Natural Metaphysics Blowing Through the Air

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In November 2009 the Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences at the University of Alabama Birmingham hosted a conference entitled Does Scientific Naturalism Exclude Metaphysics? The speakers were Michael Friedman, Andrew Melnyck, Ron Giere, Mark Wilson, Don Ross, Daniel Dennett, J T Ismael, James Ladyman, and Paul Humphries. The conference was video taped and the videos are now up on YouTube  here courtesy of Sarah Vollmer and her graduate student Morgan Anders who are also in the process of making a short documentary film on the issues raised.

The conference focused on Ladyman and Ross’ new book Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized where they argue, first that scientism is true and second that a lot of contemporary metaphysics, even from philosophers who claim to be naturalists, physicalists, and scientismists (Armstrong is cited as an example), relies on a fundamentally misguided and outdated conception of scientific reality as consisting of little billiard balls flying around in space banging into each other, you know basically the idea that Democritus had 2,500 years ago. Scienticism is the view that science, in particular physics and the methods it employs, is the only real way to know about the world. A priori reasoning on this view is no good, especially when it is detached from science or especially when it employs this outdated model of the scientific model. They argue that the proper role of metaphysics is that of elucidating the connections between the various special sciences so that they form a unified picture of the nature of reality. This is a task that falls to no specific science and so can be called metaphysics (they cite as an example the claim that chemistry unified is physics and physics unified is metaphysics).

My own reaction is to be sympathetic to the criticism of philosophers who try to derive conclusions about the actual world from current a priori reasoning. Given the track record it is far from clear that a priori intuitions are a good guide to the nature of the actual world. They are however a fine guide to the possible worlds. A priori reasoning fills out the space of possible and impossible worlds and science then locates the actual world in that space. The “fictional world” that occupied David Lewis, David Armstrong, as well as philosophers like Locke, Hume, and Kant, is a perfectly respectable possible world and is interesting in so far as it is a live option, which roughly means that it hasn’t been ruled out by scientific inquiry. The main thrust of Ladyman and Ross can then be seen as an argument that science doesn’t bear this picture out and so naturalistically minded philosophers should stop thinking about one set of possible worlds. But nothing in the argument suggests that a priori reasoning about a different set of possible worlds wouldn’t be useful. In fact we need the a priori reasoning about possibilities to make sense of the empirical data and this is the way we will ultimately identify the the mind with the brain, for instance. .

What we get from this kind of picture is a two-dimensional view on which a priori reasoning gives us the primary intensions of statements and science gives us the secondary intensions, or to put it in more Kripkean terms, the job of science is to reduce the epistemically possible to the metaphysically possible. This is still an empiricist position broadly construed since the claim is that for beings like us the only way to know about the actual world is via empirical means. In fact i would count this as a scientismist position. This is perfectly consistent with the claim that an ideal agent who knew all of the facts would be in a position to know about the actual world in an a priori manner.

Emotive Realism and Moral Deviance

Richard Brown 10 Comments

On my view a moral judgement consists in a moral emotion or sentiment as well as a belief about the correctness of that sentiment. So to judge that slavery is wrong is to have the moral sentiment of condemnation and the belief that condemnation is the correct emotional reaction to have. I also claim that we express both of these attitudes at the same time when we say that slavery is wrong but that this is not the meaning of the sentence ‘slavery is wrong’.

Last night while having drinks with my colleague Aaron Rizzieri he brought up what he thought was a problem for my view from what I will call moral deviance. Take, for instance, someone who has a genuinely positive emotional reaction to the thought of violence against women but at the same time knows that this is the wrong way to feel. This person might say “Violence against women is wrong, and I feel the wrong way about it”. It may seem that on my view ‘violence against women is wrong’ is used to express moral condemnation of violence against women (i.e. the moral emotion of condemnation and the belief that this is correct way to feel about it), but this person does not morally condemn violence against women since they have a positive emotional response to it so it looks like he is contradicting himself, even though the sentence itself is not contradictory. However, in this case the person most likely means that they understand that moral condemnation is the appropriate attitude to take towards violence against women and is saying that the attitude that they actually have towards such violence is the wrong attitude to have. This is not a problem for my view because I only claim that we typically use these sentences to express our moral sentiments, not that we do so in every case. This person is using the sentence in a non-standard way, but we often use sentences in non-standard ways. The only claim I want to make is, as already said, that the speech acts that I am pointing out are done by us as well. And that these speech acts capture what we might call distinctively moral speech acts.

Now Aaron raised a slightly different objection from moral deviance. When our moral deviant says that violence against women is wrong he is not performing the speech act that I have called moral condemnation but is he expressing a moral judgment at all? Saying no seems implausible but if yes then it doesn’t seem like my account captures what is essential to moral judgements. It seems to me that they do make a moral judgment but that it is deformed. Deformed moral judgments seem to me common and useful. The hope is that one’s belief will eventually lead to one having the appropriate moral emotional reaction and thus to the appropriate behavior.

