July 2021 - Colin McGinn

Color and Object

July 30, 2021/4 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Colin McGinn

Color and Object

I am going to give a list of reasons for supposing (a) that colors are mental and (b) that colors are in external objects. None of them is apodictic but they provide a powerful prima facie case, which I think is supported by common sense.

As to (a) the first point to make is that colors are not physical or regarded as such: we distinguish them (and other secondary qualities) from physical qualities like figure, motion, and mass. We contrast them with the physical (whatever this notion quite comes to): we know that they are fundamentally different. Second, colors are subjective in the sense that we only grasp their nature from a specific point of view: we only know what red is by having experiences of red—as we only know what an experience of red is by having such experiences. So colors are like mental states in good standing in this respect; not so for primary qualities like figure and motion, which are accessible from many points of view. Third, colors are arguably supervenient on dispositions to produce experiences, though not identical with them, whereas primary qualities are not. [1] They are thus relative to a perceiving mind and pro tanto mental. What supervenes on the mental is mental, if only derivatively. Fourth, we naturally classify them with other secondary qualities like sounds, tastes, and smells, thus indicating that we regard them as mental in the way those qualities are (surely a sweet taste is mental not physical). Fifth, similar issues arise about colors as arise about the mind—specifically, how they relate to the physical properties of an object. Are they distinct properties (property dualism) or are they perhaps reducible to physical properties? We have a kind of color mind-body problem (could there be immaterial substances that instantiate colors?). Sixth, they are clearly not abstract like numbers, so we can’t place them in that ontological category: they are concrete realities, just not physical realities. Do we want to create a fourth category for colors to belong to or should we assign them to the mental category? Seventh, colors are intrinsically bound up with seeming, as figure and motion are not: the way red is is the way it seems, with no conceivable gap between them. We thus can’t be wrong about the nature of red: we know exactly what the color red is just by knowing how it appears to us. The explanation of this necessary connection is that red is mental like seeming red. Eighth, there is no good reason to deny mentality to colors, as there is for figure and motion: they play no role in physics, they lack causal powers, and they are not part of the “absolute conception”. Ninth, there is as much reason to classify colors as mental as there is so to classify regular mental states: for we classify a wide variety of phenomena as mental—sensations of many types, emotions, desires, beliefs, memories, traits of character, and acts of imagination. What do these all have in common? It’s hard to say yet we confidently apply the concept anyway. Applying it to colors seems no great stretch, any more than applying it to tastes and smells: they are all “in the mind”. Tenth, pain is “in the body” but not on that account non-mental: we don’t require that a state be a state of a self for it to be mental. The subject of a pain can be bodily part and still pain is mental. Some balk at this and call pain a non-mental state of the body, but that is an ordinary language point that doesn’t classify pains according to more important characteristics (such as how they are known). Eleventh, colors form a “quality space” parallel to that of sensations of color, with relations of similarity and difference: this suggests an intimate affinity between color and sensations of color, as between taste qualities and sensations of taste qualities. Twelfth, people often confuse colors with sensations of color, eliding the difference between them, thus suggesting an affinity of nature—as if colors were really made of sensations of color in some way. Thirteenth, people often suppose that colors are literally qualities of the mind or the self, as with sense data theories: they work like other mental attributes. They aren’t qualities of objects at all but of inner states, which we somehow imagine to belong to outer things. This can be seen as a manifestation of a tacit acceptance of the mentality of colors, combined with a narrow view of the possible bearers of color, as if everything mental must belong to the human self or to inward consciousness (no unconscious mind, no insect mind, no panpsychist mind—all as a matter of definition). Fourteenth, it is more parsimonious to classify colors as mental than to invent an extra category for them—a non-physical non-mental non-abstract category with no recognized name. Fifteenth, colors are connected to the realm of appearance: visual appearances are often described as patches of color with nothing standing between them and the perceiver’s consciousness. We don’t think of primary qualities this way, because we know that they can be presented via different sorts of appearance. Colors constitute appearances, and appearances are joined to perceptions, so colors exist in close proximity to the mind. Sixteenth, isn’t there something it’s like to be red? Not just to see red but to be red. The phrase trips off the tongue, which it doesn’t for figure and motion—as if we think of color itself as a mode of consciousness. According to projectivist views, that is just what it is, so we find ourselves thinking of colors as modes of what it’s like. Seventeenth, colors are always included in the list of sense data and hence treated as mental, however confused this may be; but we don’t so readily speak of primary qualities this way, since they are regarded as objective features of external objects (at most we hear about sense data of “perceived shape”). Eighteenth, tastes, smells, and sounds are already taken to be mental, so it would be surprising if colors didn’t fall into line, despite their distal appearance. Nineteenth, it may be tempting to some to confuse colors with their physical basis, and hence to deny their mentality; but once we recognize the distinction the way is clear to accepting their mentality. Twentieth, we simply have a primitive intuition that colors are mental, and the only question is what really has them and what kind of mental property they might be. This intuition needs to be respected in any account of the ultimate metaphysics of color.

As to (b) the first point to make is that colors look to exist in external objects: it really does seem to us that objects are objectively colored—not that we are somehow internally colored. They look as objective as figure and motion; they don’t look like projections from inside our minds, whatever that might mean. The color looks to be onthe object, as much as its texture. Second, we need to explain how color can exist unperceived if it is not objectively present in the object in the way that primary qualities are. It can’t be present merely as a disposition to cause experiences in perceivers, since that is not a way that color exists unperceived, merely a way that dispositions can exist without being continuously manifested. The object is really red when no one is looking at it. Also, it could have a disposition to appear red even if it were not really red, and it could be red and lack that disposition: this is a common failing of dispositional theories of anything. Third, color is not a property of mental items, since that would make experiences literally colored (an old point); nor is it experienced as such. And what else could have it save the object that appears to have it? Fourth, there is no good explanation of the appearance of color other than the obvious one, viz. that the appearances are veridical. The projective explanation limps at every point, and the obvious question is why the appearance of color should be so alien to its true nature. Error theories need an explanation of the error or else we can question whether there is really an error. Fifth, projective theories are implausible and incoherent: there is no evidence of a mental act of projection, internal of external; it is a mystery why projection should happen at all; it is puzzling why the phenomenology is so similar to that of shape perception if in fact color does not inhere in external objects; and it raises the question of why color perception doesn’t work like pain, i.e. the external object triggers an internal sensation recognized as such. That could have been the way we use color to negotiate the world instead of falsely attributing it to external objects: why project color at all? We don’t project pain but pain sensations are useful sources of real-world information. Sixth, there is no good reason to deny it—no reason to doubt common sense and perceptual phenomenology. Some people say science has discovered that objects are not colored; no, it has not, it has simply discovered that colors are not relevant to physical phenomena, particularly motion. Objects can really have properties without those properties figuring in the explanations of physics (the theory of motion). Seventh, we can compare colors to aesthetic properties like beauty, which also strike us as outer: do we really want to say that paintings and landscapes are not beautiful but only inner states of the observer are? Color and beauty exist side by side in the object; neither is the result of the observer hurling his inner states into the external world, where they mysteriously stick to the surface of objects. Eighth, we don’t want to say that nothing instantiates color, neither the outer object nor the inner sensation: for why should there be a property that nothing instantiates yet which is perceived all the time as instantiated? Ninth, if sensations were literally colored, they would have to have shape too; but that is absurd. Tenth, it seems plausible that colors preexisted animal minds in some way, because it is hard to see how minds could have generated them from nothing. Primary qualities preexisted minds and were not created by minds, so shouldn’t secondary qualities also preexist animal minds? How could a mind or brain produce the quality of red from nowhere? The quality had to be there already for minds to latch onto it. Eleventh, if colors are sui generis primitive properties, they could be possessed by objects without the existence of perceivers, since their being does not include the being of such extraneous perceivers (though it might presuppose the existence of perceivers inside the perceived object). Twelfth, not being causal does not imply not being out there, because there are many properties of external objects that are not causal, such as aesthetic properties or modal properties. Thirteenth, colors are always extended in space, but only objects in space are extended in the way required, so color must be instantiated along with extension, i.e. in external objects. The patch of color always has an extension, and it precisely coincides with the extension of the external object; so that’s where the color is located. Why would it so precisely coincide with objective extension if it were projected outwards? Fourteenth, we would have to suppose a systematic error in perception if colors were not where they appear to be: but what is the explanation of such an error? Why didn’t nature devise a structure of perception that didn’t commit this error, such as suggested by the pain model (external object triggers a sensation that is not as of an external property of pain)? Fifteenth, perceived color varies with distance and ambient conditions, like perceived shape, and it exhibits the familiar perceptual constancies, which suggests a similar objective status. A projective theory is ill equipped to handle these phenomena, which depend on objective conditions. Sixteenth, if projection were the truth of the matter, wouldn’t we be able to project color onto arbitrary objects, such as areas of space or even other minds? Yet we don’t do that: only ordinary objects are seen as colored. Isn’t this simply because only they are (objectively) colored? And why don’t organisms project colors according to whim, depending on what wells up inside them? [2] Instead their perceptions follow objective patterns, just as if they are responding to real-world facts. Seventeenth, if colors were really projected, not found, wouldn’t they be like images—products of a creative faculty and not of a passive sensory system? But color perception consists of involuntary impressions not active imagery. We don’t see the world as overlaid by a layer of self-generated color images but as an array of colored external objects externally imposed on us. Nor is color perception anything like seeing-as with its characteristic features. Eighteenth, we have a primitive intuition that colors are located where external objects are, not nowhere at all or inside our minds, and this intuition needs to be respected in any account of the metaphysics of color.

