Is the Mind Cause or Consequence?

Philosophy of Mind
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If you are going to fall back into labeling, instead of directly addressing what I’ve said then I am not interested in continuing. You need to explain why it matters necessarily, as opposed to subjectively ( fro some). Relativism is one thing―presuming to speak for others, let alone for all, is another.

I don’t need to add “by the senses or by scientific instruments”, because I am open to any form of reliable detection you might cite. Reason by itself tells us nothing about the world ―it is merely a method that (hopefully) practices consistency of thought. It cannot guarantee its premises and must rely on observation to generate those.

Existential truths are discovered by observation of human life and by reflection on one’s own experience. For me the imagination is paramount, not in delivering propositional truths about the nature of things but in embodying the most beautiful visions. For me music is the paradigmatic art form in that it says nothing about the nature of things at all, and yet it can move us so profoundly.

I’m familiar with the term imaginal. I coined it for myself before I ever encountered it in the writings of Jung. As far as I know Jung saw himself as a scientist and never claimed that the imaginal yielded any universal or absolute truth about the nature of the Cosmos. Of course it, indirectly, yields truths about humanity in that what we can imagine is a great part of what we are.

Spinoza, as a rationalist, believed in the verity of intellectual intuition as guide to the nature of nature. Kant rejected that and then Hegel brought it back (“the Rational is the Real”). I tend to (reservedly) believe in the power of imagination and intuition myself, but I know the veracity of our imaginings cannot be demonstrated to point to any absolute reality, and in any case for me it consists more in the nature of poetic intimations than it is explicitly discursive. Look at continental philosophy―much of it is ineliminably ambiguous, and it is within that ambiguity that the sense of insight lives.

The idea that science demystifies and disenchants our view of nature is itself ambiguous. Looked at one way we can say it does, but from another perspective it re-enchants nature by freeing our view of it from fossilized dogma. It is down to individuals as to whether they are enchanted or disenchanted by science. That is not relativism but is simply an acknowledgement of human diversity, which the dogmatists would so like to eliminate.

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It’s not science itself that is at issue in all this. but ‘mechanistic materialism’. I had a brief skirmish over this with another contributor a few days back who would accept nothing less than the proposition that ‘humans are 100% machines’. (The conversation didn’t progress much past that point.)

Other than that, :clap: for the remainder.

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Okay, perhaps we misunderstood one another a little. Now I think we are not disagreeing over much of substance.

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Sure, that’s why I began the thought with “if it does.” I don’t think the dichotomy has to be forced in this way.

Let’s consider this. We might mean two different things by such a formulation. We might mean, “Reason itself has been constructed, formed, created, ‘brought about’, etc. as a natural adaptation.” That would be a questionable explanation of “reason in biological terms,” one that leaves no role for the claims of reason itself.

But we might also mean, “Reason, in all its sovereignty or completeness or quiddity, has appeared in the evolutionary story as a result of biological imperatives.” I don’t find that nearly as objectionable. It merely acknowledges that we’re not trying to tell a story in which Reason (deliberately capitalized) manifests itself all at once like the Holy Spirit, with no explanation or placement within the natural evolutionary world.

An analogy might be with a manufactured thing, say a car. The car has an “evolutionary story”; it doesn’t just appear on the road. But qua car, it is what it is, and its capacities are its capacities, not those of its component parts. You can’t explain the car by talking about how it was made. But nor can you leave out how it was made, if you want to tell a complete story.

This analogy is imperfect because the car doesn’t also make claims about its own role in the scheme of things! But I think it helps to make the idea clear. The point is that we can acknowledge a genetic, temporal story about how reason comes to be placed in nature, without having to conclude that therefore what reason is, is fully determined by nature.

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The whole conversation ends if we don’t want to say that items like mind and rationality are not natural. They are natural.

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I see what you’re getting at. But @Wayfarer is exploring whether “natural as ‘essentially mechanical’” needs to be rejected. A better understanding of what “natural” means wouldn’t have to contrast it with “supernatural” as the opposed binary. Presumably you’d be fine with that as well.

