Is Neutral Monism Possible?

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Is Neutral Monism Possible?

My aims here are limited, as befits the topic. I will make some remarks about the proper formulation of neutral monism with a view to demonstrating its obscurity, not to say infeasibility. The thought is that we should seek a level of description of reality that is neutral between the mental and the physical so as to make progress on the mind-body problem. Putting aside the (very real) question of how to define “mental” and “physical”, we can ask what is meant by “neutral” here: what does it mean to say that a type of description, or type of conceptualization, is neutral? The word usually means something like “non-committal” or “impartial”—not favoring one thing or party over another. But whatever it is that unites the mental and the physical could not be neutral in this sense; on the contrary, it must be fully committed—in both directions at once.[1] For it must express the essence of both the mental and the physical simultaneously: it must, in a word, reduce the mental and the physical to some third conceptual category. Neutral monism must be a committed monism—not at all neutral about the nature of the mental and the physical. It is easy to be neutral (non-committal) about the nature of the mental and the physical; it is much harder to provide a positive account of them. The doctrine known as neutral monism is really best described as all-encompassing monism or unifying monism. If you believed the mental and the physical could be unified using the concepts of causality or information, you would be a neutral monist in the intended sense, but you would certainly not be neutral about the nature of the mental and the physical. What is true is that the unifying monistic theory can’t simply use existing mental or physical concepts to capture the nature of the mental and the physical—that would deliver either idealism or materialism—but it does have to commit itself on the nature of both things. Russell’s brand of neutral monism did precisely that by identifying sense data as the neutral stuff: but of course it clearly favored the mental in its construction of reality as a whole, and is really a form of idealism. So what kind of description are we looking for that can unify the two domains without biasing the theory to one side or the other?

            We might think we have something ready to hand, viz. what is called topic-neutral language. Discussions of the mind-body problem regularly invoke that category of expression, which is thought to be shared by both the mental and the physical. It includes logical language, mathematical language, temporal language, and language for causal relations, abstract structure, and modality. The idea is that such language is not confined to mental or physical discourse but crops up univocally in both. All well and good, but it is a bold man that claims such language can provide what the neutral monist seeks: this looks like a conspicuously exiguous basis on which to build a grand theory that unifies the mental and the physical. The language isn’t biased towards one or other side of the divide, but it is hopelessly weak as a putative reduction of the mental or the physical. So the existence of topic-neutral language is no comfort to a would-be neutral monist; it doesn’t encourage the idea that we might be able to contrive the kind of unifying description abstractly indicated. So far, then, we have nothing with which to fill out the conceptual terrain gestured at by the neutral monist. We are left at a high level of abstraction with no indication of how we are to produce the kind of theory we are looking for. The theory appears to be more of a wan hope than a substantial research program. Its logical form is an existence statement without any verifying instance.

            Can we find any analogue of neutral monism elsewhere? Then at least we would know what we are talking about—we would have a model to go by. Here I think we reach the crux: for there is a model, hugely influential historically, that lies behind the neutral monist’s ambitions, and functions as its main inspiration. I mean atomism in the theory of the physical world. According to atomism, seemingly disparate elements of nature can be unified in a common vocabulary, which functions reductively. Thus the four traditional elements of earth, water, fire and air can all be explained by postulating homogeneous atoms that appear in different guises. The atoms are “neutral” in the sense that they appear in each element equally as common factors; the difference arises from their manner of aggregation—specifically, how tightly packed and mobile they are. They are dense and immobile in rocks and other earthy objects, also dense but more mobile in water and other liquids, quite rarified and volatile in fire, and highly dispersed and moveable in air. The unification works by finding a common constituent and then shifting the observed variety to relations between the constituents, specifically relations of proximity and motion. This is a kind of neutral monism of the four elements—and it works. It is actually true that the fourfold reality reduces to a single reality! The natural world turns out to be a lot more homogeneous than we supposed; the ancient atomists’ dream turns out to be sober fact. This provides a boost to the flagging spirits of the aspiring mental-physical unifier—maybe such an atomistic monism can supply the unification we seek. So we declare that mind and body must be composed of atoms of some sort that are shared between them; the variety or divergence we observe is but a superficial reflection of different relations between these underlying atoms. As the same physical atoms can occur in fire and water, so the same neutral atoms can occur in pain and salt. The atoms just combine differently, producing pain in one case and salt in another. The neutral monist has thus provided a model for how his conjectured theory might be true. He isn’t stuck just flapping his hands with a faraway look in his eye.

            The trouble is, of course, that this kind of atomism is completely implausible as a theory of the mental and the physical. In the case of traditional atomism we are dealing with four types of physical phenomenon, but that is precisely what is not true of the mental and the physical. The atoms that work to unify physical phenomena don’t work to unify the mental with the physical. We would need a completely new type of “neutral” atom—a hitherto undiscovered particle—in order to vindicate the type of atomism suggested by the neutral monist. But we have no evidence of any such particle, nor even a clear conception of what we are talking about. So the model limps—in fact, it never even gets moving. It operates rather as a mirage, like illusory water on the desert horizon. It makes us think that we have a real theory-sketch in hand, which we just need to fill out; but in reality it distracts us from the nature of the problem. It gives us false hope. We still don’t know what neutral monism would look like if it were true. Citing the atomist precedent is yet another instance of trying to understand the mental-physical divide by reference to something quite different, i.e. divisions within the physical domain.[2]

            Does this mean that neutral monism must be false? No: it means that we don’t know how it can be true. We have no clear conception of what its truth might be like. It can’t be like idealism or materialism because they are not neutral; it can’t be stated by recourse to topic-neutral vocabulary because that vocabulary lacks the requisite expressive power; and it can’t be modeled on the example of classical atomism because it is a problem of a completely different order. Anything we can cite as a possible format for the theory fails to do what is required of it, and nothing else suggest itself. All we can say is: if neutral monism is true, then it must take a form that transcends what we can currently understand. Nor is it like anything we can currently understand. Perhaps it will entail abandoning wholesale our current conceptions of the mental and the physical (a kind of “error theory”)—we are systematically deluded about the real nature of these categories. Maybe reality is fundamentally different from the way we naturally conceive it, and possesses a unity we cannot even dream of. Or perhaps the whole idea of unity is itself a mistake. In either case we have nothing substantial on which to base our hopes for the theory called “neutral monism”. It is a theory without precedent or precise formulation. That doesn’t make it false, but it does make it close to unintelligible.[3]

Colin McGinn         

[1] We might label it “Janus-faced monism”: it has to provide a unitary vision from two directions of gaze.

