Is the Mind Cause or Consequence?

Philosophy of Mind
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This is all subject of those very long conversations about causal closure, right? The causal closure principle being that real effects must have physical causes. Space of reasons, normativity, free will and determinism, all that.

Remember, this thread starts with philosophy of biology (and by implication evolution). In that context, the mainstream theory is the emphasis is on physical causation as distinct from intentional or purposive behaviour. The corresponding debate in the general sense, is whether human intentionality and reason are themselves attributable to physical causation or are simply products of physical causes:

The general idea, then, looks something like this:

• The true nature of things is evident only at the bottom, and so we must understand life from the bottom up.

• What we find at the bottom are scraps of molecular machinery.

• Through the power of natural selection — which operates like a mindlessly mechanistic algorithm (Dennett) or a blind, unconscious automatism (Dawkins) — these low-level molecular machines slowly evolve into the kind of apparently purposeful, complex entities we recognize as organisms, including ourselves.

• Whatever we are to make of this appearance of meaning and purpose — including my own intentions as I write this and yours as you read it — we are both urged to shed our prejudices and acknowledge that we with our intentions somehow arise from more basic, underlying processes that are essentially dumb, meaningless, and mindless.

Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness, Steve Talbott.

Now, surely you don’t think like this, nor most of the other contributors to this discussion, but nevertheless that is the main foil for this debate.

On the contrary, I think the popular view is that we have an excellent grasp of the past, far more accurate than our forebears, and on one level this is perfectly true, through evolutionary biology, geology and cosmology. But where I differ from scientific realism, is to insist that this understanding is still reliant on the perspective that only the observer can provide. Evan Thompson et al quote Merleau Ponty to this effect in their book The Blind Spot:

For what exactly is meant by saying that the world existed prior to human consciousnesses? It might be meant that the earth emerged from a primitive nebula where the conditions for life had not been brought together. But each one of these words, just like each equation in physics, presupposes our pre-scientific experience of the world, and this reference to the lived world contributes to constituting the valid signification of the statement. Nothing will ever lead me to understand what a nebula, which could not be seen by anyone, might be. Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world ~ Merleau Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p465

Quoted in:
The Blind Spot
Adam Frank; Marcelo Gleiser; Evan Thompson;

A quote that often produces a violently hostile reaction :wink:

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103

I like this part:

It seems to go nicely with the idea that consciousness can’t be an illusion, because an illusion needs a viewer, and it hardly makes sense to say consciousness is an illusion to itself.

The next sentence is also good:

If meaning and purpose exist at any level, then they are part of this reality. It doesn’t seem justifiable to say that they can only exist at some specific level(s).

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Yes, Steve Talbott’s essays are excellent. They’re the source of a lot of the reading in philosophy of biology I’ve been doing.

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Very good, I never noticed that.

To expand on @John 's point: Earlier, I used the analogy of a car to talk about how reason might be said to evolve. I’ve realized that an even better analogy would be the eye. Did the eye evolve in order for creatures to see? In one sense, yes. But we can’t explain the evolution of the eye that way. The vastly complex structures that comprise the eye, and eyesight, were selected, one by one, because the creatures that possessed them survived and propagated. Fine, but this doesn’t at all mean that the (eventual) eye does not serve the purpose of seeing, or that seeing is therefore explainable in terms of its constituent components.

So with reason. There is surely an evolutionary story about how the various components we require in order to reason – many of which are still a mystery to us – came about. But the result, reason itself, is sui generis. I don’t think this is a reductionist account, therefore. It doesn’t explain reason, it explains (or will someday) the evolution of the capacities that lead to reason, and that is not the same thing, any more than explaining photoreceptor cells would explain eyesight.

If any of this is right, then the important takeaway would be that reason is not being “explained in other terms” here, any more than the eye is. We use the eye for seeing, and quite rightly. We use reason for thinking, quite rightly. The fact that both faculties help us survive (if they do!) isn’t relevant.

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OK. But doesn’t the essential question remain: How does that something – call it what you will – act as a cause, with effects in the physical world?

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I’m fascinated by how three threads – “Placement Problems,” “Is Mind Cause or Consequence?” and “Question about a philosophical sentence” – have converged to treat similar problems. So I’m going to post this twice, here and also in “Placement Problems” – I can’t tell which is the more appropriate spot!

