What is a Mental State?

The first-person viewpoint is apt to skew our conception of what a mental state essentially involves. We introspect the state and think we have attained a pretty comprehensive picture of what it is, intrinsically, constitutively. Fundamentally, this is a confusion (conflation) of epistemology and metaphysics—privileging one mode of knowing over other modes. The nature of a thing is unlikely to reveal itself fully to a single viewpoint. The introspective viewpoint is so familiar, so natural, and so automatic that we easily fall into overestimating its revelatory power. Phenomenology becomes comprehensive insight, not just one perspective among others. Enormous amounts of philosophy have flowed from this movement of thought (we might even call it “the introspective fallacy”). But there are two other viewpoints that need to be taken into consideration, which have no natural names: I mean the viewpoint of an observer of the behavior of another, and the viewpoint of the brain scientist (including brain surgeon). Both are third-person, but they differ markedly—one being natural and shared by all, the other esoteric and specialized. They should be sharply distinguished. I will characterize the former in a variety of ways, as befits its complex nature: it is functional, action-oriented, teleological, biological, dynamic, and behavioral (the catch-all term). It is the mind in action, engaged, goal-directed; it is where the biologically adaptive nature of the mind shows itself (not so much from the introspective viewpoint). It is the reason the mind exists at all—its evolutionary sine qua non. It is also where the social dimension of our psychological discourse belongs: how we think of each other (animals too). It is not to be forgotten or downplayed. Mental states have causal roles, purposes, interactions, bodily expressions. It is quite wrong to think of them as purely “inner”; they have an outer nature too. Behaviorism, in its many varieties, is by no means wildly off-target: it stems from a deep truth about the nature of the mental. The mental, like all biological phenomena, is an active functional reality; the deed is woven into it. But this nature is not immediately available from the introspective standpoint, which confines itself to feeling, subjective appearance, what-it’s-likeness. That standpoint has to be prescinded from in order to grasp the functional-teleological aspect of mental states. In addition to this conception of the mind we have the unfamiliar and artificial standpoint employed by the student of the brain. For most of us this is obtained only from books: we don’t observe brains every day, with the naked eye or under a microscope (etc.). Truth to tell, this cerebral (cortical, neural) standpoint is quite alien, even alienating: it taxes our normal ways of understanding people and animals. Yet the involvement of the brain in the mind is undeniable, obscure as it may be: somehow the mind is rooted in the brain, dependent on it, impossible without it. The brain is as essential to the mind as its phenomenology is, though this is not apparent to us in ordinary life. Mental states must have a cerebral nature; they don’t exist outside the brain, as if owing nothing to it. In the vernacular, the brain is up in the mind. Thus, materialism is also not a wild and gratuitous imposition on reality; it is based on the sound perception that the mind is deeply indebted to the brain and must indeed be a brain state (of some sort). Mental states have a nature that is revealed by adopting the viewpoint of the brain scientist (or surgeon). So, they have a triple nature—a tripartite architecture. A triple aspect ontology is what they demand. But these three aspects don’t easily slot together: they don’t entail each other, not by a long chalk. Indeed, they are fundamentally conceptually distinct, seemingly jammed together, barely on speaking terms. Integrating them takes serious work (and may not be possible for us). But they are not inconsistent with each other, just heterogeneous. Mental states are therefore not like regular natural kinds: water is just H2O and heat is just molecular motion, neither more nor less, but pain is a feeling plus a functional kind plus a brain state. It is a composite being, existing on three plains, as it were. It is a phenomenological-teleological-corporeal kind, part feeling, part purpose, part neurology. The mind-body problem is really the problem of integrating these three aspects without denying or shortchanging any of them. For how can the same thing be all three, and how are they connected? Once we see the triple nature of mental states, we can make sense of the various positions that have been adopted towards them. Dualism, behaviorism, and materialism are all exaggerated responses to the threefold being of the mental; they select one aspect and make too much of it, neglecting the other aspects. Thus, the history of psychology goes from the introspectionist (phenomenological) school to the behaviorist school to the neurological school (what is now called neuroscience), each declaring that it alone is true to the real essence of the mental. But the mind has three aspects, intrinsically, essentially, irreducibly. We also see how various thought monsters insinuate themselves: the disembodied mind, the mindless zombie, the free-floating mental stuff supposed to constitute physical reality (purposeless, non-biological). These all involve detaching one aspect of the mind from the other aspects and declaring it autonomous. The truth, however, is that all three are equally integral to the nature of a mental state: the phenomenal, the causal, the physical. Disciplinary boundaries don’t correspond to real ontological divisions. The mind needs three disciplines to study its complex nature (plus a fourth to integrate them). Above all, we must not let epistemology dictate metaphysics: just because we have three different epistemic perspectives on the mind doesn’t entail that the mind itself must fall into three separate non-communicating compartments.[1] Mental states are not as cleanly divisible objectively as the viewpoints we take to them. We could in principle have one of these viewpoints without having the others, but the mind itself couldn’t exist in such a divided state: it necessarily has each of them. It has a physics, a biology, and a phenomenology—each as essential as the other two. It can’t therefore be modeled on cases in which only a single level exists (water, heat, light, etc.). Idealism is thus impossible, as is reductive (eliminative) materialism: mental states can’t exist without a biological function and a cerebral realization, and they can’t exist without an introspectively known phenomenology (the brain can’t swallow up the mind). Nor can behaviorism, however relaxed, provide a complete account of the mind. Each is part of the truth, but not the whole truth. Biological traits have two aspects, physical and teleological, while physics and chemistry have just one, but psychology has three. The concept of mind, then, can be analyzed into three parts, each with its own proprietary conceptual apparatus, somewhat as the concept of knowledge can be analyzed into three parts (roughly). No one scheme of concepts will suffice, and no one is more central than the others. In particular, concepts of the brain are essential in giving a full accounting of the mind, despite their general invisibility. Much of the mind is hidden, though some is out in the open. That’s just the way the mind is: the hidden part is as vital as the open part. In other terminology, the mind is subjective and objective.[2]

