Neutral Monism and the Social Character of Consciousness
By Harvey, John
The mind-body problem today resembles a battle-zone in which warring camps, including physicalists, property dualists, panpsychists (Shan 2003), and emergentists (Gonzalez, Broens, and Haselager 2004) clash on a darkling plain, each side regarding the others’ positions as radically unacceptable. Amid this struggle, neutral monism lies as a neglected option, treated as a historical position that has somehow failed. The purpose of this essay is suggest that neutral monism is indeed the solution to the problem, and to outline a form of that theory which avoids some of the drawbacks of previous versions.
Defining Physicalism
In affirming neutral monism, I shall be denying physicalism, and therefore it would be good to know that the denial (and affirmation) of physicalism has content. More trouble has been generated than necessary over the vagueness in the term physicalism. Critics have pointed out that to assert that mind can be explained in terms of present-day physics is a booby-trapped theory, inasmuch as historical extrapolation strongly suggests that our physical theories will eventually be discarded in favor of new theories.
Therefore it has been suggested that physicalism is the doctrine that consciousness will be explicable by a “completed physics.”1 But there is no reason to think that there is or ever will be such a thing as a completed physics. We could as well say that the solution to the mind-body problem is whatever answer Santa will bring us this year.
Yet to say more vaguely that mind will be explained in terms of some future physics is still an empty position, since we do not know what conceptual transformations physics (that is, the future science that will be called physics) will undergo.2 Therefore this physicalism reduces to saying that mind will be explained in terms of something or other.
We should note also a graver danger than vagueness. We can foresee the possibility that mind will be explained physically by cheating; that is, that the palette of fundamental ideas used in physics will be enlarged by the addition of mental entities. That the new, augmented physics will be able to account for the mind will produce the bogus appearance that some epoch-making reduction has occurred.
But semantic changes wrought by future generations are not our concern. We are no more responsible for applications our grandchildren may make of the term “physics” than Kant was for the crop of occult books that currently resides beneath the label “Metaphysics” in bookstores. Yet a perfectly coherent and meaningful theory can be formulated by humbly adopting a definition of “physics” from the American Heritage Dictionary (3rd ed.) and defining physicalism as: “The doctrine that mind can be explained in terms of the science of matter and energy and of interactions between the two.” This is clear enough, at least if we remember to use the physicists’ definition of “energy”: “the capacity for doing work,” and steer clear of the New Age use in which energy is a modish re-labeling of the supernatural force that anthropologists call mana.3 As for matter, I stress that it is essentially an object, that is something derived from perception by abstracting away the subject.
The proposed definition of physicalism avoids two perilous shoals. On the one hand, it disentangles us from responsibility for how our descendants use the word “physics.” On the other hand, by refraining from specifying any particular physical theory, but only mapping out a kind of theory, the definition does not tie us to any perishable propositions.4
Having defined physicalism, it is now possible meaningfully to deny it and seek a better alternative.
Problems with Physicalism
I shall not attempt a comprehensive refutation of physicalism here. My aim is different. I shall only refer to a couple of the points that may be made against physicalism as a way of motivating the alternative theory I wish to present.
I say that matter is derived from perception by abstracting away the subject, leaving the conceptually isolated object. Now, one is free to look at the subjective-objective split and say, “I don’t buy it; I’m not going to divide the world up that way,” as Heidegger did indeed say. But the physicalist who (explicitly or implicitly) denies the existence of the radically subjective is not doing this. For the matter, energy, and so forth that he takes as real and to which he attempts to reduce the mind remain essentially and effectively objective; that is, they retain the character with which they were first stamped when the development of science conceptually carved them out.
A form of physicalism that, for good reason, is getting a lot of attention lately is the mind-brain identity theory. Among the many errors in this theory, perhaps the simplest is this: The physicalist says that despite appearances, introspective thoughts are really about brain processes. But this assurance leaps over the very thing that demands to be explained: the appearances themselves. One may assert that behind appearances lies matter, but the question is: Why are there appearances at all? Why is our world not one of matter without conscious recognition? The mere occurrence of sensation and brain process does not explain this, as countless writers have pointed out.
Stated somewhat differently: The psychophysical identity theory says that consciousness is just brain process seen from a different point of view, that is, different from that of a neurosurgeon inspecting the inside of a patient’s skull. What this theory fails to explain is the existence of either point of view. To say that I, unlike the neurosurgeon, can view my brain processes from inside makes sense only if we continue to postulate a ghostly ego lodged in obscurity inside me, who can have a different view of my brain processes than another person. But a theory that believes in such a ghostly ego is very far from genuine materialism. In a pure material world, there would be no points of view, only atoms in motion. The mind-brain identity theory only shoves the self back one ontological and epistemological step, where it hovers in the background like Wittgenstein’s metaphysical subject and where, it is hoped, young and unwary materialists will not notice the lurking immaterial presence.
