Chalmers' Zombies and The Hornswoggle Problem: Patricia Churchland

Context and Introduction
In this article Patricia Churchland is arguing against David Chalmers' assertion that the physical sciences, including contemporary disciplines like neuroscience, will never be able to explain consciousness.  More specifically, they will never be able to explain the hard problem of consciousness: how and why physical processes give rise to subjective experience.  Otherwise stated, how and why is it that subjective experience arises from physical processes?

We can contrast the hard problem of consciousness with the easy problems of consciousness.  Easy problems of consciousness involve explanations of how cognitive or behavioral functions are performed.  Examples include how our brains merge perception of different attributes (e.g., color and shape) which take place in different parts of the brain into a unified perception and how independent processes in the brain combine to produce coherent (behavioral) responses to perceived events, such as verbal reports.

The easy problems are all questions about how our brains discriminate stimuli, integrate information, produce reports, etc... these problems are all about identifying and explaining physical processes. Since these are all questions about how physical systems work, in principle, neuroscience will advance enough to give an explanation.

 However, none of these explanation give us any answer to how or why conscious experience arises from these processes.  If everything performed by the brain (inputs to outputs) is a closed physical system, why have conscious experience of anything?  To further bring out this problem, lets look at the zombie thought experiment...

Zombie!!!
To illustrate that consciousness might not be necessary for successfully navigating the world, consider the' famous Zombie thought-experiment (pre-dating Chalmers, but famously advocated by him).  Chalmers says that we can conceive of beings just like us in every way except they lack conscious experience.  They live lives just like ours: walking, talking, driving, eating (mostly brains), discussing philosophy of mind, etc..except they don't experience these things consciously.  There is no phenomenal aspect to their lives.  They have no qualia.

Consider motion detection and vision.  It seems loco to think we could decouple motion detection from phenomenal awareness of what we are seeing.  However, there is considerable evidence that we can detect motion without having conscious experience of it!  Crazy, I know, but this might be the case.  This condition is called "blindsight."  There are people who have brain damage in the part of the brain that produces conscious awareness of what we are seeing yet still behave as though they can see!  This seems to show that we could navigate through our world without walking into things without having the phenomenal experience of seeing.  If this sounds too crazy to be true, check out the video:


Start at 6:50 on this one then from the beginning of the second video.

The main point is this:  suppose there are processes/functions that we have which are accompanied by conscious phenomenal experience but that we could perform these same functions just as well without the consciousness (like someone with blindsight).  This means that consciousness is just "tacked on" to the process.  It doesn't help us perform the task any better or worse (maybe even worse, because there's one more thing to go wrong).  

If this is the case, then if we explained the process in physical terms, we'd be left with a "hard problem":  why the crap is consciousness added on to this process?  Also, since we'd know everything there is to know about the process from a physical point of view, there'd be information about the conscious experience of performing that process that'd be left unexplained by our physical account.   Therefore, a purely physical account of the mind is incomplete.

Conclusion
Anyhow, the upshot of Chalmers' position is that since the physical sciences will never be able to give us an answer to the Hard Questions of consciousness, we need to postulate consciousness as a separate fundamental feature of our world, not reducible to physical laws on any level.  Just as electro -magnetic forces can't be explained in terms of other physical laws and principles and and are thus considered fundamental forces of the world, so too should we consider the psychophysical laws and principles of consciousness--fundamental and irreducible.

The Hornswaggle Problem:  Churchland's Response to the Hard Problem
I think Churchland's article is as close to a rant as you can get in published academic writing.  She essentially takes a machine-gun approach to criticizing Charlmers' argument for a distinction between the easy problems and the Hard Problems.  Hold on to your hats, we're going on a critical thinking rampage! 

Conceptualization
Churchland's general approach to opposing the assertion that the is a Hard Problem is to cast doubt on whether this is the right way to conceptualize consciousness.  The idea here is that if you misconceptualize a problem, you will make it seem intractable while, in fact, it may not be.

Consider an analogy.  Medieval doctors, to explain animation, would ask of the heart, "in which part are the animal spirits concocted?". Of course, if you conceptualize animal spirits as being what causes animated life, asking this question about the heart will seem like an intractable problem.   If, however, you ask how much the blood the heart pumps/hour, the problem no longer seems intractable.  The point here is that how we conceptualize a problem has everything to do with how solvable it will appear.

Arbitrary Line-Drawing 
Another attack on the Hard Problem is to ask why it is that the line of what can and cannot be solved through the physical sciences is drawn at the particular place Chalmers suggests--rather than somewhere else.  Consciousness is a difficult problem, but difficult problems are nothing new to the scientific enterprise.  

Why not also include into the Hard Problem the neurological basis for autism and schizophrenia? why we dream when we sleep? how short-term and long-term memory work? how we develop skill acquisition, plan, and make decisions?  Why is the dividing line between the Hard and soft problems drawn exactly where it is?  There doesn't seem to be any good reason for drawing the line in the particular place it is.

The Left-Out Hypothesis
Chalmers argues that even if we were to solve all the easy problems, their answers wouldn't inform the Hard Problem.  But where is the evidence that if we eventually understood all the easy problems that we still wouldn't understand the Hard Problem? (why and how consciousness emerges from those processes).   The left-out hypothesis is why would the solution to the Hard problem be "left-out" from our cumulative understanding of all the easy problems?  Where's the evidence for this hypothesis?  And how many sentences can I end with question marks?

Another implication of the left-out hypothesis is that the Hard Problem frames the issue of consciousness such that current research on consciousness is presumed to fail even before the results are in.  But if we accept the demarkation line suggested by the Hard Problem, we must say, before the research runs its course that this line of research will not contribute anything to the problem of consciousness.  This conclusion runs counter to what the empirical results suggest.  We should be guided by empirical results, not a priori conclusions about what is or is not a solvable possible.  Let the science decide!!!