Basically I want to bring our friend John McDowell into the loop again, and quote some of what he says in the final lecture in Mind and World. I should add that I don’t think McDowell has the last word on any of this, I just happen to be reading him right now and finding him helpful.

He references Aristotle:

. . . the Aristotelian idea that normal mature human beings are rational animals. Animals are, as such, natural beings, [but] a familiar modern conception of nature tends to extrude rationality from nature. The effect is that reason is separated from our animal nature, as if being rational placed us partially outside the animal kingdom. Specifically, the understanding is distanced from sensibility.

. . .

One way to avoid this dilemma is to leave unquestioned the conception of nature that threatens to extrude reason from nature, but to reconceive reason in naturalistic terms, on a corresponding understanding of what it is for a term to be naturalistic. This position is what I have been calling “bald naturalism.” It allows us to conceive ourselves as rational animals . . . but it does not address the philosophical worries I have been considering, but simply refuses to feel them. (108)

In other words, we could simply assert that reason is natural after all – it is not the sort of thing that is “extruded from nature” – and leave it at that. But that is unsatisfying, because it seems not to account for the Kantian spontaneity of reason – or, as we might say, the claim that the space of reasons is sui generis, and deals with meaning, not cause-and-effect.

The other way to go, according to McDowell, would be to reject a conception of “natural” that reduces reason to the realm of lawlike behaviors. Aristotle’s conception of “rational animal” is

neither naturalistic in the modern sense (there is no hint of reductionism or foundationalism) nor fraught with philosophical anxiety. What makes this possible is that Aristotle is innocent of the very idea that nature is the realm of law and therefore not the home of meaning. That conception of nature was laboriously brought into being at the time of the modern scientific revolution.

. . . [So] we can acknowledge the great step forward that human understanding took when our ancestors formed the idea of a domain of intelligibility, the realm of natural law, that is empty of meaning, but we can refuse to equate that domain of intelligibility with nature, let alone with what is real. (109)

Thus, we can tinker either with what “rational” means or with what “natural” means. McDowell favors the latter. He doesn’t think we can shove rationality into the Procrustean bed of “bald naturalism” and then walk away. Instead, we should reconsider what counts as “natural,” and why we are feeling the anxiety about a “natural world” that somehow mechanizes or reduces rationality to the realm of law (science). Whose conception of “natural” are we frightened of here, and what warrant is there for it?

I won’t go any further, but I hope it’s plain how these various options have informed the discussions on the threads so far.

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Yes, the question definitely remains, and it is the essential one. And we know there is an answer to be found, because we know it’s happening.

My guess as to how it works will make most of you think I’m crazier than you already think I am. But I have my fireproof clothes on, so it’s all good. :grinning_face:

I think it’s all about feeling. At least, “feel” is the best word I can think of. I think subjective experience is felt experience. We speak of the feeling of experiencing red. I think Nagel’s “What is it like…” means “What does it feel like…” What does it feel like to be a human? Not what it feels like physically, although that is a part of it. Not what it feels like emotionally, although that is a part of it. Subjective experience is the feeling of being.

Let’s consider Brian Greene’s words again:

I think he has it exactly right. Properties of matter that make it produce something also make it subject to that thing. It goes in both directions. Why wouldn’t it? The property of iron that allows it to be turned into a magnet also makes it subject to magnets.

I propose that the property that leads to clumps of matter that have mental states that we experience as thought, awareness, and self-awareness, makes those same clumps of matter susceptible to thought, awareness, and self-awareness.

Let’s think about how infants move. They aren’t thinking about moving yet. Their brains have to develop much more before they’ll be able to think. At first, they move uncontrollably. Their limbs jerk all around. But soon, they learn control. How does this happen? It happens by feeling. They feel what it’s like when their arm moves this way, when their leg moves that way. I don’t mean an emotion. I mean the feeling of physical motion. And, with enough time, and a developing brain, they remember when a movement leads to something good. They see mom, their arm stretches out in various ways, and they make physical contact with mom. The next time they want to touch mom, they reproduce the feeling of the arm moving the way it did last time. And they get their reward of more physical contact with mom.

They can only reproduce the feeling. They can’t think about specific muscle movements. Even we can’t do that. Think about how you move your muscles when you write with a pencil. Think about it as clearly, in as much precise detail as you can.
Exactly what do you think?
Exactly which muscles do you move?
Exactly how do you accomplish the movement of each muscle?

