Neurath's Boat

Feser Chapter 6

Finally, the conclusion of the discussion I began so long ago!  Feser begins chapter 6 by mocking the Churchlands.  It is obvious from recent psychological research that there are mistakes and confusions in people's common understanding of notions like "belief" and "desire."  For that matter, this has long been obvious to those who have tried to understand those notions; many philosophers (Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche come to mind) anticipated some of the discoveries of the recent psychological research.  So the serious question is whether "belief" is more like "phlogiston" or "aether" or more like "heat" or "metal."  Thinking we know exactly what it refers to and that something exactly like that exists is absurd.  The Churchlands, of course, think belief theory is more like phlogiston theory.

Feser makes heavy weather of how hard it is to state their theory.  Since I don't myself reject beliefs, I can of course simply talk about what they believe, but as Feser notes, it seems that they shouldn't.  I do actually think it's a problem for them that they speak of these successor concepts without providing them; nobody did, or should have, rejected phlogiston chemistry before the rival oxygen theory was proposed.  But equally, nobody should have said phlogiston theory couldn't be replaced, and nobody should say that about folk psychological notions either.  Patricia Churchland makes a pretty convincing case for the thesis that folk psychology is deeply defective.  That doesn't make it clear how much should be revised and how much replaced, much less exactly what revisions and replacements should be made (Paul seems to make more radical claims about those things than Patricia, and to be less careful about citing evidence), but Feser seems to think everything is fine, and that's just absurd.

Perhaps the Churchlands should be taken as speaking about beliefs and desires analogically when they talk about what people think or want.  I complained when Feser said that God is "analogically" a person, because that seems to mean that God is a person when Feser needs God to have human-like features and not when those features seem to be problematic, but obviously the notion that something could be analogically like something else is not inherently defective.  I can't see how there would be any fatal confusion were Patricia Churchland to claim to analogically know her own mind better than Feser analogically knows it.

Certainly Feser doesn't provide anything like a decisive argument.  He is tacky enough to make jokes about the Churchlands' pillow talk; I will not speculate on what it sounds like when Thomists talk to their lovers in private, but thinking of my own case, I certainly hope that it is not a strike against any philosopher that what they say to their lovers in private seems rather silly.

Feser also makes much of what he takes to be the a priori character of his own theories about mind and intentionality, suggesting that we should take the Churchlands no more seriously than we should take someone who says we should expect a new form of addition to be discovered according to which 2+2=23.  As usual, I think the mathematics analogies are misguided on many levels, but even if intentionality were the same kind of a priori matter as addition, what would Aristotle or Aquinas have thought of the claim that there's a number n such that n is greater than 1 and n+n=n?  No doubt that whatever any future oddballs who proposed such a thing would be doing would not be arithmetic.  And yet I doubt that's Feser's own opinion of Cantor (it would be odd that he expresses such admiration for Frege if he rejects modern mathematical ideas like cardinal numbers).

Of course, most modern materialists are not eliminativists, as Feser grants.  Before talking about his specific arguments, I do want to mention one general issue which seems to me to be at work in some of his complaints.  It is logically impossible to theorize about everything, because the theorizer is part of everything, and including the theorizer among the objects of the theory generates self-reference paradoxes that should be familiar to anyone who knows anything about modern philosophy from Frege onward.  Having a total theory of everything requires being outside of everything; it requires the impossible "view from nowhere" in Nagel's memorable phrase.  This fact may generate theological problems (it may make divine omniscience incoherent), but it is no problem for materialism.  There is no principled obstacle to generating a complete material theory of anyone except myself, or to them generating a complete material theory of me (it's puzzling that I couldn't use their complete material theory of me as a complete material theory of myself, but a little reflection on the nature of the problem will show that puzzling or not, that's just how it must work).  A number of the problems Feser tries to raise for materialism seem to involve this required distinction between the thinker and the object of thought, but as indicated these are not actually problems (just facts), and if they were problems, Feser's view wouldn't solve them; the problem isn't that the thinker must be distinct from any material facts thought about, but that the thinker must be distinct from any facts at all that are thought about.  Souls and final causes don't make any difference to that issue.

It seems to me that this is part of the confusion involved when Feser makes heavy weather of the fact that a symbol must be interpreted by a thinker as representing in order to represent.  He's right to insist that how I as a thinker manage to do that interpreting itself involves me representing things, and isn't something that I can fully account for in terms outside of my thoughts.  But he fails to recognize that the reason is that it's something I can't fully account for at all (and it is something someone else could fully account for materialistically).

Still, Feser is right about another point; teleology is necessary to understanding thought.  And he briefly mentions the most popular way to explain teleology materialistically; use evolutionary accounts, as Millikan does in Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories.  Feser is not impressed.  He cites Fodor as saying we can make a shrewd guess as to the functions of many biological features without knowing their evolutionary history.  It is hard to see how anyone could take that seriously as an objection to the theory; it is as if someone objected to the theory that gold is the element with atomic number 79 on the basis that one can make a shrewd guess as to whether some substance is gold without counting the protons in any of the atoms the substance is composed of.

Feser also claims that on Millikan's story the first instance of some trait, or the traits of swampman, will not have functions.  For the first instance of a trait, there seems no reason not to say that it has a function based on how selection will operate on it in the future.  As for swampman, I think in that case it is less clear that swampman's organs do have functions (does Feser also think swampman has beliefs and desires?  If so, I wish he'd indicated that he holds that highly controversial view!)  But if we must say they do have functions, that still isn't really a problem.  It would hardly constitutes abandonment of Millikan's principles to say the functions are determined by counterfactuals about how selection would operate on the traits of those organs in some suitable range of circumstances.

Still, Feser says the deeper problem is that the teleology in Millikan's theory isn't real teleology.  I think the confusion I mentioned above is at work here; part of the reason he's suspicious of it is that it doesn't provide the view from nowhere, but his view doesn't do that either.  At least, I can't see anything else that final causes are needed for that Millikan's "Normal functions" can't do perfectly well.  And it's clear that Dennett is talking about what Millikan is talking about.  The only sense I can make of Feser's complaints against Dennett in this section is that he thinks Dennett needs some "real" teleology which goes beyond that.  And the only sense in which that seems remotely true is the sense in which Dennett as thinker must be outside the kinds of things he's thinking about even when he's thinking about thought.  But that doesn't mean that some special kind of teleology other than Millikan's must be going on in Dennett; any different senses of teleology wouldn't have anything to do with the real sense in which a thinker must be distinct from the objects of thought.

