
about causation and the scope of ensoulment that
trouble dualist views.
The bizarrenesses
of materialism and dualism may not be immediately evident, manifesting only when
details are developed and implications clarified. Idealism, in contrast, is bizarre on its
face.
vi.
There
might be an alternative to classical materialism, substance dualism, or
idealism; or there might be a compromise position. Maybe Kant’s transcendental idealism
(1781/1787/1998) is such an alternative or compromise, or maybe some sort of Russellian (1921, 1927) or Chalmersian
(1996) neutral monism or property dualism is.
However, I think we could hardly accuse Kant, Russell, or Chalmers of
articulating a commonsense view of the metaphysics of mind. Chalmers, for example, offers no good
commonsense answer to the problems of immaterial causation and the scope of
immateriality, tentatively favoring epiphenomenalism and panpsychism:
All information processing systems, even thermostats, have conscious experience
or at least “proto-consciousness”, but such immaterial properties play no
causal role in their physical behavior.
The attractions of Kant, Russell, and Chalmers lie, if anywhere, in
their elegance and rigor rather than their commonsensicality.
Alternatively, maybe there’s no
metaphysical fact of the matter here. Maybe
the issue is so ill-conceived that debate about it is hopelessly misbegotten (Carnap 1928/1967, 1932/1959; maybe Searle 1992, 2004). Or maybe asking metaphysical questions of
this sort takes us too far beyond the proper bounds of language use to be
meaningful.[9] But this type of view, too, seems
bizarre. The whole famous mind-body
dispute is over nothing real, or nothing it makes sense to try to talk about? There is no fact of the matter about whether
something in you goes beyond the merely physical or material? We can’t legitimately ask whether some
immaterial part of you might transcend the grave? It’s one thing to allow that facts about
transcendent existence might be unknowable – an agnostic view probably within
the bounds of commonsense options – and it’s one thing to express the view, as
some materialists do, that dualists speak gibberish when they invoke the
immaterial soul; but it’s quite another thing, a much more radical and
unintuitive thing, to say that there is no legitimate sensible interpretation
of the dualist-materialist(-idealist) debate, not even sense enough to allow
the materialist coherently to express her rejection of the dualist’s
transcendent hopes.
vii.
I
am making an empirical claim about the history of philosophy and offering a
psychological explanation for this putative empirical fact. The empirical claim is that all existing well
developed accounts of the metaphysics of mind are bizarre. The psychological explanation is that common sense
is incoherent with respect to the metaphysics of mind. Common sense, and indeed I think simple
logic, requires that one of four options be true: materialism, dualism,
idealism, or a compromise/rejection view.
And yet common sense conflicts with each option, either on its face or
implicitly as revealed when metaphysical choices are made and implications
pursued. If common sense is indeed
incoherent in the metaphysics of mind, then the empirical claim can be modally generalized:
It is not possible to develop a metaphysics of mind that is both coherent and
non-bizarre by the standards of current common sense, if that view involves
specific commitments on tricky issues like fundamental ontology, mind-body
causation, and the scope of mentality.
Call this thesis universal
bizarreness.
Crazyism
requires conjoining universal bizarreness with a second thesis, universal dubiety, to which I will now
turn. The universal dubiety thesis is
just the thesis that none of the bizarre options compels belief. Even on the fairly thick slicing of the
options I’ve been using –materialism vs. dualism vs. idealism vs.
compromise/rejection – no one option probably deserves credence in the
philosophical community much in excess of 50%.
I offer three arguments for universal
dubiety.
viii.
An
Argument from Disagreement.
When experts disagree about some
proposition, doubt about that proposition is the most reasonable response,
unless the opinions of experts on one side can be disregarded. Experts disagree about basic issues in the
metaphysics of mind, such as the truth of materialism vs. dualism vs. idealism
vs. a compromise/rejection view. So
unless there is good reason to disregard the opinions of experts on all but one
side of the dispute, doubt is the most reasonable response. Usual reasons for discounting experts, such
as disproportionate ignorance or bias on all but one side, do not seem to apply
to the present case.