When I want to write something with a pencil, I don’t think of the specific muscle fibers in all my fingers and arm, telling each to move in exactly the right way. I know what I want to do. I can vocalize my intentions, but those specific thoughts aren’t how I move.

I move by reproducing the feelings of the movements. This is what it feels like to move my fingers in this manner. We can even reproduce those feelings in our imagination without moving our hands, just as we can think of sentences without speaking.

Feeling is what consciousness is, and feeling is how consciousness is causal.

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109

Not crazy at all. In fact, I need to chew on it for a while. The reciprocity of affecting/being affected is certainly characteristic of a lot of items in nature.

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I think you are right, and that the way you’re depicting it is not reductionist. What I criticized was the (almost universal) assumption that reason and language are the product of natural selection as if this accounts for the capabilities they bestow. But then, no sooner I write that, than I hear someone ask, ‘what else could they be?’ The implication being that either it’s the ‘product of natural selection’, or it’s theist or vitalist. (In my earlier thread On Purpose I was constantly coming up the accusation of vitalism, that it’s what I really meant even if it wasn’t being said out loud.)

Also consider this. According to Simon Conway-Morris in Life’s Solution, the eye has evolved independently somewhere between forty and sixty times in different lineages — camera eyes in vertebrates and cephalopods like the octopus, compound eyes in arthropods, pinhole eyes in nautilus, various intermediate forms in other groups. The remarkable thing is not just that eyes evolved repeatedly but that they converged on similar solutions — the camera eye of the octopus is structurally very similar to the vertebrate eye despite having evolved completely independently.

But then, from an Aristotelian-Thomist perspective (encompassing teleological explanations), all these different organs are instances of the form ‘sight’. They evolved by many diverse pathways — in order to see! But it is the ‘in order to’ which has been problematical for molecular biology — because it implies purpose. This is why, I contend, the neologism ‘teleonomy’ was devised (by Colin Pittendrigh, in 1955).

Breaking news: Having just written that, I casually googled ‘Colin Pittendrigh’ to validate the above date, and stumbled upon Evolution “On Purpose” - Teleonomy in Living Systems (MIT open access). It is about just the ideas being discussed in this OP, and also in the thread On Purpose (Reprise). This book is a goldmine. Sample chapter titles: How Purposive Agency Became Banned from Evolutionary Biology, Denis Noble and Raymond Noble; Evolutionary Foundationalism: The Myth of the Chemical Given, Denis M. Walsh; Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis as a Teleonomic Process, Michael Levin.

This book is associated with the Third Way in evolutionary theory. This presents itself as an alternative to intelligent design, on the one hand (Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer) and mainstream neo-Darwinism on the other (Dawkins et al). It’s known as the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.

Anyway - I digress. I’ll make some further comments later, I have some pressing commitments to attend to.

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I think mechanistic materialism actually died before God did. Unfortunately there seem to be many on whom one death or the other, perhaps even both, has failed to register.

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I think feeling is essential to it, and feeling is unavoidably subjective.

So you wouldn’t categorise ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ as mechanistic materialism? it addresses the appearance of design in nature and argues that natural selection operating on random variation produces the illusion of purpose without any actual purpose. The watchmaker is blind — no foresight, no intention, no goal. It is an illustration of what Hans Jona describes as “ontological dominance of death” — nature as a fundamentally purposeless mechanism, with apparent purpose as an evolutionary side-effect. And we are constantly assured that the ‘universe is fundamentally purposeless’ in this view.

From Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness, Steve Talbott (cited above)

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this (i.e. biomolecular reactions) exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.

Do you think that idea is dead?

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I diverge here it seems. For me the deepest structure is what cannot be a part of the forum, and yet provides the possibility for its existence―the invisible that sustains the visible. I don’t know if you understand animals to be a part of the forum, but they are certainly, in my view, part of the shared world. We humans can speak about our perceptions, and so from the anthropocentric view we can say that the in itself consists merely in the possibility of future perceptions or past perceptions we could have had if we had been there, but I see it as being much more, infinitely more, and paradoxically much less, infinitely less, than that. It is its very indeterminability that makes possible perceptual determinations, it’s very lack of identity that makes identification possible.