Feser concludes with a discussion of the "new essentialists" and various advocates of non-Humean understandings of causation and scientific theories generally.  He oversimplifies the Humean view, as usual, and I actually think that if it isn't oversimplified the Humean approach is superior to the alternatives, but as he says this "new essentialism" is extremely popular, so he would have a lot of allies if it were as closely allied to his position as he believes.  But it isn't, for reasons I've already discussed from various angles.  Feser completely blurs the line between the minimal thesis that things have properties which determine their behaviors in some way (a thesis even Humeans accept) and the very substantial thesis that pretty much the essences Aristotle believed in are present in things and produce their behavior in pretty much the way Aristotle described them as doing.  It helps him blur this distinction that Aristotle was often extremely vague in his descriptions, but the details of Feser's philosophy depend on his getting very specific about them at times (as I've discussed extensively for the specific case of the form or essence of humanity).

The new essentialists are somewhere between the minimal thesis and the very substantial thesis, but they reject the very substantial thesis for the same reason the Humeans do; it's obviously false.  And so perhaps there are powers in the world of the kind Armstrong and Cartwright and others believe in; there's no evidence against that thesis, at least.  Or perhaps there are powers of kinds nobody has thought of; certainly there is no evidence conclusively showing there couldn't be unimagined powers.  But the potentials Aristotle described?  Unless we strip out all the details (in which case Feser can't make his claims about morality, God, etc.), there is plenty of evidence against those.

Feser Chapter 5

So, the theory of Forms has been one of the main topics of my discussion, as Aristotle's version of it is central to Feser's account; I have of course consistently criticized Feser's attempts to insist that it is rationally compulsory.  Feser knows, of course, that Aristotle's metaphysics have been rejected in the modern era, and in chapter 5 he tries to explain why this is, attempting, naturally, to do so in such a way as to avoid the conclusion that the reasons why it has been rejected are any good.

One of his crucial moves is his attempt to sharply separate Aristotle's scientific theories from his metaphysical theories.  Aristotle himself would have recognized no such sharp separation, and Feser's appeals to Aristotle often bleed over into scientific matters (as with his insistence that there are forms corresponding to biological species, which is incompatible with biological facts).  But it is true that the new science didn't refute everything in Aristotle.  What the new science did incontrovertibly show is that Aristotle must have been in many cases wrong about which forms exist, and what their natures are.  The new mathematical physics did not show that the motion of bodies doesn't involve forms at all, but if forms are involved, they aren't the ones Aristotle thought existed.  And Darwin didn't show that there are no forms involved in life, but he did show that there are no forms of biological species.

But that result is already enough to have serious consequences.  The form of a human being is one of the things that science has discarded, and it is of course central to Feser's project.  Furthermore, the mere fact that Aristotle was so badly wrong about the forms casts serious doubt on the idea that the forms are somehow built into us.  One of the more puzzling aspects of Plato for a modern reader is that in a number of dialogues he spends a very long time wrestling with the problem of how it's possible for anybody to be wrong about anything.  That's actually a serious problem on Plato's theory; if we have access to the forms, and the forms make the world the way they are, why don't they give us infallible knowledge of the world?  Aristotle, as usual shallower than Plato, doesn't think through the consequences of his theory far enough to see why this is such a huge problem, and Feser naturally follows Aristotle in sweeping this problem under the rug of "common sense;" contradictions are fine, apparently, as long as common sense endorses both halves of the contradiction.

One natural way to keep forms and avoid the problem is to abandon the dual role of the forms; say they don't both control our thoughts and the world, in different ways, but that they only control the world.  If you insist on keeping some kind of forms, but both grant that Aristotle was largely wrong about which forms there are, and also draw the conclusion that knowledge of the forms can't be acquired by pure reason but must depend on scientific inquiry, you're David Armstrong (one of the modern naturalists that Feser says never actually thinks about the really serious issues).  I think it's better to dispense with the forms altogether, but Armstrong's view has a huge advantage over Feser's in that it is at least is not contradicted by firmly established scientific knowledge.

Feser's opium example may help illustrate the issue.  Feser criticizes the naturalists for inconsistency in claiming both that the explanation of opium in terms of a "dormitive power" is empty, and claiming that it's false.  But one of the central problems with scholastic forms is that they are so vague; interpreted one way, claims about scholastic forms are empty, interpreted another way they are false.

The false doctrine is that there is some single thing, a "dormitive power", which is fairly simple and works the same way in all the various things that cause sleep, and which doesn't do anything else and which is very different from the power of anything else to do anything else.  The empty doctrine is that there's something about opium that causes sleep.  It is true that the full account of the powers of opium can be described with or without forms; it involves the chemical properties of the compounds that make up opium and the chemical properties of animal life, which of course are themselves determined by the physics of the particles that make up those compounds, and one could go along with Armstrong and say that the properties of the physics particles are forms, or one could say that the story about forms isn't really adding anything useful (as I would) and do without it.  And the details of this underlying story make the false doctrine false; the properties of opium are very complicated, and there are things very similar to opium at the chemical level in very many ways which don't cause sleep, and things which cause sleep which are in very many ways very different at the chemical level.

Feser claims that these details, which he admits would have to be settled empirically, make no difference to the metpahysics.  Unfortunately, Feser's claims about the form of humanity are much more like the false version of the dormitive power story than they are like the empty version.  If he were to grant that we could be very wrong about exactly which forms are involved in human life and how they were connected to other forms, and insist only that forms are involved somehow, that would completely undermine his efforts to derive detailed moral conclusions from the form of humanity.