Furthermore, there is strong evidence in current research suggesting that attention, awareness, and short-term memory are very closely connected consciousness.  Why shouldn't we think that advances in these areas won't contribute valuable understanding to the problem of consciousness?   

Vs The Zombie Thought-Experiment
Recall that the Zombie thought experiment is supposed to show that we can't study consciousness by studying physical stuff:  All (or at least some) of our mental/brain functions can possibly work without the conscious experience, therefore, conscious experience and qualia are simply "tacked on" and are fundamentally different "stuff" from physical "stuff". (see Zombie discussion in the intro of this post)

Anyhow, assuming that we've rejected the left-out hypothesis, the only thing still supporting the Hard/easy distinction is the zombie thought experiment.  Since the zombie shares all of our behaviors and capacities (minus consciousness), using the physical sciences to explain how all these capacities work would not tell us anything about how and why we have conscious experience of these processes (since consciousness adds nothing to our ability to perform them and the contents of subjective consciousness can't be accessed by the physical sciences).

But accepting the conclusion of the zombie thought experiment relies on the possibility of zombies.  Zombies are merely a thought experiment!  It seems redonk to draw conclusions one way or another about the limits of science based on a thought experiment about zombies!

For example, imagine a possible world in which gasses do not get hot even though their constituent molecules are moving very quickly.  Does your ability to imagine this possibility function as an argument against the empirically verified relationship between temperature and mean molecular kinetic energy?  That's just silliness!

Just because we can imagine non-conscious zombies is no argument for the limits of brain science (mmm...brain science!).

Vs Scope of Qualia/Spectrum Argument
The Hard Problem seems to be directed at brain events that are accompanied by qualia.  But there doesn't seem to be any consensus as to which types of capacities or functions are accompanied by qualia and which aren't.  There are of course obvious cases like the pain you experience when you stub your toe or the blue you experience when you look up at the sky...or maybe even the overwhelming pleasure you feel when you know it's time for philosophy 101.

But there are also areas of dispute.  Some people say they have "limb-position" qualia; that is, they have a phenomenal experience of where there limbs are.  Others disagree.  Do we have quali associated with "what it's like" to move our head?  To know which way is up?  Do eye movements have qualia? Maybe some movements do and other's don't?  What about introspective qualia?  Or thoughts?...some seem auditory, others visual, others, like when I do logic problems, don't seem to have any qualia.

When it comes to capacities and functions, is there a continuum for the vividness of qualia that are associated with them?  Does it vary from individual to individual?  Do some have qualia for a capacity and and other's don't have it? All of these issues cast doubt on a clear demarkation line for the Hard Problem--if there is indeed such a problem.  The answer to where to draw the line between the processes that have qualia and those that don't might seem clear when we consider only the prototypical cases of qualia, but these cases represent only a small sub-set of the whole.   

The class processes accompanied by conscious experiences is not as well-defined as we might initially suppose.  To further confuse matters, there are fuzzy boundaries between attention, short-term memory, and awareness.

Are the Easy Problems Really Easy?
The easy problems are yet to be solved, so why should we suppose their solution is easy?  This is pure conjecture.  For example, the nature of motor representation is a mystery:  a signature is recognizable whether it is written with the dominant or non-dominant hand, the foot, or with a pencil strapped to the shoulder.  How can completely different sets of muscles do this when they weren't the muscle groups used to learn the task?

The solution to this problem lacks important--not just minor--details about the concepts of motor control, learning, and information retrieval.  On what grounds do we call it an Easy Problem?

The Danger of Drawing a Line
There is a danger of drawing a line at consciousness based on current ignorance.  If we rope an area off to certain methods of research before really giving it a good try, then we are writing a self-fulfilling prophesy and blocking off what might have been fruitful research.

Argument from Ignorance
The Hard Problem is an argument from ignorance.  That is, the argument moves from a claim that we are currently ignorant about/lack understanding of a phenomenon (consciousness) to the conclusion that the phenomenon will never be understood/explained (using current methods) etc...  Specifically, in the context of the problem of consciousness, Chalmers'  argument goes like this:

(P1)  We do not understand much about consciousness;
Therefore:
(C1)  Consciousness can never be explained;
(C2)  Nothing science could ever discover would deepen our understanding of consciousness;
(C3)  Consciousness can never be explained in terms of physical properties.

But the fact that we know little of a particular phenomenon only tells us that we know little about it! Consider an analogy.  Just because I don't know what a flying object is, it doesn't follow that it's an alien space craft.  I can only conclude that...I don't know what it is!   Not knowing isn't positive evidence for some positive conclusion.  We cannot draw substantive conclusion from our lack of knowledge...especially given that modern brain science is still in its infancy.

If brain science had progressed as far as molecular biology has on the transmission of evolutionary traits, we could make a substantive conclusion, but, again, given the pre-pubescent state of neuroscience, all we can reasonable conclude is, we don't know.

Metaphysical vs Epistemological "Mysteriousness"
The fact that a problem appears mysterious is not a fact about the problem or a fact about the metaphysical nature of the universe.  It is an epistemological and psychological fact about us!  The problem is mysterious to us given the current state of our science.  Perhaps, if the state of our scientific understanding of the brain were different, the problem wouldn't be so mysterious.

The history of science is littered with previously "mysterious" problems.  Consider the problem of life previously known as "the mysterious problem of life".   For millennia the best minds could not grasp how life could emerge from the inanimate matter of cells.  "Surely, the physical sciences can't solve this problem!" they said!  "There must be magical animal spirits...or something."

The mystery of how life emerges from proteins and sugars was a mystery to be sure, but the mystery was not a property of the problem, but a consequence of the epistemological state of the pre-cellular biology world.