[2] Compare all those well-known analogies to empirically discovered identities in the physical sciences such as “Heat is molecular motion”. 

[3] By “unintelligible” I mean unintelligible to humans, not contradictory or otherwise necessarily false. It might be a true theory we can never grasp, even in outline. At present it amounts to not much more than the proclamation, “There must be something unitary out there otherwise the world would make no sense”. 

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Memory and Knowledge

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Memory and Knowledge

What is the connection between memory and knowledge? To judge from the standard literature, very little—in a typical treatise on knowledge memory is hardly mentioned. I wish to urge a strong connection: all knowledge is memory knowledge. Memory enters into every instance of knowledge; all knowledge presupposes memory knowledge. That is, all present-tense knowledge depends upon knowledge derived from the past. I don’t just mean that inferential knowledge derives from premises stored in memory—though that is true enough—I mean that even the premises rest upon antecedently possessed knowledge. If I now judge that there is a cup on my desk, this piece of present-tense knowledge requires that I possess knowledge acquired in the past. The reason for this is that in order so to judge I must already know what a cup is: I must have that knowledge stored in my memory. I must have the concept of a cup (as well as the concept of a desk and myself), and having a concept is an epistemic state. My memory interacts with my current experience to deliver the knowledge that there is a cup on my desk. If my memory were blank in this respect, I would not be able to make such a judgment. This is a point about human knowledge not about all logically possible types of knowledge: it is conceivable that a being should acquire knowledge of the same proposition at the same time as acquiring the concept of a cup. But as things are with humans that is not the case: we first have the concept and then use it to formulate the knowledge in question. According to traditional empiricism, the concept derives from perception of cups in the past, traces of which are stored in memory—a concept is an abstraction from perceived objects retained in the mind over time. According to nativism, a concept is an innate item of knowledge that persists in the mind over time. Strictly speaking, it is not stored in memory but in something analogous to memory: an informational storehouse of some sort. At any rate, it exists in the mind as a result of past events—it functions like a memory proper. It exists in the mind unconsciously and occasionally reaches conscious awareness in the form of explicit knowledge. Thus for both theories present knowledge depends upon past knowledge, because it depends on the prior existence of suitable concepts. You can’t know something now unless you already knew something earlier. Knowledge is a cross-temporal phenomenon.

            This makes knowledge different from experience. You can have an experience now without having had any prior experience: I can see a cup now without having seen one before, or seen anything before. Present experience doesn’t depend upon past experience. It is like bodily sensation: having a pain now doesn’t depend on having had pains in the past, or having had any sensations. Pain is an at-a-time phenomenon. Accordingly, it is perfectly possible to have an experience of a cup and yet fail to recognize the presented object as a cup. You could lose your memory of what a cup is and still see one. Similarly, you could forget who John is and yet still see him: you no longer know the identity of the presented person yet he can still come within your field of vision. But you can’t know that John is in front of you without knowing who John is—that is, having the individual concept John. Knowledge is made of concepts, and concepts are remnants of the past (whether stored in individual memory or “species memory”). Present knowledge always depends on past knowledge. Note that this is not regressive: the past knowledge is not knowledge-that but knowledge-what. To know that there is a cup on the desk you have to know what a cup is, but this latter knowledge is not a type of knowledge-that. If it were, knowledge would be impossible: for then the knowledge would depend on an antecedent piece of propositional knowledge, which would require another piece of propositional knowledge, and so on ad infinitum. But conceptual knowledge is not propositional knowledge, so there is no regress. The thesis being defended might more cautiously be stated as follows: all propositional knowledge presupposes non-propositional knowledge (which takes the form of memory). First we have conceptual knowledge (knowing-what), and then we have propositional knowledge (knowing-that). We never have a piece of propositional knowledge that is independent of our past epistemic state (this applies equally to self-knowledge). We never know anything about the present that derives wholly from the present.

            This position stands opposed to acquaintance models of knowledge—theories that regard knowledge as simply a type of perception. But we can never know a proposition simply by being acquainted with its subject matter at a given time, as if this knowledge were splendidly cut off from the past. Seeing is not the same as knowing. For knowledge requires classification—bringing something under a concept—and concepts pre-date their exercise in acts of propositional knowledge. I can’t even know that I am in pain by pure acquaintance, since I need to apply the concept pain, and that concept stems from my epistemic storehouse. I must already know what pain is in order to judge and know that I am currently in pain. I can feel pain without any antecedent preparation, but I can’t know that I am in pain without already knowing something about pain. Such knowledge is a coordination of past and present not merely a momentary act of acquaintance. That idea is a myth—an empiricist myth—born of modeling knowledge too closely on perceptual experience. There is a deep distinction between knowledge and experience; the former is never a special case of the latter.

            How does this conception of knowledge fit the case of the a priori? The answer is: not smoothly, but this shows something important about a priori knowledge. Suppose I judge that the number 3 is prime: to do this I need to know what a prime number is and what the number 3 is. Does my knowledge result from applying this prior knowledge to my current experience of 3? It does not: I don’t have any such experience. I am not presented with the number 3 and then dredge up my concept of that number, along with the concept of a prime. There is no analogue of perceptual experience to combine with antecedently possessed concepts. If I didn’t have the concept three, I couldn’t be confronted with the number 3. Numbers can only come before the mind as so conceptualized. There is no perception of numbers that leaves it open whether the object in question is a number, or the number it is. There is no pre-conceptual apprehension of numbers.[1] Still, in order to make the judgment that 3 is prime I need to bring to bear my prior knowledge of numbers, i.e. my mathematical concepts. So the basic thesis applies to the case of a priori knowledge: propositional a priori knowledge depends on non-propositional conceptual knowledge. Knowing-that depends on knowing-what. It is just that we don’t have the combination of experience and cognition that we have in the empirical case. This is one way that the a priori differs from the a posteriori: such knowledge is not “by experience”, i.e. it requires no triggering perceptual input. Putting the point in terms of memory, propositional mathematical knowledge requires memory knowledge concerning what the objects of interest are—numbers, sets, geometrical forms. Thus mathematical knowledge involves a type of remembering, as empirical knowledge does: both are excavations of the cognitive past. The faculty of memory is being exercised as knowledge is acquired; and this is a deep-seated fact about human knowledge (if not all logically possible knowledge). Knowledge is not separable from memory. As memory takes us back to the past, so knowledge takes us back to the past—it is backwards looking. Remove someone’s memory and you remove his knowledge. New knowledge is inseparable from old knowledge. This is obvious for inductive knowledge, since we need to remember past observations, but it is also true for non-inductive empirical knowledge and for a priori knowledge. In acquiring any item of knowledge the past is always operative in the present. When knowledge is defined as true justified belief (or some such), not only is the justification typically derived from past observation; the very possibility of forming the belief in question derives from a prior epistemic state. Recollection is always in the picture. Both empiricism and nativism tacitly recognize this necessary involvement with the past: empiricism by holding that all knowledge depends on past experience in the form of stored perceptual encounters; nativism by locating the basis of knowledge in what is cognitively present at birth. Knowledge always has a history—in the individual and in the species. Only a kind of misplaced epistemic atomism could suppose otherwise—the idea of knowledge as an isolated quality of a time-slice. Perhaps experience can be conceived that way, but not knowledge. Realistically, knowledge always builds on the past, cumulatively and derivatively; it never descends from the sky and installs itself in the mind ab initio. Memory is what makes knowledge possible.[2]