Feser maintains that the idea of secondary qualities requires dualism, but this is only true of one insists for some reason that, for example, a perception of redness must be red.  But that is, of course, absurd.  I myself lean toward a dispositional theory of secondary qualities; red is a disposition of surfaces to produce sensations of a certain kind.  Feser thinks dispositions require final causes; more on that next chapter, but if we're talking about final causes in the bare logical sense I mentioned at the end of chapter 2, it's not so much that dispositions require final causes as that they are final causes, and so final causes can't explain dispositions because if any explanation is needed, final causes need it to the same extent.  Of course, Feser's final causes are supposed to be more than bare logical final causes, but while Feser tries to define them as things which explain more, he actually doesn't have any worthwhile account of how they provide this additional explanatory help.  Thus, since explanations can't be conjured up out of nothing by definition, his final causes don't actually have any more explanatory power than the bare logical final causes.

Feser also claims that intentionality cannot be accounted for on materialist grounds; he keeps harping on this throughout his book, but in only one place (in the next chapter) does he make any effort to directly address the best materialist story about intentionality (and his effort is disappointing, to put it mildly).  I am greatly annoyed by what appear to be Feser's frequent attempt to appeal to authority, and have tried to avoid such nonsense myself, but I feel I must note that many of the "allies" he cites for his anti-materialist cause think the materialists have won on the intentionality issue; David Chalmers, for example, thinks this, and Frank Jackson not only has long granted that materialism can explain intentionality, he has even recently come around to agreeing that qualia aren't an obstacle to materialism either.

 

Feser's "solutions" to assorted philosophical problems:

 

Skepticism:  Feser says that the rejection of the Aristotelian view produces skepticism, since without Aristotle's claim that the same forms work on our minds and on the world, there's no guarantee that the world will match up to our thoughts at all.  But this is of course nonsense.  Skepticism became dominant at Plato's academy shortly after Plato's death, and not because they already anticipated Cartesian views.  I suspect it was partly because of Alexander the Great and the return of military autocracy as the default government pattern; if you don't claim to know anything, you are never claiming to know the rulers are wrong about anything, so you're slightly safer from hostile rulers.  Still, skepticism seemed to be an available option because all it actually requires is admitting that people can be wrong about anything.  Once that obvious fact is granted, it is hard to see how you can completely rule out the possibility that we're wrong about everything

And that's why Aristotle's view doesn't actually solve skeptical problems.  After all, we do make mistakes, so even an Aristotelian has to have some account of how such errors are possible.  And whatever the account is, it will always be possible to raise the skeptical worry that errors like that could be much more common than we think.

 

Induction:  The problem of induction suffers the same fate; Aristotelianism has a solution to the problem of induction if our knowledge of forms is infallible.  But if our knowledge of forms were infallible, we couldn't make a lot of mistakes we quite obviously make.  So the Aristotelian view doesn't actually solve the problem of induction, and so arguments like Goodman's can be run against the Aristotelian; how do we know we're not making one of our mistakes about essences in thinking that it's green rather than grue which can genuinely be part of the essences of things?  Not that I think an Aristotelian should actually be a skeptic, of course, but Aristotelianism alone is not an answer to the problem; the Aristotelian must join the rest of us in seeking other answers.

 

Personal identity:  Derek Parfit and other contemporary philosophers seem to have been rediscovering Buddha's insight that our concept of ourselves is in many respects deeply misleading, indeed incoherent.  Parfit also follows Buddha in thinking that good consequences follow from this insight (as they often do from recognizing the truth); the mistaken notion of the self is deeply implicated in destructive forms of selfishness, so recognizing the flawed notion of the self should help free one from those harmful selfish impulses.  Feser will of course have none of this; selfishness is central to the conservative mindset, and must be defended at all costs!  Now, of course the objectionable moral implications of Feser's view don't constitute evidence that his view is false (it's false because it involves the same impossible theory of souls that I've criticized all through his discussion), but since he's constantly harping on the supposed immoral consequences of modern naturalism, I couldn't resist giving a nod to the morally appealing consequences of the Buddhist view.  Incidentally, Feser insists that skepticism about personal identity originates with Descartes; I find it implausible that Descartes' influence was the source of Buddha's views on this matter.

 

Free will:  A free choice cannot be derived from the world as understood by the chooser; when you freely choose to do something, you don't examine your evidence to determine what choice you are going to make, you make the choice.  Hence, it must come from outside of that?  Perhaps it must come from outside of everything?  Feser says not quite; it must come from outside of everything material, but that's fine, because there's the realm of souls and forms and final causes.  But that's actually no help at all, at least so long as we understand the realm of souls and forms and final causes (as Feser insists we do); the problem comes from our understanding of the world, not the material nature of the world.  Kant recognized this, and so said free choices comes from an unknowable realm; others since have found the idea of an unknowable realm problematic (how do we know it's a realm?  It's unknowable!) and so Heidegger and Sartre and others say free choices comes from nothing.  Crazy answers, to be sure (though much depends on how you interpret them), but at least they recognize that there's a serious problem here.  Compatibilists also take the problem seriously for the most part.  Feser does not take the problem seriously; he gives no explanation of what it is about final causes that is supposed to connect them to freedom, probably because to do so he'd have to say a lot of things that are contrary to the common sense he claims to be respecting.

 

Natural rights:  I of course am a consequentialist, and think doing without natural rights is an improvement.  But I would have thought this would be the place to discuss Kant.  Since Feser instead uses it as an opportunity to heap scorn on Locke, I have little to say about this part of his discussion; since Feser is unfair to nearly all of his opponents, I expect he is unfair to Locke, but I am not sufficiently a Locke scholar to say how.

 

Morality in general:  I haven't done a lot of quoting of Feser, because he usually buries his points in considerable excess verbage (and ad hominem), but I'll quote this one.  He complains that Hume does not "really have anything to say to a group of sociopaths - Nazis, communists, jihadists, pro-choice activists, or whomever - who seek to remake society in their image by social or genetic engineering, say.  The Platonist, Aristotelian, or Thomist can say that such people are behaving in an inherently irrational and objectively wicked manner, given human nature.  All the Humean can say is 'Gee, I hope they don't succeed.'"  Leaving aside the somewhat suspect character of his list of sociopaths, does Feser really think it is of such over-riding importance, or indeed any importance at all, what one says to Nazis?  Plato was not so foolish (Socrates himself could not move Callicles, or Meno for that matter, and the conversion of Thrasymachus is presented in such a way as to make its sincerity highly dubious, to say the least), and I hope no Platonist would be.  I am less expert on the Aristotelians and Thomists, but I had not heard that they believed in magic spells, for surely it would have to involve magic if a Nazi ever changed his behavior in the slightest upon hearing the incantation "you are behaving in an inherently irrational and objectively wicked manner."

