9 Dualism and its Problems

1
9Dualism and its Problems
2

• The Distinct Substances Problem
• The fact that an individual is composed by two
  distinct substances runs against all contemporary
  neuroscience and cognitive sciences.
• It is hard to accept the non-corporeality of the
  mind.

3

• The Causality and Interaction Problem
• How can a non-bodily substance cause bodily
  movements?
• How can our thoughts/desires/ (qua non-extended
  substance) cause bodily movements?
• Since the mind is space-less how can it
  influence the body?
• Descartes answer is that the soul is united
  with the body. Hence the mind/body unison problem.

4

• I think that I have clearly established that the
  part of the body in which the soul directly
  exercises its functions is not the heart at all,
  or the whole brain. It is rather the innermost
  part of the brain, which is a certain very small
  gland in the middle of the brains substance and
  above the passage through which the spirits in
  the brains anterior cavities communicate with
  those in its posterior cavities. (Passions 1 CSM
  I 340)
• A phantom limb shows, according to Descartes,
  that a nerve is agitated and goes to the brain
  producing in the soul residing in the brain a
  pain sensation.

5

• The Mental-or-Physical Dilemma
• Either we are dealing with purely physical
  (mechanical) or purely mental events, i.e. the
  perception of an incorporeal spirit.
• What about psycho-neural phenomena such as
  vision which seems to be neither purely physical
  nor purely mental?

6

• Imagination vs. Perception
• They are special modes of thinking (as such they
  differ from thinking, willing, doubting, )
  insofar as they requires physiological activity.
• The difference between sense-perception and
  imagination is really just this, that in
  sense-perception the images are imprinted on the
  brain by external objects which are actually
  present, while in the case of imagination the
  images are imprinted by the mind without any
  external object, and with the windows shut, as it
  were. (Descartes Conversation with Burman 27)

7

• Problem
• Sensations such as imagination and perception
  cannot be captured by Descartes dualism insofar
  as they are neither purely physical nor mental.
• Theyre somewhat between the mental and the
  physical.

8

• Trialism
• Descartes recognises tree primitive categories
  in terms of what we think about the world the
  res cogitans, the res extensa and the
  psycho-physical interaction (e.g. sensations and
  passions).
• The latter is somewhat derivative of the former
  but it is nonetheless primitive insofar as it
  cannot be classified either as purely mental or
  purely physical
• Cf. the analogy of the mule which derives from a
  horse and a donkey and yet it cannot be
  classified as either equine or asinine.

9

• E.g. hunger has tree aspects
• 1. the purely physical events such as the
  shortage of nourishment (this would also appear
  in a zombie or a comatose individual)
• 2. the purely mental events such as the
  qualia-less judgement such as my body needs
  food and
• 3. the feeling of hunger (the qualia).
• Sense-perception is the property of an embodied
  being thus a non-corporeal being (e.g. God,
  angels) lacks it.

10

• Even if physicalism is correct, it remains that
  there are three distinct ways to characterise a
  human being
• 1. There are his bodily/physical events which do
  not require any form of consciousness
• 2. There are the thinking events peculiar of
  language- user beings (e.g. belief, desires, ).
• 3. There are the qualia which are conditions/
  sensations of the body produced by effect of the
  external world and cannot be fully described in
  language.

11

• Perception and Reality
• While reason can tells us about ourselves and
  our experiences, our experience does not teach us
  much about reality. Sensory-experience does not
  teach us what really exists in the things
  themselves. That is, the sensory-qualities such
  as color, taste, etc. (the qualia) are silent on
  what external bodies are like in themselves.
• But in all these there need be no resemblance
  between the idea which the soul conceives and the
  movement which causes these ideas. (Optics CSM
  1 167)

12

• Descartes takes our ideas of sensory qualities to
  be like internal sensations such as the sensation
  of pain.
• While it makes sense to say that a sensation of
  pain is not in the object causing it (e.g. is not
  in the bullet hitting ones leg), it is more
  difficult to claim that redness or heat is not in
  the object causing it.

13

• We attribute redness to roses and heat to real
  objects, (e.g. roses and radiators).
• Descartes rules out this view because of his
  conception of causation (the Causal Similarity
  Principle) that there is nothing in the effect
  that is not in the cause, i.e. the cause is like
  the effect.
• If this is the case a quality like redness
  (which is in a rose) could not cause my sensation
  of redness since the latter (the qualia) is so
  different from the former.

14

• The creator, God, has chosen that some events
  are marked in the mind in a specific way, but
  God could have chose to mark them in a completely
  different way (qualia are arbitrary).
• Cases of color qualia-inversion could be invoked
  in favour of this idea. It would be harder to
  think of pain-sensation as arbitrary, though, for
  natural selection would not help one who does not
  feel pain the way we actually do (e.g. if sex was
  painful, reproduction and thus the survival of
  the species would be endangered).