Thus theses (a) and (b) have substantial support from a variety of considerations. The question then is what happens if we combine them, i.e. if we regard colors as both mental and yet features of external objects. For that is a curious combination according to traditional and received thinking: how is it possible for external objects to have properties that are both intrinsic to them and also mental in nature? [3]

[1] See my “Another Look at Color”, Journal of Philosophy, 1996.

[2] The alleged perceptual projection is nothing like Freudian projection, which does consist in arbitrary projections from inner mental states. It is curious that those who advocate projective theories of color and other secondary qualities never enquire very closely into the workings of this allegedly pervasive act of mind.

[3] This is the subject of my “Mind in World”: the present paper provides some background for the argument developed there, by defending two of the premises involved in that argument. There is a clear tension between theses (a) and (b) and we need a theory that resolves the tension: that theory is that objects themselves contain minds—at any rate, this is a theory that needs to be added to the range of options.

Mind in World

July 27, 2021/3 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Colin McGinn

Mind in World

I am going to describe a chain of reasoning that begins with commonsense premises and ends with a startling conclusion. It is prompted by some remarks of Berkeley concerning the instantiation of mental properties: “Now for an idea to exist in an unperceiving thing, is a manifest contradiction; for to have an idea is all one as to perceive: that therefore wherein color, figure, and the like qualities exist, must perceive them; hence it is clear there can be no unthinking substance or substratum of those ideas.” [1] That is, if colors and the like are “ideas”, then what has them has to be a perceiving thing, since mental properties need a subject to inhere in. Let me reconstruct the argument as follows: Objects are colored; colors are mental properties; mental properties are had by psychological subjects; therefore objects are psychological subjects. Alternatively, to possess mental properties is to have a mind, so if objects possess mental properties they must have a mind; but they do possess mental properties, in the form of color and other secondary qualities, so they have a mind. Thus every colored (etc.) object has a mind! You see what I mean about startling: the subjectivity of secondary qualities implies that objects possess minds, which means that minds are everywhere. And given that each object possesses many secondary qualities, objects have quite complex minds—consisting of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile qualities like heat and cold. We have here a rather sudden move from a platitudinous premise to an outrageous conclusion, the crucial link provided by the connection between the subjectivity of color and the possession of a mind: no mental instantiation without mentation, as we might say. As Berkeley would put it, the esse of an idea is percipi, and colors are ideas, so what has them has to be a perceiving thing.

Of course an argument is only as good as its premises, and each of the premises in this argument has been contested: objects don’t really have colors, only items in the mind do; colors are not mental entities but physical ones; mental properties don’t need psychological subjects in order to be instantiated; the idea of minds or psychological subjects as entities is itself suspect. I won’t try to defend each of the premises in the argument, though I think they are all true, but I will try to articulate what lies behind them. There have been many attempts to deny that objects are really colored, locating colors instead in the mind of the perceiver; but they run afoul of a very stubborn intuition, namely that colors (etc.) are as much intrinsic properties of objects as figure and motion—that is certainly how they look. Some say we project them onto objects by a special kind of objectifying mental act, but there is no introspective evidence that such an act ever occurs (is it voluntary?); also this theory has trouble explaining the sense in which objects continue to have colors when not being perceived. [2] Some try to reduce colors to wavelengths and the like, but this underestimates the difference between primary and secondary qualities; and we have a natural conviction that colors, sounds, tastes, etc. are mental in nature. Why we have this conviction is an interesting question, which I won’t go into, but it is robust and widely shared: it is simply how such qualities strike us, as with sensations of pain and indeed sensations of color. The third premise is where the argumentative work gets done—the link between mentality and mentation. That is the novelty of Berkeley’s observation: other philosophers of the period assumed that colors are mental but didn’t draw the conclusion that they need a psychological subject or mind in the object, or existing somehow alongside it. They perhaps assumed that the mind of the perceiver is the subject of the mental property that is color, since there must be one somewhere: the color is in the object in virtue of being perceived there by the human mind. All we get from the third premise is that there has to be a subject of some sort not that the subject is the object itself. The identity of the subject is so far left open.

So that is the key premise that powers the argument. There are several options for making this premise come out true that fail to imply universal mentation. Berkeley’s own preference is that the needed subject is simply God: all ideas subsist in his mind—no ordinary object is ever the substance in which an idea inheres. Thus Berkeley infers theistic immaterialism from the third premise: spirits are the things that colors inhere in not material substances, God being the spirit in chief. Along the same lines someone might propose that there exists a cosmic mind pervading the universe, and this mind is the one in virtue of which objects are colored—the true subject of the mental qualities of color and the rest. Or we might just follow tradition and suppose that the human mind is the one that provides the necessary grounding for the mental properties in question—it is the thing that colors exist in when an object looks to be colored. Again, I won’t discuss these proposals in detail; it seems to me that there are obvious problems with each of them and that the natural theory is simply that the object itself is the subject of the mental properties it apparently instantiates. We surely don’t want to follow Berkeley in banishing material substance altogether and with it the belief that some properties are not intrinsically mental; and God seems like a rather heavy-handed way to deal with a problem more easily solved without assuming his existence and direct participation in perception. Similarly for the cosmic mind as the true subject of color, heat, taste, and so on: we don’t want to wheel in such heavy machinery if we can avoid it. As for the human mind, the obvious problem, insisted upon by Berkeley, is that objects remain colored when not being perceived by us, so it cannot be that the instantiation of color depends on our perceiving the object all the time, since we don’t (this is where God proves his metaphysical worth for Berkeley). We need a continuous perception to allow for the continuous existence of the secondary qualities even when unperceived by us or other perceiving organic creatures. Thus the natural theory is that the object itself contains a mind in which its qualities continuously inhere: the object is continuously red, say, because it continuously perceives itself as red. It has a mind that never sleeps.