So, I’m not sure about Kant’s purported allusion to alien life, because I can see no reason to doubt that he would have thought any possible perceptual process to be spatiotemporally mediated, which would leave the purportedly non-spatiotemporal in itself untouched―forever beyond any possible perception, alien or otherwise.

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I think we’ve been over this many times―perhaps too many times. Humans of course have purposes, and we can discern what we think of as purpose in living organisms. Can we discern purpose in the non-living parts of nature?

To say that there is no ultimate, overarching global purpose or meaning is not necessarily to deny that there may be “local” purposes wherever there is sentience and it is also not necessarily a mechanistic view. I take Dawkins to be arguing specifically against the monotheistic idea that creation was designed purposely by God―that God has a plan in mind. This designing, law-giving and ultimately law-enforcing God who is understood to be so concerned with, and ready to reward or punish, his creatures also seems to me to be a pernicious, detrimental to human life, and thus unacceptable, idea.

Some of Dawkin’s rhetorical language such as “mindless robots” which is obviously primarily designed for polemical effect is not to my taste, and his key idea of the “selfish gene” is, ironically, and inconsistently, an anthropomorphic projection. So, he doesn’t come across as much of a philosopher, but he is a great scientist with an unfortunate axe to grind.

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That book I just found, above - really worth a look. And it’s open access!

Well obviously Dawkins ‘argues against God’. He’s made a career out of it, and sold millions of books on it. But the philosophical question of purpose in life is rather a more delicate issue. By saying that purpose is ‘local’, then you’re again ‘subjectivising’ it - making it a matter of individual predilection. I think there’s much more too it than that, but that the attempt to explore the question is usually interpreted by you as a covert appeal to theism.

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According to a philosopher, a common fallacy made by those who oppose naturalism (evolution +) is that of equivocation, on the word “design”. It’s true that there’s design - organisms are well-designed, in most cases, for their environment - but this design is brought about by a combination of a replicator (DNA), mutability (random variation), and natural selection (environmental pressure). There’s no mind hiding behind the curtains, tweaking the dials.

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This might not matter much, but I would change where you put the emphasis: “the (almost universal) assumption that reason and language are the product of natural selection as if this accounts for the capabilities they bestow.” In a sense, reason and language are products, or at least they may be. But being produced by natural selection (if that is what happened) does not mean that we now have an account, an explanation, for the capabilities in question. As you point out, the eye has been a product many times over. But that is not an account of sight, of the capacity of seeing.

Well, but fair play, it’s a good question. The “implication” may not be right, but we all want to know the answer: How should we describe and understand items like reason, mind, meaning, et al.? If there were no puzzle about this, the entire conversation (including the very idea of a “placement problem”) would be inutile.

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That’s what I meant. But it also means that it’s easy to collapse the meaning of reason into ‘why it evolved.’ And why did it evolve? Well, it gave early man great survival out on the Veldt! He could outthink predators and prey, even if he couldn’t outrun them. And yet somehow, that same ability has enabled us to weigh and measure the Universe! What a happy coincidence! (Nagel makes this remark, somewhere.)

Steve Talbott is once again great on this. His essay What Do Organisms Mean puts it as follows. Talbott distinguishes two fundamentally different ways of explaining why something happens. There is the because of physical law — the kind of necessity we associate with gravity, chemistry, and mechanism, where precisely defined and invariant relationships hold regardless of context. And then there is the because of reason or because of meaning — where what happens is governed by contextual significance, by what makes sense within a larger whole, where any detail however remote can colour and transform the significance of any other.

The crucial point is that biological description unavoidably deploys the second kind of because. Words like “signal,” “respond,” “regulate,” “communicate,” “adapt,” and “coordinate”, which are all routinely invoked in molecular biology, are paradoxically not reducible to the language of physics and chemistry. They invoke a context of meaning — a whole within which parts find their significance — that no causal-mechanical account can capture. It is something that they are pre-disposed to avoid. As Talbott puts it, the organism is not explaining itself through causes but expressing itself through meaning, the way a text or a musical performance expresses meaning — where the whole governs the parts rather than the parts mechanically producing the whole.

