A Case for Fundamental Intelligence

Metaphysics & Epistemology
1

This is the 3rd version of the argument I’ve posted. The central claim hasn’t changed, but further considerations have helped me clarify the reason for preferring a rational, mind-like foundation and what the limits of that preference are. I want to set out this revised argument in one place so we can focus on what it claims.

Part of my reason for starting this thread is to challenge the materialistic view that I often see taken for granted in these discussions. A nonmental foundation has explanatory questions to answer. I want to examine whether a rational, mind-like foundation is a better explanation of conscious experience, understanding, and reasoning.

By “fundamental” I mean what’s basic to reality, viz., what things ultimately depend on and which doesn’t itself depend on something even more fundamental. The question is whether conscious understanding belongs to this basic nature or arises from something that’s completely nonmental.

Taking the rational and mind-like as fundamental or bedrock is my proposed account of the basis of the world and our individual conscious experiences. It doesn’t give us all the details, but an account can explain something without explaining every detail.

The argument is an inference to the best explanation. I’m not claiming that a nonmental account is impossible or that the conclusion follows with absolute certainty.

P1. We have conscious experiences, understand things, and reason about them. These faculties are connected. In conscious reasoning, we understand what we’re considering and how it bears on a conclusion.

P2. Both accounts must explain how these faculties have their basis in what they take as fundamental.

P3. If what’s fundamental is completely nonmental, conscious experience, understanding, and reasoning must arise from something nonmental. Describing a physical arrangement doesn’t, by itself, explain why that arrangement involves these faculties.

P4. If what’s fundamental is rational and mind-like, these faculties have their basis in what reality already is. On this account, individual minds express something already basic to reality.

P5. Taking these connected faculties as basic gives the mind-like account an explanatory advantage. It doesn’t require conscious understanding to arise from something completely nonmental. Other things being equal, this gives us reason to prefer it.

Conclusion. Other things being equal, we have good reason to favor a rational, mind-like foundation over a completely nonmental one as the basis of conscious experience, understanding, and reasoning.

The main point is in P5. If something rational and mind-like is at bottom, conscious understanding has its roots in reality’s fundamental essence. If what’s at bottom is completely nonmental, these faculties have to arise from something that lacks them.

Maybe they can. I’m not saying they can’t. I’m saying that must be explained, and that taking mind as basic offers an advantage.

Both accounts bottom out somewhere. That alone isn’t an objection to either argument. The question is what each starting point helps to explain.

“Other things being equal” leaves open whether other considerations outweigh the advantage I’ve put forth. It doesn’t require that every question be answered before we can reasonably favor one account over another.

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Very glad to see this OP.

A clarifying question, though: Wouldn’t we have to explain the nonmental via the mental, if P4 were the case? You’re not saying that the nonmental is in fact generated by consciousness, are you? Or maybe you are.

3

The OP is just a composition fallacy (or panpsyche-of-the-gaps fallacy), and therefore, I think acknowledging that we do not know yet how ‘mental’ relates to ‘nonmental’ is the more reasonable position.

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Thanks Jay. I’m saying that something rational and mind-like is fundamental to reality, so the physical world would be sustained or caused by that foundation. So, yes, the account includes the physical world too.

I’m not making the claim that consciousness generates matter through some particular process. P4 doesn’t say how that dependence works or operates.

I’d also distinguish physical from nonmental. Calling the world physical doesn’t settle whether its ultimate basis is completely nonmental. That’s part of what’s being considered. My argument is that a rational, mind-like foundation better accounts for conscious experience, understanding, and reasoning.

5

Got it, thanks.

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Where in the world does the argument infer that what’s true of a part must be true of the whole? P1 just identifies the faculties we’re trying to explain. P4 stipulates the foundation, and P5 gives a reason for preferring it. I haven’t argued that because we’re conscious, the universe must be conscious. That’s a different argument.

The reasoning isn’t simply that we don’t know how consciousness arises, therefore mind must be fundamental. P5 claims the advantage in taking these connected faculties as fundamental. You can challenge whether that provides an explanation, but calling it panpsyche-of-the-gaps doesn’t address the reasons I gave.

We don’t know yet might be a reasonable position. However, uncertainty doesn’t prevent us from comparing explanations or having a good reason to favor one. You’d need to show why the reason in P5 isn’t sufficient to justify the preference.