[1] For some reason it feels natural to describe the introspective perspective as the view from above, the cerebral perspective as the view from below, and the behavioral perspective as the view from the side. Or is it just me?

[2] This paper follows on from my earlier paper “A Triple Aspect Theory” with some changes of emphasis. I now see the functional aspect as more indispensable than I did.

Are There Psychophysical Laws?

This question has been much debated since the publication of Davidson’s 1970 article “Mental Events”.[1]Here I will give my current take on the question. First, we must distinguish strict laws from statements that are lawlike or law-ish, i.e., those that have some nomological force but don’t achieve the status of basic laws of nature. A strict law is fixed, inexorable, universal, and exceptionless; it ensures that “a particular natural or scientific phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions are present” (OED)—with special emphasis on “always”. A non-strict law (better to say “generalization”) is only probabilistic or ceteris paribus—not inexorable and universal. Our question, then, is whether there are any strict psychophysical laws, not generalizations with some degree of nomological force. What would be an example of a strict law? The question might be debated, but prime candidates would be Newton’s law of gravitation, or his three laws of motion, or the laws governing electromagnetism (Lorentz’s force law, Ampere’s law, Faraday’s law of induction, Lenz’s law: you can look them up if you don’t know them by heart). Let’s focus on the gravitational law (it is familiar and intuitive): the mass of the sun (say) acts on the earth over the intervening space and the degree of force it exerts is proportional to that mass and the distance separating the two bodies (the shorter the stronger). What is important is that the law operates continuously, reliably, and without exception—there is no deviation from it. Mass and distance are the only variables involved, and nothing can interfere with the law’s operation—things always work that way. Physical forces are like that: they never let you down, never slacken, never permit exceptions. So, the question is whether psychophysical generalizations are like that—have that kind of regularity, uniformity, simplicity. Consider first belief formation—in science, politics, ethics, aesthetics, etc. Do people believe the same things when confronted by the same evidence? Does the stimulus constituted by the evidence invariably lead to the same belief as response? It does not. No way, no how. The reason is that people form their beliefs based on a variety of factors apart from the objective evidence: their other beliefs, their desires, their personality, what they had for breakfast—and so on. Does everyone arrive at the theory of evolution by natural selection just by looking around at the animals of the world? Of course not; Darwin only arrived at it because he had vastly more evidence than other people, was more intelligent, had greater intellectual integrity, etc. We all live in basically the same world but we form very different beliefs about it. There is no strict law relating sensory input (whatever that is) and beliefs formed; it’s not like the sun’s mass and the earth’s consequent motion. The same physical stimulus does not invariably lead to the same belief formed. The process is more holistic than that, more context-dependent, messier. It is a whole lot more complex. We can’t single out a specific factor and move from that to a prediction about what will happen belief-wise. This is obvious, and it shows that there are no psychophysical laws of that type. Whoever thought there were? But what about perception—are there strict laws governing perception? Here things become less obvious but the consensus is that perception is a lot more like belief formation than has been traditionally supposed: there is no simple automatic transition from physical stimulus, distal or proximal, to eventual conscious percept. I won’t go into the details but we now know that an elaborate quasi-inferential process is at work that supplements and modifies the physical input to the senses. This process is subject to