Hume was actually a more practical sort; he favored saying whatever would work best, and employing other means, again whatever accomplishes the most for the least cost, when words fail.  I never cease to be astonished at how often people try to argue against consequentialism on the basis that endorses policies with bad consequences; if your argument is that consequentialism is committed to a policy which has bad consequences, that is a sure sign that there's something wrong with your argument, not that there's something wrong with consequentialism.  If the policy has bad consequences, consequentialism correctly interpreted will always say do something else.

Now, Feser admits that his opponents may have space for a "pretense" of morality, but he thinks that unless they use the magic spells, that can have no impact.  Of course, a consequentialist moral theory is hardly a pretense of morality, but perhaps more to the point, Feser's discussion of this issue suggests that he thinks people behaved more morally in the middle ages than they do at present (elsewhere in the chapter he suggests that they were more devoted to wisdom as well!)  I usually don't think much of the incredulous stare as an argument, but I'm not sure where to begin with this aspect of Feser's discussion.

Feser is aware that the modern era has produced non-consequentialist ethics as well; Kant's moral theory is perhaps even more influential than any variety of consequentialism.  But Feser's discussion of Kant's moral theory would barely get a passing grade if it came from an undergraduate in an introductory ethics class.  Kant's central idea is that ethics is supposed to be both inherently universal, and chosen by humans.  So what we can choose is constrained only by the requirement that our choices must be consistent with the requirement of universality.  This means I cannot make choices that undermine the rights of others to their choices; I must treat all choices as mattering.  I don't want to try to give Kant's full story, but since Feser seems to think the modern worldview means you can't criticize anyone (perhaps the reason he doesn't like it; he loves to criticize!), I should probably at least mention that detail in Kant's approach.  One way of putting Kant's version is that we must be tolerant of everything except intolerance; we must treat impartially all perspectives which are not themselves partial.  If we respect the choices of others who do not themselves respect the choices of others, we are failing to respect the choices of their victims; if we give equal weight to the biased, we are in part sharing their bias.  So we can't fully respect the choices of others like that (of wrongdoers).  The closest we can come, Kant thinks, is to respect their choice to be biased by applying their standards to them; being biased against them.  Hence proportional retribution as the response to wrongdoers.

Feser only discusses the first form of the categorical imperative, and indeed the first form is very hard to sensibly interpret if one ignores the other two forms.  But Feser's criticism of Kant goes from being pathetic to high comedy when he complains that there is no way Kant could possibly derive detailed moral rules from "reason alone," using only his principles.  I know that Feser is under the delusion that his own Thomistic principles are clearer and less susceptible to conflicting interpretations than Kant's, but it certainly is nothing more than a delusion.

Feser Chapter 4

On Representing:

So, chapter 4 of Feser's book gave me flashbacks to Hubert Schwyzer's Kant seminars.  I wonder if Feser ever took those when he was at UCSB; if not, it's unfortunate, as they might have helped him.  "Knowing is not like eating," as Schwyzer would say as he tried to explain Kant's struggles with the representational aspect of knowing.  Knowing something does not involve taking the objects of knowledge into our minds in the way that eating something involves taking the objects of eating into our bodies.  Rather, our minds somehow contain representations of the objects (of course, we may know things about our minds, but even in those cases the knowledge is not the same as what is known). The very name "representation" may be tendentious, but I intend for it to be as content-free as possible; whatever it is in the mind that determines which objects are being thought about is the representation of those objects.  The Churchlands may think there are still hidden assumptions buried in this, and perhaps they are right, but leave those worries aside for the moment.

Considerable progress has been made on the nature of representation since Kant's time.  In particular, Ruth Millikan provides an extremely interesting account of how thoughts can represent the world in her Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories.  It would take considerable time to go through all of the details, but it is an evolutionary story.  Words and thoughts have functions in roughly the sense that biologists speak of things as having functions; the functions are whatever they do that leads to their being favored by natural selection.  Millikan argues that a detailed account of these functions can enable us to pick out the objects of thought (in the case of representational thought), because of the way the functions relate to those objects (again, details are lengthy; I highly recommend her book).

The functional story of how my knowledge of the glass of water on my desk is related to the glass of water involves causal relationships between the glass of water and my thought (the functional/evolutionary story picks out which causal relationships are relevant), so the case of knowledge of abstract objects seems to be more difficult, since it will lack such causal relationships.  However, while certainly nobody has filled in all the details, I would say this much; a priori knowledge seems to contain a strong conventional component.  David Lewis provides a thorough account of conventions in his book Convention, one which connects very naturally to Millikan's theories about thought (Millikan harshly criticizes Lewis, but only on one issue, and I think she misinterprets his theory as being more different from hers than it is; I discuss this in my dissertation).  Millikan also has some things of her own to say about a priori knowledge; again, not all the details are filled in, but it all looks very promising to me.

Formal representation:

I mention all of this because Feser's argument requires the assumption that there is one and only one way representation could work, and it is nothing like what I've sketched above.  Rather, Feser insists on what is surely one of Plato's biggest mistakes, repeated in Aristotle.  A Platonic form serves a dual role; it both makes things in the world the way they are, and makes thoughts the way they are, and so one can represent things in the world as being a certain way because the things in the world are made that way by forms that are also present in our thoughts about the world.  And so for Feser knowing is like eating after all, in a sense; the object of knowledge, the form, is actually in the mind.