Colin McGinn                  

[1] The same can be said of other entities of which we have no experience: concepts themselves, platonic forms (the Good), and the self. In these cases we have no pre-conceptual experience of the entity in question, so that there is no presentation of these entities to the mind that leaves open what they are. We are never in doubt about what is before our mind. For example, we can never misidentify the Good as something else—an elephant or the Bad, say. 

[2] As a corollary, skepticism about memory always dogs human knowledge: if our memories are radically in error, our knowledge is doomed. Memory is fallible, so knowledge based on it is always subject to doubt. 

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Lying

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Trump is of course a massive liar, as last night’s debate demonstrated yet again, but everything about him is a lie: his hair, his skin, his fake success, his marriage, his accent, his teeth, his clothes. It is all deception from head to toe. He is a living lie. Nothing about him is real–except the reality that he is a liar through and through. He is the Anti-Truth.

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Phenomenological Behaviorism

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Phenomenological Behaviorism

Could it be that there is an element of truth in behaviorism? Behaviorism is usually presented as a third-person view of the human mind—what we know of the mind by external observation. It often goes with a materialist metaphysics. It therefore naturally incurs the charge of ignoring the first-person perspective—of overlooking the mind’s phenomenology. But can’t we also motivate it by taking an inward view—by considering what the mind is like from the inside? Thus consider pain: isn’t the experience of pain essentially bound up with avoidance behavior? When you feel pain you instinctively avoid the painful stimulus—you withdraw from it, are averse to it, avoid it at all costs. You don’t feel pain and find yourself attracted to the painful stimulus, or indifferent to it—you want to get away from it, so that it stops hurting you. You behave in a certain way as a result of the pain, and this behavior is written into the experience: pain is inherently that which initiates avoidance behavior. Even if you can’t actually behave this way, you are strongly inclined to—you desire to, urgently. Pain is not behaviorally neutral; and this is a matter of its phenomenology, not just something tacked on. The same can be said of pleasure, only now the behavior is attraction not repulsion, approach not avoidance. Desire is much the same: you want to do what will satisfy your desire—you want to behave in a certain way, e.g. eat. These mental states are partly behavioral: not wholly, because there is also a subjective aspect, but partially. The state is a kind of hybrid of the phenomenal and the behavioral, to put it crudely. Behaviorism might thus be said to be partly true: behavior (or dispositions to it) is certainly not the whole of the mind, but it is at least a part of it—necessary if not sufficient. And this is a phenomenological fact not the result of a methodological stipulation: the mind feels behavioral–from the inside, from the first-person point of view. Just remember your last serious pain and how intensely your body wanted to escape the painful stimulus. The pain is subjectively behavioral—its subjective mode is AVOID.

            This is not to say that actual behavior is necessary to the existence of mind: paralysis is possible with full mental preservation. It is to say that behavioral inclinations, desires, plans, tendencies and urges are part of the experience of pain. Let me put it this way: the body image is integral to sensation—if not the physical body itself. We mentally represent our own body—proprioception being the main vehicle of bodily representation—and this representation is built into our sensations. Sensations are intertwined with the body image, including its dynamic aspects. This is equally true of perceptual sensations: visual experience is intertwined with awareness of the eyes as they point and move; tactile experience with the whole touchable and mobile body; auditory experience with the ears; smell with the nose; taste with the mouth. All of this is behavioral, because the sense organs move and orient themselves: they are behaving organs. The same is not true of the brain: we have no brain image that accompanies our every mental episode—as we have no liver image or kidney image. The muscles and the mind, however, are deeply interconnected—those makers of movement, large and small. Emotions too have their behavioral expression: flight, fight, laughter, and copulation. They are not indeed exhausted by their behavioral manifestations, but the behavior is part of their phenomenological character—as real as any other part. We are accustomed to recognizing that mental states have intentionality—they are about things—but we must also recognize that they have a kind of secondary intentionality in relation to the body: they represent the body in its active mode. Time is also part of their phenomenology, in addition to the objects they are about; and the body is yet another dimension of phenomenology. A visual experience, say, is made of the following components: an intentional object, an experienced time, a subjective mode, and an ocular organ.[1] It is not some sort of primitive atom of subjectivity, as in the mosaic model of consciousness, but a tightly structured other-referring entity—and the body’s (apparent) behavior is part of this complexity. The movement of the eyes, much studied by psychologists, is built into the phenomenology of vision: I experience the visual object as seen by my mobile eyes, detected and scanned by those nimble bodily organs. Visual experience is behaviorally imbued. Thus behaviorism is a phenomenological fact—subjective first-person behaviorism. Mentalistic behaviorism not materialistic behaviorism: behavior as initiated and apprehended from within, part of the body image. Consciousness itself is behaviorally inflected. Phenomenology is always bodily phenomenology—partly at any rate.