One might see this kind of objection pushing one towards the view that the moral judgment should be identified with the belief in question.  So on this reading our moral deviant would be expressing the belief that the moral emotion of condemnation is the correct emotional response to violence against women but ultimately this just doesn’t seem right to me. Real moral judgments just seem to me to be rooted in emotional reactions.

Higher-Order Mental Pointing

Richard Brown 2 Comments

I recently re-watched the footage of the discussion from Hakwan’s actual talk at NYU. One interesting issue that came up (there were others I may talk about later) was whether a higher-order theory can avoid the mis-match problem.

The problem is this. Suppose you have a first-order state that is a seeing of red while one has a higher-order state to the effect that one is seeing green. David R. argues that the phenomenology goes with the higher-order representation and so in this case the person would have green visual phenomenology. They would be consciously seeing green. A first-order theorist will argue that the phenomenology goes with the first-order state. Block suggests this when he says that it is just the first-order state getting above a certain thresh hold that makes it phenomenally conscious. Hakwan wants to avoid this and so adopts a pointing view. On his view we have a higher-order confidence judgement to the effect that I am such and such % sure that I am in this or that sensory state. Since the higher-order state is just pointing at the first-order state Hakwan suggests that there is no mis-match problem for his view.

But the question then arises: what is mental pointing? On my view mental pointing is just having the right causal connection. That is I have a purely causal theory of reference for higher-order thoughts. However, these are complex demonstratives and have the form I AM IN THAT-RED* STATE. Where the THAT-red* term has it’s reference fixed by the causal connection between the states (sometimes I think it might be because it has the function to do so, sometime I don’t…) but the phenomenal character is determined by the conceptual content of the complex demonstrative. What are the other candidates for mental pointing? When asked later in discussion Hakwan offers the following. Suppose that each sensory state that the brain can be in is labeled 1-n. Suppose that the state labeled ‘1’ has a very good signal but something goes wrong and one has a higher-order confidence judgement that the state labeled ‘4’ is true then one will hallucinate 4 and fail to consciously see 1. But what are these labels if not the kind of complex demonstratives I talked about above?

Interestingly, later in the discussion, Hakwan proposes a nice empirical test that might help to decide between the higher-order view and the first-order view. The higher-order view predicts that one can have a conscious experience of green even when one has a first-order representation of red. Given what we know about the brain this might translate into having certain kinds of activity in the pre-frontal cortex that is different from the activity is V4. Suppose that we could identify, or read-out, stimulus color from the activity in V4 and we were also able to read out the color from activity in the pre-frontal cortex. Suppose that when the stimulus was unconsciously presented we say only the activity in V4 and not in the PFC. Suppose that in the Sperling-type cases we got evidence that the stimulus was represented unconsciously (activity in V4) but in the PFC we only got the read-out told us that they only saw some letters arranged in a grid. This would do what Hakwan suggests; take a prediction that no one in the world believes, do an experiment and see what happens.

I think that until we are in a position to do these kinds of experiments, or someone thinks of a clever way to get at the issue in a different way, we cannot rule the higher-order theory out. It may turn out to be false, but it may turn out to be true. Conceptual objections cannot help us as they only serve to tell us what we find intuitive.

Commercial Free Philosophy?

Richard Brown 1 Comment

I recently cam across Rick Grush’s Commercial Free Philosophy site, a movement which I am deeply sympathetic to (see below)…I have been dying to read the new paper by Michael Gazzaniga but my school is too cheap to subscribe to Science Direct so I’ll never know what the right level of mind-bran analysis is…but anyways, I noticed that there was no mention of presenting at for-profit conferences. It seems to me that the arguments which support abstaining from publishing in for profit journals would also apply to conferences.

Just as an example, and since this one is coming up, take the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness,


 Late Fees (after Friday 21st of May)
Student Member CA $280
Member CA $430
Non-member CA $530
Tutorials CA $60 each
Conference Dinner CA $70
Accommodation CA $94/night (or $47 shared)

$500.00 just to present a poster!?!?! On top of the money to fly there and have a room…Horseshit! Similar remarks can be made about the Tucson conferences, the SPP, the apa, and virtually every major conference out there. Now, look, I know that you need to charge something in order to offset the money put into organizing the conference (well, you don’t HAVE to (I didn’t) but I can see why one would think it was fair to do so) but these prices are ridiculous…most of us can’t afford that to present our research. It is true that the University helps offset the price but unless one is at a fancy research institution (hint: most of us aren’t) the help is negligible. So, to go to the apa in Vancouver cost me $2,500 and I got $500.00 from LaGuardia…big help. And for what? To be crammed into a session with three other papers plus commentators and five minutes scheduled for discussion? What a joke!