The Argument from Personal Incredulity
The other informal fallacy Churchland accuses Chalmers of is the argument from personal incredulity.  It goes like this, "well, I simply cannot imagine how x will be able to explain y."  We've been hearing this argument for centuries in regards to everything from thunder to computers that can learn.  As far as I know, this type of argument has by and large been on the losing end.  I simply can't imagine it being right! ;)

Anyhow, Chalmers' argument seems to--in part--rely on an argument from personal incredulity.  He just cannot fathom how the physical sciences could explain consciousness.  But that's more a reflection of his epistemological state than it is an argument against the possibility of a scientific solution.  Why should we care two hoots about what someone can or cannot imagine when we consider what science may or may not be able to explain?

Again, the history of science give us plenty of examples which were imagined to be too difficult to solve, but ended up having fairly simple solutions, and also examples of problems that were thought easy to solve but turned out to be very difficult.

Summary
In short, Churchland argues that when you're in a position of ignorance concerning scientific matters, and the science is still young, we need to do the science and see how it plays out, not make pronouncements about what can a cannot be solved.

Brain Damage, Mind Damage, and Dualism (Phelan, Mandelbaum, and Nichols)

Introduction and Context:
In describing what philosophy does, I've heard Prof. Todd Jones (of UNLV) say "philosophy is usually about one of two things:  Things that are so abstract and obscure that most people wouldn't bother to think about them, and things that are so obvious that most people wouldn't bother to think about them."  Substance dualism falls into the latter category.  For most people, that humans have an immaterial mind/soul that is independent from their body is so obvious, it's not even something to question...but this is a philosophy class!

Up until now we've looked at what substance dualism is, how Descartes argued for it, and one of it's main problems--the interaction problem.  Now we're going to look at another argument against substance dualism: the communication problem (aka argument from brain damage).  The communication problem is that substance dualism gives a very poor account of why brain damage (i.e., damage to a physical system) has an effect on the mind (i.e., an independent non-physical system). That is, if the brain and the mind are two distinct entities, and the immaterial mind can exist intact and fully functional for eternity without a body (i.e., brain), why should brain damage matter to mental abilities now--when we have a brain?

Essentially, the argument is that the physicalist model give a comparatively better account:  it says certain parts of the brain are responsible for certain functions. If you damage those parts, you'll diminish or lose those functions.

Brain Damage:  The Case of Clive Wearing
 The communication problem becomes apparent when we consider how substance dualism would account for loss of mental capacities caused by brain damage.

Consider the famous case of Clive Wearing (CW) who, after having a normal life for 50 years, contracted viral encephalitis.  The end result of the encephalitis was anterograde and fairly severe retrograde amnesia.  The former is when you can no longer form new memories, the latter is when one cannot recall events from before the brain damage occurred.  Brain scans on CW showed that the areas associated with memory had, for the most part, been destroyed by the virus.

It's a Communication Problem:  The Dualist Account of Brain Damage
The dualist account of brain damage cannot imply that damage to the brain would cause damage to the mind.  Since the mind isn't the brain and the mind can persist eternally regardless of whether we have a physical brain or not, they have to explain why brain damage apparently causes loss or diminishment of mental functions.  I emphasize "apparent" because the dualist cannot answer that damage to the mind can actually occur as a consequence of damage to the brain. Otherwise, how do you explain how the soul function and exist eternally once the brain is worm food?  For this reason, the dualist instead has to argue that the mental damage is only apparent.

The dualist has to argue that the mind remains perfectly intact but something's gone wrong with the mind-brain interface.  We can think of it like this:  the brain has within it a "modem" or "router" that transmits stuff about the body to the mind and also receives information from the mind (to be converted into physical movements).   In the case of brain damage, what has gone wrong is not that the mind doesn't function perfectly (it still does), it's that the modem/router isn't working for certain types of operations.  In short, for the dualist, brain damage is a communication problem between a damaged physical system and an undamaged non-physical system.

Two Possible Dualist Replies
There are two possible dualist accounts of why the communication between mind and body fail.  The first is that the perfectly intact mind sends information to the brain, but upon receiving the information, the brain messes it up somehow.  The second is that the brain, because it's broken, sends the mind distorted information and so that's why new memories can't be formed.  Lets flesh these out...

Option 1:  Distorted Input
Think back to CW with his anterograde and retrograde amnesia:  When he is asked if he remembers his wedding, he replies he doesn't.  The dualist has to say that this memory is perfectly preserved in his undamaged immaterial mind.  When someone asks him, "How was your wedding?" in his immaterial mind he perceives it perfectly but the receiver in the brain somehow mistranslates his intended answer (the description of the memory) to "I don't remember." The receiver in the brain takes the mind's input of clear coherent memories and garbles it, thereby causing the output "I don't remember."  

On this account, poor CW has total access to the memories.  They are as vivid and clear to him as they were pre-brain damage.  He just can't express them to people.

This, on it's own, seems quite implausible but it gets worse.  CW's retrograde amnesia doesn't apply to all his memories, it's not complete.  If you ask him if he is married, he will say "yes."   Why is it that for some memories the "modem" garbles the input from the mind and in other cases it doesn't?  Does each memory have a separate modem?  That doesn't seem very plausible...

The other difficulty is to explain why, when the modem garbles the mind's input, is the output always "I don't know"?  Why not  "gjkdajfopjoqwjfoa[jfo[asj[fj'ljkd!"  or "I like ice cream"?  And why does it garble in these ways for memories about the wedding but not for memories about whether he's married?

Although the physicalist model is still a work in progress, its account (brain equals the mind, damage to brain equals damage to mind) seems much more plausible and in line with our best current scientific knowledge.

Option 2:  Distorted Output
The other possible response the dualist can give to explain why damage to the brain is only apparent (but not real) damage to the immaterial mind is to say the communication problem is from the brain to the mind.  

In the case of anterograde amnesia, the brain is trying to send new memories to the mind for storage, but the modem is down, and so they never arrive.  Kind of like if you tried to upload something to the cloud but your modem is down.  The information can't get to where it needs to go to get stored and so it is never encoded.  So far this sounds plausible...except 2 things.