            Consider those tireless winging bats again (our philosophical helpmates): when they use their sense of echolocation they simultaneously and inextricably mentally represent their own flying bodies, particularly ears and mouths (where the echoing shrieks originate). That is the behavioral phenomenology of bat echolocation. This is something we can in principle grasp—for we know what it’s like to be aware of our ears and mouths. We may not grasp the subjective modality of the bat’s experience entirely, but we do grasp an aspect of it—the behavior-directed aspect. We know what it’s like to be a sense-organ aware creature. We grasp the nature of the bat’s body, so we grasp the behavioral aspect of bat experience (they are mammals after all). There is, we might say, an objective aspect to the bat’s subjective experience—the aspect corresponding to the bat’s behavioral phenomenology. Just so, the blind man can grasp the objective aspect of visual experience, i.e. the part that involves ocular awareness (he is aware of his eyes by proprioception). So sensory experience is partly objective, because partly behavioral, though not wholly so. Partial behaviorism affords partial objectivity, i.e. general availability. The mistake of old-time behaviorists was to push the element of truth in behaviorism too far: first, by exaggerating its reach; and second, by adopting a third-person perspective. But there is room for a type of phenomenological behaviorism that acknowledges the first-person perspective; indeed, such a behaviorism seems unavoidable, given the embodied nature of the mind. The mind is phenomenologically in the body, directing it, responding to it: it is part of what the mind is constantly aware of. We (and other animals) are phenomenological activists, steeped in awareness of our own behavior.

            But here is the puzzle, the enigma: how does a mental state combine its behavioral dimension with its subjective (“qualitative”) dimension? It is not as if pain consists of an ordered pair of a quale and a behavioral disposition: the two do not just sit side by side without meshing together. On the contrary, the avoidance aspect is integral to the felt aspect: pain could not be anything other than an avoidance-inducing sensation. There could not be a being that experienced pain and yet felt no avoidance with respect to it (contrary to what is sometimes said about masochists): the sensation of pain is essentially an aversive phenomenon. This is, in the jargon, an a priorinecessity.  Moreover, the subjective and behavioral are internally connected not merely externally conjoined. We have a two-factor theory in which the factors are inseparable from each other. The sensation breaks down into two elements, but the elements are not really separable: we have a conceptual distinction without an ontological distinction. This is puzzling (more so than two-factor theories of propositional content)—the objectively behavioral seems to have taken up residence in the most subjective aspects of the mind. The eyes are a part of seeing! So let us accept that the truth of partial behaviorism leads to a deep puzzle, which may help to explain why it has not occupied a place in thinking about the mind. Total behaviorism at least avoids the problem of the subjective-behavioral nexus—as total subjectivism also does. The hybrid conception courts the problem without solving it. Not that this counts against the theory for a resigned mysterian—indeed, mystery is par for the course. The truth is often mysterious. Still, we should acknowledge that partial phenomenological behaviorism does give rise to a difficult problem (analogous to the general mind-body problem): the problem of integrating the behavioral with the subjective—or seeing the subjective as imbued with the behavioral. The behavioral follows from the subjective, rather than being opposed to it—and that is a puzzling fact. What is it like to be a bat? Look at the bat’s body and imagine its internal mental representation of its own body: that is part of what it’s like for the bat—along with the more elusive matter of its specific subjective experience. And that latter thing embeds the former thing inextricably.

            Nor are the puzzles quite over yet. What about thought, particularly abstract thought—does it have a behavioral aspect? That is not so obvious: does introspection reveal a phenomenological aspect relating thoughts to a bodily organ or part? Are there specific things that thought inclines us to do (like desire, pain, emotion, etc.)? Doesn’t it seem pretty damned disembodied? Maybe thought is an exception to partial phenomenological behaviorism—it has zero behavioral phenomenology. Maybe it belongs to the immortal incorporeal soul, as some have regarded Reason. One possibility is that it is connected to language and thence to speech: vocal behavior is its behavioral accompaniment (or sign language). It is just that its behavioral aspect is more remote than normal, but still essential. Or is the head somehow involved—clutching it, cradling it (as in Rodin’s Thinker)? It does seem right to distinguish degrees of behavioral involvement: some mental states have a larger behavioral component than others—pain a lot, perception rather less, belief even less. Maybe thought is just at the far extreme of behavioral disengagement—only tinged with the behavioral not flooded with it. It may not be purely subjective (removed from everything behavioral in its essential character) but has its finger lightly on the behavioral pulse. On the other hand, if it were resolutely non-behavioral that would be an interesting result, meriting the headline, “Thought Not Behaviorally Contaminated According to Scientists”. I won’t attempt to resolve the issue here, having merely noted it. The important point is that for many types of mental state a (partial) behavioral phenomenology is strongly indicated. The doctrine of behaviorism, which held sway for quite some time, is not completely without merit of motivation—though, ironically, its main rationale stems from introspection. The introspectionist psychologists should have been behaviorists! For we necessarily appear to ourselves introspectively to be behaving beings. Our consciousness is (partly) a behavioral consciousness. This is just to say that the body exists on the horizon of the mind.[2]

[1] More controversially, we could add the self to this list: an experience presents an object to a subject in such a way that the subject is part of the phenomenology too. There is a reference to the self in every mental act. An experience is thus a phenomenological quintuple consisting of a subject, an object, a subjective mode, a time, and a behaving body. This is a far cry from the simple “idea” or “impression” of traditional philosophy of mind—the analogue of an elementary atom of matter. I would call it a multi-aspect theory of mental phenomenology. The mental points in several directions simultaneously. 

[2] This is to be distinguished from the idea that the mind is as a matter of objective fact essentially embodied; it is rather the thesis that the mind is experienced as embodied (and no doubt is). The mind is embodied as a matter of its phenomenology, even when its intentional object is not the body itself. The behaviorism is virtual rather than real (though no doubt it is also real).

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The Logical Form of Omission Sentences

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The Logical Form of Omission Sentences

There is an undeniable appeal to Davidson’s treatment of action sentences, in which adverbs appear as predicates of events quantified over.[1] Thus “John buttered some toast quickly in the kitchen” becomes “There was an event esuch that e was a buttering and e was by John and e was quick and e was in the kitchen”. Events have properties and action sentences ascribe these properties to them by means of adverbs. The underlying logical form is the familiar pattern of existential quantification plus conjunction. But what about omission sentences such as “John omitted to butter some toast quickly in the kitchen”? Suppose you instruct John to do just that and he agrees, but then he neglects to perform the action in question: the quoted sentence then expresses a truth. There are omissions as well as actions. Can we render that sentence in Davidson’s style? This would read: “There was an event e such that e was an omission of buttering and e was by John and e was quick and e was in the kitchen”. But none of that is true: there was no such event and it certainly wasn’t quick and in the kitchen. Nor can we say, “There was an omission o such that o was a buttering etc.”: even if we are willing to quantify over omissions, it sounds wrong to say that the omission in question was quick and in the kitchen. How can omitted actions have properties? They didn’t occur, so how can they be one way rather than another? Neither would it be correct to take the omission sentence as simply the negation of the corresponding action sentence, as in “It is not the case that John buttered some toast quickly in the kitchen”. That sentence does not entail that there was any omission on John’s part, but simply that he didn’t perform a certain action—it is clearly not true that whenever we don’t do something we omit to do that thing. One’s life is not full of omissions corresponding to all the actions we don’t perform. The problem, evidently, is that omissions are not events with properties, which is what Davidson’s analysis calls for. Accordingly, omission sentences don’t have the logical form of action sentences, so the adverbs appearing in them are not functioning as predicates of events. But further, action sentences and omission sentences have the same syntax, both containing adverbs, in which case it is hard to see how action sentences can have Davidson’s logical form either. Any action sentence can be converted into an omission sentence simply by inserting “omitted to” before the action verb, so the two must clearly share their semantics. Therefore action sentences don’t have the logical form of quantification plus conjunction. What logical form they do have is another question.