In rebutting Dennett’s doctrine of the intentional stance, Crispin Wright has expressed himself so lucidly that I cannot do better than to quote him.
Is not such a stance itself individuated by its content-by the complex of attitudes one ascribes to the subject? And must the Dennettian theorist not take it as a matter of fact thatwhen one is- one is taking such a stance? According to the proposal, we can somehow deflate the realistic purport of ordinary psychological attributions by viewing them merely as entertained as part of an instrumentally useful stance. But it is thereby presupposed that one does-or can-really take such a stance. So that is then a bit of intentional reality that there is no remaining room to construe as fictional or merely instrumental. To deploy a complex of supposed fictions in the Dennettian manner is already to enter into a complex attitudinal state-in no relevant way distinguishable from regular intentional states like hope, belief, and desire. Taking the intentional stance is entering into an intentional state. So the Dennettian antirealist account winds up with a presupposition at odds with itself. (Wright 2002, 212)
I am sensible that dualism or anti-physicalism may annoy physicalists, seeming a mere obstruction to a triumphant program. After physics and chemistry overcame the vitalist hesitation and showed that they could explain biology, it seems a natural extrapolation that biology can soon explain consciousness. The excitement of this movement is not to be denied. Because I do not want to present a mere negative response to the physicalist program, I shall offer a non-physicalist account of consciousness and matter that, even if not true in every respect, may encourage further research along these lines.
Solubility of the Problem
No approach to the mind-body problem is complete without a consideration of Colin McGinn’s provocative suggestion that it is insoluble, at least by human beings. I hope McGinn will not feel that I am calling his vigor into question when I suggest that he is giving up too easily. He could not indeed have expected that this pronouncement of the insolubility of the mind-body problem could have been followed by a permanent resignation to ignorance, any more than Kant’s conclusion that the thing-in-itself is unknowable could end philosophers’ restless probing for the essence. My response to McGinn is as follows.
McGinn confuses perceptibility with conceivability. He says that we have two modes of access:
1. Perception, whereby we can (with surgical help) sense the brain; and
2. Introspection, whereby we can intuit our own thoughts.
He notes that we lack a third kind of access that would allow us to embrace sensation and introspection, and concludes that we cannot understand the relationship between matter and consciousness (McGinn 1999, 43-53).
This, however, is fallacious. It is as if we were to say: Touch and sight are different; therefore we cannot understand the relation between how a ball feels to our hands and how it looks to our eyes. Yet we can understan\d this relation. We can conceive of three- dimensional space and within that conception we can find room for both our tactile and our visual understanding (in a broad, Heideggerian sense) of objects.
Similarly, we can understand both consciousness and matter by looking conceptually for a deeper level, or a more encompassing space (many metaphors are possible) from which both can be conceived to be derived.
Methodology
My epistemology is the critical rationalism of Karl Popper: that is to say, I do not claim that my theory of consciousness can be deduced apodictically from the facts of experience or from commonly held beliefs about the mind; rather, I claim that my theory does greater justice to the facts, and does so more economically, than any rival theory known to me.
Neutral Monism
Neutral monism has a history that extends back at least as far as Spinoza. The Dutch rationalist called his neutral stuff “substance,”"nature,” or “God,” and he is able to do justice to the world as we find it by insisting that thought and extension are both attributes of God (Ethica, ii, 1, 2), an attribute being defined as “that which intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence” (ibid., i, definition 4, trans. White).
Implications of this theory, however, lead to trouble. Since thought and extension are part of the constitution of the essence of substance, they are present throughout, implying that all bodies have thought, as Spinoza confirms (ibid., ii, 13, scholium).
This solves the problem of the relationship between thought and material (extended) existence only by delivering a severe blow to our intuition by telling us that everything is animate, presumably including rocks. Now, not only are most of us unwilling soberly to say that rocks are conscious, but Occam’s razor would seem to indicate that we are unconscious during dreamless sleep (though constitutional amnesia has also been suggested as an explanation of this lost time). So, if we could believe that rocks and corpses are conscious, the mind-body problem would have been solved as of 1677. As it is, we still seek a criterion of consciousness that will explain when and why it is present without implying the incredible.