My question to Wayfarer would be: If you rightly jettison all these unsatisfactory understandings of “natural,” is there one that’s left, which you believe is appropriate for describing how mind and rationality appear in our world? Or are you holding out for a way of seeing those items that is properly called “non-natural”? In which case, what is the specific contrast being made that would justify this?

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"Natural as ‘essentially mechanical’” certainly does need to be rejected. Even if consciousness was proven to be essentially mechanical, we would have no justification for declaring the only things that make up our reality are things that can be detected with our senses and technology.

I do not believe consciousness is mechanical. I am not aware of any physical characteristics, nobody has suggested any when I’ve asked, no physical properties or characteristics have any obvious similarity to consciousness, and there are no theories as to how the physical creates consciousness. If there is no justification for declaring everything in our reality is essentially mechanical even if consciousness is known to be so, then the uncertain nature of consciousness surely doesn’t strengthen that position.

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There is one major problem here: The mind cannot gradually emerge. This means that something either has a mind or it does not, if we accept that the mind is emergent. So, there must be a point in the progression of life in which, before, there was no mind, and after, there was a mind. Life, however, is a natural phenomenon that gradually evolves. This means that we cannot divide life into pre- and post- modes where the mind does not exist and then exists. There is, however, a tension between these two statements. The only way to remove the tension is to accept that the mind is not emergent and it is fundamental.

Any form of life experiences. This follows from the previous argument that the mind is fundamental and exists in all forms of life.

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That was @Wayfarer 's phrase, perhaps a bit strong. Another way of saying it might be, “Nature as the realm of law, of cause and effect.” Put that way, it’s more problematic, wouldn’t you say? I mean, we do assume cause-and-effect when we do science; we subsume events under laws. Of course quantum strangeness raises some questions about that, but at the macro level this is one of the many reasons why placing consciousness in nature can be difficult. Certainly I agree that consciousness is not in any sense mechanical, but is it an effect of a cause, and thus subsumable under “normal” science? And if so, does that make reason also an effect of a cause, or is that an entirely different question?

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But even the expression ‘appearing in the world’ is a naturalistic attitude, isn’t it? Treating mind and reason as phenomena which appear, which can be examined alongside other phenomena. Humanity is then a species and reason an adaptation to the enviorment. Cognitive and evolutionary science may of course see it that way, but the philosophical question arises from a different perspective. Wasn’t this central to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology?

The complete inversion of the natural stance of life, thus into an ‘unnatural’ one, places the greatest conceivable demands upon philosophical resolve…Natural human understanding and the objectivism rooted in it will view every transcendental philosophy as a flighty eccentricity, its wisdom as useless foolishness, or it will interpret it as a psychology which seeks to convince itself that it is not psychology. (Crisis § 57, p. 200; VI 204)

Husserl criticizes the ‘natural attitude’:

From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined.

But I don’t like the term ‘unnatural’ or ‘non-natural’. It’s more that something in human nature transcends nature - which goes back to the ‘evolutionary threshold’.

.’…we may be surrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined by nature, nor by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual I.’ The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy, Alfredo Ferrarin

Hans Jonas brings in ‘Spirit’ in the later essays in his book - but not at all in sense intended by creationism. He was a secular Jew. (But then, consider Jonas’ earlier book on the gnositcs, who beleive we were spirits trapped in an alien world from which we had to escape (‘we are spirits in a material world’ ~ The Police).

I think behind all of this is a deep question about the nature of reason. It was assumed by Greek philosophy that there was a reason why we exist, why the world is as it is. Discovering those reasons was part and parcel of philosophy. But reason in that sense became consigned to the realm of metaphysics, leaving only physical causation as a respectable object of scientific analysis.

I recall a less-than-inspiring debate on Australian television in 2012 between Bishop George Pell (now deceased) and Richard Dawkins. Pell raised the question ‘why are we here?’, to which Dawkins responded with something very like, You’re playing with the word “why” there. We can give you antecedent causes, but the question of “why” is meaningless.