[1] See “The Logical Form of Action Sentences”.

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Epiphenomenal Facts

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Epiphenomenal Facts

Epiphenomenalism is the doctrine that mental facts (properties, events, states) are causally idle. When it seems as if mental facts are causing behavior it is really correlated neural facts that are doing the causing—electrical signals sent from the brain down the efferent nerves and into the muscles. This is taken to be a singular fact about the mental: it is uniquely lacking in causal powers. Even in the case of a steam engine emitting waste steam—the standard analogy for epiphenomenalism—the steam can cause something, possibly burns in someone too close to it. The mental is thought exceptionally idle, and this is taken by many to be an objection to epiphenomenalism—too much of an anomaly. But is that true—are there no other epiphenomenal facts in the world? In fact, they seem quite plentiful upon closer examination. Obvious examples would be mathematical and ethical facts: they don’t cause anything either, but they are real. Nor is this merely contingent: it is intrinsic to such facts that causality be foreign to them. The same is true of such properties as identity, existence, necessity, and set membership—none of these feature in causal explanations or confer causal powers. Ditto for logical properties such as entailment and validity: these have no causal consequences either. Does the property of being a cause itself have causal consequences? Nope. These may be thought rather abstract properties, unlike mental properties, but we can easily find more concrete properties that likewise fail of causal potential. Colors are an obvious example: colors don’t cause anything either—only their underlying physical correlates do. If colors are projected onto the world, it is predictable that they make no difference to the causal powers of the objects onto which they are projected—subtract them and the object remains causally indistinguishabe. This is why mechanics makes no mention of colors in its theories of motion (red balls move the same way as blue balls). Acceleration and mass affect the causal powers of bodies, but not color (or taste etc.). Epiphenomenalism is all around us.

            And it doesn’t end there. Do space and time have causal powers? Not inherently—not independently of material objects (even in Einstein’s General Relativity). Does infinity have causal powers? Does the infinite divisibility of space and time show up in the causal powers of things? Would it make any difference to the causal workings of the world if they were finite? It is not clear that it would. Is it even clear that geometrical forms have causal powers? Does it really make a difference to how objects behave whether they instantiate perfect circles? Causality is not fine-grained enough to care whether objects are platonically perfect. Causal powers in the physical world stem from four underlying forces: gravity, electromagnetic force, the strong force, and the weak force. But these operate independently of the geometrical and chromatic properties of objects: being a perfect circle (or an imperfect one), or being a whiter shade of pale, are not their concern. Mass matters, for sure, but not platonic forms or visual appearances. Of course, it matters whether an object is circular or rectangular in the vernacular sense, but not its fine-grained geometry. This is too abstract and ideal to be of concern to the rough and tumble of causality. In fact, objects don’t instantiate perfect platonic forms, though they do approximate to them, but it wouldn’t make any causal difference if they did.[1]

            This is all before we get to such peculiar properties as being thought of by Bertrand Russell one Saturday afternoon. Whether an object has this property makes no difference to its causal potential. Nor does the property of being round and such that 1 +1 = 2. Nor does the property of having a counterpart in another possible world. These are all far too extrinsic to count as causal powers. But mental properties are not extrinsic, so shouldn’t they have causal powers? Let’s consider functional properties, e.g. having the function of pumping the blood. The heart has this property: is it causal? It is not: the heart doesn’t pump blood in virtue of having the function of doing so. It pumps blood in virtue of its elastic and propulsive properties—the properties that enable it to discharge the function it has. The heart could have that function and not have the power to pump blood (it’s a defective heart). No more does a lawn mower cut grass in virtue of having the function of mowing lawns—for that it needs sharp blades and forward momentum. Having a certain function is not part of the causal powers of an object; having the properties that carry out that function is. So we could say that functional properties are epiphenomenal: they are facts but not causal facts. Just so, an organism has many functional properties that are causally idle, corresponding to its various organs. The color of blood is epiphenomenal, but so is its function per se. Functions are not causes. Teleology is not causality. Nor is species membership a cause: being of a certain species is not something that makes a causal difference, not in itself. True, members of a species have the power to interbreed, but not in virtue of species membership—for that they need a certain kind of physiology. Properties that sit idly by are certainly correlated with hardworking causal properties—and this may mislead us into thinking that they are less than completely indolent—but closer inspection reveals that they are not as such causally active. The pattern is that epiphenomenal properties sit atop causal properties—as functional properties are embodied in causal properties without being identical to them. 