William James called his neutral stuff “pure experience.” Russell seemed to think that this was simply an unhappy locution: “The use of the phrase ‘pure experience’ in [James's] essays points to a lingering influence of idealism. ‘Experience,’ like ‘consciousness,’ must be a product, not part of the primary stuff of the world” (1921, 24). And indeed there is reason to believe that James did not intend the connotations of consciousness that come along with the term “experience.” He said:
If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: “It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not.”. . . Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures. (James [1904a] 1987, 1153)
Note that he says sensible, not sensed. Unlike Spinoza, James seems to recognize that only some bits of neutral stuff become involved in conscious events.
Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of ‘consciousness’ ; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective ‘content.’ (Ibid., 1145)
And again,
A ‘mind’ or ‘personal consciousness’ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit together by different transitions. (James [1904b] 1987,1177)
Russell ( 1921,35 ) is more explicit about the conventional character of the mind-body distinction: “mind and matter are neither of them the actual stuff of reality, but different convenient groupings of an underlying material.”
The weakness of James’s and Russell’s theory here is similar to the weakness of Dennett’s theory (1991). It relativizes the status of consciousness, thus again leaving everything explained except what requires to be explained: the world of our experience, a world in which I am conscious of some objects on my desk; I am not conscious of events taking place in the neighbors’ house; and the desk is presumably not conscious of me. It is trendy to relativize things; it rides on a Zeitgeist going back at least to 1905; but what we want is not an account of how we can conceptually gather a bundle of events and call it a mind; rather we want to explain why I am in fact conscious (whether or not anyone else conceives that I am) and why the desk presumably is not. We need to specify the conditions of consciousness.
I assert that neutral monism is true, and I nominate being for the neutral stuff. I do not want to drag along with the word “being” a large burden of existential baggage (it is partly for this reason that I refrain from capitalizing it). The being I refer to is what all things that are have in common. Thus I have being, you have being, my desk here has being, and the number 32 has being. Unicorns lack being, as does the real square root of-9. Obviously, I am referring to the existential, not the predicative or the identical use of “be.” Anyone who can assent to any of the propositions “I am,”"you are,”"she is,” or “the desk is” must agree to the legitimacy of the notion of being.
One might object that the word “being” refers not to a substance but to a property or state, and therefore cannot be used as we use the word “margarine.” A full reply to this would involve a deconstruction of the dichotomy of substance and attribute, beginning at least from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Fortunately, that is not necessary, for in fact nothing in my derivation depends crucially on identifying the neutral substance as being. This requires a brief digression.
It has been alleged that neutral monism failed because of an inability clearly to characterize the neutral substance. But this objection repeats the worst errors of essentialism. In any legitimate scientific theory, biological, chemical, or physical, a point comes when the query “What is it?” ceases to find an answer. We might now be able to say that the proton is an assemblage of quarks; but the question “What is a quark?” though it might be answered with a list of quantum numbers, would receive no answer that would satisfy a Platonist. If Einstein’s dream were fulfilled, we would be able in every case to refer particles to “the physical states of space itself; but then the question “What is a state?” would be likely to evoke mystery.
Therefore I might, if I preferred mystery, just call the neutral stuff “neutral stuff’ rather than “being,” for the point is not what we call the neutral stuff but how we construct phenomena out of it.
Beginning with being we can understand both consciousness and matter. Consciousness occurs first in the I-You relationship.5 (I gratefully borrow Buber’s concepts and terminology without claiming to present a theory he advocated or would agree with.) The I-You relationship occurs when being relates to being as being. The meaning of this becomes clearer when we contrast it with the I-It relationship, which occurs when being relates to being as a tool or as equipment (Zeug; see Heidegger 1993, 68). The labels “I-You” and “I-It” are evocative, but I must stress that I intend them as basic words, not molecules formed from the atoms of “I,”"You,” and “It.” Rather, matter arises from the I-It relationship by abstracting away the “I.”
It may immediately be objected that an entity cannot enter into a relationship with itself, a relationship occurring meaningfully only between different things; but this is a mistake. An entity has the relationship of identity to itself, recognized as a relation by two such unimpeachable analytic philosophers and Whitehead and Russell (Principia Mathematica *50.01).
Well, it may be rejoined, that is trivially true, but an entity has no other relationship with itself. That also is false. The number 1 has at least two relationships with itself, not only identity but also square (that is, 12 = 1 ).
Accordingly, the first conscious experience is an I-You experience. Conflict of our will with the wills of others eventually produces the differentiation of I-You into I and You, each one of them now a conscious subject.