The first problem is that it seems to presume new memory formation requires having a physical brain. The dualist, in essence is saying, he can't form new memories because the part of the brain that sends experiences to the mind isn't working.  The implicit assumption here is that memory formation requires having a brain!  This is something the dualist cannot abide.   On the other hand, if your mind can form new memories without a material brain, then why is the brain damage a problem in the first place?
  
If the immaterial mind can't acquire new memories except through the intermediary of the physical brain, how's this going to play out in the "ever after."  Will you never be able to form any new memories once your body has decayed?  Are you stuck for all eternity with only the memories you acquired in your brief stint on earth?  Eternity is a long time.  That might suck for more than a few people.  It's certainly motivation to do some crazy shit in your life.  Maybe Drake should have said "YOFMO":  You Only Form Memories Once...

The second problem is this:  Suppose we ask CW, "do you remember your wedding?"  The sound waves enter his auditory system and get converted into a neural signal which gets sent to the brain.   But since the modem that sends signals from his brain to his immaterial mind isn't working right, the message "do you remember your wedding" comes out as gibberish.   The mind never receives the right question even though it contains the information to answer the question.

Up to this point, it's still a moderately plausible account.  However, if the mind is receiving gibberish, why does CW respond "I don't remember" rather than "I don't understand a damn word you're saying!" 

Understanding the question doesn't seem to be the real problem.  That signal is getting through just fine: he just doesn't know the answer to it because he doesn't have that information.

Additional Arguments Against Dualism
Argument from Phylogenesis
At what point in the evolutionary process the organisms get "souls"?  Most people (except maybe Leibniz) would say that one celled organisms don't have souls.  So how about 2 celled organisms?  No? What about 3? ...4?   100? 

Recall that for the dualist you can't have partial souls, so the dualist can't say that mental capacities gradually evolved along with complexity.  Either you have a complete functioning soul or you don't.  This means that at a certain point in evolutionary development a parent didn't have a soul while the offspring did.  The metaphysical commitment to the existence of metaphysically independent immaterial souls makes the existence of souls difficult to square with our best scientific knowledge of the development of life.

Argument from Ontogenesis
The argument from ontogenesis is similar to the previous argument but applies at the level of the individual organism.  Consider how an individual human develops.  Most people, including dualists, will say that neither the sperm or the egg has a soul.  When the two touch to form a single cell, does a soul appear too?  If so from where? How do we know?  Does a single cell have a soul?  If not, then how about when that cell divides and becomes 2 cells.  Now does it have a soul?  What about after there are 4 cells?  

The idea that "poof" a soul appears after a certain number of cell divisions is going to be difficult to defend.  It's just as problematic as defending the idea that a soul appears for a single cell the moment the sperm penetrates the egg. 

To a certain extent, defending against the arguments from phylogenesis and ontogenesis require to dualist to make empirically defensible claims about when the soul appears. This will be tough. 

How Can Souls Move Bodies? Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia

Introduction and Context:
In the previous post we got a quick introduction to substance dualism (aka Cartesian dualism), the idea that the mind/soul and the body are not one and the same and are therefore fundamentally distinct substances.  That is, your brain is not your mind and your mind is not your brain.  We looked at two of the arguments that Descartes gave for the position and some of the objections.  Whether we find the arguments convincing or not, most psychological studies show that most people are dualists (but few philosophers and neurologists are).  There are also some contemporary arguments for different types of dualism which we'll look at in later posts but for now we're going to focus on substance dualism.

Setting all that aside, supposing we are convinced that dualism is true, it's interesting to consider what difficulties this position might give rise to.  Descartes' contemporary, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (who's momma didn't raise no fool) brought up some of these problems to Descartes himself in their written correspondence.

The Interaction Problem
At the heart of the problem with dualism is the interaction problem:  how is it that something that doesn't have any physical properties (i.e., doesn't exist in space, has no extension, and has no mass) can interact causally with something that is physically extended and has mass? and vice versa...  

So, how is it that thoughts in the mind (which have absolutely no physical properties) can causally bring about actions in a physical body?  Or that something happening to the body (e.g., stimulation of our perceptual organs or being poked by a needle) can bring about perceptual experiences and thoughts (e.g., "I see a red chair" or "ouch! that freakin' hurt!")  It would seem that for anything to causally affect a physical body it too must be physical or at least have some minimal physical properties like mass and extension (unless you want to invoke magic).

To see how Descartes responds to the interaction problem, Let's take a look at the back and forth in the letters between the two and see if he gives a satisfactory response.

May 21, 1643:  Descartes' First Attempt
The reason it seems like there's an interaction problem between mind and body is because I haven't explained how they interact yet!  The goal of the Meditations was only to give the notions of body and soul that explained why they are 2 distinct substances--not to explain how they interact. But now that you're asking...

Also, although I only discussed the notions of body and mind that allow us to distinguish them, it doesn't mean that there aren't additional notions we can appeal to that explain how the two interact.

The confusion arises because you are using the notions that allow us to distinguish between the two to try to explain how the two interact.  But this obviously won't work because we're missing the relevant explanatory notions!

He then gives Elizabeth an analogy to illustrate his point:
The scholastics (the tradition of philosophy that Descartes opposed) believed that there was a "thing" called "heaviness" that caused objects to fall to the ground.  But they were misunderstanding the notion of heaviness.  Yes, having "heaviness" is why objects fall to the earth, but the scholastics misunderstand "heaviness" as being an actual thing that physically causes the object to fall.  They were misapplying concepts, this is why they were confused.

Something along the same lines is happening when we talk about the properties we attribute to our bodies and minds to account for how they interact.  We are mis-conceptualizing and misusing the properties, and this is the cause of our confusion.