            This is the picture the epiphenomenalist envisages for the mental and the cerebral. Mental facts are strictly speaking epiphenomenal facts, but they are tightly correlated with causal machinery in the brain. Is this a plausible view of mental facts? In the case of factive mental states like knowledge it certainly seems true: whether a belief counts as a case of knowledge is irrelevant to its power to affect behavior—being true is not a causally relevant property (the same for whether a perceptual experience is veridical). Intuitively, factives are too extrinsic to function causally. But much the same holds for propositional content generally: even a bit of externalism will have the result that content is epiphenomenal.[2] And how could an abstract proposition contribute to the causal powers of a belief? The causal powers of beliefs evidently derive from underlying brain states, possibly of a syntactic nature (this is a familiar story). Beliefs as such don’t cause behavior, but only the correlates of belief; or if you like, beliefs have a causal aspect but they are not causal through and through. Thus intentionality generates epiphenomenal facts, which is not very surprising—being about something is not the kind of property that can get muscles to contract. More interesting is the property of subjectivity: is what it’s like subjectively epiphenomenal? To be a subjective state is to be such that the nature of the state can only be grasped from a single point of view, i.e. by a being that shares the state in question. Only perceivers of red can grasp what it’s like to see red. This is an epistemic property of a mental state: it can only be known in a certain way. But how could that property contribute to the causal powers of the state? How could the state cause behavior in virtue of being knowable only in a certain way? Maybe material objects can only be known about in a certain way, i.e. by perception, but that has no bearing on their causal operations—physics doesn’t care about such epistemic questions. So the subjectivity of mental states isn’t part of their causal profile—which means that what an experience is like for its possessor isn’t part of its causal profile. The fact that we can’t know what it’s like to be a bat doesn’t affect the causal powers of bat experience—it carries on causing bat behavior irrespective of what we can know. Presumably bat experiences cause bat behavior in virtue of various objective facts about the bat’s brain—electrochemical activity, as we now believe.[3] In one clear sense, then, consciousness is epiphenomenal—it doesn’t cause behavior in virtue of there being something it is like. Of course, we can truly say of a conscious experience that it caused an episode of behavior, because it has a cerebral aspect or correlate; but we can’t infer from this that its conscious aspect is itselfa causal power. That is, given that a conscious property is not identical to a brain property, it does not have causal powers. We can loosely report that an experience of red caused someone to move in a certain way, but we can’t mean that the subjective nature of the experience acted causally—only that an underlying physical correlate did. Logically, the case is like saying that the color red caused someone to see red: it is not the color as such that does the causing but only its physical correlate in the object. Colors themselves are epiphenomenal, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of a correlated causal sequence leading from object to experience. Similarly, conscious states are epiphenomenal, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of a correlated causal sequence leading from brain to behavior. After all, epiphenomenal facts are common in nature, as we noted, and consciousness simply follows suit. It is not anomalous in this respect but typical.

            This solves a difficult problem. If conscious states had intrinsic causal efficacy, then we would have causal over-determination, since brain states also cause behavior. Each would be sufficient to cause the behavior in question, which means the other cause is not necessary. It may appear that the only way out is to identify the conscious state and the brain state, thus committing ourselves to reductive materialism. But a viable epiphenomenalism allows us to avoid this result while not accepting causal over-determination: it is the brain state alone that is doing the causing—the conscious state sits idly by, serenely epiphenomenal. The conscious state is numerically distinct from the brain state and the brain state is the sole cause of the behavior—because the conscious state has no causal role to play in producing the behavior (not intrinsically and as such). Thus epiphenomenalism allows us to escape a difficult problem without succumbing to reductionism. Nor is this merely ad hoc since epiphenomenal facts are quite common in nature—the norm, we might say. The metaphysical picture is that nature has two layers: an underlying layer of causal machinery, which is quite restricted, and an overlying layer of epiphenomenal properties that coast on the first layer. A perfectly reasonable hypothesis is that the causal layer consists of nothing beyond the four fundamental forces identified by physics; the rest of nature is not in the causal line of business (save derivatively). It is thus quite wrong to think of nature as exclusively composed of causal facts. The four basic forces do all the causal work while the rest of nature stands by without lifting a finger.[4]

[1] Causation is all about the induction of motion, but pure geometry lies beyond this. Which geometry holds of nature need not impinge on the causal machinery of nature.

[2] Reference is causally irrelevant, notoriously. Where is the energy emitted by the reference relation? 

[3] The brain itself has various epiphenomenal properties over and above its conscious properties, so not everything about it is causally implicated in behavior—for example, its color, its taste, its precise furrowing, and its spatial location. If the brain qua brain has epiphenomenal properties with respect to the causation of behavior, then surely the mind can. Among the epiphenomenal properties of the brain are its mental properties.

[4] This means that if you were to remove the four forces from nature leaving everything else intact all causation would be expunged. This seems like a plausible result—even the basic atomic entities are nothing causally without their accompanying forces. They are certainly not epiphenomenal.

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Temporal Panpsychism

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Temporal Panpsychism

In the interests of exploring every metaphysical option, I will consider the doctrine of temporal panpsychism. Several positions on time may be distinguished: materialism, idealism, functionalism, mysterianism, and panpsychism. Materialism says that time reduces to physical objects or processes: clocks, whether natural or man-made, or possibly physical processes such as entropy. Idealism says that time reduces to experiences of time—human consciousness, basically. Functionalism says that time is whatever it is that plays a certain role, notably functions as the medium for change and events. Mysterianism says that time is something whose intrinsic nature transcends our knowledge, though we know that it exists and can be measured. Panpsychism says that time has an inherently mental reality, possibly quite different from our own mental reality—a kind of free-floating river of mental being. Idealism identifies time with human consciousness of time; panpsychism identifies time with a specifically temporal form of consciousness existing independently of human consciousness (or that of any other sentient being). These positions are all analogues of positions with which we are familiar in regard to matter and space; in particular, temporal panpsychism is the analogue of material and spatial panpsychism. Just as it is thought that matter has a hidden mental nature, and that space has a mental nature too, so it is contended by the temporal panpsychist that time has a hidden mental nature. That is, wherever there is time there is a certain kind of mental stuff that constitutes it. We are not normally aware of the nature of this mental stuff (but see below) yet it is real nonetheless—it is part of objective reality. And it performs two explanatory jobs: it is the foundation of mind as we and other animals experience it, and it furnishes a substantial reality to time over and above the rather sketchy conception of time we have from common sense and from physics. It is the logical analogue of the familiar forms of panpsychism as applied to matter and space.

            Temporal panpsychism can come in two strengths, pure and mixed. The pure form maintains that only time has a mental nature—not matter and space. This nature alone suffices to explain the emergence of mind in the universe, and it confers on matter and space whatever substantial being they have. The mixed form is less ambitious claiming only that time has a mental nature in addition to the mental nature of matter and space. This is the natural view to adopt: it simply extends regular matter-space panpsychism to include time, on the principle that it would be odd if the rest of nature were essentially mental but not time. The picture, then, is that matter and space enjoy their own form of mentality while time simply adds more of the same—each has the form of mentality appropriate to its nature. Perhaps time has a more flowing mental nature than matter and space, which are relatively static. The mind of matter and space is a kind of spread-out mind; the mind of time is more of a fluid mind—more like a river than a mountain. We can also distinguish a strong form and a weak form of temporal panpsychism, analogous to parallel doctrines for matter and space: the strong form says that time has an exclusivelymental nature while the weak form holds that time has both a mental nature and a non-mental nature—a kind of double-aspect theory. Pure strong temporal panpsychism thus says that the ultimate reality of the whole world consists in the mental nature of time, and only of time: everything—including matter, space, and animal consciousness—stems from the mental nature of time. This nature might be quite alien to us—we don’t know what it is like to be time—and yet it is the foundation of everything real. Clearly this is an extreme doctrine. Alternatively, the temporal panpsychist might more modestly claim only that the mental reality of time is just one reality among others; it is limited to time itself. Matter and space have their own independent forms of mentality. A psychic trinity prevails in the universe.