7

There are a some objections I want to head off at the pass.

First, does the argument assume intelligence in order to explain intelligence? The argument claims intelligence/mind as fundamental and gives a reason for preferring it. Considering a proposed claim isn’t the same as assuming it’s true. However, the claim still has to do some explaining. The question is whether the connection identified in P5 gives us that reason or explanation.

Second, is this special pleading? That would require treating the accounts differently without some reason. I haven’t claimed that emergence is impossible or that my account can ignore the physical world. I’ve simply claimed an advantage in explaining conscious understanding. Obviously that advantage can be challenged, but claiming it isn’t, by itself, asking for an exception, which is why it’s not special pleading.

A stronger objection is that the argument can be reversed. Why not favor the nonmental foundation especially since it doesn’t require the physical world to arise from a mind/s?

This raises the question about whether the advantage I’ve stipulated is somehow offset by something the other account better explains. By reversing the wording it doesn’t settle that comparison. But I can’t dismiss the reversal merely because my argument focuses on consciousness. This is part of what other things being equal leaves open to us.

Finally, I’m not claiming that these are the only possible accounts. A different account might explain these faculties better than either one. That possibility doesn’t prevent us from comparing the two accounts before us.

8

In order to “explain” what you describe as “mental” in yourself directly (and indirectly in other human beings) you argue cannot emerge from “nonmental” reality and therefore reality must itself be “mental” – parts of reality (e.g. humans) are “mental”, therefore the whole of reality must be “fundamentally mental”.

9

Yes, this is more or less what my clarifying question was about. Someone could argue that the gain in explanatory power (if we agree there is one) about consciousness is offset by the new puzzle of how “the physical world arises from a mind/s.” On the other hand, one might maintain, reasonably enough, that either “arising” is hard to explain, no matter whether it’s “consciousness from the physical/nonmental” or “the physical/nonmental from consciousness.” So there’s neither a loss nor a gain in explanatory power.

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You’ve added two claims I’ve explicitly rejected, viz., that consciousness cannot arise from the nonmental and that reality must therefore be mental. The OP says that a nonmental claim isn’t impossible and that my conclusion doesn’t follow with absolute certainty.

I also didn’t infer that the whole has a property because some of its parts have it. P1 stipulates what we’re trying to explain. P4 proposes a mind-like foundation, and P5 gives the reason for preferring the claim, other things being equal.

The conclusion depends on that claimed explanatory advantage. It isn’t humans are conscious, therefore reality is conscious. You can challenge whether P5 provides a good reason, but replacing it with an inference I haven’t made doesn’t make your point that I’ve committed a composition fallacy.

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I agree that the advantage could be offset as you say, but that’s why the conclusion says other things being equal. But the fact that both accounts have something difficult to explain doesn’t demonstrate that there’s neither a gain nor a loss in the power of the explanation.

P5 gives a reason for favoring a mind-like foundation concerning conscious experience, understanding, and reasoning. Your objection raises a question about whether that reason is outweighed elsewhere. That remains open to discussion, but the possibility of an offset doesn’t itself cancel the reason given in the argument.

Part of my aim is to show that favoring a mind-like foundation is reasonable, because many counter-arguments try to demonstrate that such a position is unreasonable. I don’t need to settle every further question to do that, although the reason given in P5 still needs to hold up. Your objection identifies something relevant to the comparison, but it doesn’t by itself show that the preference is unreasonable.

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@Sam26 I don’t really fully understand the argument (I don’t have any expertise in philosophy), but I have an adjacent question. Do you hold that human minds are able to apprehend reality, and that reason is more than just a contingent function of our cognitive apparatus? And does this matter?

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Quite right. I’m not even sure it was an objection, as I’m still thinking over your OP. I just noticed a line of development, as one might in a chess game.

The main thing you’ll have to keep insisting on, I think, is that you’re proposing an IBE, not a watertight syllogism that proves something about metaphysics. People will want to misunderstand you on that score.

14

I do think we can know things about reality. Although our knowledge is limited, and we can easily be mistaken or fool ourselves, but that doesn’t prevent us from knowing things.