Now, it is a great mystery how something could play such a dual role, especially on Aristotle's version; how can the same thing make a stone heavy and make my thought a thought about heaviness?  A thought being about heaviness seems very different from a thing being heavy.  The Aristotelian tradition has no explanation beyond that forms are just like that, and have to be like that to play the role that they do.  And what about knowledge of the forms?  Does that involve forms of forms, or is it some completely different process than ordinary knowledge and representation?  Plato already worried about these issues and many others, and scholars of Plato and Aristotle debate them to this day, but Feser sweeps all these controversies and questions under the rug.  Really, even if his story wasn't so problematic, it would still be fatal to his argument that it doesn't seem to be the only explanation possible.  It shouldn't be necessary to provide an alternative to his account to note that he hasn't proven his is the only possible account, but conveniently we even do have an alternative; the Millikan/Lewis story I allude to above.

Feser "proves" that the mind must be immaterial because the way that, say, the form of the dog works on material things is by making them dogs.  It is the form of the dog, on his account, which makes my thought about a dog be about a dog, and if my mind were a material thing, the way it would act on my mind would be by making my mind (well, my thought) a dog.  So my mind must be something else.  This is not actually valid even given Feser's other assumptions; there doesn't seem to be any logical reason why forms might not operate differently on different kinds of matter, so even given the implausible assumption that knowing is like eating, that the same form must be present in the mind as in the things, it doesn't follow that the mind must be immaterial in contrast to the material things.  Some other difference could explain it.  And, of course, a more plausible account of representation would completely undermine this argument.

Feser's discussion of mathematical abstractions is if anything even worse, perhaps because he makes the common mistake of identifying the thoughts with the objects of thought in mathematical cases.  But even in mathematical cases they are not the same things, and so the triviality that mathematical objects are universal and determinate while nothing material is either universal or determinate is simply irrelevant to whether thoughts of mathematical objects are material; thoughts are not universal either, and even if I didn't already think they were material, I wouldn't have suspected them of being determinate.  Fortunately, for thoughts to be about objects it is not required for the thoughts and objects to be identical.  This is true even for Feser, of course; the same form must be involved in the thought and the object, but that falls far short of saying that the thought must be the object (the thought of a dog is not a dog, as Feser himself insists).  Presumably this is obscured for Feser because he thinks the object of thought is the form in mathematical cases, but that is another unargued assumption, and in any event that would not entail that the thought itself is the form in mathematical cases, as would be needed for his argument to be valid.

Souls and forms:

In other words, Feser's supposed "rational proof" that souls must be a certain kind of thing is anything but.  There are further problems with his idea that the soul is the form of a human being.  Really, there are endless mysteries and confusions here.  The soul is both a special kind of thing which the forms act on to produce knowledge, and it is itself one of the forms; how does it play both of those functions?  Feser thought he needed radical metaphysics to explain the dual role of forms in affecting thought and affecting the world, but the dual role of the form of a human being passes without comment.  But, more importantly for Feser's subsequent discussion, post-Darwin, biological species are known to be poor candidates for forms.

A Darwinian species is a population united primarily by a certain history; it has related capacities for inter-breeding and similarities in appearance and features, but the history of how selection favored the ancestors of the current members of the population is the decisive element.  There is thus no such thing as a "perfect" or "ideal" member of a species, no exact template that members of the species are supposed to match.  We may speak of a member of the species as being defective if it lacks one of the traits that selection favored in its ancestors, but this is a somewhat loose way of speaking.  A deviation from what is most common among members of the species may be a disadvantage in some sense, or it may be an advantage of some kind (if it's a survival/reproduction advantage, selection will make it more common over time, of course), or it may be of no significance at all; species always display many kinds of variation.  This variation makes it impossible to even construct a bare logical form for a species; there may not be any traits which are universal among members of the species while absent from all non-members of the species (unless you include the having of a certain history among those traits, which would produce a very different kind of form than Feser intends).

Feser argues that human life begins at conception because that is when someone acquires the form of humanity (and so the soul).  Now, species-membership does plausibly begin with conception, but being a member of a Darwinian species is not like having a soul (as Feser himself would admit).  But one does not aquire the form of humanity at conception because there is no such form; "human" is a biological species, and biological species don't work like that.  And since the soul is not the form of humanity, it remains an open question when (or perhaps whether, depending on one's theory of souls) it is acquired.  So Feser's metaphysical anti-abortion argument fails.

Natural Law:

Feser's natural law morality generally relies on their being a form of humanity, so that deviations from the form can be classified as defects, and as immoral if they are under conscious control.  Absent such forms, one must have some other standard for identifying moral deficiencies.  However, in practice natural law morality tends to (somewhat ironically) identify traits as defects on grounds rather similar to those which lead something to be identified as an evolutionary disadvantage.  Notably both natural law theories and evolution see reproduction as central human purposes.

And so Feser classifies homosexual sex as unnatural because of the reproductive function of sex, and so immoral because people can consciously choose whether to engage in it or not.  However, one difference between at least most evolutionary biologists and most natural law moralists is that evolutionary biologists recognize that it can be difficult to identify all of the functions and purposes involved in the traits and behaviors of a living thing, while natural law moralists seem to think identifying functions is easy (Feser thinks our bones are somehow involved in our mysterious ability to identify such fuctions).

Another difference is that even a consciously chosen evolutionary disadvantage does not seem to automatically be immoral (nor is an evolutionary advantage always moral), but whether homosexual activity is even an evolutionary disadvantage is unclear.  In general, humans have far more sex than they need to for the purposes of reproduction (most mammals have mating seasons to reduce the amount of effort and energy expended on sex).  It seems likely that this additional sex serves some purpose or purposes (or there would have been heavy selection pressure against it; the pressures that produce the mating seasons of other mammals), and mostly the evolutionary biologists seem to consider it an unsolved problem what those purposes might be (though they have plenty of guesses).

The natural law moralists also seem to feel the need for such theories, and try to provide them (as I said, they are eerily and ironically similar to the evolutionary theorists in this area); generally the story involves producing bonding in married couples, which are important for raising offspring.  Now, this is hardly an absurd theory, but in the context of evolution it would be laughable to pretend that one could rationally prove it was the only possible story.  And if that isn't the whole story of the excess human sex (and, in fact, this story doesn't seem to work very well as an evolutionary account; our current evidence doesn't seem to suggest that the family structure implicit here was present in our distant ancestors, so it couldn't have been selected for), the other purposes of sex may include purposes for homosexual sex.