            It might be wondered how heterogeneous the mental reality of time is. Is time composed of a single phenomenological quality or is it made up of several? Time seems homogenous to us, so the former alternative might seem more natural—time is, as it were, a single-note affair (an eternal C-sharp perhaps). This would pose a problem for its ability to ground the full variety of animal consciousness, but a similar problem arises for material and spatial panpsychism—they too appear more homogeneous than the animal minds they are supposed to explain. So temporal panpsychism is at least no worse off than the more familiar forms of the doctrine. But there is really no logical bar to recognizing greater phenomenological variety: maybe time just seems homogeneous—in its objective being it might be variously hued. Presumably a view of time closer to that of Relativity Theory will render such a conception of time attractive: there are many distinct times (many simultaneities), each relative to a reference frame; and time and motion are more tightly connected than we tend to suppose (plus light seems to have something to do with time). Certainly, if we link time to measuring devices, we will be able to obtain a more variegated view of its nature. If we believe that the ultimate physical reality is something called space-time–a kind of amalgam of time, space, and matter–then we can suppose that time has a richer and more complex structure than under an austerely Newtonian conception. In any case, various metaphysical options are open to us ranging from the monotonously homogeneous to the strikingly heterogeneous.

            But is there anything to be said in favor of the doctrine? Yes, in as much as other panpsychist doctrines can claim to have rational support. First, physics tells us little about the nature of time, beyond mathematically describing its structure; the panpsychist can remedy that lacuna by suggesting that time has a hidden mental nature. He can tell us what time intrinsically is—not just specify its abstract form. Russell had the idea that the intrinsic nature of matter is revealed to us in acts of introspection; we could make the same claim about introspection and time. In effect, the brain acts as a window onto the intrinsic nature of time, which is otherwise concealed from us. This nature shows up as our own consciousness of time. Second, consciousness has an essentially temporal character, as has been frequently observed: time and consciousness are closely bound up with each other. This is why some philosophers have been attracted to an account of time as essentially a psychological phenomenon. The temporal dimension of consciousness is as evident as its intentionality and its subjective character (hence time has always been central to the phenomenologists). All conscious experience is consciousness of time; there is no timeless consciousness. Thus we need, in our account of consciousness, an explanation of its temporality—and here temporal panpsychism scores well. The nature of subjective time emerges from the nature of time itself, since objective time already harbors a primitive form of temporal consciousness. The consciousness embedded in time is itself a temporal consciousness, so this is available to provide a foundation for temporal consciousness in sentient beings. The logic here is exactly the same as the logic employed by other proponents of panpsychism—we find the basis of animal minds in the primitive types of mentality generally embedded in the world. Time features in our conscious minds in virtue of temporal mentality in time itself. So temporal panpsychism has the same credentials as material panpsychism. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how it could fail to be entailed by material panpsychism, given that the very existence of physical events and processes requires the participation of time. There is no such thing as matter without time, because material things are subjects of change, so their mental reality must enable them to participate in events and processes—but then it must include time. If matter is ultimately mental, and matter changes, then time must make this possible—and how does it do that without itself having a mental nature? If we think of time as having a mental nature of the type Will, as in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, then this is what is necessary in order to get matter activated—otherwise it is stuck. The mental nature of time is what enables the mental nature of matter to undergo change.[1] Time is the will of matter’s mind. Once we go panpsychist about matter, temporal panpsychism cannot be far behind. The different types of panpsychism thus conspire together to give us the world we experience.[2]

            Are there any good objections to panpsychism, temporal or other? Of course there are—plenty of them. I have only suggested that temporal panpsychism needs to be added to the usual kinds in order to round out the metaphysical picture. We need a General Theory of panpsychism, talking in time as well as matter and space. Father Time should be granted his full measure of mentality if other parts of nature are to receive that (possibly dubious) largesse.[3]C

[1] I am not saying this is not obscure, but then everything is obscure in this area.

[2] One possible view is that matter embeds only unconscious mental states—pre-conscious qualia—and that it is the mental nature of time that converts this into full conscious awareness. Time acts as a kind of switch turning on the light of consciousness; it does so by adding its own mental nature to the (unconscious) mental nature of matter. The mental nature of time triggers consciousness in the otherwise unconscious mental states already present in matter. For example, matter supplies a subliminal perception of red (possibly in some more primordial form) and then time adds to that the secret sauce of consciousness, thus producing a conscious percept of red. That is, time is specially designed to generate consciousness as such, leaving matter to do the grunt work of producing the raw psychological materials. I have no idea if this hypothesis is true (or even meaningful), but at least it suggests a way of thinking with some theoretical structure. It has the consequence that the whole world is brimming with consciousness as a joint result of the exertions of matter in producing pre-conscious mentality plus the ability of time to inject consciousness into this basic psychological material. There is a kind of division of labor between matter and time in the generation of conscious mentality.

[3] This paper arose out of an email exchange between Rebecca Goldstein and me, but I blame myself for its existence.

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Dualism Naturalized

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Dualism Naturalized

Traditional dualism is characterized by two theses: (a) the mind is a separate substance (object, entity) from the brain, and (b) the mind is immaterial. These are logically independent; in particular, (a) does not entail (b). The mind could be a separate physical substance from the brain, existing alongside it. Or neither could be physical, since the concept of the “physical” is irredeemably ill defined, ever since mechanism was abandoned in the wake of Newton’s introduction of action-at-a-distance. Descartes believed both (a) and (b), holding that matter is defined by extension and mind by thought (which is not extended). But if we give up on that way of defining the difference between mind and body, we can assert that the mind is not identical with the brain (or body generally) and yet is not immaterial. Neither is the brain “physical” in any useful sense, since it harbors powers and forces not recognized by traditional materialist science (electromagnetism, notably).[1] According to modern physics, the brain consists of fields and quantum states not hard little lumps of impenetrable matter. In any case, we are under no logical obligation to describe the brain as physical and the mind as non-physical, as if this reported anything of serious significance. The brain is a biological organ, to be sure, but so is the mind—whether identical to the brain or not. So it is logically open to us to maintain that the brain and the mind are separate things—separate biological organs—without getting caught up in the matter of immateriality. The important question is not whether one is “material” and the other “immaterial” but whether they are the same or not. That is the question of dualism (versus monism) not the question of whether the world contains any immaterial substances as well as material ones. This latter question we can happily discard as antiquated, while the former question can legitimately command our attention. If the mind is indeed a separate substance from the brain, it is available as the subject of psychological predications; it is not the brain that is the bearer of mental states but the mind. Or the self, if we prefer to speak that way: the self is the thing that thinks and feels, senses and acts. According to dualism, the self exists as a separate entity from the brain, i.e. the two are not numerically identical (this is compatible with certain kinds of dependence). We can say this without buying into some supposed dichotomy of the material and the immaterial: we can be dualists without being immaterialists. We just decline to talk in that style or, if we are wedded to it, we describe the mind as another sort of physical thing—rather as earlier physicists agreed to describe electromagnetism as physical even though it was of a different nature from what had hitherto been rated “physical”. The better question is whether there are minds or selves distinct from bodies and brains: are we composed of two sorts of thing or one?