To summarize, (1) He sort of explains why, given the incomplete descriptions of mind and body that he's given, we can't understand how mind and body interact. However, (2) he avoids ever giving an answer to the interaction problem.

June 10, 1643:  Elizabeth's Reply
Before I begin, I just want to point out that Elisabeth's writing is a stunning example of the principle of charity. Descartes' initial reply was unconvincing at best and totally side-steps the problem at worst. But look how Elizabeth replies

Now the interests of my house, which I must not neglect, now some conversations and social obligations which I cannot avoid, beat down so heavily on this weak mind with annoyance or boredom, that it is rendered useless for anything else at all for a long time afterward:  this will serve, I hope, as an excuse for my stupidity in being unable to comprehend [the "heaviness" example that Descartes gives to explain why the interaction problem isn't really a problem, but simply the result of not having or misunderstanding the notions for explaining how interaction occurs].

Ah! If only facebook and youtube disputes had this much civility....(meh...they wouldn't nearly be as much fun).

Ok, on to her reply...
In short she says, even with the "heaviness" example, I still don't understand how an immaterial thing that doesn't exist in space or have mass or extension can causally interact (via contact) with a physical thing (i.e., the body).   I cannot conceive of an immaterial thing as anything but the negation of matter, and in order for matter to move, it must be acted upon by physical force and contact (none of which are possible for an immaterial substance to do).

In fact, it would be easier for me to think of the soul as being material than to conceive of how something non-material could causally interact with something material.

(Bonus information: Locke, writing just after Descartes, actually suggests this as a solution: If God can do anything, why could he not create matter that can think?)

Information?
Always the helpful one, Elisabeth offers Descartes a possible solution:  One possibility would be that the soul moves the body by communicating information to it, however, the information can only be interpreted and understood by the body if the body possesses intelligence...and Descartes denies that matter can be intelligent..Doh! So, that's not going to work...

June 28, 1643: Descartes Second Reply
In short, Descartes still doesn't offer a direct answer.  He says that since it is easier for her Highness "to attribute matter and extension to the soul than to attribute to it the capacity to move a body and to be moved by one without having matter" she should feel free to attribute the matter and extension to the soul.  By doing so she will be able to conceive of the union of soul and body, even though in reality they are two distinct things.

This reply is quite unsatisfactory because (a) if the soul is not extended (as Descartes maintains) how will conceiving it as such explain away the interaction problem?  Also, (b) if we are to conceive of the union of body and soul as Descartes instructs us, presumably this would involve conceiving of some sort of causal connection, but that's precisely the thing that Elizabeth is not able to conceive of!

Clearly irritated by the fact that he can't come up with a good answer, Descartes ends his letter by admonishing Elizabeth for being too philosophical!

Finally, though I believe it is very necessary to have understood well once in one's life the principles of metaphysics, since it is these that give us knowledge of God and of our soul, I also believe that it would be very harmful to occupy one's understanding often in meditating on them [...]

Lol.

Now, we're getting into facebook-fight territory!  At this point I think Descartes would have blocked her...

Sept. 13, 1645:  Elisabeth's Reply
Up until now, Elisabeth was primarily focused on asking how the immaterial mind could causally influence the actions of the material body.  Now, she asks for clarification on the other side of the interaction problem:  How is it that the "passions" (i.e., bodily feelings like hunger or physical pleasure) can interact with the non-material mind to influence our thoughts?

The Passions of the Soul  (Not of particular philosophical import)
Descartes wrote The Passions of the Soul largely as a response to Elisabeth's request for more information on the interaction between the passions and the immaterial mind.

First he lays the groundwork for how to distinguish between things that pertain to the soul and things that pertain to the body: 
(1) Anything that we can experience as being in us and which we see as existing in wholly inanimate bodies must be attributed to our body; 
(2)  Anything that we cannot conceive of as belonging to a body must belong to the soul.

From (2) it follows that thoughts belong to the soul.  From (1) it follows that heat and movement belong to the body.

17C Physiology and Anatomy 101:  How the animal spirits (the stuff that causes bodies to move) cause movement:
The animal spirits (tiny particles that 17C physicians believe to be responsible for animation) are contained in the blood.  They are very very fine particles.  The heart pumps them up to the brain where they enter cavities and go through pores thereby coming in contact with the nerves and then the muscles.  That's how bodies moves...(!)

How does the body move without the soul?
Sometimes the animal spirits can cause some pores to open or close more than others, which in turn causes a muscle to contract more or less.  The sensory nerves can cause the pores to be opened more or less than usual, which in turn causes the animal spirits to change direction and go to the muscles in such a way that causes the body part to move as it usually does for such an occasion.

In short, our bodies are self-sufficient robots. Our sensors cause the animal spirits to open and close pores which in turn direct the animal spirits to the correct muscles for the appropriate movements.

The function of the soul:  In this mechanistic framework you may be asking where our soul/mind is in all this.  The soul is the "place" where we have our thoughts of which there are 2 main kinds:  actions of the soul and passions of the soul.  Actions of the soul are our volitions since we experience them as coming from our soul. The passions of our soul are the various perceptions we have since they are externally caused.

How do the soul and body interact?  Through the pineal gland in the brain.

How do we know the pineal gland is the "seat of the soul"?  All of the organs for our external senses come in twos (eyes, hands, ears, and so on...)  (Ignore that you only have one tongue and one mouth, 10 fingers, etc..!)  There must be a place where the two images coming in the two eyes or the double organs of any other sense converge to form a single image or impression before reaching the soul--otherwise the soul would see two of the image!  That's science!  ...well, 17C science anyway...

(Sadly, there are people who still believe this!!!)

Descartes and Philosophy of Mind: The Conceivability Argument and the Divisibility Argument

Introduction and Context:
Watch the Video first:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CqbO_5FKRc

So, is the brain the mind?  Is the mind the brain?  Are they separate things?  If so, are you your brain or your mind?  Or are you somehow both but they aren't the same thing?  Are you confused?