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What is Philosophy that it Sucks so Bad?

Richard Brown 4 Comments

Brian Leiter wants to know what philosophers think of philosophy in 75 words or less…here is my 50 word stab (longer stab here)

Philosophy is distinguished from other endeavors by its method, which is roughly this: a good argument with the conclusion that p is a reason to believe that p. Philosophers, as we say, feel the force of arguments and are compelled to either accept their conclusions or to show why one needn’t.

You Must be Joking

Richard Brown 2 Comments

A few years ago I had the terrible idea of taking classic jokes and “translating” them into philosophical lingo. Some work has been done in this area on lightbulb jokes but there are so many other kinds of jokes. Some are pretty obvious…like

  • Yo mama is so fat, when she sits around the house she sits AROUND the house; in all possible worlds
  • Yo mama is so dumb she has the B relation of taking more than an hour to watch 60 minutes

Some are just plain silly,

  • Yo mama is so fat she is the truthmaker for ‘your mama is fat’
  • If you mow your lawn and find the nonbeing of four cars…you might be a philosopher
  • If you go to a psychology conference hoping to meet women…you might be a philosopher
  • If someone asks you to fill out a form and you think of Plato…you might be a philosopher
  • If you think “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” actually was a good defense…you might be a philosopher

Some are just plain ridiculous as in

  • Yo mama is so dumb she thinks the transcendental deduction is a tax break for club kids
  • Yo mama is so dumb she thinks the T-schema was the code name for the Boston Tea Party

Others?

On an unrelated note, thanks to Netflix I just rewatched Return of the Living Dead II and I realized that whenever I am asked the name of the blog that I contribute to I should say Braaaaaiiiinnnnnsssss!

The Unintelligibility of Substance Dualism

Richard Brown 5 Comments

Over at Siris Brandon offers some interesting criticism of my argument against substance dualism. He distinguishes two senses in which we may say that a theory is viable. In one sense we simply mean to be asking what reasons someone might have for believing in that kind of thing. In that sense a viable theory is one which there is reason to believe. In another sense we may be asking not what the reasons are to believe it but instead what the thing in question is in the first place.  A viable theory in this sense is one that can tell us what the thing is. Brandon then goes on to show that this distinction corresponds to a distinction between things that a problem for a theory and things that a problem within the theory. Brandon then goes on to argue that my complaint is not a problem for the theory that there are immaterial substances but is rather a problem within the theory of immaterial substances itself and so should be answered by more research into immaterial substance and not with a dismissal of the theory.

The picture that Brandon seems to have is this. We decide whether or not there are good theoretical/common sense reasons to believe that there are immaterial substances and if we decide that there are we then try to construct a theory of what they are. Naturally in doing so we do not know very much about the immaterial substances and so one of the projects of the theory is to say more about what they are. Given this it is a mistake to think that our lack of understanding about what immaterial substances are is any reason to think that they don’t exist.

I completely agree with the spirit of Brandon’s comments but I do not agree with his conclusions. First, to where I agree. We clearly must recognize the kind of distinction that Brandon draws. And while I disagree that there are any real reasons or evidence for immaterial substances I agree that if there were, or if one thought there were, one should then go on to try and give a theoretical account of what they are.

Let us be generous and grant that there are reasons to think that some kind of substance dualism is true. When we then ask what an immaterial substance is we get told that it is the immaterial substrate of thinking and consciousness and that it is not located in space-time as we know it. David Chalmers has offered one way of making sense of this in terms of the matrix, and I won’t rehash it here but it seems clear that this kind of move makes the immaterial substance material outside of the matrix and so isn’t really a threat. What else can we do? At this point we have no further ideas. All we can say is that it is an X we know not what which underlies thinking and consciousness. If the theory never progresses past this point then we may start to think that it is in trouble.

So, to take Brandon’s example of evolution in biology, people had proposed accounts that looked evolution-ish as far back as Democritus, who seemed to have proposed that life as we know it was built up over time from simpler parts but this was not the theory of evolution because he did not have the right mechanism (natural selection). If the theory of evolution had stayed at the level of “evolution is whatever it is that underlies speciation and isn’t God doing it” no one would care about it. So too if the best that substance dualism can do is to say that an “immaterial substance is whatever it is that underlies consciousness and thinking and isn’t physical” it seems uninteresting. One might think this shouldn’t be a problem because lots of theories have been like that in the past (gravity seems to be a notable one) but the problem is that  it has been this way since its inception and not one step forward has been taken in 3,000 years. The most significant advance, if one were to call it that, has been the post-Humean nonchalance to the issue of physical/non-physical causation. If all there is to causation is constant conjunction, and the non-physical events are constantly conjoined with the physical ones then voila! mind-body problem (dis)solved!!