            And there are good reasons to return the answer two. For minds and selves are not individuated as bodies and brains are, as many thought experiments from the theory of personal identity show. Brains and minds have different identity conditions and don’t necessarily track each other over time or at a time: the brain can remain in existence while the mind perishes; a single mind can conceivably occupy different brains (by uploading or gradual replacement of parts); a person can survive the removal of half of his brain while brain itself is no longer fully intact; and so on. Brain and mind have different criteria of identity. The right thing to say here is that just as there are emergent properties so there are emergent objects: selves or minds are biologically emergent objects, stemming from brains no doubt, but not reducible to them. We need a robust ontology of such entities (get your quantifiers ready!) as well as the ontology of bodies and brains.[2] If we ask what the nature of these extra entities is, we have a number of options: we can stick to appearances and declare their nature to be nothing other than what is supplied by our ordinary talk of the mental, or we can postulate a hidden nature the terms of which currently escape us. The latter alternative allows us to suppose that the second substance has a real essence (as Locke would say) that could in principle be discovered and investigated, analogous to the chemical structure of familiar substances. Maybe cognitive science is even now mapping this hidden terrain. In either case we need not be silent on the question of nature: the mind or self has a nature proper to it just as the brain and body do. It is just that these natures are different. Of course, there is interaction between the two, and a dependence of mind on brain, and an interlocking of function—but not numerical identity.[3] The case is like the distinction between lungs and heart: not the same things but plenty of interplay.

            To what extent do these separate entities share attributes? Here is one notable overlap: both are temporal. Brain processes take place in time, and so do mental processes. Both things are temporally extended (unlike abstract entities such as numbers). Descartes never denied that, merely insisting that the mind is not spatiallyextended. This is actually quite a concession, because it locates both mind and body in the same world of changing perishable phenomena—in nature, in one sense of that pliable term. And then there is the possibility that the temporal must have a foot in the spatial, if time and space have any necessary connection. In any case, the mind shares with the brain the attribute of temporal existence. What about spatial extension itself? The question is not straightforward: admittedly, the mind does not belong to phenomenal space—we don’t see it as thus extended—but it might nevertheless belong to noumenal space, whose nature may be capacious enough to include it. Maybe the mind is extended in this possibly unimaginable space—it takes up some of it. Certainly it exists cheek by jowl with spatially extended matter, so one might suppose that it cannot be quite removed from space; conceivably the two join together in a type of space that defies our ordinary conceptions. So, pace Descartes, we might allow that thought has a spatial aspect, even though we have no perception or conception of it. Actually I think this idea has a good deal to be said for it, but I won’t go into that now; it is enough to remark that the two substances could resemble each other in point of space and time while still being genuinely distinct. This would be quite different from classic forms of metaphysical dualism.

            Surely this picture fits the case of animals better than the religiously tainted picture in which the immortality of the soul must be guaranteed. The mind of an octopus, say, which is remarkably rich, is not identical to its widely distributed brain, but it can hardly be deemed “immaterial” in the sense that it could exist without the octopus’s body and brain. Its mind is an adaptive organ, evolved from more primitive attributes, and not to be identified with its brain (ditto the octopus self)– yet the metaphysics of the immaterial substance hardly fits the case, or the immortality of the octopus soul (sadly). We can allow ourselves to speak of these things as distinct from the octopus’s body without incurring the charge of immaterialism. Dualism is alive and well but it is no longer in cahoots with immaterialism. There is nothing “unnatural” about accepting that the mind is an entity distinct from the brain—that is, a type of substance dualism. And there is nothing supernatural either—nothing evidencing divinity. Given that we already accept a dualism of properties, this is indeed the natural way to go: we need a suitable object to go with these properties, to be their proper subject. There was always something funny about ascribing mental properties to brains and their parts for fear of raising the specter of the immaterial soul.[4]            

[1] I won’t go into the full rationale for saying this here; it has been well documented elsewhere (Chomsky et al). 

[2] The metaphysical background to what I am saying here is supplied by all those puzzles of identity we are familiar with: the statue and the piece of bronze, organisms and the matter that composes them, objects and the property bundles that characterize them, etc. Leibniz’s law does the heavy lifting in distinguishing objects we might lazily have supposed identical.  

[3] You might try to respond by conceding the non-identity of mind and brain but contend that the former is constituted by the latter, thus preserving the spirit of materialism. The case is like the relation between a statue and the lump of matter that composes it: not identity, since they have different persistence conditions, but constitution—there is nothing more to the statue than the stuff that composes it. But this analogy fails, because it is not that the mind simply has to assume a certain shape to be what is: the mind isn’t the brain in a certain geometrical form. If there is a constitution relation here, it is nothing like the familiar paradigms. Similarly, we can’t model the mind-brain relation on, say, the relation between water and its constituent molecules: the mind is not a collection of physical constituents, viz. neurons. So the dualism is far more pronounced than these alleged models would suggest, and hence identifying the mind with the brain is a far more problematic position. In fact, we really have no idea how to understand this relation; we only know that the mind is a thing distinct from the brain, in both the identity and constitution senses. But the general nature of the link between mind and brain appears sui generis.

[4] There are those who proudly describe themselves as property dualists but wouldn’t be caught dead defending substance dualism. This paper is intended to allay their qualms by making some necessary distinctions. The main point is that mere ontological dualism has no immaterialist implications: all that follows is that the mind is not a congeries of neurons (with only the properties ascribed to neurons in current neuroscience). 

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