Now let us look at I-It. This includes manipulation and also perception. What we perceive is no random sampling of the world, but rather has evolved as a gathering of information (I use this term in a wide sense) that is useful to us. This relationship is not necessarily conscious. The hydra that reels in a water flea is in an I-It or an It-It relationship to it; the whole affair is quite possibly unconscious. (I do not pretend to any extraordinary knowledge of which creatures are conscious; to begin with, all we have to go on is our intuitions. An advantage of my theory, however, is that, once accepted, it allows us to deduce which creatures are conscious and which not.)
But of course, we humans tend to be conscious of our perceptions. (Let us note in passing that if we take perception in the psychological rather than the phenomenal sense,6 the match between what is conscious and what is perceived is not as good as the match between what is conscious and what is reportable. More on this later.) If perception is essentially an I-It relation of manipulation, and therefore not essentially conscious, why are some perceptions conscious for us? Because we are socially introduced to them. Members of our society, especially our parents, direct our attention to aspects of our environment, aspects that then become part of the I-You micro-society. It is above all by the acquisition of language that we are taught what to be aware of and what to ignore.
Voltaire (Lettres philosophiqu\es XIII) in responding impatiently to the argument that the soul must exist because the body cannot think, said, “Je suis corps et je pense: je n’en sais pas davantage. Irai-je attribuer une cause inconnue ce que je puis si aisment attribuer la seule cause seconde que je connais?” Thus it may be suggested that I am complicating the ontology of the situation by not simply assuming that whatever properties are needed to give rise to consciousness are present in matter, even though these properties may be invisible to empirical inspection. My response is that I am trying to avoid a relapse into Renaissance occult properties (the latent attributes of matter that were supposed to explain many kinds of phenomena), and also to avoid the kind of ontological cheating I referred to above. I honor the effort of simplification that has resulted in our present stripped-down picture of matter, as possessing only a handful of ultimate quantum numbers, and I do not think that physicists would thank philosophers for burdening matter with whatever proto-psychic qualities are needed to construct the kind of consciousness we are familiar with. Nothing momentous turns on this decision: we can, as Lucretius and Diderot apparently did, posit some sort of sensitive quality which lies buried in matter and emerges only in conscious life; but I think it is more clear to use the term “matter” as physicists do, that is, for an object, and to recognize that the neutral stuff must be beyond (or prior to) the subject-object split.7
Consciousness and Reportability
An advantage of the proposal of the social character of consciousness is that it explains a feature of our world, the nearly identical extension of consciousness and reportability, which numerous commentators have noted8 but none to my knowledge explains. It may be thought that this coextension is logically or metaphysically necessary-”After all, that’s what it means to be conscious”- but that is false, as may be seen by the coherence of a counterexample. Imagine members of an alien species who unconsciously exchange numerous signals about practical matters (where food can be found, etc.) but who all the time are consciously introspecting about something else, mathematics perhaps, or the nature of consciousness. The reader may well doubt whether evolution would ever contrive such a wasteful use of mentality, but the point is that there is no contradiction in the picture. But certainly it is not our condition, which therefore cries out for an explanation. The empiricist may reply, again, that it is quite meaningless in practice to suppose that the conscious is not the reportable, because we ascertain one by the other in psychological research: that is, we ask subjects about their experiences. That is true as far as it goes, but my approach is different. I am asking you, the reader, whether you can imagine a situation in which your conscious mind is not coextensive with your reportable mind. Imagine: You spend an hour thinking about certain mathematical ideas that you have never managed (or, perhaps, tried) to communicate to anyone else; you later learn that during that hour you communicated to someone some practical information that you got from a third person, without your being aware of the information transfer. This scenario is philosophically coherent even if it not biologically likely or useful to the experimental psychologist.
Dualist theories such as Chalmers’ leave the actual human coextension of the conscious and the reportable as a brute fact that never gets explained, in effect a gigantic coincidence. By contrast, the social theory of consciousness, in which consciousness is essentially of the other and introspection is an invagination of social experience, makes it perfectly natural that in a species with language the conscious should be the reportable.
Further Objections
It may be objected that my theory is no better than physicalism, in that where physicalism derives consciousness inexplicably from matter, my theory derives consciousness inexplicably from being, which is less well defined. But this apparent drawback is in truth an advantage of my theory. Physicalism attempts to construct consciousness from entities (mass, energy, space, time, and a handful of others) that have finite, well-defined features such that we can see that no combination or permutation of these features could possibly be identical with consciousness. My theory, by contrast, begins with being, which I fleshed out with the examples of not only “the desk is” but also “I am,” and “you are.” Thus I begin with an entity9 that is not (as matter is) confined to one side of the subject-object split, and is therefore capable, with proper structuring, of generating both subjects and objects as derived entities.