The natural law moralist could claim that this is an area where there theories are different from the evolutionary theories, but in fact they don't seem to have any more evidence for their claims about the purposes of sex than the kind of thing an evolutionary story could give (well, except for evidence gleaned by consulting the bones), so it is unclear how they rule out the possibility of such alternative purposes.  Feser mocks Andrew Sullivan for suggesting that the purposes of sex might be more complex than Feser supposes (Feser likes to mock a lot), but he doesn't actually provide any evidence that Sullivan is wrong.

Still, one of my biggest problems with natural law morality is just that its stories sound so much like evolutionary stories, and evolutionary stories don't sound to me like stories of morality.  So many horrible things are adaptive in the evolutionary sense.  Evolution produced the black death!  Admittedly, when something they intuitively judge as bad ("in their bones") seems to serve natural purposes, Feser and his ilk are not likely to call it good; they instead invent convoluted and implausible stories about how it doesn't really serve natural purposes after all.  Better to recognize that morality is about purposes humans choose, not purposes given to us by nature; Kant was right to advocate an ethics of autonomy, however inconsistently he may have done so in practice and however many details he might have gotten wrong.

Evil and Miracles:

I mentioned in my discussion of chapter 3 that Feser treats God's attributes as "analogical" when he's in trouble, but most of the time ignores that part of his story.  His section on "Faith, reason, and evil" contains particularly egregious examples.  The miracles of Jesus are to be considered credible because of the proofs that there's a God who could produce miracles like that.  Sorry, Feser, we don't know that about the "analogical" God; miracles seem possible when you're thinking of God as being a person with human-like purposes that could be served by such interventions.  As Hume argued, if we think of God as the source of the laws of nature, then God's purposes seem to be clearly given by those, so we should expect God to never produce anything but consequences of those laws of nature.

Similarly, when he discusses the problem of evil, the evil in the world seems unnecessary in the way a parent's punishment can seem like an unnecessary bad thing to a child.  Sorry, "analogical" God isn't much like a parent.  Really, the problem of evil seems less serious for "analogical" God, but only because we have no way to know what to expect from such a God (and so for the same reason "analogical" God seems a poor basis for any religion, and certainly no help in shoring up Feser's shaky moral conclusions).  But here the shuffling back and forth is especially rapid.  God might have good reasons for evil which are very much like the good reasons a person might have for causing or enduring some unpleasantness, totally ignoring that for a person causing or tolerating something bad often seems like the best choice precisely because our options are limited, because we're not omnipotent.  But Feser hasn't forgotten God's omnipotence; it gives God endless capacity to bring unlimited good out of any evil.  And yet Feser's imagination suddenly stops again before the obvious next step, or perhaps God's omnipotence disappears and we're back to non-analogical human-like powerful God, as Feser doesn't even consider that God's omnipotence should surely extend to the capacity to bring all the same good out of no evil.  Feser's discussion of the problem of evil is an embarrassment to anybody who has ever seriously examined the issue (from either side).

I've ignored most of his tedious ad hominem attacks in chapter 4, but the chapter is, of course, full of them, like the rest of the book.  As usual, I wish he had spent less time on those, and more time trying to fill in a few of the gaps in his arguments.

More unconscious dualism?

Perhaps I'm missing something, but what is remotely surprising about finding cultural differences in the brain?  If two people think differently, that means their brains work differently, for whatever reason (perhaps because of education, or other experiences, or physical trauma, or disease, or genetics, or drugs, or nutrition; we know lots of things that affect brains).  Examining their brains in enough detail will presumably be able to reveal this difference.  Why isn't this result incredibly obvious and commonplace?

Neuroscientists are getting better at reading minds

The interesting results are mentioned here.  I found myself wondering what would happen if you told the people what the brain scans predicted they would do.  If you asked them again what they thought they would do after they were told what the brain scan said, would their own predictions become more or less accurate?  Would they still be less accurate than the brain scan?  Would telling them what the brain scan predicted make the brain scan less accurate?  I know I'd try to use a brain scanner like this to see if it predicted my doing anything I wanted to avoid doing, so I could try to find some better way of getting myself to not do it, but I have no idea whether I'd be successful at that.  Clearly an area where lots of additional research is needed! 

Male and female brains

I've always been a little puzzled by transsexuals.  I think of myself as male because of the obvious physical evidence; I don't have any internal feeling that it's somehow "right" for me to be male (or wrong, for that matter).  It's not that I'm indifferent; I'm actually quite comfortable with a lot of aspects of being male, and happy playing a lot of male roles, and if it were easy to choose one's gender I would certainly not choose to change (though if it were very easy to switch back and forth I'm sure I'd try out being female for a short time).  I can easily imagine someone having other preferences than mine, though, and wanting to be female.  But transsexuals almost never describe things in terms of wanting to be the other gender, they claim to somehow know that they really are the other gender (interesting critical discussion here).  Of course, this could be strategic (people are generally hostile to the idea of others doing non-conforming things involving sex and gender simply because they want to; think of how the anti-gay crowd pushes the line that homosexuality is a "choice," as if that would somehow make it wrong), but the impression that I get from what transsexuals say or write is that that wouldn't be the whole story.

There are surely a lot of things going on here.  For one, being a cisgendered male is a position of some degree of privilege, and so the invisibility of privilege is operative; in many cases being a member of a privileged group is usually not conceived of as a special part of one's nature, but rather just as being normal and something one doesn't think about.  I believe women are more likely than men to view sex as an essential property (in the philosophical sense), probably for this reason.  I'm generally skeptical of essences on philosophical grounds, so to the extent that this is what's at work, I suppose I tend to think that this is one more tiny example of the numerous ways in which the privileged are advantaged; they are less tempted by faulty metaphysical views about themselves.

On the other hand, there's a reason so many philosophers for the past few centuries have set themselves the task of tearing down Cartesian dualism; it's incredibly seductive.  Maybe despite my materialism, my tendency to view my sex as non-essential owes more than I would like to admit to some lingering tendency to think of my mind as the "real me", and my body, where my sex resides, as just something that happens to be attached to my mind.

So, which is it?  Am I still a closet Cartesian, as Rorty thought all of us analytic philosophers still were, or am I just a good anti-essentialist?  I'm really not sure.