Thomas Kelly (2005) has argued that you
may disregard peer dissent when you have “thoroughly scrutinized the available
evidence and arguments” on which your disagreeing peer’s judgment is based. But we cannot disregard peer disagreement in
philosophy of mind on the grounds that this condition is met. The condition is not met. No philosopher has thoroughly
scrutinized the evidence and arguments on which all of her disagreeing peers’
views are based. The
field is too large. Some philosophers
are more expert on the literature on a priori metaphysics, others on arguments in
the history of philosophy, others on empirical issues; and these broad
literatures further divide into subliteratures and
sub-subliteratures with which philosophers are
differently acquainted. Furthermore,
epistemic peers, though overall similar in intellectual capacity, tend to differ
somewhat in the exact profile of virtues they possess. Consequently, even assessing
exactly the same evidence and arguments, convergence or divergence with one’s
peers should still be epistemically relevant if the
evidence and arguments are complicated enough that their thorough scrutiny challenges
the upper range of human capacity across several intellectual virtues – a
condition that the metaphysics of mind appears to meet. Some philosophers are more
careful readers of opponents’ views, some are more facile with complicated
formal arguments, some are more imaginative in constructing hypothetical
scenarios, etc., and world-class intellectual virtue in any one of these
respects can substantially improve the quality of one’s assessments of
arguments in the metaphysics of mind. Every philosopher’s preferred metaphysical
position is rejected by a substantial proportion of philosophers who are
overall approximately as well informed and intellectually virtuous as she is,
and who are also in some respects
better informed and more intellectually virtuous than she is. Under these conditions, I submit, a high
degree of confidence in one’s position is epistemically
unwarranted.
Try this thought experiment. You are shut in a seminar room, required to
defend your favorite metaphysics of mind for six hours (or six days, if you
prefer) against the objections of Ned Block, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett,
and Saul Kripke.
Just in case we aren’t now living in the golden age of metaphysics of
mind, let’s add Kant, Leibniz, Hume, Zhu Xi, and Aristotle too. (First we’ll catch them up on recent
developments.) If you don’t imagine
yourself emerging triumphant, then you might want to acknowledge that the
grounds for your favorite position might not really be very compelling.
Consider everyone’s favorite philosophy
student: She vigorously champions her opinions, while at the same time being
intellectually open and acknowledging the very substantial doubt that
appropriately flows from her awareness that others think otherwise, despite
those others being in some ways better informed and more capable than she is. Even the best professional philosophers still
are such students, or should aspire to be, only in a larger classroom.[10]
ix.
A
No-Method Argument.
There is no conscious-ometer. Nor should
we expect one soon. There is also no
material-world-ometer. The lack of these devices problematizes
the metaphysics of mind.
Samuel Johnson kicked a stone. Thus, he said, he refuted Berkeley’s idealism
(Boswell 1791/1980, p. 333). Johnson’s
proof convinces no one with an inkling of sympathy for Berkeley, nor should
it. Yet it’s hard to see what empirical
test could be more to the point. Carnap (1928/1967, p. 333-334) imagines an idealist and a
non-idealist both measuring a mountain; there is no experiment on which they
will disagree. No multiplicity of
gauges, neuroimaging equipment, or particle
accelerators could give stronger empirical proof against idealism,
it seems, than Johnson’s kick.
Similarly, Smart, in his influential defense of materialism, admits that
no empirical test could distinguish materialism from epiphenomenalist
substance dualism (1959, p. 155-156); there is no epiphenomenal-substance-ometer.
Why, then, should we be materialists? Smart appeals to Occam’s razor: Materialism
is simpler. But simplicity is a complex
business. Arguably, Berkeley’s idealism
is simpler than either dualism or materialism and solipsism is simpler
yet. And anyhow, simplicity is at best
one theoretical virtue among several, to be balanced in the mix. Abstract theoretical virtues like simplicity
will, I suggest, attach only indecisively, non-compellingly, to the genuine
metaphysical contenders. I’m not sure
how to argue for this other than to invite you sympathetically to feel the
abstract beauties of some of the contending views other than your favorite. Materialism has its beauty. But so does transcendental idealism, and so does neutral monism.
If you’re willing to commit to materialism,
you might still hope at least for a conscious-ometer
that we could press against a human or animal head to decide among, say,
relatively conservative vs. moderate vs. liberal materialistic views of the
abundance or sparseness of consciousness in the world. But even this is too much to hope for, I
think, in our philosophical lifetimes.
Is a frog conscious? That is, does
a frog have a stream of phenomenal experience?