Here you shrilly protest: “But it is absurd to suppose that ordinary colored objects perceive colors in the way we do!” The force of this protest depends on the final five words of it: for we need not assume that the object perceives red in the way we do. Minds come in many grades and types across the animal kingdom, from the simple and primitive to the complex and sophisticated. When an insect sees color, say, this might be very different from the way mammals like us do. Extrapolating, we might suppose that colored objects perceive color in a way very different even from the perceptions of lowly insects. To borrow a term from the panpsychist literature, they have proto perception of color, not full-blooded human-like perception of it. Indeed, we might view the position being described as a form of macro-panpsychism: observable objects have minds in much the same way panpsychists have envisaged elementary particles having minds—inchoately, dimly, darkly. We might have no clear idea of this form of perception, viewed from the inside, but it is theoretically possible. Then we can say that colored objects have minds in whatever way inorganic things have minds, which might be quite alien to us. We might not know what it is like to perceive red for a red object, but that is neither here nor there so far as the reality of such perception is concerned. We have to keep a broad mind when it comes to the variety of minds (bats, Martians, atoms, and pillar boxes). And it seems that some enlargement of the domain of mind is required by the simple fact of objects having secondary qualities, by the argument cited.

It may help to ease the reader’s qualms if I remark a structural parallel between the minds I am postulating and more conventional minds. Objects have two sorts of property corresponding to the primary and secondary quality distinction, only one of which requires the existence of a psychological subject. Similarly brains have two sorts of property conventionally designated mental and physical, only one of which requires the existence of a psychological subject. Thus both objects and brains have a psychophysical nature, having both a mental aspect and a non-mental aspect. And just as we can describe different sorts of theory of the relation between these aspects for things with brains, so we can describe different sorts of theory for the two aspects of objects. We can envisage property dualism, materialist reduction, eliminative materialism, and even substance dualism (objects contain immaterial souls as the bearers of their secondary qualities). We have a mind-body problem for virtually everything, because mentally constituted secondary qualities are everywhere. Might it be that objects already exhibited the basic form of a psychophysical being long before any organic such beings came along? Could this be the basis for the advent of animal minds—not micro mentality, as in panpsychism, but macro mentality, as in colored, hot, tasty objects? What is clear is that there is a lot more mentality in nature than we bargained for, under the current hypothesis. In Berkeley’s system there is nothing but mentality; in this system it is everywhere the secondary qualities are. To repeat: colors are “ideas”, and ideas need minds, and minds in the colored objects are the best hypothesis. Colors are mind-dependent, but the minds they depend on reside in the objects of perception not in the human perceiver. It would be very strange to suppose that ideas in human minds depend for their existence on other minds existing at some remove from them; in the same way it would be strange if the ideas existing in material objects depended for their existence on minds extraneous to them (such as human minds) instead of on minds located inside those objects. Common sense tells us that objects are colored and that colors are mental, and it is not contrary to common sense to infer that those properties need a subject to inhere in—thus crediting them with a psychological subject of some sort. Hence we get mind in world.

Querulously you enquire whether these minds are conscious, and if so what it is like to have this consciousness. Here the answer is as above: consciousness comes in many grades and types, and it may be that the consciousness of red objects is of a primitive and (for us) unimaginable type. It may be a step down from the consciousness of even the simplest conscious organism—deeply proto, inscrutably dim and dark. Who knows? As to what it’s like, we can’t leap to the conclusion that it is like seeing something red: for this is about what it’s like to be red not to experience red; and it may be that having the property of being red is not accompanied by the phenomenology of seeing red. The object perceives red but it may not perceive that property by having the experience of seeing red (you can perceive a hippopotamus without it seeming to you to be a hippopotamus). Still, maybe the phenomenology is just its seeming to the object that it sees a red thing, in which case red objects have experiences as of red (nature is phenomenologically parsimonious). The important point is that it has to seem to something that things are a certain way, since the esse of “ideas” is percipi: red objects have to perceive their color in a certain way, whatever that way is. So they need a way to sense their own ideas (subjective qualities)—just we need a way to sense our own pains or color sensations. Red is to red things as pain is to things in pain. And let it not be forgotten that ordinary objects are extremely complex and in many ways mysterious: all those atoms and their constituents and the mysterious forces governing them. It is not beyond their powers to allow room for mental properties to be instantiated by the objects they compose. But it must be admitted that we need a radical revision of our view of nature if we are to take on the kind of metaphysical picture I am describing: we need to accept that mind is everywhere and right on the surface of things (not lurking imperceptibly in the particles that constitute matter, as in micro panpsychism). One surprising result of this is that some mental properties are not imperceptible and private but perceptible and public: for we can sense the secondary qualities of things with our eyes and ears and mouths. Here the mind is fully open to view, not hidden inside an opaque shell. So mind is not just literally all around us in the inorganic world but also plainly visible in the perceptible properties of things—we can see “ideas”. Whenever you see a red object or taste sugar you are literally seeing or tasting a mind, because you are sensing a mental attribute that is backed by a mental substance (i.e. thing that perceives in some modality). There are many more minds than we thought and they are a lot more knowable than we ever suspected. There is mind in the world, and it lies right before our eyes. [3]

[1] Principles of Human Knowledge, section 7.

[2] This is why we call color blindness a form a blindness: it is a lack of sensitivity to what is objectively there not just a failure to project what other people project. The idea that a red object ceases to be red when I shut my eyes is surely preposterous, and it doesn’t matter if the entire human race shuts its eyes. This kind of point makes trouble for dispositional theories of color and other theories that make color dependent on the human perceiver.

[3] One might ask why objects have minds in the way suggested: it can hardly be because minds are an evolutionary adaptation for them with all sorts of benefits for survival. No answer to this question appears forthcoming, but then we don’t know why objects have many of the properties they do either—they just do. That’s just the way the universe is made (theists might suggest that God gave us secondary qualities to add to life’s rich pageant). Physics doesn’t care about secondary qualities (perhaps it should), but physics is not the measure of the real. In effect, sentient beings came into a world already inhabited by sentient beings, though of another order.