Poor Karl.  Lets try to help him clear up his confusion.  Fortunately, we have philosophy at our disposal to provide some answers in our time of need (where else could you possibly go?).  To get at some kind of an answer lets start with Descartes who thought he had a solution to this problem.  The short answer, as you should know by now, is that you are a mind, not a body.  

Descartes proposed 3 main arguments for what is called substance dualism which is the position that the mind and the body (i.e., brain) are two completely different types of things (i.e, substances).   Because my main goal is simply to present the general position, for our purposes we'll only look at two of the arguments.

The Conceivability Argument (6th Meditation)

The conceivability argument rests upon two similar principles: (a) The doctrine of clear and distinct is that anything that can be clearly and distinctly conceived of is possible and therefore can, in the "real world" correspond perfectly with one's understanding of it.  Lets not worry too much about this part...The other principle plays a more important role:  Hume's law is that if we can conceive of something then it is logically possible.

Ok, with those principles in "mind" lets take a look at a stripped down version of the argument: 

(P1)  I conceive that I, a thinking thing, can exist without my extended (i.e., physical) body existing.

(P2)  Anything that I can conceive of is logically possible.

(P3)  If it is logically possible that X (mind) exists without Y (body), then X (mind) is not identical to Y (body).

(C)   Therefore, I, a thinking thing, am not identical with my extended body.

Recall from the 1st meditation where Descartes shows that we can doubt everything, including the existence of our own physical body, except that we think and that we exist. Because we can conceive of ourselves as existing without having a body, we must not be identical to our body.  Since we are not identical to our body, our minds and our bodies must be 2 completely different sorts of things (he calls them "substances").

Most philosophers reject this argument because it relies on Hume's law (P2) which most contemporary philosophers also reject.  Conceivability is not sufficient for logical possibility. 

Another reason for rejecting the argument is that while Descartes may be correct in that thought is essential to mind and extension is essential to bodies, it doesn't follow that this is all there is to each.  He argues that since the essence of mind is thought, he "can infer correctly that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing."  But just because thought is an essential property of mind it doesn't necessarily follow that this is the only property of mind.  In other words, he can't make that inference. 

Alright, for our purposes, this should suffice...

Next argument:

The Divisibility Argument

We can present it simply like this:

(P1)  All extended things are divisible. (It's possible to divide the body or matter into parts) 

(P2)  Minds are not divisible.  (When you introspect, you can't distinguish parts of the mind within yourself).

(P3)   Although it appears as though my mind and body are united, if I were to remove body parts, "nothing would have been taken away from the mind", thus, minds are not extended. 

(C)  Therefore, it follows that the minds are distinct substances from bodies.

Most contemporary philosophers (and brain scientists) reject (P3).  We know that if we remove parts of the brain, part of our "mind" will also be removed.  Also, when the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves connecting the two hemispheres) is removed, the "mind" seems to divide into two separate consciousnesses. 

While it's interesting to dissect what when wrong in Descartes arguments, the more interesting philosophical area is to look at the problems that arise if we accept (or reject) dualism.  Recent psychological studies show that most people are natural dualists (i.e., they believe in a non-material mind/soul/spirit/etc...).  Not that it matters what the unwashed masses think (I kid! I kid!) but it's interesting to inquire what sorts of problems come about from accepting dualism.  Very early on, the very astute Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia noticed some of these problems and presented them to Descartes in written correspondence...which is the topic of the next post...

What Can A Pain in Your Butt Teach You About Metaphysics?

This section of the sixth and final meditation is for me the most interesting and raises the most philosophical issues.  I still remember when I first encountered it 12 years ago in my second philosophy class.

Arguments For What My Senses Can and Can't Tell Me About the World and Myself

     There is nothing that my own nature teaches me more vividly than that I have a body, and that when I feel pain there is something wrong with the body, and that when I am hungry or thirsty the body needs food and drink, on so on.  So, I should not doubt there is some truth in this.

     The basic argument here is that sensations such as pain demonstrate that humans are a composite of Mind and Body.  The fact that we can perceive sensations that belong to Body in our minds is evidence for the Mind-Body hypothesis of humans.  We are not Minds that are merely present in a Body "as a sailor is present in a ship".  If this were the case we wouldn't feel any of the sensations we do.  A sailor doesn't feel pain when his ship bumps into a rock, he only perceives it by sight and understands what has happened via the intellect.  Yet we have in intimate awareness of sensations, that are not purely intellectual understandings, when we bump into a pointy object, for example.  The same goes for hunger and thirst which are not just intellectual concepts when we feel them.

     We are also aware that there are other bodies around us that produce in us sensations of heat, smell, sound, colour, taste, etc...  We also know that we have an aversion to some of these sensations, like the smell of rotten eggs; and we have attraction to others, like the taste of pizza.

     Of course sometimes what our senses tell us about the world can sometimes be false.  In this case I'm not talking about optical illusions and such, but that the way in which information about the world comes in through the senses shapes the way we think the world is structured.  Take for example the sensation of heat:  Is there actually a thing "heat" which I am perceiving?  It's kind of interesting to think about.  In everyday language we still say, "that's hot" but our scientific understanding of the world contradicts this idea.  

     This is where Descartes really got it right.  On the Aristotelian view, objects that were hot contained an essence, "hotness" (not the kind that some chicks have--another kind) and when we feel heat we are somehow perceiving a thing/essence "hotness".  Descartes on the other hand had a mechanistic view of the world.  Although the idea of heat as being average kinetic energy hadn't been discovered yet Descartes had an idea that was very close.  His idea was that the particles that made up a body were rotating very quickly and these particles interacted with nerve endings which sent a signal up the neural pathways to the part of the brain which was the interface with the mind.  For Descartes (and any modern person) we know that if I were to perform an autopsy of a hot object, I would never find any thing I could point to and call "heat".  As a general explanation it's quite amazing how close to being right he was.  