If two theorists of consciousness disagree about this matter, no output
from an fMRI machine or set of single-cell recordings
is likely to resolve their disagreement – not unless they share much more in
common than generally is shared by conservatives and liberals about the
abundance of consciousness. Similarly intractable,
I think, is the dispute about how richly detailed human experience is – about
whether, for example, people have constant tactile experience of their feet in
their shoes.[11] If such disputes are intractable, we have no
firm grounds of choice between approaches to consciousness that are relatively
liberal (perhaps even as liberal as panpsychism) and
approaches that are relatively conservative (perhaps even as conservative as
restricting consciousness to adult human beings in their most self-aware
moments). Either there’s something it’s
like to be a frog, or there isn’t, or somewhere in-between, or the question is
somehow broken. These are substantially
different positions, each with some ineliminable
plausibility and no broadly acceptable means of empirical test. Our epistemic situation is even worse if we
consider the wide variety of hypothetical alien species and artificial human
constructions that a well developed metaphysical position must be ready to address.
Thus I suggest: Major metaphysical
issues of mind are resistant enough to empirical resolution that none compel
belief on empirical grounds; and this situation is unlikely to change in the
foreseeable future. Neither do these
issues permit resolution by appeal to common sense (which will rebel against
all and might be a poor guide anyway), or by appeal to broad, abstract
theoretical considerations. I assume
there are no logical self-contradictions or irresolvable conceptual incoherences in any of these views, at least insofar as
they are well developed real contenders.
I see no other means of settling the matter.
I am not recommending epistemic anarchy,
in which all metaphysical views deserve equal credence. A view on which people have
immaterial souls for exactly seventeen minutes starting on their eighteenth
birthday has no merit by the standards of common sense, empirical science, or
theoretical elegance and deserves extremely close to zero credence. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to
distribute one’s credences unequally among the four
main metaphysical options, and then among subsets of those options, on some
combination of scientific, commonsensical, and abstract theoretical grounds.[12]
x.
An
Argument from Cosmological Crazyism.
If a broad-reaching cosmological crazyism is true, then crazyism
in the metaphysics of mind is a natural consequence. If we don’t know how the universe works, we
don’t know how the mind fits within it.
I can’t defend cosmological crazyism in detail here, but a few remarks can highlight
its plausibility. Consider the
bizarreness of quantum mechanics and the lack of consensus about its
interpretation, including the fact that some interpretations treat mentality as
fundamental (such as the many minds view and some versions of the Copenhagen
interpretation[13]). Consider the bizarreness of relativity theory
and the apparent conflict between relativity theory and quantum theory.[14] Consider that many cosmologies now posit
either a creator who set the physical constants or initial conditions at the
time of the Big Bang so as to support the eventual occurrence of life, or some
sort of dependence of the universe upon our observation of it, or the real
existence of a vast number of universes with different physical constants or
conditions.[15] If the number of universes is infinite, as
many cosmologists now think, or if there is even a single infinite universe of
the right sort, then every event of finite probability will occur
an infinite number of times (given certain background assumptions about cosmic
diversity). The spontaneous congealment,
from relatively disorganized matter, of a molecule-for-molecule twin of any
living person is often held to have a very tiny but finite probability.[16] You would, then, be one among an infinite
number of actually existing molecule-for-molecule twins of yourself, of diverse
origin. (Shades of Nietzsche’s eternal
return?) Quantum cosmology has also been
interpreted as suggesting the backward causation of the history of the universe
by our current acts of scientific observation (Hawking and Mlodinow
2010, p. 140).
Shall we look, then, to religion for
non-bizarre cosmologies? That seems an
unlikely source. Creation stories,
accounts of the afterlife – especially in the hands of those who would attempt
to work out the full ontological implications – seem only a source of further
bizarreness.
Another issue is this: If consciousness
can be created within artificial networks manipulated by external users – for
example in computer programs run by children for entertainment – and if the
beings inside those networks can be kept ignorant of their nature, then there
could be beings in the universe who are vastly deluded in fundamental matters
of metaphysics. Such beings, perhaps,
might think they live in a wide world of people like them when in fact they
have three-hour lives, isolated from all but their creator and whatever other
beings are instantiated in the same artificial environment. There is, I think, a non-negligible
possibility that we (I? you?) are such beings.[17] To think that we are in fact such beings is, of
course, crazy. But is the possibility too crazy to figure in a disjunction of
live cosmological options? Is it more
than one order of magnitude crazier than multiverse
theory or the typical well developed religious cosmology? There are no commonsense cosmologies left.