15

• Essence vs. appearance
• Descartes distinguishes between the world as it
  is (in itself, i.e. as God does perceives it) and
  the world as it appears to us.
• This rests on the very idea that there is a
  subjectivity involved in our perception of
  reality. Since God implanted in us the seeds of
  truth about the universe, in our abstract,
  mathematical concepts we can take Gods viewpoint
  and perceive the universe as it is.

16
Chomsky on the Mind/Body Problem

• Chomsky vs. Descartes
• Chomskys Cartesianism does not mean that he
  accepts all the Cartesian views.
• Chomsky rejects Descartes view concerning the
  privilege access of our own mind. No scientific
  study of the mind could accept this thesis (cf.
  linguistics).

17

• In rejecting Descartes mechanism Chomsky rejects
  the idea that in order to act one upon each
  other, things must be in contact (a dead horse
  since Newtons law of gravitation).
• This parallels the rejection of Descartes view
  of matter or substance.
• This in turn entails the rejection of Descartes
  mind/body substance dualism.

18

• Once forces such as gravitation (which Descartes
  would have characterized as mysterious) enter the
  real world there is no reason to exclude mental
  features from the physical realm.
• Hence there is also no reason to make a coherent
  distinction between the physical and the mental.
• The mind-body problem should no longer be taken
  seriously.

19

• The Cartesians observed that certain phenomena
  of nature (notably, the normal use of language)
  did not seem to fall within the mechanical
  philosophy, postulating a new principle to
  account for them. Given their metaphysics, they
  postulated a second substance (res cogitans,
  mind), for other reasons as well. Implementation
  aside, the move was not unreasonable, in fact,
  not unlike Newtons reasoning when he discovered
  the inadequacy of the mechanical philosophy.
  Postulating of something that lies beyond the
  mechanical philosophy gives rise to two tasks to
  develop the theory and to solve the unification
  problem in the Cartesian case, the mind-body
  problem. All of this is normal science wrong,
  but that is also the norm. (Chomsky 2000 83-4)
• The mind-body problem made sense in terms of the
  mechanical philosophy that Newton undermined, and
  has not been coherently posed since. (Chomsky
  2000 86)

20

• Biological Rationalism
• No place for a mechanism called reason doing
  reasoning.
• Unlike the syntactic process involved in
  language production, reason is not a mechanism
  with fixed operations.
• As such reason cannot be the subject matter of
  science and cannot have a place in a scientific
  rationalist study of the mind.

21

• Reason can be seen as a human attribute provided
  by common sense understanding.
• As such it can be seen as something guiding our
  (scientific) enterprise it cannot be the subject
  of scientific inquiry.
• Reason is a kind of social practice, hence quite
  different from linguistics which is more closed
  to chemistry and physics.

22

• Reasoning
• It is a normative process carried out by
  persons. It is not confined to a dedicated part
  of ones mind/brain.
• Reason rests on the domain of human freedom,
  while the language faculty does not. The former
  is normative, the latter, like vision, is not.
• Linguistic processes and vision, unlike
  reasoning, are unconscious and cannot be modified
  by the community. They are innately configured
  faculties which operate automatically and blindly.

23

• Philosophical challenge
• No science can eliminate persons and their
  mental life.
• No science can eliminate intentionality.
• Any correct description and explanation of the
  human species and what happens in their head must
  deal with persons and their intentions.

24

• Chomsky has a dismissive answer.
• He does not deny that our understanding of
  persons relies upon common sense concepts or that
  these understanding can be dismissed.
• E.g. we learn more about people from arts and
  poetry than from psychology or philosophy.

25

• If the concept of person is found in the domain
  of common sense it can be inquired trough arts
  and history.
• From the common sense viewpoint this inquiry is
  more fruitful than an enterprise, such as
  linguistics or biology, committed to a formal
  description.
• Science is not suited to the way in which the
  concept of a person is dealt with in common sense
  understanding.

26

• Anti-Eliminationism/Reductionism
• Common sense concepts have been useful for
  millennia and there is no reason they should be
  eliminated by a scientific study of the
  mind/brain.
• We have different explanations serving different
  purposes.
• We cannot make science continuous with common
  sense. They are different universes which do not
  intrude each other.