Matter and God

July 23, 2021/10 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Colin McGinn

Matter and God

Berkeley’s philosophy is built around the idea that matter and God are inconsistent with each other so we need to remove matter from our metaphysical view. The reason for this is that matter encourages skepticism, both about the external world and about God himself. If the world consists of matter, then there are insurmountable problems about our knowledge of it; and if matter is the cause of our sensations, then there is no place for God in the workings of things. Thus we can rationally doubt that matter exists, or that we know its nature; and we can worry that God has been metaphysically sidelined. Berkeley’s own immaterialist philosophy obviates these problems by (a) locating objects firmly in the mind and (b) making God the cause of human experience and all other events. Matter is no longer what we perceive when we perceive things (even indirectly), and it is no longer the cause of what happens: for it has no existence whatever. We perceive ideas in our minds, and everything ultimately resides in the infinite spirit that is God’s mind. According to this metaphysical system, skepticism gets no foothold, since there is no gap between experience and reality, and because there is no danger of God’s redundancy. We also avoid questions about how an immaterial God could create matter, about how matter can have active powers, about whether the nature of matter can be grasped, and about how matter can be defined. All the problems bequeathed by Descartes, Locke, Gassendi, Malebranche, and others are swept away in one stroke; in particular, skepticism, both about the external world and about the teachings of religion, is decisively vanquished. Berkeley’s underlying reasoning is simply that matter leads to skepticism so that it must be removed for skepticism to be defeated. A purely immaterial world, on the other hand, consisting of ideas and spirits, finite and infinite, is a skepticism-proof world, and hence a world in which God’s existence is assured. We need no longer fear that skepticism undermines God’s wisdom and benevolence, leaving us hopelessly adrift in an ocean of doubt, reliant on mere faith to save us from the epistemic abyss. [1]

This is a coherent and in many ways attractive story: the denial of matter certainly helps ease the threat of skepticism about objects and about God. For now we have immediate experience of objects, and God is essential to the universe as the ultimate cause of everything that happens. God steps in to do what matter was alleged to do, but without the problems inherent in the materialist position. [2] But Berkeley’s position depends on a prior acceptance of common sense and religion: we already have to be convinced of these belief systems in order to do what is necessary to save them. Can’t we contrapose Berkeley’s argument to derive the conclusion that God does not exist? That is: if there is matter, then there is no God; but there is matter; so there is no God. [3] For if matter exists, then skepticism is real and unanswerable (despite various heroic efforts); but God would never create a world in which this was the case, so there is no God. Why would God create a universe in which reality is so out of epistemic reach, and in which his own existence has so little rational foundation, when he could create an immaterialist universe to Berkeley’s specifications, in which skepticism is impossible? So the existence of matter, and with it the materialist metaphysics of “sensible objects”, is a reason to doubt that God, as traditionally conceived, exists at all. Berkeley is quite correct in his reasoning—matter and God are inconsistent—but the indicated conclusion is that there is no God. To put it baldly: the existence of matter entails the non-existence of God. That is basically what Berkeley believed, but he thought he had a viable alternative to matter, unlike the philosophers he contended with. But if we can’t stomach his idealism, we have to draw the conclusion he was so keen to avoid, viz. atheism. Berkeley was right: matter leads inexorably to atheism—but the correct inference is that atheism is true. He had a clear sense of the lie of the metaphysical land, but he drew the wrong conclusion. A world of matter (even conjoined with Cartesian immaterial minds) is not a world in which God can happily exist, because of the skepticism it generates, both about itself and about the place of God in the great scheme of things. Matter is essentially anti-God.

You may reply that we could just accept Berkeley’s own view and reject matter, thus avoiding the inevitable atheism he so feared. That depends, however, on whether his metaphysical system is internally viable. I won’t go into this question here, but two points may be noted. The first is that Berkeley was much concerned with a certain fact about perception that apparently conflicts with his position, namely that objects appear to exist at some distance from the perceiver. The materialist has an account of this—material things are laid out in space relative to the perceiver—but what can the immaterialist say? Shouldn’t the objects of perception appear to be in the mind, which is where they actually are? It might be replied that we are under a perceptual illusion about their location, but then we are back with skepticism: how could God have built us in such a way that our every experience contains an error that invites the false belief in materialism? Berkeley struggled with this problem, and the problem is certainly real. Second, there is this question: what about other sorts of skepticism? Berkeley focuses on skepticism about the external world, but that is not the only kind of skepticism there is—what about skepticism concerning other minds, or the past, or the future? These forms of skepticism are not undermined by the immaterialist position, so skepticism still afflicts us even assuming Berkeley’s metaphysics. There is still a problem about reconciling God’s existence with the specter of skepticism. Berkeley’s system does not free us of skepticism, after all; it merely dulls the edge of one form of it. Any form of skepticism is a threat to the existence of God, as he is traditionally conceived, so it won’t suffice to banish one form of it. So Berkeley’s metaphysics doesn’t really do the job it is supposed to do and it has internal problems of its own; we can’t just cheerfully adopt it and leave the way clear for belief in God. Accordingly, we must accept that the truth of materialism about “sensible objects” poses a problem for theism, just as Berkeley supposed. His great contribution was to see that matter and religion can’t peacefully coexist. The corporeality of tables and chairs is inconsistent with the existence of God. [4]

[1] Here is Berkeley early on in the Principles of Human Knowledge: “We should believe that God has dealt more bountifully with the sons of men, than to give them a strong desire for that knowledge, which he had placed quite out of their reach.” (Section 3) Why torment us with being knowledge-desiring beings whose desires can never be satisfied? That would be like making us food-desiring beings but without the ability to eat. God is not capable of such cruelty or ineptitude.

[2] Note that materialism here is not the general doctrine that everything is material (including minds); it is the more limited doctrine that the objects of sense are material. In this sense Descartes counts as a materialist (about the world of mountains, rivers, trees, etc.).

[3] Strictly, we should not say that there is matter in the classical sense of extended substance, since it is doubtful that there is any such thing for reasons deriving from physics (see my “Is Matter Intelligible?”). Instead we should say that there is something non-mental and existing outside the mind: this could be energy or fields of force or objective space or whatever basic stuff composes reality. We could even include psychic entities of the kind postulated by panpsychism, since these are equally anathema to Berkeley, being liable to skepticism and not present to the conscious mind of man.

[4] It took a genuinely religious man, of remarkable sharpness of mind, to see that his religion was threatened by such a seemingly innocuous assumption. In effect, he came up with a startling disproof of God’s existence, contrary to his intentions.

Is Matter Intelligible?

July 20, 2021/2 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Colin McGinn

Is Matter Intelligible?

Matter has long been felt to be problematic. Berkeley thought it unintelligible, mainly on account of its causal inertness. Russell found it suspiciously akin to old-fashioned substance, replacing it with events and neutral (i.e. mental) stuff. The positivists suspected it of the crime of metaphysics and declared it meaningless. It is certainly not a perceptual given: we have no sense impression of matter. Please don’t say matter is what composes the objects of perception: that could be anything as far as perception is concerned—sense data, immaterial souls, God’s body. Matter is a postulate, a theoretical entity. As such it demands explication: what is it? Several ideas have suggested themselves: solidity is one, extension another. There are obvious problems with solidity: it is a dispositional not a categorical concept; it is not clear that all matter is solid; it is questionable whether only matter is solid (impenetrable)—what about minds and selves? Thus extension has tended to be the default position, following Descartes: the mind is not extended but matter always is (even if not invariably solid). This is the essence of matter, what makes it stand apart. The idea is encouraged by the phenomenology of perception, especially vision: for we see the world as composed of segmented objects of varying shapes and sizes—matter is simply the stuff that has these spatially defined properties. The mind doesn’t strike us this way, as extended in space, as consisting of variously shaped discrete objects. And extension is intelligible, as intelligible as geometry, so matter can be intelligibly defined. Moreover, this definition of matter fits nicely with mechanism as a causal thesis: objects cause changes in other objects by making contact at their boundaries (and not otherwise)—their extension is what fixes their sphere of operation. Extended bodies move about and collide with other extended bodies; and that’s how the world works, causally speaking. Matter, then, is the ideal stuff to constitute the subject matter of physics, because its essence—extension—is integral to causation. The natural world is made up of extended things interacting by contact causation. Notice that objects need well-defined boundaries for this conception to work; they need surfaces and geometric figure. They need to be as they appear in perception, more or less. The theoretical postulate must mirror perceptual phenomenology.