And yet, without that sense of meaning, reason in some sense looses it’s fulcrum.

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It depends on the specific thing we’re discussing, and how we define it. I think consciousness is fundamental. Everything is conscious. It is not caused by anything any more than mass is.

I think minds are a completely different topic. And yes, “Nature as the realm of law, of cause and effect” is definitely more problematic when it comes to minds.

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What’s fascinating here is the unexpected collision of Dawkins and Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein this “failure of the why” is the “mystical” itself. The brute fact of the world is wonderful, and scientific explanation is a merely local affair, a finding of patterns within that fact. Dawkins might even agree in dry conceptual terms on this issue with Wittgenstein, but of course his primary concern is defending scientism. To be clear, he’s a great scientist. By “scientism” I mean a certain way of making sense of science in relation to the larger lifeworld (and in relation to religion, for instance.)

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Good stuff !

We also need not read Nature deterministically at the global scale. And palpably nature is a fountain of novelty. If we entertain reason as emerging from nature, then nature is hardly something “dead” and “fixed.”

In general, we have a “softened Hegelianism” at our disposal, that is less insistent on the goal being determined from the beginning. Nature is such that creatures emerging within that nature can (try to ) speak the nature of nature. Strangely, nature emerges in the first place through this speaking, and yet this speaking also comes last.

I lean toward the priority of the future and its asymmetry with respect to the past, but I acknowledge the utility of the construction of the past.

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Hmm, I wouldn’t have thought so. If we say that mind and reason are phenomena to which we have access (which is all I meant by “appear in the world”), we haven’t committed ourselves one way or the other toward naturalism. I think you have to be careful not to exoticize reason so much that we can’t even claim to experience it.

But if you took me to be using “appear in the world” in a way that assumes such an appearance must be a “traditional” naturalistic event, then yes, I can see your objection.

Yes to all that, and now you’re gesturing at a possible contrast with “natural” which I’d like to see elaborated. As you say below:

Here is the place to apply pressure, I think. What more can we say about this transcendence that will distinguish it from mere “non-naturalism” but not wind up talking about the supernatural after all? (There had better be something more to say, otherwise my version of non-naturalism is in trouble too!).

Another way to put it: Let’s say something like “liberal naturalism” is true, at least as a general attitude. We still need the ontological distinctions already mentioned. Whether, in making them, we end up identifying something that can’t fit even into liberal naturalism – that’s the question. What is that transcendent something? And how are we going to place it nonetheless within the world of human beings?

OK. From that point of view, I agree that consciousness couldn’t be considered an effect, caused by something else.

Then I guess that’s what I meant, in your parlance. If we place mind in nature, that seems to require a causal explanation of how subjectivity can be an effect in the natural world. For that matter, it equally requires an account of how it can be a cause of physical events, as we believe it to be.

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That is very like what Descartes believed. He equated thought with reason, and as only humans have the capacity to reason, then animals were regarded as automatons, totally devoid of interiority. (This had unfortunate consequences.)

Dawkins has a notoriously inept grasp of philosophy.

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I wonder if there is a substantive difference between the two framings you present here. Surely the ability to tell a logically consistent story about the diverse conditions critical for survival that humans found themselves faced with across the ages of human life would be an adaptive advantage. And even some animals reason, so the capacity is not unique to humans, although it seems obvious that symbolic language enables a great expansion of reason.

What is the difference between "brought about as a natural adaptation’ and “as a result of biological imperatives”. Surely survival is the first and foremost biological imperative.

The capitalization “Reason”, and the talk of the “sovereignty of Reason” I think mystifies the issue unnecessarily. If our reasoning is not consistent and coherent then our survival will be threatened. This is happening now in regard to global warming and all the other dire environmental and social problems we face.

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But I do share this view, my friend.

The “thing in itself” is the “idea” of the thing as an infinitely open collection of its different faces. A system of faces with no true or final face.

The “absolute” is the infinitely open system of the world’s “faces.”