27

• Suppose I say, the rock drop from the skies,
  rolled down the hill, and hit the ground. The
  statement cannot be translated into the theories
  that have been developed to describe and explain
  the world, nor is there any interesting weaker
  relation the terms belong to different
  intellectual universes. But no one takes this to
  constitute a body-body problem. Nor do the
  natural sciences aspire to distinguish this
  description from the statement that the rock fell
  down a crevice, which could be the same event
  viewed from a different perspective. (Chomsky
  2000 88)

28

• Common Sense Concept of the World
• A scientific conception of the world cannot play
  a role when we come to apprehend the real world.
• A three year old apprehends the real world in
  much the same way as a tree year old Greek
  apprehended it thousands years ago.

29

• The empiricists cannot rely on science (a recent
  invention which is constantly changing) to
  explain how we commonly apprehend the world.
• The sole concept of the physical world that we
  can possibly imagine to be unchangeable over time
  and/or cultures is the one understood in common
  sense (folk physics).

30

• The rationalist explains our apprehension of the
  world claiming that the basic concepts used to
  explain the physical world are innately
  specified, they are part of a fixed human nature.
  
• The correct explanation of a fixed common sense
  (including folk physics and folk psychology) does
  not rely, pace the empiricists credo, on
  scientific explanations, but in a fixed human
  nature.
• The relevant concepts are provided at birth and
  need only an experiential trigger to activate
  (see poverty of the stimulus argument).

31

• Folk Psychology
• It must be convenient across people and time.
• And for it to be so convenient we must posit a
  basic human nature with fixed concepts and basic
  needs that makes the use of these concepts
  convenient.
• Cf. The evolutionary psychology enterprise.

32

• This is not an explanation that the empiricist
  doctrine welcomes, for according to the latter
  convenient concepts can change across time and
  cultures. And they must insofar as empiricists
  claim that they depend on experience.
• In short, how can one explain folk psychology
  stability without appealing to stable and
  universal concepts?
• To posit the stability of folk psychology on the
  fact that there subsists a similarity across
  cultures would be a circular explanation.

33

• Chomskys Anti-Reductionism
• There is no convincing reason to expect that the
  mental can be reduced to the physical as
  currently conceived.
• Physics keeps evolving and, thus any reduction
  the current/contemporary physics could propose
  would be unsatisfactory regarding the physics as
  it will be developed in the future (see Lycan
  2003. In Chomsky and His Critics).

34

• I have not been concerned with the question of
  reduction of mind to matter, and do not even
  understand what the question is. I use the term
  mind with no ontological import rather, as an
  informal way of referring to the study of the
  bodyspecifically the brainconducted at a
  certain level of abstraction. I also see no
  reason to question the general conclusion reached
  long ago that thought is a little agitation of
  the brain (Hume) or a secretion of the brain
  that should be considered no more wonderful than
  gravity, a property of matter (Darwin) From
  this point of view, there is no place for Lycans
  problem about reduction of mind to matter.
  (Chomsky 2003. Reply to Lycan 257-8)

35

• Physical vs. Mental
• The distinction between mental and physical or
  material can have only a descriptive content. It
  cannot be scientifically sustained and it has no
  metaphysical import.
• What does merely physical mean? Are mental
  things the only things that are not merely
  physical? How about magnets? Stable molecules?
  Insects? What is the import of the word things?
  (Chomsky 2003. Reply to Lycan 259)

36

• There is an intrinsic error among materialists
  who persist in talking about the difference
  between the mental and the physical they
  perpetrate a kind of dualism they aim to reject
  (see Strawson 2003).
• We should turn to experiential vs.
  non-experiential terminology.
• By mind, I mean the mental aspect of the
  world, with no concern for defining the notion
  more closely and no expectation that we will find
  some interesting kind of unity or boundaries, any
  more than elsewhere no one cares to sharpen the
  boundaries of the chemical. (Chomsky 2000 75)

37

• Since the brain, or elements of it, are
  critically involved in linguistic and other
  mental phenomena, we may use the term
  mindloosely but adequatelyin speaking of the
  brain, viewed from a particular perspective
  developed in the course of inquiry into certain
  aspects of human nature and its manifestation.
  (Chomsky 2000 76)

38

• Methodological Naturalism
• A naturalistic approach to the mind
  investigates mental aspects of the world
  seeking to construct intelligible explanatory
  theories, with the hope of eventual integration
  with the core natural sciences. Such
  methodological naturalism can be counterposed
  to what might be called methodological dualism,
  the view that we must abandon scientific
  rationality when we study humans above the neck
  (metaphorically speaking), becoming mystic in
  this unique domain, imposing arbitrary
  stipulations and a priori demands of a sort that
  would never be contemplated in the sciences, or
  in other ways departing from normal canons of
  inquiry. (Chomsky 2000 76)
• Naturalistic inquiries onto the mind yield
  theories about the brain, its state and
  properties UG, for example. (Chomsky 2000 103)

39

• Physics
• Epistemological characterisation
• The domain of the physical is what we come more
  or less to understand and hope to assimilate to
  the core natural sciences.
• Yet we distinguish between physical things that
  represent the world from physical things that do
  not.
• We thus seem to rely to some distinctions
  between the mental and the physical.