But now there is a problem: his name is Isaac Newton. Here we need to understand just how upsetting Newton was to Cartesian mechanistic physics; indeed I am going to suggest (following others) that Newton destroyed the concept of matter, by rendering it unintelligible. And not just Newton: the pioneers of electromagnetism drove the point home even more powerfully (James Clerk Maxwell has a lot to answer for). The problem, famously, has to do with action at a distance—causal powers exercised over empty space. There was already a problem about space: space has extension like matter, but space isn’t material. Descartes solved it by declaring space to be a form of matter, and relative views of space appeared to allow room for this type of maneuver (not to mention more modern views of space); so this objection looked to be surmountable, if disquieting. But the new problem was far more troubling because it questioned the foundations of mechanism. Objects no longer interact by contact at their boundaries: their mode of extension does not confine their causal powers. Bodies can influence other bodies that lie far beyond their boundaries and never make contact with them. That looks to spell the demise of mechanism (but see below), but it also throws into question the whole idea of material extension. For where now do bodies begin and end? What is the extension of the Sun, say? We already know that the Sun is in fiery flux at its surface and that it sends out particles of light across space, thus enlarging its sphere of operations; but with Newton we need to accept that it projects a force across space that has an impact on other bodies. Why isn’t this force part of the Sun? Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there (imagine it appearing as colored in some way). Similarly, we now know that bodies exert electromagnetic force that projects beyond their surfaces (though diminishing quickly)—or do these forces really just enlarge the surfaces? Under mechanism we don’t need to worry about these questions, because bodies have no effects that go beyond their mode of extension; but with gravity and electromagnetism we have to reckon with effects that reach beyond what we are naturally inclined to call their boundaries. [1] This idea comes to seem arbitrary and hidebound: modern physics suggests that objects are not as confined in one place as we thought, and that their physics extends beyond what we can perceive as boundaries. Thus there were suggestions that bodies should be viewed as spread out in space according to their causal powers: the Sun is everywhere it exerts an influence! The gravitational and electromagnetic fields are parts of the object itself (as the earth’s atmosphere is part of the earth). This has the advantage of salvaging something of mechanism, because now we can say that objects exert causal power via the fields that surround (constitute) them: the fields “touch” remote (i.e. proximate to the fields) objects. We don’t think of the forces as extrinsic to the extended object, which makes things look causally occult; we think of the object as including the forces via the fields. In fact, we drop the idea of spatially enclosed objects with definite shapes and sizes hovering at some distance from each other, replacing it with the idea of spatially distributed fields with no clear boundaries and shapes. That is, we give up the idea of extension as a theoretically relevant property, as it was under pre-Newtonian Cartesian physics. In effect, this is the physics we find today, in which the concept of extension plays no significant role, not as classically defined anyway. The geometry is quite different, as is the picture of underlying reality. Perceptual phenomenology is no longer taken for granted as a guide to the objective nature of the physical world.

But this destroys the concept of matter. Matter is no longer a useful and viable concept for describing the world of physical interactions: it isn’t part of the physics of gravity and electromagnetism. The only (halfway) intelligible definition of matter, as extension, no longer applies to the subject matter of physics: there isn’t any matter in that sense (as there isn’t any phlogiston or entelechy). We can certainly allow for the “physical reality” of fields and forces, but these are not to be characterized in terms of classical extension, and hence are not “matter”; they are invisible unbounded spheres of influence of a rather elusive character. We have no commonsense ontology for fields and forces, as we do for extended objects under mechanism; physics has left our ordinary notions of material things behind. The object you see when you look at a cup, with its neat boundaries and definite shape, is not the object described by physics, which radiates out across space in virtue of its gravitational and electromagnetic powers. Just think of a simple magnet: its physical reality is not confined to the spot in space where the magnet appears to be. The reality consists of a rather mysterious force that acts on remote objects (remote according to ordinary perception, not remote from the point of view of the field of force involved). There is no matter in the sense ventured by traditional physics, simply because the commonsense notion of extension turns out not to apply to the physical world. Descartes was well aware that he was offering a theoretical edifice into which physical phenomena could be placed, but with later physics it turned out that this edifice had no application. Physics is not “the science of matter” in any intelligible sense, because there is none. Nor could there be once the reality of gravitational and electromagnetic forces is recognized. The concept derives from pre-scientific ideas rooted in the common sense associated with human perception; it is not part of the “absolute conception” propounded by physics. We could even say that the perception of extension in objects is a kind of sensory illusion—there is no such thing out there. It arises because fields and forces are invisible and because we have a biological need to segment the world into localized packets. We thus think that reality objectively comprises extended objects with clear boundaries, but that is projection encouraged by illusion. The world of Newton and Clerk Maxwell, not to mention quantum physics, is very different, better imagined as a kind of sea of overlapping fields and forces. It isn’t spherical billiard balls striking each other in the way the manifest image suggests; it’s shapeless fields of force invisibly distributed over space flowing into each other. Currents and smears, not nuggets and chunks: there is no matter to be found anywhere. [2]

Colin McGinn

[1] There is a subsidiary worry about gravity and matter if we define matter in terms of extension, namely that gravity does not vary with extension. It isn’t that the bigger or more spherical an object is the greater its gravitational attraction, yet the essence of matter is said to be extension. This is awkward for Descartes and the mechanists because the key property of matter (viz. extension) is not responsible for its most conspicuous effect (viz. gravity). Instead gravity is a function of mass, which is not definable in terms of extension. Instead mass is “quantity of matter”, which leaves us where we started: is mass the “quantity of extended things”? This difficulty might induce us to switch our definition of matter from extension to mass, but that too has problems, as Descartes was no doubt aware, which is why he doesn’t propose it. Definitions in terms of inertia are dispositional not categorical, and why should minds and selves not have inertia? And what about extended stuff that has no inertial mass? Mass by itself cannot define a workable notion of matter.

[2] The idea that according to modern physics there is no matter in the universe is not of course original to me; in fact, it is a commonplace of popular science. What I have done here is spell out the reasoning behind this verdict, with special reference to the concept of extension. Without this concept the word “matter” has no definite meaning, signifying something like “the stuff the world is made of”—whatever the nature of that stuff might be.