Our way of reasoning may depend on how we’re constituted. However, that doesn’t settle whether our ability to understand and reason has a completely nonmental basis. That’s the question I’m raising.

It matters to my argument that we can understand and know things. I’m asking whether a rational, mind-like foundation better explains those capacities. I’m not assuming that reason exists separately from minds.

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15

I agree.

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Isn’t this where much contemporary philosophy seems to be heading, certainly at a popular level? Think of figures as different as Jordan Peterson, Iain McGilchrist, Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, and David Bentley Hart. Despite their idiosyncrasies, they all seem to be moving toward some form of idealism, often with a significant whiff of Neoplatonic influence. Would you be comfortable following that trajectory too, or do you think it goes too far?

I’ve often found it ironic (if a superficial observation) that even the concepts central to materialism, such as matter, causation, space, and time, are abstractions produced through mental activity. In that sense, materialism appears to depend upon consciousness for its own formulation, since the very idea of a material world is something constructed within thought.

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Consider that a mind or Mind requires parts for thinking, planning, implementing, etc., and as such the part would have to be more fundamental than the Mind; so it is that minds come about way later on.

It does seem, though, that the capability for consciousness is inherent in a physical nonmental base.

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18

I’ve listened to most of those people. I find, for e.g., that Peterson is stronger on psychology than philosophy, but I’m sympathetic to some of their general ideas.

It’s true that materialism depends on thought for its formulation. Someone has to understand what “matter,” “space,” and “time” mean before they can use those concepts to explain the world.

A materialist could reply that its our brains that make understanding possible. That’s a reasonable reply, but it leaves the question, as I’ve pointed out, of how something completely nonmental gives rise to conscious understanding.

That’s the question my argument addresses. We experience things, understand them, and reason about them. Is that better explained by something already mind-like at the foundation, or by something completely nonmental? I think its the former.

19

  1. Cite some evidence which supports “something already mind-like at the foundation”.

  2. Describe how this “mind-like foundation” explains how “we experience … understand … and reason”.

:neutral_face:

20

Consider your argument in light of current developments in the phenomenology of biology and basal cognition (which refers to cognitive-like capacities found in relatively simple living systems, including cells and organisms without nervous systems). The physicalist picture tends to treat life and mind as successive additions to an essentially nonmental physical substrate and evolution as like a chemically-driven algorithm (compare Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett.)

But approaches such as enactivism instead begin with organism as agent: a self-maintaining system for which environmental conditions are significant. A bacterium does not merely undergo chemical reactions; its activity is organised around maintaining itself, and it negotiates its environment according to what matters for its continued existence. I think it can be argued that this is already a manifestation of intelligence: not by any means a ‘grand designer’ but more like the manifestation of something implicit.

Theoritical biologist Michael Levin’s work on basal cognition and bioelectricity provides examples. Levin argues, and demonstrates experimentally, that cognitive capacities need not begin with brains or nervous systems. Cellular collectives can exhibit goal-directed problem-solving, while bioelectric networks can store and communicate information involved in regulating large-scale anatomical outcomes. Morphogenesis and regeneration can be investigated in terms normally associated with cognition, although this need not imply consciousness in the human sense. In a book chapter called Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis as a Teleonomic Process he writes

“goal-directed function is not just the province of advanced brains with self-aware agency, but rather is a primary principle scaled up from basal functions in the most primitive life forms.”

This doesn’t establish that mind is fundamental nor that cells are conscious. But it calls into question the supposed division between a completely nonmental physical foundation and the eventual emergene of mentality (which in my view still harks back to the Cartesian division).

There is an interesting historical resonance. The Stoics conceived logos spermatikos as an immanent formative principle: the Logos was simultaneously force, law and “seed”, the principle by which things develop toward their characteristic forms, ‘penetrating the world as honey does the honeycomb’ (ref) . This obviously isn’t the same as contemporary biological teleonomy, but there is a striking structural parallel with Michael Levin’s work. Levin argues that goal-directed organisation is not something that first appears with brains and conscious self-awareness, but is already present in basal biological processes. His work on morphogenesis describes cellular collectives as maintaining target states, detecting deviations from those states, and modifying their behaviour to reduce the discrepancy. Bioelectric networks can even encode and retain information about those target states. So, perhaps this is a precedent for a way of thinking about the kind of intelligence at issue.