error, breakdown, individual variation, and outright illusion. There is no strict law leading from physical stimulus to veridical perceptual response; there is only the rough generalization “People generally see what’s in front of them”. Even perceptual constancies can be easily disrupted (as psychologists have shown). Not for nothing have perceptual psychologists described perception as a species of hypothesis construction analogous to scientific inference. The perceiver makes an enormous contribution to what is seen; it isn’t a kind of immediate imprinting on the senses—analogous to the influence of the sun’s mass on the earth’s motion (or the effects of magnetism). The earth doesn’t have to interpret the sun’s impact on it in order to know how to move; it’s more like the patellar or blink reflex.[2] Perception is thus like belief formation in respect of its etiology (though not its propositional character) and unlike gravitational influence. Hence there are no strict perceptual psychophysical laws. The causal lines are far more complex and susceptible to subversion; it is not a matter of a single force uniformly doing its thing. The same is true on the output side, and more widely recognized: specific beliefs and desires don’t lead inexorably and universally to a given action; the mind gives rise to behavior in a much more holistic fashion. Again, I won’t labor the point: causal holism is generally accepted where intentional rational action is concerned. But that means that there is no strict law linking specific belief-desire pairs to action types, so there is no strict psychophysical law of this kind either (a fortiori, one might say). The causal sequence is far more circuitous and easily subverted than in cases like gravitation and electromagnetism (we have nothing like “Like poles repel and unlike poles attract”). At best we have probabilities and rules of thumb, not rigid rules and hard determinism. The interface of mind and action is as friable and elastic as the interface between stimulus and percept, more so. Let me sketch an analogy to biology: are there any biophysical laws? Specifically, are there such laws linking survival with physical conditions in the environment, as in the case of shark survival and physical conditions of the ocean? It is well known that temperature and other physical parameters affect plankton proliferation, which affects sardine populations, which affect tuna populations, which affect shark diet (they eat tuna), leading to higher or lower survival rates in sharks. So, we can say that physical conditions in the oceans cause sharks to survive in high numbers or low numbers, as the case may be. But obviously there is no strict law linking these two things, because the intervening variables are so numerous and susceptible to outside influences. We have a huge web of interconnected causal factors at work in producing shark survival or its opposite. Well, the causation of action by the mind is a bit like that: the “stimulus” afforded by a particular belief-desire pair is filtered through a vast network of other mental states that operate in concert to produce a particular behavioral “response”. We don’t have an isolated force capable of producing effects without the cooperation of other variables. In fact, this is the normal state of things: many factors combine to produce particular effects, unlike the pure cases exemplified by gravity and electromagnetism. It would be strange if psychophysical generalizations had the single-minded simplicity of basic physical forces. So, we shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that strict psychophysical laws are not to be found in nature. Causation is seldom simple and straightforward, and it attains a high degree of complexity in the relations between mind and physical reality. Gravity and electromagnetism are special cases: they obey laws that really are strict and unbending, tunnel-visioned and obsessive-compulsive, uncooperative and go-it-alone. Strict laws have a localized causal structure, but the causal structure of psychophysical generalizations is global and diffused—multi-causal not uni-causal.[3]

[1] I wrote about it in my 1978 paper “Mental States, Natural Kinds, and Psychophysical Laws”.