A Private World

July 16, 2021/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Colin McGinn

A Private World

We live in a mixed world: partly public, partly private. There are public perceptible states of affairs and there are private imperceptible states of affairs—for example, rocks and animals, on the one hand, and thoughts and sensations, on the other. You can see the color of your cat’s eyes but you can’t see what she is thinking and feeling. Her inner mental life is private while her outer bodily features are public. The mind escapes sensory observation while the body is open to sensory observation. This is a common, indeed platitudinous, statement: you can’t gaze at the mind in the way you can gaze at the brain; you can’t look at the mind; you can’t take a magnifier to it. I won’t defend this platitude here, but I will have to say something by way of interpretation—for the notion of privacy is not pellucid. Some might suggest that the notion comes down to an epistemic asymmetry between the subject and outside observers: the subject of the mental state knows about it directly while other people only know about it (if at all) by inference. But this neglects the case in which the subject has no knowledge of his inner states—say, a cat with no introspective faculty. In such a case the subject has a private mental state but not because he has superior knowledge of the nature of that state, since he has no such knowledge. Rather, the mental state is a private entity in its own right, not because of an alleged epistemic asymmetry: it is intrinsically imperceptible by others, whether known about by the subject or not. Also, we cannot equate the notion of privacy with the notion of imperceptibility, since atoms are imperceptible but not private in the intended sense: atoms are the kind of thing that could be perceived by the human senses, but mental states are incapable of such perception. They are hidden in a special way, not in the way microorganisms and atoms are hidden (these are public entities). So imperceptibility is necessary for privacy but not sufficient. The difficulty comes in spelling out what this special notion of hiddenness comes to, though we have a strong intuitive sense of it. But I will not consider the question further, being in pursuit of other quarry. Let it suffice to say that some facts in the actual world are public and some are private. The former are typically “physical” and the latter are typically “mental”. But note that the concept of the private does not entail that everything private is necessarily mental: there could perhaps be non-mental things that are private in the intended sense—hidden in that special way that mental things are hidden. I know of no actual examples of such things, but the possibility is not analytically ruled out by the concept of privacy. The best way to understand the philosophical concept of the private is simply as the non-public; then we can say that our world is partly public and partly non-public. It has a dual ontology.

Now I can ask my question: are they any possible worlds that are completely public or completely private? We might think the answer to the first question is obvious: of course there are—any worlds without minds in them. That indeed sounds right, but we must not forget our panpsychist friends—they hold that matter in general has a mental aspect (and may in fact be completely mental). If that were so, then all worlds with our kind of matter in them would be worlds with a private dimension. Perhaps there are worlds containing matter that has no mental dimension at all, in which case these would be completely public worlds; but that is a substantive metaphysical claim and not beyond serious controversy. If panpsychism were true of our world, it might be that most of the actual world is private, if the hidden psychic dimension were rich enough (compare the proposition that most of matter is dark matter). But the really interesting question is whether a world could be completely private, i.e. contain no public facts at all. Again, this is not the same question as whether a world could be completely mental, since privacy might take non-mental forms; it is the question of whether any type of private fact, mental or non-mental, could exist in the complete absence of public facts. That is, could there be a purely private world? If you were to travel there in your inter-world space ship, you wouldn’t see a damn thing, because everything would be hidden from view in that special way that mental states are hidden. This world will appear to contain nothing, though it could be that all sorts of perturbations are going on in the private realm that constitutes it—perturbations with no public face. This is a world of pure unadulterated privacy: everything that exists in it is invisible, like thoughts and sensations. Is such a world really possible?

First, it might be wondered whether the private can exist without a bedrock of the public: in our world it seems that there can be no private fact without an underlying public fact (minds require brains). Second, don’t we need space and time, and aren’t these public entities? That question isn’t easy to answer because space and time might themselves be private entities—after all, we don’t perceive them with our senses. However, I think we can confidently state that a possible world could be mainly private, with only a smattering of the public at its periphery; and that is the point of philosophical interest. There is no necessity that the public must dominate across logical space: for all we know, possible worlds dominated by the private are commonplace. In any case, a world could be largely private—full of “private matter” (“matter” in the sense of “stuff”). I suppose it might even turn out that ourworld is largely private (consider panpsychism again), if reality contains a lot of hidden non-public aspects. Privacy might be the rule not the exception, in our world and across possible worlds. The appearance of preponderant publicity might be an illusion born of our local cosmic condition and our limited senses. Privacy might be the basic form that reality takes.

I now want to ask a different modal question: are privacy and publicity essential or contingent properties of what has them? Thoughts are private in the actual world, but are they private in all possible worlds? Bodies are public in the actual world, but are they public in all possible worlds? One’s first reaction to these heady questions is apt to be that these are not real possibilities: privacy and publicity are essential properties of what has them. But the question is not as easy to answer as might be supposed, because the properties at issue depend on the existence of certain sorts of sense organ. Is it not logically possible for there to be a sense that can respond directly to the thoughts of others? Couldn’t a sense organ be causally linked to other brains in such a way that an impression of a thought is produced in the mind of an observer? Isn’t telepathy at least a logical possibility? [1] And can’t we imagine a possible world in which bodies are hidden from perceiving creatures because of the absence of the requisite sensory apparatus? These creatures can see another creature’s states of mind but they don’t have any of the normal human senses, and so cannot form sense impressions of ordinary physical objects. Admittedly, these are far-out logical possibilities, and we may not be able even to adequately grasp what they involve, but they seem describable and coherent. We could have public-private inversion in a possible world: minds public, bodies private (non-public). It all depends on what kinds of sense organs exist in the world in question. People might believe in material objects and even know of their existence, but nothing gives them the sensory impression of such objects; and they may be assailed with impressions of other minds, as we are assailed with impressions of other bodies. Logical space is large and accommodating. In our world, with its specific laws and sense organs, thoughts are necessarily private and bodies are necessarily public; but if we reach out to the outer limits of possibility we may find undreamt of possibilities—such as creatures with eyes for minds but no sensory access to ordinary physical objects. Accordingly, there might be worlds that are completely mental yet completely public, as well as worlds that are completely physical yet completely private. So the completely private worlds I mentioned earlier need not be mental worlds at all: they could be worlds consisting of facts unlike any in our world, or they could simply contain ordinary physical facts. How things are in our world is a poor guide to the full extent of modal reality; our world might be quite unrepresentative of logical space. In our world privacy is the exception not the rule, and it is linked closely to the mind; but both of these truths are fungible when we consider the full range of possibilities. The concepts of privacy and publicity need further examination; in particular, we should treat privacy as a natural fact about the universe that needs to be investigated, empirically and conceptually. Here I have tried to open up the subject of its modal status. [2]

[1] One difficulty here is that it is not easy to say why thoughts and sensations are private: what is it about them that makes the private? Are they just private as a brute fact with no rationale that can be provided? Or is their privacy a consequence of their subjectivity or their intentionality or some other feature? But why exactly should these properties give rise to the property of privacy? It is hard to see what explains the privacy of the mental, or whether any such explanation should be sought. Privacy is obscure, possibly terminally mysterious.

[2] We can formulate parallel questions about subjectivity, i.e. what-it-is-likeness. Can there be a completely subjective world, or a completely objective world? Is subjectivity an essential property of what has it (likewise for objectivity)? The relationship between subjectivity and privacy is also worth investigating, but deeply obscure—like everything else in this area.

Missing footnote from the end of Survival of the Fittest

July 13, 2021/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Colin McGinn

[3] It may be that the organism-centered view of evolution is a holdover from religious views of the origin of life. If we think of God as our creator, we naturally picture him as especially concerned with our welfare, particularly our life and death. By extension, then, we imagine him concerned with the individual lives of the organisms he has created: he has created them in order that they should live and die. Creation thus centers round the individual organism, construed as a quasi-self. When we switch to secular Darwinism we naturally cleave to the organism-centered perspective, only now with Nature in the place of God. But nature does not have the concerns of God and is quite indifferent to the welfare of animals and humans. We need to take the final step away from Creationism and recognize that nature (i.e. natural processes) is not responsive to questions of individual survival but only to the prevalence of traits: traits are not morally significant but they are the materials through which evolution operates. Nature selects traits, often very basic ones, and these are not equivalent to selves or even insentient life forms. The idea that God would choose to create traits for their own sake is bizarre, but it is very much the modus operandi of impersonal nature. Individual organisms just happen to be where traits cluster. From the point of view of nature, I am just a trait location.