Further support for cosmological dubiety
comes from our (apparently) miniscule cosmological perspective. If mainstream scientific cosmology is
correct, we have seen only a very small, perhaps an infinitesimal, part of
reality. We are like fleas on the back
of a dog, watching a hair grow and saying, “Ah, so that’s how the universe
works!”[18]
There seems to me to be sufficient
cosmological uncertainty to cast materialist metaphysics into doubt. For example, if it might be the case that an
immaterial entity fashioned the physical constants, then we cannot justifiably
rest assured that materialism is true. If
there might really exist actual universes so radically different from our own
that cognition transpires without the existence of anything we would rightly
call material, then materialism is at best a
provincial contingency. If we are
created within a simulation by outside agents, our experience of objects as
necessarily laid out in space and time might be a feature of our programming
environment that doesn’t reflect the fundamental structure of the universe
(Kant meets cyberpunk).
Scientific cosmology is deeply and
pervasively bizarre; it is highly conjectural in its conclusions; it has proven
unstable over the decades; and experts persistently disagree on fundamental
points. Nor is it even uniformly
materialist. If materialism draws its
motivation from being securely and straightforwardly the best scientific
account of the fundamental nature of things, materialists ought to think twice. I focus on materialism, since it is the
dominant view in contemporary metaphysics of mind, but similar considerations
cast doubt on dualism, idealism, and compromise/rejection views.
xi.
Certain
fundamental questions about the metaphysics of mind can’t, it seems, be settled
by science, in anything like its current state, or by abstract reasoning. To address these questions we must turn to
common sense. If we then have good
reason to think that common sense, too, is no reliable guide, we are
unmoored. Without common sense as a
constraint, the possibilities open up, bizarre and beautiful in their different
ways; and once open they refuse to shut.
This is crazyism.
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[1] For
helpful comments on drafts or conversation on these topics during the course of
writing thanks to Ned Block, Kurt Boughan, Peter
Carruthers, Becko Copenhaver, Helen De Cruz, Dan
Dennett, Fred Dretske, Sandy Goldberg, Chris Hill,
Linus Huang, Bryce Huebner, Jenann Ismael, Hilary Kornblith, Uriah Kriegel, Barry Loewer, Bill Lycan, Pete Mandik,
Jozef Muller, Steve Stich, Galen Strawson, Alan Tapper, Nathan Westbrook,
Splintered Mind readers, and audiences at University of Cincinnati, Princeton,
Harvard, Institut Jean Nicod,
and St. Andrews.
[2] See
also Churchland 1981; Stich 1983; Kornblith 1998;
Dennett 2005; Ladyman and Ross 2007; and Weinberg, Gonnerman, Buckner, and Alexander 2010; and historically
Hume 1740/1978; Kant 1781/1787/1998; Bradley 1893/1930; McTaggart
1908. Even metaphilosophical
views that treat metaphysics largely as a matter of building a rigorous
structure out of our commonsense judgments often envision conflicts within
common sense so that common sense cannot be entirely preserved: e.g., Ayer
1967; Kriegel 2011.
[3] Recent
reviews of the difficulties in settling among various bizarre interpretations
include Penrose 2004; Wallace 2008.
[4] See Hempel 1980; Crane and Mellor 1990;
Chomsky 2009; Montero 1999; Stoljar 2010.
[6] See
also Adams and Dietrich 2004. See Aydede
2009 and Hill 2009 for rather different arguments that the folk metaphysics of
pain is incoherent. See Schwitzgebel in
preparation for further illustration of the bizarreness of Lewis’s approach to
pain.
[7] See also
Edelman 2008, p. 431-433; Koch 2012, p. 131-134.
[9] This
might seem a broadly Wittgensteinian position, but
it’s probably not Wittgenstein’s own position; see esp. 1945-1949/1958, p. 178,
and 1947/1980, vol. 1, §265.
[10] For
arguments somewhat similar to those in this section, though not focusing on the
metaphysics of mind in particular, see Goldberg 2009; Kornblith 2013; Frances
forthcoming.
[12] Kriegel
forthcoming develops a similar argument in more detail, focusing on the
ontology of objects as his test case; see also Strawson 2012.
[14] See Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen 1935;
Bell 1964; Maudlin 1994/2002. On
inconsistency in scientific theories, see also Norton 2002.
[15] This
is the “fine-tuning” issue. See Barrow,
Morris, Freeland, and Harper, eds., 2008; Stenger
2011.
[18] Image inspired
by Hume 1779/1947, §II, p. 147-149.