Qualia and Intrinsicality

Jaegwon Kim once told me that he thought secondary qualities were intrinsic if anything is.  Since that time, he seems to have shifted from being a reluctant defender of reductionist functionalism to a reluctant adherent of something like Chalmers' view (a relatively small shift, since in each case the reluctance consisted of his strong pull toward the other of the two options).  As I've alluded to in the past here, and here, I think the view that qualia are intrinsic is important to the debate about qualia.

I shall approach this topic from a distance; at the most abstract level of fundamental metaphysics, it seems to me that staying away from intrinsicness has produced some spectacular results.  Buddhism teaches that there is no self with any intrinsic nature; the self is just a placeholder in a network of relations.  To put it somewhat tendentiously (as the Buddhists themselves sometimes did), the self is an illusion.  This view did not, of course, maintain that the self was an illusion in the midst of a world of non-illusionary things; the world experienced by the self is also an illusion on this view.  There's just a network of relations, with things being only placeholders for positions in the network.

I suspect that this is why it was Indian mathematicians who invented the concept of zero; to the ancient European mathematicians, numbers were things, and so an absence couldn't be a number.  This is also why the Pythagoreans got so stressed out by irrational numbers; they could make sense of a ratio between countable collections of things, but how could something that wasn't either a count of things or even a ratio between such counts exist?  To the Indians, on the other hand, numbers as placeholders in a network of relations no doubt seemed natural (since they were used to thinking in that way anyway), and it's obvious that idenfying the zero spot in the network of relations is useful.  This view of mathematics as being about such relations is of course orthodoxy in modern times, and has been very good for mathematics.

I think it's not just good for mathematics.  Intrinsic properties just cause trouble; structures and relations are where all of the answers are to be found.  I think we shouldn't believe in intrinsic properties anywhere.  This is somewhat of a paradoxical position, admittedly, and of course there are some, such as Rae Langton, and if her plausible account is right, Kant, who think that while we can't know anything intrinsic, there must nonetheless be intrinsic properties.  I find such views even more puzzling than a complete rejection of intrinsic properties; we can know there are these specific things we can't know about?  But Kant scholars have been debating that sort of thing endlessly since his own time.  I shall leave it aside for now, as the topic I'm most interested in involves qualia, and qualia are not supposed to be uknowable.  So take just the place where extremists like myself agree with Langton and Kant and other moderates; we can't know anything intrinsic.

This is enormously relevant to the issue of qualia.  Phenomenal character appears to be an intrinsic property of experiences.  This, it seems to me, is the main intuitive obstacle to a functionalist account of phenomenal qualities:  functional properties are quite obviously non-intrinsic.  But if the intrinsic can't be known, then apparent intrinsicality is always an illusion.  And if such appearances are always misleading, then they're misleading in this case, so the intuitive obstacle can be swiftly dismissed.

This also strikes me as being the real heart of a lot of the arguments surrounding anti-materialist theories of qualia.  Lewis, for example, in "What Experience Teaches," goes through a very lengthy discussion of what knowledge of phenomenal qualities can't be like.  It seems to me that a good short summary of the argument is that if phenomenal qualities are to serve the role they are supposed to serve in Jackson's knowledge argument, they must be intrinsic, but looking at all of the things we know about our experience, it turns out that we can't find any role for anything intrinsic; looking for knowledge always turns up extrinsic things.

To take another example, it seems to me that Chalmers' zombie argument works by asking us to separate out the intrinsic properties of experience, and imagine that they're absent in the zombie world.  Obviously, if experience has no intrinsic properties, this procedure is impossible; either all worlds are zombie worlds, or (more reasonably) there's some account of phenomenal experience in terms of relational properties, and any world with the right relational properties has phenomal experiences.

Phenomena, Properties, and Documents

I've decided to give this google docs thing a try, and so I put up one of my current works in progress, related to what I was posting about a few weeks ago.  It can be found here, for anyone interested in reading a somewhat lengthier version of the argument I mentioned in this recent post.

Instead of getting much further work done on that paper, I've been reading other things.  I re-read Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World, as well as his Meaning and Necessity, and also read van Fraassen's Laws and Symmetry.  There seems to be a common viewpoint held by Carnap and van Fraassen, and also related to the views of Langton I mentioned earlier.  All concerned seem to hold that if you know the structure of a situation, the various relationships between the parts involved, you know quite a lot.  Further, they all maintain that it's fortunate that structure tells you so much, because it tells you everything you're ever going to get; there's nothing else that can be known.

This is, I think, actually relevant to the philosophy of mind topics I've been thinking about.  Functionalist accounts are, of course, all about structure and relationships, and the argument that a functionalist cannot account for the phenomenal often seems to be based on a view of phenomenal properties on which they just aren't structural/relational.  I also glanced at Chalmers recently, and was thus once again struck at how implausible his argument seemed to me.  The claims he presents as obviously true which strike me as obviously false often involve the word "property;" I'm almost certain he doesn't use the word the way I do (as surely he'd recognize the obvious falsity of his claims if he did).  I'm less sure what he does mean, but it seems likely that he intends the kind of metaphysical meaning Carnap and the rest say is incoherent.  As usual, I'm with Carnap.

What is it like to be a bat?

So Scribefire seems to be misbehaving; perhaps some incompatibility with Firefox 3 or something.  As a result, this initially appeared as a blank post.  Still, it was a short one; easy to reconstruct.  I just linked to this post from cocktail party physics, and noted that reading things like that tended to make me think I'd learned a little bit more about what it is like to be a bat.  Which, of course, also leads me to be ever more skeptical of those arguments that I can't know anything about that.

Why zombies are inconceivable (short version)

Consciousness does work.  My being consciously aware of various things motivates me to react in various ways, to do things in response.  The zombie scenario claims that consciousness has been removed, and everything else left the same, with "everything else" including the work that consciousness does getting done.  But that's impossible; if consciousness is removed, what it does won't get done unless something else does it instead (and the zombie scenario is certainly not supposed to be adding any substitutes).