Survival of the Fittest

July 13, 2021/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Colin McGinn

Survival of the Fittest

What is it that survives and possesses fitness? The organism, of course: natural selection favors organisms that survive longer than other organisms—they are the ones with a greater chance of reproducing themselves. And the fitter the organism is the greater its chances of survival to reproductive maturity. Evolution is all about which organism can live the longest, i.e. can persist through time better than its rivals. Organisms are the focus of natural selection; they are the things that carry the genes over time, ensuring their survival. Clearly organisms persist over time—the point hardly needs stating—and this fact is key to the evolutionary process: persistence is what every organism strives to achieve, the better to pass on those precious genes. The ontology of the theory of evolution is thus an ontology of organisms existing over time. The theory quantifies over individual organisms and regards them as continuant particulars—substances, in the Aristotelian sense. And it is much concerned with whether these living substances live or die, reproduce or fail to, survive or perish, stay in existence or go out of existence. We are very concerned with that in our own case—we are the death-obsessed species—and evidently so is the process of natural selection: individual survival is the name of the game. How could this not be the case?

But do organisms survive over time? Don’t caterpillars go out of existence to be replaced by butterflies? Is this contrary to the spirit of natural selection? Doesn’t natural selection seem to favor this plan? It is more adaptive to cease to exist than to continue to exist in the world of Lepidoptera. You might retort that actually the caterpillar still exists in the form of a butterfly, and so does not go out of existence—it survives the transformation—but do you want to commit evolutionary science to this metaphysical proposition? For that is what it is: it isn’t a theorem of biology or an empirically discovered biological fact. It’s a philosophical assumption. And it looks less plausible than the alternative, namely that the caterpillar does not survive metamorphosis and is replaced by a spanking new butterfly. But isn’t this just an extreme example of a biological commonplace, viz. biological change over time? Organisms don’t stay the same: they grow and mutate, often changing their form dramatically. The seed becomes an oak tree; the egg becomes a chicken; the sperm and ovum becomes a great scientist. Does it matter if we say that there is identity through time here? What difference would it make to evolutionary biology if we said instead that organisms don’t persist over time? Maybe selves do (or maybe not), but do we want to make biology hostage to metaphysical fortune? All biology really cares about is whether certain combinations of traits have the ability to survive, not whether some supposed underlying substance does. Can’t we just drop this way of talking and leave evolutionary biology intact? Then the ontology of persisting individual organisms will no longer be central (or even relevant) to biology; instead we will talk of bundles of traits and their adaptive capacity. We might call this Humean biology—biology without persisting substances. [1] Natural selection works primarily on traits, or bundles thereof, not on individual organisms that allegedly bear these traits; and the traits persist only when they do, not when they are replaced by new traits in the ongoing life of the organism. We have an ontology of traits not an ontology of persisting substance-like organisms—characteristics (“characters” in an earlier terminology), properties, types, forms. Some of these traits work better than others in the bid to reproduce, but we don’t speak of particular organisms surviving or perishing; life and death cease to concern us as theoretical biologists. We drop the metaphysics of enduring substances and replace it with a metaphysics of characteristics—types not tokens. The question is not whether this or that individual organism will survive but whether this or that constellation of traits will survive. Traits are where the evolutionary action is. The dinosaurs are now extinct—there are no such individual organisms stalking the planet—but there are also no more dinosaur traits in the biosphere. Those traits proved not to be adaptive in the new world they confronted, so they disappeared. If by some miracle individual dinosaurs had transformed themselves into mammal-like creatures, thus surviving the drastic change of environmental conditions, the evolutionary situation would have remained essentially the same—no more dinosaur traits. It’s the traits that come and go by natural selection; the individual organisms that happen to bear them are neither here nor there. If organisms could survive their apparent death and continue down the generations, assuming different forms, that would make no difference to the evolutionary story: we would see the same pattern of trait exemplification and trait elimination that we see now. The theory itself is quite neutral on these metaphysical questions; it is concerned only with the explanation of the persistence of designs—plans, phenotypes, forms, and functional structures. The fittest of these survive, or fail to; the individual organisms are as may be. Even if there are no individual organisms—this is just misguided prescientific ontology—that is irrelevant to the truth of standard evolutionary biology. We could drop the whole idea of individual persistence and make do with an ontology of events and processes (as some have suggested for physics): there is nothing that survives from day to day but just an ever changing array of characteristics grouped together—as has often been supposed for the self. According to this conception, nothing ever survives over time in the biological world, so there is no such thing as survival of the fittest organism. But still some bunches of traits do better than others: they survive, but they are not persisting particulars–they are not living organisms.

On this way of looking at things, organisms and their individual survival recede into the background, theoretically speaking, to be replaced by more general entities. We won’t any longer say dinosaurs are extinct; we will say their traits are. It doesn’t matter whether the individual animals somehow made it through the dust and darkness and now exist in the garb of birds; all that matters is that their phenotype went the way of the dodo’s phenotype (individual dodos might have survived in the form of platypuses). We humans are very concerned about matters of individual life and death, but from nature’s point of view that is an irrelevancy: organisms are simply bearers of traits, and traits are where the evolutionary action is. Evolution is essentially a process of trait generation and trait elimination: if there could be traits without organisms to possess them, the process would be essentially the same. So stop thinking of individual organisms coming and going and think instead of a vast sea of biological characteristics subject to forces of elimination. Animals only come and go in virtue of possessing these characteristics, so we may as well put the characteristics at center stage. Theoretically speaking, that is all there is: the individual is just a tiny pawn in a vast game of trait competition and differential survival. Alternatively, it is the traits of individual genes that are locked into the competitive battle not the individual genes themselves (types not tokens). Whether token genes persist through time is of no significance; what matters is that certain types of genes make it into the next generation. It doesn’t matter whether the gene tokens live or die; all that counts is that they give rise to copies of themselves that may be passed on, i.e. tokens of the same type. To put the point differently: nature doesn’t care about the individual and its survival; all it cares about is the general type exemplified by that individual. The usual way of putting things places the individual organism at the center of the story, but that is a human viewpoint not the viewpoint of impersonal nature. [2]