40

• For naturalistic inquiry, there is no interest
  in taking mental types to be non-biological
  The computer analogy can be useful as a stimulus
  to the imagination, much as mechanical automata
  were for seventeenth and eighteenth-century
  scientists. (Chomsky Reply to Lycan 261)

41

• Physicalism
• The term physical has no definite content.
• Thus physicalist thesis turn out to be
  meaningless, they lack a definite content (and
  thus truth-value).
• They are not empirical hypothesis and cannot
  play a serious role in enquiry.

42

• This rests on the fact that there is no a priori
  conception of the physical grounded in natural
  language, folk science or metaphysics, which
  provides the required content.
• Given the character of scientific inquiry (in
  particular in physics) physicalists cannot hope
  to identify a definite meaning for the term
  physical from a consideration of physical
  theory.

43

• Problems vs. Mysteries
• Problems are questions that can be formulates in
  such a way that they allows us to proceed with
  serious inquiry.
• Mysteries are problems which cannot be
  (scientifically) inquired, because they escape
  our capacities, i.e. because we are ill equipped
  to solve them (e.g. as a mouse is ill equipped
  to deal with prime numbers).
• This rests on the limits and power of the human
  intellect/mind.

44

• Descartess dualism was not abandoned because he
  could not solve the interaction problem, but
  because his problem could not be posed
  Functionalism did not repair a meaningful flaw in
  the Identity Theory Computational theories of
  language, insect navigation, etc., require no
  Identity Theory. They are theories about the
  nature of the organism (mostly its brain) that
  have to be judged on their merits as explanatory
  theories, like others. Prior to unification with
  core physics, chemistry needed no Identity
  Theory, surely not one that linked it to the
  physics of the day, which had to be radically
  revised to be unified with chemistry these
  lesson apply to the study of the mental aspects
  of the world. (Chomsky Reply to Lycan 260-1)

45

• It is unknown whether aspects of the theory of
  mindsay, questions about consciousnessare
  problems or mysteries for humans, though in
  principle we could discover the answer, even
  discover that they are mysteries. (Chomsky 2000
  83)

46

• Dualism
• Many problems linked to philosophy of
  mind/language are driven by a dualist conception.
  It is often claimed that the mental must be
  characterized in terms of access to
  consciousness, awareness, and the like.
• Thus faculties like LAD (Language Acquisition
  Device) or UG posited by the Chomskian school
  cannot be characterized as mental or
  psychological (see Nagel) insofar as they escape
  a subject awareness. They do not differ from
  physical properties.

47

• Some also claims (see Quine) that one cannot
  follow these rules at best ones action fits
  these rules, for we can talk of rules guiding
  actions only insofar as they are consciously
  applied to cause behaviour.
• All these philosophical worries rest on an
  implicit dualism at work. That is, on the
  distinction between the mind and the body and the
  view that a naturalistic account remains silent
  on the nature of the former.
• Thus while some philosophers engage themselves
  in some form of reductionism and/or
  eliminativism, others accept a form of
  behaviourism.

48

• Quines behaviorism is a variant of this form of
  dualism. He argues that the behaviorist approach
  is mandatory (Quine 1990 37) for the study of
  language because, in acquiring language, we
  depend strictly on overt behavior in observable
  situations (p. 38). By similar argument, the
  nutritionist approach is mandatory in embryology
  because, in the passage from embryo to mature
  state, the organism depends strictly on nutrition
  provided from outside just as linguists must be
  behaviorists, so biologist must be nutritionists,
  restricting themselves to observation of
  nutritional inputs. The fallacy in the latter
  argument is apparent the same fallacy undermines
  the former. Only radical dualist assumptions
  allow the matter even to be discussed. (Chomsky
  2000 101)

49

• Cartesian Dualism and its Collapse
• The reasons for the collapse of Cartesian
  dualism are somewhat misconstrued as noted, it
  was the theory of body that was refuted, leaving
  no intelligible mind-body problem, no notion of
  physical, etc. In this realm, we have only the
  naturalistic approach to construct explanatory
  theory in whatever terms are appropriate, and to
  face the unification problem. Second, it is, for
  the moment, only a hope that neurological terms
  are relevant for the unification problem.
  Finally, there is no reason to try to define the
  mental vocabulary of ordinary discourse in a
  naturalistic framework, just as no one
  contemplates that for physical vocabulary, at
  least in the modern period. (Chomsky 2000 103)