[2] Notice the law of gravitation doesn’t say that some global state of the sun is the cause of the earth’s motion; it says that mass is, and mass alone. But in the case of the mind many causal factors are at work simultaneously.

[3] This way of looking at things does make the denial of psychophysical laws seem unsurprising and rather banal, not bold and exciting (as it perhaps seemed to Davidson—and to my earlier self). Still, it has the advantage of being demonstrably true (Davidson always admitted that his arguments against psychophysical laws were less than conclusive). Strict covering laws are the exception rather than the rule in the universe as we have it.

On Drumming

My thesis is that all playing of musical instruments is drumming. Drumming is what they all have in common, what constitutes their underlying real essence. It might be thought that this cannot be right, because drums are a rhythm instrument and other instruments are used to produce melody. But actually, drums also produce melody in that they have different tones or pitches (drums proper as well as cymbals). Without these tonal differences a drum set would be a poor musical instrument (monotonous, boring). The pitches succeed each other musically and can be superimposed to produce chords. And clearly, we can envisage drum sets that are more tonally designed, with each drum tuned to a specific note and melodies played by striking these drums. There is nothing atonal about drums and drumming. A good drummer (especially a jazz drummer) will use pitch and timbre differences to accentuate and enliven his or her playing. But how can other instruments be forms of drumming? Consider first the xylophone: it is very similar to a set of drums and clearly the act of striking the plates is a type of drumming. The OED gives us the following for “drum” (verb): “beat or play (as) on a drum; make a continuous noise by rapidly repeated blows”. For “drum” (noun) we get: “a percussion instrument sounded by being struck with sticks or the hands”. These definitions fit the xylophone perfectly—and you just have to look at a xylophone player to see the similarity to paradigm drummers. A device (“stick”) is used to strike or tap or otherwise impact a surface that responds by making a particular sound the purpose of which is to produce music. There would be no essential difference if the plates were replaced by drums. True, we don’t call xylophone players drummers, but that is because such a description would be misleading for conversational implicature reasons; however, it is literally true that they employ drumming motions in playing their instrument. Now the piano: the hands are brought down on the keys which then produce notes by way of the instrument’s mechanism. The fingers work percussively (OED: “the action of playing a musical instrument by striking or shaking it”). The pianist is a species of drummer: he hits keys that produce sounds in response. You might say that he also touches or depresses keys, but remember that drummers sometimes use brushes not sticks—it’s not all vigorous banging. And some pianists are highly percussive (e.g., Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard). What about stringed instruments, which may be picked, plucked or bowed? Well, they too are operated by means of percussive actions, more or less vigorous (think of Pete Townsend’s slamming chords). Again, we have a striking action performed on a responsive medium—but a string not a membrane (the drum head or skin). It would be possible to stretch a string over a drum head and pluck it so as to make it strike the drum; that would still be a type of drumming.[1] So, playing guitar, say, qualifies as a form of drumming, as does violin playing. The interior of the instrument (resonance chamber) resembles the interior of a drum, and the action of playing it is like striking (or brushing) the skin of the drum (you can drum your fingers on a table, remember). There is no reason of principle why you couldn’t bow the head of a drum; to be a drummer it is not necessary to drum—you can also scrape, stroke, and palpate. You could be a drummer and never actually drum, or use a drum for that matter. So, logically, pianists and guitarists could be drummers without using drums or even drumming. Still, I prefer the strong and simple thesis that all instrumentalists are drummers, all instruments are drums, and all playing on instruments is drumming. Any oddity in these propositions arises from conversational implicature; logically, drumming is the rule, the universal. Drumming is the underlying essence of all these activities; it is the natural kind that subsumes them. But surely (you protest) wind instruments are not drums and playing them is not drumming—there is no use of hands or feet! By now my response to this will be predictable: first, the hands and fingers are used in depressing the pistons or blocking the holes; but second, air is forcibly expelled into the instrument causing it to vibrate and respond with a particular sound. Drums could be played this way too: a burst of air could be directed at the drum head and a sound elicited. We have a physical (mechanical) stimulus and a musical response—an impact producing a sound in the course of making music. What if the trumpet player were to produce a series of sharp bursts of air that impact the reed and produce rhythmic sounds—wouldn’t that be very like playing the drums? It might even be synchronized with the drummer; the trumpeter has joined the rhythm section. Bass players and rhythm guitarists are already there, striking strings. Finally, the voice: again, this is not difficult to slot into place—the singer drums (percusses) by propelling air into the vocal cords (really vocal membrane) and producing musical sounds. We are familiar with beat-box voicing—imitating the sound of drums with the mouth—so it is not much of a stretch to include ordinary singing in our natural kind. Singing is a variety of percussion—one thing hitting another to produce musical sounds. Tap dancing is also a type of drumming and may be used musically; singing is really not all that different—vocal tapping (using the larynx to produce music by physical impacts). So, all music-making is really drumming: this is its hidden architecture, its compositional make-up, its basic anatomy. There is a continuum from regular drums through xylophone, piano, violin and guitar, wind instruments, and voice—with no natural break or division. Probably drums are the oldest of these instruments, and most primordial, but other instruments build on the same basic idea.[2] That is why it is natural to pick drums out as paradigmatic, but really, we have a family of instruments all united by a common principle—by the mechanism of percussion. We hit things to make sounds and then we string these sounds together to create rhythm and melody. All music is drumming refined and extended. The drummer is the progenitor of all music. Ringo Starr was well-named: he made the Beatles possible.[3]