      So here's the cool part.  Suppose I stub my toe (again) on the "Gotdamned" chair again.  According to Descartes the pain I feel does not exist in my toe, but in my mind.  Of course it sure doesn't feel that way but again this is a case where the way our senses function to perceive the world causes us to draw false conclusions about the world.  Pain is not a property of Body.  Pain (a sensation) is a property of Mind, thus the pain is a consequence of an interaction with Body but the pain itself is not in mah toe.  If I cut the nerve route from my toe to my brain/Mind, I would have no sensation of pain.  Pain is really our brain/Mind telling us "there is damage to sector 7G".

     In the Aristotelian view the pain actually exists in the toe.  It's really there, just as properties of mass and shape are.  As an aside, I think it's kind of interesting that despite centuries of science we still speak of the world in the Aristotelian sense.  I guess you could make an pragmatic argument for speaking of the world in an Aristotelian way.  It'd be quite a mouthful if every time you stubbed your toe you said, "Got damn particles in that chair collided with the particles in my toe, which initiated a chain reaction to the part of my brain that is the interface with my mind and produced a sensation that I call 'pain'".

     The bottom line is that the purpose of sensory perception is not necessarily to tell us how the world actually is but to help us navigate the world by informing us what is beneficial and what is harmful.  I think this is a really important philosophical point and one that even everyday people misunderstand (say it ain't so!).  The issue is whether the world exactly resembles the way we perceive it.  Within philosophy of perception and epistemology there are some that say that there is no way to know because we can never step outside of what we perceive in the "theater of mind" and there those that says there is a one to one relationship...and as you might expect the bulk of people's opinion is somewhere in between.       

     Descartes answer is that our perceptions of Body resemble the modes of Body that are necessary (size, shape, extension, mass); however this is not the case in the other modes of Body.  In the case of the non-necessary modes of Body (eg., scent, colour, texture, etc...), there is something (structure perhaps) in the body that produces in us as sensation of a property, but the property we perceive doesn't resemble the property in the Body that caused it--although it is not ruled out as a logical possibility. 

     This is a little bit complicated but bear with me: Lets take colour for example.  Suppose I'm looking at a purple cup.  Is the cup actually purple (an essence) or is there something about the structure of the the cup that produces in me the perception of purple?  Does "purpleness" fly from the cup into my eye?  Probably not.  Descartes gets this right too:  We know that the surface atoms of the cup are structured in such a way as to absorb all wavelengths of light except purple; it's not really purple as in, the atoms are all coloured purple.   

     So, because of the structure of the cup, light of only 1 wavelength of reaches my eyes.  Now, is the light that reaches my eyes actually purple?  No, it's just light waves at a certain frequency.  It just so happens that when my eyes receive light at this particular frequency it produces a certain nerve impulse that produces in my Mind the (phenomenal) sensation of purple.  Had the light waves been traveling at a different frequency, it would have resulted in slightly different nerve impulses which would have produced in my Mind a different phenomena of colour.  

      Also, if my brain were structured slightly differently, maybe the wavelength that now produces in me the colour purple might produce in me the colour red.  This raises a tangential issue, which is that when it comes to these secondary modes there is no way to know if one person's experience "purple" isn't another person's experience "green".  The things is, it doesn't matter so long as we all make the same distinctions and call it the same thing.  

     Now lets try to relate this all back to our starting point, that our senses don't necessarily tell us about the world as it is but tell us instead how we should best navigate our world.  Lets go back to the subject of "pain".   Through faulty reasoning I may come to the conclusion that the "Got Damned chair" I stubbed my toe on has something in it that is "pain" that is now in my toe, or that a fire has something in it that is heat.  But fire is not made of any thing called heat any more than my toe is has something in it called pain.  Nevertheless, my sensory perception of my interaction with these entities tells me that I should avoid striking the chair with my toe and should not put my hand (or any part of me for that matter) in the flame--unless it is into the feh-laaaaaames of passion.

But If God's So Good, How Come Sometimes Our Senses Tell Us to Do the Wrong Thing?

     Descartes realizes he has a little problem if he is going to simultaneously hold that a) god isn't a deceiver; b) that he wired us (are there wires in clay?) in such a way were we can be deceived about the world; and c) sometimes it seems that our sense perceptions of the world lead us to the wrong course of action.   Descartes explanation is that although there are situations that can arise where our reaction to a stimulus isn't the best one, the fact is that most of the time it will be.  God wired us in the way that will bring about the best response to deal with situations that will most frequently occur.

     Here's an example:  Suppose you have a wound on your finger and you need to put some sort of disinfectant on it and this disinfectant stings upon application.  The problem is that your sensory system, whenever you put the disinfectant on says "ARUGA! ARUGA! ARUGA! We are sensing pain.  Begin evasive maneuvers immediately!"  Our sensory system is giving us a message that is actually detrimental to us in this particular circumstance.  

     Descartes would concede that this is true but that more often than not moving your limb away from things that cause the sensation of pain is a good thing and will preserve your life and health longer.  Therefore god's still a good guy after all.  I think this is a pretty good argument and if we substitute "natural selection" for "god" we have a good modern argument.  Ta! Da! 

    

What is the Only Thing You Can Know For Certain?

Descartes:  Second Meditation

Recap

     Lets very briefly recap the 1st meditation.  Descartes says that if we really think about it, pretty much everything we know can be called into doubt.  Knowledge is typically viewed as what we learn from experience but everything we experience when we (think we) are awake is exactly the same as what we experience when we are dreaming.  So how can we be sure we are not dreaming?  Also, how do we know that all the images we have in our mind aren't being magically placed in us by some uber powerful evil demon or machine whose sole purpose is to deceive us.  We can never get out of our own minds the verify the source of what comes in.  Thus we should conclude that there is nothing we can truly know...Or is is there?  Oh snap! Bring it Descartes!