To put it another way, if in a physical duplicate world the work consciousness does is still getting done, something physical must be doing the work in that world.  But if it's a physical duplicate world, whatever it is that is doing the work in that world is also present in this world.  But in this world consciousness is doing the work.  So whatever that physical thing that's doing the work is must, after all, just be consciousness.

This didn't end up being as short as I expected.  Still shorter than the last two posts on the topic, I suppose.

More phenomenal content!

My previous post generated no counter-examples, just a claim that I had changed the subject. It is possible that I was insufficiently clear, so I'll start by stressing something I may not have stressed sufficiently.

The point of the depth perception case was to show that within a single subject, phenomenal characteristics seem to track force and vivacity; something's seeming to be at arm's length depends on how strongly my various ways of perceiving depth are pushing me to believe it's at arm's length, and doesn't depend on which of the various ways is active.

Conversely, absences of phenomenal content track absences of force. For example, blindsight is sometimes mentioned when the topic of phenomenal consciousness comes up; this involves the absence of qualia, but seemingly the acquisition of information via the visual system. It could thus support arguments that qualia are inessential to the functions of perception. But those with blindsight are merely better than chance at identifying features of the visual field they claim not to perceive; they come nowhere near being as good at this as those with normal sight, and in general the information they receive through blindsight has far less influence on them than the information a normally sighted person receives through ordinary visual perception (trivially, nothing they perceive leads them to make comments on what they're seeing, but there are lots of other ways in which the influence is weaker or absent as well). Thus, it is quite easy to account for this phenomenon on my theory; these people get very little force and vivacity from stimulation coming through their eyes, so they don't get anything like our usual perceptual qualia.

To take another case where the role of awareness, its associations and effects, track its phenomenal feel, consider learned abilities to perceive. Words we recognize sound different from words in a foreign language; listening to them feels different. Similarly, a trained musician's experience of a symphony or a wine expert's experience tasting a wine is different from that of a novice (or so such people report, comparing their experiences to before they acquired their expertise). Again, the training changes what the awareness does, and it ends up feeling different.

It is, of course, open to someone to steadfastly insist that no matter how closely differences in phenomenal feel track differences in the functional activity of the mind, there's still a distinction between the feel and the functional activity. But it seems to me that at some point it becomes unreasonable to keep insisting that there just have to be two different things here.

Still, I suppose I'm biased. It just seems obvious to me that consciousness does something, so for me the question is what does it do, and any defects in any functional account merely indicate that we haven't quite gotten the function right yet. I have difficulty wrapping my mind around views which take seriously the possibility that consciousness could be functionally inert. But one must be able to take that seriously in order to take zombies seriously, and lots of people seem to be able to do that. I confess I don't know what it would be like to be able to do that.

A phenomenal theory!

So, I've been thinking a lot about qualia, and trying to get a paper together on why they shouldn't be seen as such a problem for materialism.  It seems to be generally accepted that features of mental life which can be analyzed functionally are not problematic for materialism, so my line is that, contrary to superficial appearances, qualia can actually be adequately characterized by their functional role in our minds.  I propose that what is characteristic of qualia is something like what Hume called "force and vivacity"; their tendency to bring associated ideas to mind, and enliven ideas in the sense of making them more believed or plausible.

All you zombies

Richard Chappell has been recently engaged in a defense of Chalmer's zombie argument; it has been ongoing, but an early summary of his position is here. One issue has come to worry me. Chappell keeps emphasizing that he's talking about special non-third-personal facts, which is why he's not impressed by Brown's argument against non-physical third-personal phenomenal facts. Now, there are first-personal facts which are known to be irreducible to anything third-personal, as discussed for example in Lewis' "Attitudes De Dicto and De Se." But no zombie scenario is needed to show this. No duplicate of me is me, no matter how close the physical match (and as a counterpart theorist, I'd say that this holds across possible worlds; no physical duplicate of me in another possible world really is me in any strict sense).

Of course, that nobody except me has my perspective does not show that nobody except me has any perspective at all. At least, so one hopes, though the zombie argument does seem to invite us to take solipsism more seriously. It seems that via some sort of empathy, I can imagine being someone else. And I am inclined to think that, within the limitations of the accuracy of my empathic imaginings, the others I empathize with are actually having something like the consciousness of themselves that I'm imagining having.

A zombie scenario is one on which I would be making some mistake in thus projecting my imagined consciousness onto the zombie. Of course, many such mistakes are always to be expected, since there's so much I don't know about what's really going on with the others, but in the zombie case the error is supposed to be total, and not based on any of the usual ways of going wrong. If I think I'm imagining what it's like to be a zombie, I'm automatically entirely wrong.

This leads me to wonder what is supposed to make me wrong. I suppose Chappell wouldn't be very impressed with the question, as he thinks it's a brute fact whether consciousness is present or not, so he doesn't think any explanation should be expected. But I have to say that my sincere inability to figure out what could make me wrong makes me rather inclined to think I can't really conceive of zombies after all.

I suppose this could be turned against me, and I could be asked how I know that nobody else is me. Of course, perhaps I just don't. But perhaps it is just a simple matter of logic that I am who I am, and nobody else is; if it is thus a priori, then this would be a clear difference from the zombie case, where no a priori rescue seems available. I confess that this does strike me as plausible (interesting though the Buddhist alternative response is).

A question about dreams

Jonathan Ichikawa asks an interesting question about belief in dreams.  I am certainly a functionalist.  Since encountering it, I've been rather fond of Daniel Dennett's Joycean model of consciousness, and since it is conscious beliefs specifically which are at issue, considerations from that theory seem relevant.

On the Joycean model, consciousness is a story we tell ourselves.  So a conscious belief would be analyzed on the same model as any other belief in a claim made by a story.  I'm inclined to think that this would likely be different from the model on which implicit beliefs would be analyzed, though admittedly one simple option would be to take conscious belief to consist merely in entertaining in consciousness a story making a claim which matches the implicit belief structure.

I'm not sure why that doesn't feel right, but it doesn't, and if indeed believing a claim according to a story is different from having an implicit belief, then it may be harder for Jonathan to make his argument that what we do in dreams is different from believing a claim according to the dream story; the kinds of dispositions he notes we plausibly lack in dreams seem more relevant to implicit believing than to believing according to a story.