The upshot then is that fleshing out the theory will ultimately shed some light on the reasons for believing it. If we seem in principle unable to advance in specifying what a immaterial substance is, and we have physicalist alternatives that are relatively well understood, substance dualism starts to look impossible and we seem to loose our reason to believe it, which will in turn cause us to re-evaluate the reasons we used to have for believing it.

More HOTter, More Better

Richard Brown 1 Comment

In an earlier post I outlined the case for qualia realism from the higher-order perspective as I see it. Dave Chalmers worried that one of the moves was too quick. The move in question is the move from concepts making a difference to phenomenal experience to their determining phenomenal experience. Basically the line I was pushing was that if it is the case that applying concepts changes our phenomenal experience then “perhaps it is not too crazy to think that applying concepts is what results in phenomenal feel in the first place,” but Dave is right that there is a lot more that needs to be said.

As I also said, I think that a crucial step in securing this premise in the argument is showing that there can be unconscious states with qualitative character which are not like anything for the creature that has them. If we established that then we would have evidence that it is solely applying concepts that constitutes phenomenal consciousness. There is another line of argument which might show this as well which is given by David Rosenthal in a few different places (see page 155 in Consciousness and Mind for a representative example). Basically it is a subtraction argument. Take some phenomenally conscious experience, like listening to music. We already agree that applying new concepts will change the character of the experience. So, if I were to learn what a bass clarinet was then listening to Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon will sound differently to me. Now suppose that we subtract this concept. My experience will change. More specifically it will lack the bass clarinetiness that my experience had when I applied that concept. Now we can continue subtracting out concepts one by one without altering the first-order state in any way. Since subtracting the concept produces a phenomenal experience that lacks precisely the element corresponding to the concept we can conclude that subtracting these concepts will produce phenomenal consciousness that is sparser and sparser. What are we to say when we have reached teh point where there is just one concept characteriing the first-order state? Suppose that we are at the point where we are only applying the concept SOUND to the experience. Phenomenally it will be like hearing a sound for me but not any particular sounds. Now suppose we subtract that concept. What will it be like for the creature?

The higher-order theorist says that at that point it is no longer like anything for the creature. The other side says that there is still something that it is like, though it may not be like anything for the creature) but what argument could show this? What reason is there for thinking that there is anything phenomenal left over?

Summa Contra Plantinga

Richard Brown 6 Comments

I recently reread Alvin Plantinga’s paper Against Materialism and needless to say I am less than impressed. Plantinga presents two “arguments” against materialism each of which is utterly ridiculous.

The first is what he calls the replacement argument (sic). It is possible, Plantinga tells us, that one could have one’s body replaced while one continues to exist; therefore one is not one’s body. Of course the obvious problem with this argument is that it at best shows that I am not identical to a particular body but it does not show that minds are not physical for it does not show that the mind exists with out any body whatsoever. To show that Plantinga needs to appeal to disembodiment and he doesn’t.

It is also clearly possible that one could have one’s immaterial substance replaced and continue to exist; thus one is not an immaterial substance. This is because there is nothing contradictory in supposing that materialism is true and what this shows, as I have argued at length before, is that these a priori arguments are of no use to us at this point.

Now Plantinga, to his credit, realizes that these kinds of intuitions are ultimately question begging so his second argument appeals to an alleged impossibility, which turns out to be none other than the problem of intentionality. The argument turns on our ability to ‘just see’ that it is impossible that a physical thing can think. Just as the the number 7 can not weigh 5 pounds neither can a brain think. Never mind computers and naturalized theories of content, those couldn’t be belief contents. Oh, I see…wait, I don’t.

But of course the real problem here is that it is even more mysterious how an immaterial substance could think. Plantinga spends some time in the paper responding to Van Inwagen’s argument along these lines. Plantinga focuses on Van Inwagen’s claim that we can’t imagine an immaterial substance. The response should be obvious: we can’t imagine lots of stuff (like what a number looks like) but that doesn’t show that they are impossible. Van Inwagen’s second swipe at immaterial substances is that we cannot see how an underlying reality that is immaterial can give rise to thinking any more than we can see how an underlying physical reality can. Plantinga’s response to this is to claim that the soul is a simple and has thinking as an essential attribute in much the same way as an electron is said to be simple and have its charge essentially.

But all of this seems to me to miss the fundamental point that Van Inwagen wants to make. The very concept of an immaterial substance is unintelligible. Attempts to make them intelligible render them into ordinary physical substances at the next level up, so to speak. And it is of course out of the question to simply say that an immaterial substance is perfectly intelligible since they are just minds (as Plantinga seems to do). It is obvious that there is thinking but it is not at all obvious that an immaterial substance could think. What would that even mean?  The upshot then is that substance dualism is not a viable theory.