[1] The snare drum consists of a bunch of wires stretched tight over the reverse side of the drum, so the snare is stringed in much the same way a guitar is.

[2] I suspect that football (soccer) plays a similar role in the genesis of other sports: all other sports are variations on it or developments of it. Don’t say that football isn’t played with the hands, as many other sports are. First, football is partly played with the hands (throw-ins, goalkeeper); and second, the feet are always involved in hand-centered sports, because players have to run around. The basic form of sports consists of an object (often a ball) that is moved around in a competitive activity. Kicking a ball is one of the first sporting activities kids learn. But I won’t go into this further.

[3] Does it surprise you to learn that I was originally a drummer who moved onto guitar, harmonica, and voice? I always kept my love of drums, however. I believe that drumming is a basic human need. Drummers don’t get the respect they deserve. Drummers are close to the World Spirit (as I’m sure Charlie, Keith, and Ringo would agree, all singular figures). Drummers are cool.

Shark Attacks

I recently read Francois Sarano’s excellent forthcoming book In the Name of Sharks (sent to me by the publishers because I wrote a review of a book about the octopus in the Wall Street Journal). It puts up a strong case for the preservation of shark populations in the face of dwindling numbers and impending extinction. The shark has a bad reputation in the human population, fed by prejudice and irrational fear (Steven Spielberg has a lot to answer for in spearheading the human desire to eliminate sharks from the face of the planet). It turns out that shark attacks (Sarano calls them “accidents”) are almost invariably caused by fear (on the part of the shark), territoriality, self-defense, and misunderstanding—not by wanton aggression or predatory behavior. Sharks are not innately violent or perpetually angry. They don’t attack for no reason. They are actually pretty nice, even lovable. This set me wondering about other vices in human and animal populations: do we find counterparts of human vices in other species? Is there wanton aggression, cruelty, torture, bullying, murder, hate crimes, sadism, emotional abuse, malicious gossip, defamation, nasty comments? Apparently not: such evils exist only in human populations. Animals can certainly be violent, but there is a point to it; it isn’t motivated by sheer malice. There are no Iago’s of the animal world. If we want a trait that sets us apart from animals, sheer nastiness would be a good candidate. Even sharks look upon us with disgust and horror.