Similarly, some readers may say: You have not really constructed consciousness independently of matter; for surely, our knowledge of other beings is derived through the senses, that is, it is constructed from material elements. Here I must insist upon the radical character of my thesis. I am in fact asserting that knowledge of the other is not constructed from sense data. We know that the people we are acquainted with tend to be those whom we have sensed, but that is a parallel relationship, not a causal relationship. Because consciousness and matter both derive from being, there are parallels between (i) personal acquaintance and (ii) perception just as there are parallels between (a) conscious thought and (b) the functioning of the brain.
Let us think about the latter set of parallels. Some will say that we know that there is a 100% correlation between conscious events and brain events, and that therefore mind is best identified with brain function. Two very different kinds of response are possible to this. One is to say that such a correlation could just as well be used to support idealism as materialism, thought being taken as the basis of matter.
The other kind of response is to point out that we do not in fact know that there is any such perfect correlation. We know that there is a significant correlation, and that is what we would expect from my theory, since consciousness and matter are both developments of being. But that there must be a perfect correlation (or perhaps, rather, supervenience) is merely physicalist dogma. A rough analogy may be useful. If we looked at two sets, (i) inhabitants of San Francisco who have been to the symphony and (ii) inhabitants of San Francisco who have been to the opera, we would probably find a high correlation, but one less than 100%. This is because, though the two properties presumably depend on similar factors (taste, education, background, disposable wealth), neither of the two properties causes the other.
Conclusion: Past the Logjam
The above is obviously not a complete theory of consciousness. In particular, I have not described how the basic difference between the I-You and the I-It relationships comes about. I have also not tackled the thorny problem of mental and physical causation, which must be the subject of a separate essay. Some readers will feel that the weakness in my theory is that it is simply too vague, that is, too vague to be tested. I suggest accordingly that the right research strategy is the pursuit of psychophysical laws.10 We cannot make a leap to a detailed knowledge of the nature of being and its relationship to consciousness and matter; but we can approach such knowledge stepwise by taking consciousness and matter as we find them and looking for law-like correspondences.11 A historical analogy from physics may be helpful. To a relativist, electricity and magnetism may be merely aspects of the electromagnetic field; but we were able to construct this tensor field only by studying electricity and magnetism separately as phenomena and specifying their relationship to one another. Once we had the laws linking the two forces, it was then possible to reason our way mathematically to the single, higher-ranked field that lies behind them.
I hope that this essay has pointed the way past the present impasse in philosophy of mind that has been produced by an obsessive clinging to materialism, and encouraged a search for a unified worldview that does justice both to the marvelous creation that is physics and to the undeniable world of our own experience.
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA 15282
ENDNOTES
1. See, among many other uses of this phrase, Chalmers and Jackson, “Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation,” Philosophical Review 110 (2001): 316.
2. This flaw in this version of physicalism was first pointed out to me by Teed Rockwell (personal communication, 2002).
3. If we unpack work as J Fds, force as ma, and acceleration as dv/dt, we can see that energy implies space and time as well.
4. Crook and Gillett, in “Why Physics Alone Cannot Define the ‘Physical’: Materialism, Metaphysics, and the Formulation of Physicalism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (2001): 333-60, present an able but I think unnecessarily complicated attempt to define physicalism. Similar ideas are discussed by Nimtz and SchUtte in “On Physicalism, Physical Properties, and Panpsychism,” Dialectica 57 (2003): 413-22.
5. The restless mind of Nietzsche at least momentarily lit on a social theory of consciousness: The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, ([1887] 1974), 354, 297-300.
6. For this distinction see Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 18.
7. McGinn actually at one point approaches my view, but shies away from suggesting that it might lead to a theory of consciousness. He says that one of his conjectures “would mean that the mind is an aspect of matter after all, but an aspect that does not fit the usual conception of matter.” The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), \12 !.This becomes nearly identical to my view if we change one word and say, “the mind is an aspect of being after all, but an aspect that does not fit the usual conception of matter.”
8. See, e.g., Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 237.
9. Note that I am not concerned here with Heidegger’s distinction between Sein and Seiendes, which is not useful for my purposes.
10. One of the most serious attempts to find such laws is found in Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 213-18 and passim.
11. Thomas Nagel, in The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 53, endorses a similar program for solving the mind-body problem.
REFERENCES
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