The embarrassment of biology, Talbott argues, is that biologists routinely use this language of meaning and agency while simultaneously professing a mechanist metaphysics that denies its legitimacy. The language comes straight from the laboratory — it is demanded by what biologists actually observe — but its implications are studiously ignored. That, I say, is why the term ‘teleonomy’ had to be coined by biology - and it was used by Jacques Monod, whom otherwise was completely committed to the mechanist model of evolution - life as a biochemical accident governed by physical causation. Hence the title of his book, Chance and Necessity.

But now we find teleonomy appropriated by the EES theorists to discuss all of those meanings of ‘purpose’ which Monod had so strenuously attempted to avoid!

But then, actual field biologists (as distinct from naturalistic analytical philosophers) and environmental scientists are naturally far more open to the whole idea of context and meaning than are the pop intellectual darwinists such as Dawkins, Pinker or Dennett. I think environmental science has been one of the strong counters to reductionism in culture, while still maintaining a scrupulously scientific attitude.

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Dawkins argues against a specific notion of God; a God of intentional agency and prupose. Dawkin’s apparently attended a boarding school and spoke about a clergyman who behaved inappropriately towards boys,so his view of the Christian notion of God may well be jaded. He primarily attacks the Abrahamic religions. I don’t recall him attacking Buddhism, Daoism or Hinduism. Those latter religions do not have the idea of a creator with a purpose.

I’m somewhat familiar with Levin’s ideas, and I am interested in how they relate to Whitehead’s philosophy, as I have had a long term interest in the latter’s ideas. The idea of the ingress of “eternal objects” in Whitehead is somewhat different to Levin’s notion of a “platonic space” of possibilities that Levin sees as even somehow possessing agency and actively pushing for actualization.

Whitehead does have an idea of God, not as strictly determining what happens but as luring events towards novelty, complexity and beauty. I have never been too keen on the 'God" part of Whitehead’s philosophy, but I think the reading of eternal objects as real (and not merely logical) possibilities that may or may not become actualized is plausible.

The other thing is that I am not sure about the eternality of Whitehead’s “objects” since what are real possibilities should also evolve along with actuality. And Whitehead does see God as evolving along with the Cosmos. I haven’t read Whitehead in a while, so I’m not sure on this point as to whether Whitehead intended his eternal objects to be ever-unchanging possibilities. It would not seem consistent with his conception of an evolving God in any case.

Saying purpose is local is only to say that it seems to be confined to living (actively self-organizing) systems. I don’t deny the possibility that the Cosmos is in some sense a self-organizing system, but it does seem unlikely in view of the fact that according to relativity theory there is no universal time or “now”, and that there may be no connection at all between parts of the cosmos that are so far removed from each other that light, time and gravity can form no relation between them. I acknowledge I could well be wrong about this, though. I have no choice but to try to understand things the best way I can from my current position of ignorance.

And thanks for the open source book link…looks very interesting.

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Are signals and responses not electro-chemical? Are regulation, communication, adaptation and coordination not physical processes? Why should the fact that these are not explicable in the language of quarks, electrons, atoms and molecules be surprising? Cells are currently understood to be responsive to signals, our bodies are communities of cells, but nonetheless perception, movement and decisive action cannot be explained in terms of cellular processes. There are different levels of explanation for the various levels of process that we are presented with.

If perception and thought is a neurophysical process it doesn’t follow that logic can be explained or adequately modeled, by neurophysiology. These apparent “problems” that seem to bedevil some areas of modern philosophy seem to result from having forgotten lessons regarding context and the possibility of category errors when context is forgotten and an absolutizing view demanded. They seem to be on account of having forgotten the wisdom of Spinoza when he spoke of extensa and cogitans as two modes or attributes of one substance, and his concomitant realization that it makes no sense to speak of thought, understood as non-physical causing neurophysical activity or of neurophysical activity causing thought when the two are really inseparable and only conceptually (and perceptually) distinct and distinguishable.

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I include animals and aliens ( if they are out there.) If I think an entity can feel or suffer (is conscious ) then it’s in the forum, though perhaps not self-consciously.

I see the darkness around the forum as something that manifests within the forum. As one subject among others, I “am” a darkness relative to the light of others. What “exceeds” and “grounds” the forum is where we all have our darkness together. It’s a small technical matter, but I’m tempted to make light and darkness inter-dependent as they function metaphorically here. If the world never appeared ( was there “for” a creature) then, for me, there would be no darkness in contrast to this manifestation, as its obscure source or future.