Think of it this way: human artifacts are also locked in a struggle for survival as a result of market forces, but the struggle is between designs not particular objects. It doesn’t matter whether your individual phone is a good survivor or even whether it exists over time; what matters is that certain designs are selected by the prevailing economic forces. The fittest phone design will persist into the future, because that’s what matters to market success. Similarly, the best mouse design will be the thing that persists in the future; the fate of individual mice is of no consequence. The mice are just carriers, temporary vehicles. This is why lifespan is biologically irrelevant: you might think that longer lived species have the advantage over shorter lived species, since after all the species members survive longer, but a moment’s reflection shows that this is wrong. The shorter-lived species prospers in proportion to its ability to propagate its traits; it doesn’t matter that individuals don’t last long. Long-lived species can easily go extinct if their traits are no longer adaptive. Turtles are not more adaptive than ants just because individual turtles live a long time; and the ant phenotype has been around forever. The fittest organism on the planet is not the one that has lived the longest (some tree somewhere) but the one that has the most viable phenotype with respect to reproductive success. In a slogan: it’s the phenotype, stupid. Individual persistence through time is not the important variable; frequency of traits is. Here insects and bacteria have the advantage over every other species. Or, to put it within the requisite theoretical perspective, being a quadruped (say) is a massively successful trait—as is having eyes and ears, a stomach and lungs, blood and bile. These traits are everywhere, existing across species; they are what have won out in the evolutionary lottery. Even the species as a biological entity pales in comparison with these highly general traits: they are the true units of natural selection, the building blocks of life. They don’t tend to go extinct simply because they are remarkably successful: they are the real survivors. But they are nothing like individual organisms, let alone sentient creatures; they don’t resemble human persons at all. Yet they are the things whose fitness leads to their survival; they are what nature really cares about. That is, they are what nature in all its uncaring indifference actually selects to enjoy the privilege of existence—organs, bodily shapes, biochemical processes, and efficient physiological mechanisms. These are the most prized products of natural selection at the basic level.

[1] I am thinking of so-called Humean views of personal identity, according to which there is no continuing substance constituting the self but just a succession of connected psychological characteristics. It is easy to apply this conception to organisms: they are just series of linked characteristics not continuing underlying substances. We thus arrive at eliminative views of both the self and the organism. Such views, whether right or wrong, should not be incompatible with either psychology or biology as theoretical sciences.

[2] There is also a bias in favor of the particular: we like to think that reality revolves around particular things, since they constitute our perceptual world. We shy away from abstractions (hence the desire to think of laws of nature as somehow made up of particulars). Accordingly, we place particular organisms at the center of our theories of the biological world. But we do better to see that the important generalizations apply at the level of types, i.e. traits of organisms. Much the same is true of physics: the physicist is not greatly concerned with the fate of particular particles, or even particular galaxies, but with such abstractions as gravity, electricity, motion, mass, etc. In other words, biology needs to step back from the perceptible particular in framing its theories.

Ontological Inconvenience

July 7, 2021/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Colin McGinn

Ontological Inconvenience

The order of ontology is not the same as the order of epistemology. In fact they are inversions of each other. What is ontologically basic is not epistemologically basic and vice versa. Let’s divide reality into three levels: elementary objects, middle sized objects, and sentient objects: the first level constitutes the second, which constitutes the third. There are many names for this relation of ontological derivation: grounding, supervenience, dependence, composition, emergence, etc. Some things are more basic than others, ontologically speaking: you can’t have the non-basic things without the basic things, but the basic things don’t presuppose the non-basic things. The epistemological order is the reverse of this: knowledge of mental states is the most basic, followed by knowledge of middle sized objects, followed by knowledge of elementary objects. We know our own states of mind best, perceptible objects second best, and atoms third best (or whatever atoms are made of). This fact gives rise to a lot of philosophy, because we are least certain about the things that are most basic. Descartes’s entire philosophy is motivated by this. We have to start with the topmost layer of reality and then work our way down. Not all philosophy sees things this way: some philosophy tries to align the two orderings. Thus we are instructed to regard sense data as ontologically basic as well as epistemologically basic: everything is made of mind, including atoms. The mind constructs reality; reality does not construct the mind. In effect, the mind furnishes the atoms of reality. But this position is not common these days; now we tend to suppose that the ontological order is the reverse of the epistemological order.

Is this a necessary truth? The question is seldom (if ever) asked. Must all knowing beings start with sense data and work out to ordinary objects and elementary objects? Must every conceivable epistemology invert ontology? Apparently not: we can imagine beings that start with knowledge of atoms and work out to middle sized objects and minds. Think of Leibniz’s analogy of the mill: nano-beings that know the interior of the atom like the back of their hand but have to infer the rest from that basis. These beings have no direct acquaintance with tables and chairs and don’t introspect their own minds, but they aspire to know about these things by inference from what they are directly acquainted with. For them ordinary objects are conjectural and the existence of minds is a subject of heated debate—sense data and the like are mere posits so far as they are concerned. If you think this isn’t possible because they have minds themselves and hence must know of their existence introspectively, then imagine that our nano-beings don’t have minds: they are non-conscious epistemic agents. [1] Or we can suppose that they have minds very different from the minds we are familiar with, which they know about directly, but that they also posit other minds of the kind we know about directly: that is, they postulate minds like ours based on evidence drawn from their knowledge of matter. In other words, their epistemology recapitulates ontology, while ours does not. In their community there is no Descartes convinced of the existence of mind but uncertain about matter; rather, the atom is the most certain of things while everything else is shrouded in doubt. Their equivalent of the evil demon is misleading them about everything except the nature of atoms. They may not enjoy absolute certainty about the existence of atoms, but they regard this area of knowledge as more secure than all other areas—justifiably given their epistemic make-up.

This means that our human epistemology is contingent: not every epistemology inverts ontology. The epistemological problems that face us don’t face every knowing being, and other beings may have problems we don’t have. For example, some beings may have trouble formulating the Cogito, because they don’t have introspective access to their own thoughts and may never have formed the idea of the self. We know that we think because we have the faculty of introspection, but not every possible thinking being is like this; indeed many animals appear to be in this case. One can only formulate the Cogito if one possesses the requisite concepts, but that is not a logical necessity. My nano-beings have a specific set of epistemic faculties unlike our own, so they must contrive an epistemology suitable to their situation. There is no universal epistemology, no one-size-fits-all; it all depends on contingent psychological make-up. In our case evolution has given us a capacity to know our own mental states and an ability to make inferences from them, but this is not universally shared even among knowing terrestrial animals. We know the most high-level things most easily, while low-level things are known only with time and effort. Other epistemic beings might have a more natural way of knowing reality, starting from the bottom up. Their philosophers will shape their epistemology accordingly.

One of the curiosities of human epistemology is that we know our own minds very well but not the minds of others. We therefore have a problem about our knowledge of other minds. This is a case in which a high level phenomenon is known poorly, because we are not hooked up to other minds as we are hooked up to our own. But this too is contingent, since we can imagine ways in which minds could merge so as to allow surer knowledge of other minds: for example, bits of our brain might be inserted into other people’s brains in such a way that their mental states are directly known to us. It is only a contingent fact that we have a problem of other minds, though no doubt a deeply entrenched one, biologically speaking (our brains are isolated from other brains). I think this helps in easing the pressures caused by epistemological problems: they are not problems about knowledge as such, or about knowledge of this or that subject matter as such, but problems arising from contingent human faculties. We are only one small part of reality and how things are for us is not the measure of how things must be for everybody. We just happen to have this particular epistemology. [2]

[1] They might only have unconscious minds, so that their existence is conjectural. The epistemic system might not be accessible to consciousness. There is no necessity that knowing beings have conscious minds like ours.

[2] If we had been raised in an atomic environment like the nano-beings, no doubt we would have had a different epistemological profile—rather as microorganisms have a different epistemological profile from ours. Bacteria are well acquainted with other bacteria, though we know about them only indirectly. At the far end of the spectrum we have possible beings with only unconscious minds but intimate knowledge of other minds and even acquaintance with quarks. The logical possibilities are endless.