This open-ness is well expressed in terms of a darkness beyond all that is lit. The world is more than it has shown itself to be so far. Every object, in order to be an object, is infinitely rich.

I think there’s a way to fuse thinkers like Plato and Heraclitus and Parmenides and Heidegger along these lines.

And I agree with your last point : we don’t want to exhaust the mystery of the world, which does not mean that we don’t want to explore it in detail. Because we love its details, we also appreciate its infinite “depth.”

For Leibniz, one could zoom in forever without running out of novelty and detail. Contrast this with a pursuit for the “bottom” of things. Yet I don’t resent reductionism as a potent technique.

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I’m sorry if I misunderstood you. Perhaps the point source of misunderstanding comes from my unfamiliarity with your more radical phenomenalism, and my (perhaps superficial) understanding of “conventional” phenomenalism as a complete rejection of the reality (and not merely a rejection of the “for us” and/or determinable reality) of the in itself.

I certainly agree with Leibniz about the infinite supply of novelty and detail. If I recall correctly Whitehead acknowledges his debt to Leibniz, who was one of the truly great minds. I am yet to explore his Monadology, but it’s on the list.

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Hey no prob !

This is how phenomenalism is usually grokked, so it was risky of me to try to “reactivate” this marginalized -ism in terms of its latent possibility. As I came to see it, phenomenalism is a nondual approach to sharing objects. Mill’s possibilities of sensatation are fundamentally interpersonal and law-like. Husserl read Mill closely in his youth, and you can even see Husserl’s analysis of the spatial object as a “transcendent unity” of its adumbrations as an elaboration of Mill’s approach. With Heidegger, we get to add the rich lifeworld historicity also to the adumbration or “face” of the object. And then we can look at Plato/Heraclitus as trying to point out the “ideal unity” of these faces.

My objection to mathematical platonism is its opposition to this ideality, which it mistakes for support. The “ideal” is precisely not substance, but a strange “characterization” of substance. The river is not hidden behind its rushing waters in general but the water there now is a river because of the water that is not there now. It’s the same with a fugitive vocalization of the relatively enduring word “mother.” The word is inexhaustible in terms of vocalizations and yet not “other than” these vocalizations, which are “primarily” yet to arrive —like what hides more generally in the darkness of objects in the greater darkness of the world.

Anyway, I see Mill as radically empirical and also committed to free inquiry. Feyerabend gives him some love in Against Method. Feyerabend, following Mill, stresses the importance of a plurality of theories, because we understand each more deeply in contrast to the others.

Just for clarity, I don’t endorse all of Leibniz, but he does offer us “ontological perspectivism” and “infinite depth.”

Here’s the “infinite depth” stuff.

  1. And the Author of nature has been able to employ this divine and infinitely wonderful power of art, because each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients observed, but is also actually subdivided without end, each part into further parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. (Theod. Prelim., Disc. de la Conform. 70, and 195.) →
    …
  2. Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. →
    …
  3. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond.
    …
  4. And though the earth and the air which are between the plants of the garden, or the water which is between the fish of the pond, be neither plant nor fish; yet they also contain plants and fishes, but mostly so minute as to be imperceptible to us. →
    …
  5. Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves. (Theod. Pref. [E. 475 b; 477 b; G. vi. 40, 44].) →
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In short, my rejection of the “thing-in-itself” was just a rejection of the “internalization” of experience as something “unreal.” Experience is “immediately” the ongoing revelation of a world that will never stop unrolling and unfolding, the fugitive lighting-up of a vast darkness. For sure many thinkers have been “empirical” in a “lesser-in-retropect” sense, taking their own perishable and ultimately personal vocabularies to be the mind of eternal god, which they could impose on the flux as a constraint of its possibility to surprise. And there is something in all of us —or definitely in me — that “refuses to see” and “refuses to hear” what we don’t yet know what to do with. I left a killer quote ( at least it strikes me as even numinous) from Gadamer on “experience versus knowledge” in the Time and Being thread. He discusses a vision of what “cannot be destroyed” ( time itself?) as a basically religious experience, in the direction of Greek tragedy.