Argument for Existence and Kind

      Suppose, unbeknownst to me, a thought is implanted in my mind with a mico-chip with nano-sharks with lasers on their heads, what could I know from this?  If unbeknownst to me I'm dreaming about eating all-u-can-eat sushi on cheat day, what could I know from this?  Suppose unbeknownst to me there was the most cunning of deceiver in the wooooooooooooorld implanting all matter of hogwash in my mind, what could I know from this?  Suppose unknownst to me sweet baby Jesus himself  personally implants thoughts in my head, what could I know from this?  From these exact examples, Descartes comes to his famous conclusion that there are only two things that he can know beyond any doubt: First, he exists ("I am").  If he didn't exist he couldn't have any thoughts running through his pointy head--deceptive or otherwise.  Second, he is a thing that thinks ("I am a thinking thing"), i.e., that has thoughts.

      But what is a thing that thinks?  It is a thing that "doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perception".  The last two qualities are of interest because they come up later. 

       From this point the rest of the project of The Meditations is to logically derive the world as we know it from these foundational pieces of knowledge...sort of.  Lets continue...

The World Famous Wax Argument: Hinting at "Substance" and Further Evidence of Existence

    In the world famous wax argument Descartes hints at an argument for a metaphysics has has only 2 types of substances "mind" and body"; and he uses "clear and distinct" perception as a further argument for his own existence.  The arguments are intertwined and they go a little something like this...

     Imagine before you there is a piece of wax, better yet, imagine yourself going to the beehive in your garden to get some.  I say "imagine" a piece of wax because Descartes still isn't in a position to say there are physical things.  He only knows what is in his mind.  
     Notice the qualities the wax has, such as a scent, colour, shape, size.  Is the aggregate of set of these properties what it is for something to be wax?  Possibly.  But wait!  As I bring a flame close to the wax its scent changes; its state changes from solid to liquid; the shape changes, and so on.  Is this no longer wax before me?  Alas I am confused!  I was certain the initial properties which that wax possessed when I first lovingly rolled it between my palms were the set of properties that identified the wax as wax.  Now, my world is shaken, my life in disarray...for is this not still the same wax that I began with?

     Maybe the wax is not defined by the set of those properties which I perceived.  Maybe the wax is something more basic. Here Descartes begins to argue for the notion of "substance".  All things are constituted of a basic substance, in which the properties (i.e. "modes") of an individual thing inhere.  These properties cannot exist apart from this basic form of existence called "substance".  He will elaborate on this later but for now it is sufficient to say that for Descartes to are only 2 kinds of substance, Mind and Body, and the idea that humans magically combine these two substances is the foundation of (Cartesian) Dualism.  
     As a historical note, this also marked a change in the Christian understanding of the notion of "soul".  Prior to Descartes the soul arose out of "body" in humans, that is to say the soul was a consequence of the "humanness" of our physical form.  Consequentially, prior to Descartes, in Christianity the soul could not exist without a body (but now it can! Magic!)
     Lets return to the argument--which at this point shifts its focus back to further demonstrating the certainty Descartes existence as a Mind...So, if we strip away those initial qualities (scent, shape, size, weight, colour, etc...), what are we left with?  Something that is extended, flexible, and changeable.  Flexible and changeable means that it is capable of assuming and changing into more shapes that my imagination can fathom, thus it cannot be the faculty of my imagination that gives me the comprehension of the wax. What does it mean the the wax is extended?  When the wax is warmed from freezing to room temperature it expands.   When it is warmed from room temperature to its melting point, it expands further, and so on.  Once again, my imagination cannot fathom all the wax's degrees of contraction and expansion--i.e., the degree to which it is extended, therefore it cannot be my faculty of imagination but something else that accounts for my comprehension of the wax.

     So what faculty is it that allows us to understand what it is that truly constitutes wax?  It is the mind.  It is the mind that perceives the wax. (Who needs eyeballs when you have a mind?).  The mind allows us to understand that the wax is not simply the sum of its color, immediate shape, smell, texture, and so on.  The mind gives us insight into the qualities that are permanent to the wax regardless of conditions.  From this Descartes concludes that when we try to understand something with our mind we are using a faculty beyond the senses and imagination; that is to say we only truly perceive bodies though understanding them, which only comes through the intellect (i.e. mind).  

     Also, by concentrating his intellect on the wax (whether it was real or not) gives Descartes further evidence that he exists and that he is a thinking thing, because when he perceives the wax in his mind, only something that exists could have this experience, and the fact that he's thinking about the wax is evidence that he thinks...duh! ...or he thinks he thinks...

     A problem that Descartes runs into is that if thoughts are being fed to him maybe all that he can really say is that he is a thing that is aware of thoughts.  There is no real way for him to know if they are his own.  He can counter two ways: 1) He can say hat he can sometime control what he thinks about like if he decides to think about monkeys--he can.  But what if the evil genius knows what Descartes wants to think and feeds him those thoughts.  Now Descartes thinks the thoughts are his but in fact the evil genius created them, and Descartes is only aware of them.  2)  He can say that regardless of the origin of his thoughts it is his mind that is having them.  It wouldn't make sense to say, "I had a thought but it wasn't mine".  I think that we can partially concede 2 but Descartes is might have to compromise too.  I think Descartes will have to relegate his assertion about thoughts to a more passive "I am a thing that has thought" vs. the active "I am a thing that thinks".  It seems to me that implicit in the latter assertion is the notion of the thoughts originating in the mind of the perceiver--but that's just me!

     This idea of Descartes' that we don't simply perceive objects through the senses and/or imagination but also directly through the intellect is kind of wacky, but I think the argument could be made that there are modern day followers of this idea in the direct realist camp.

Shoot! I forgot to put my laundry in the dryer!  Goodnight!