Malcolm on Mysterianism

No, not Norman Malcolm, our Malcolm:

Re: your recent post on Mysterianism, it seems that the central paragraph is this:

And so it is with the mysterian materialist. He bids me accept propositions that as far as I can tell are not propositions at all. A proposition is a sense, but the 'propositions' he bids me accept make no sense. For example, he wants me to accept that my present memories of Boston are all identical to states of my brain. That makes no sense. Memory states are intentional states: they have content. No physical state has content. So no intentional state could be a physical state. The very idea is unintelligible. Where there are no thoughts one can always mouth words. So one can mouth the words, 'Memories are in the head' or 'Thoughts are literally brain states.' But one cannot attach a noncontradictory thought to the words.

 

The hinge of it is the assertion "No physical state has content."

But isn't this itself the crux of the mysterian materialist's position? He will dispute your assertion, and reply that it appears that some very specific physical states (or perhaps more accurately, physical processes), namely those that arise in the uniquely complex material objects in our skulls, do in fact have content, and just how that is managed is what we do not yet understand. Your impossibility is his actuality, and so his mystery.

You are right that the mysterian materialist will maintain that some physical states do have content.  But he also maintains that we will never be able to understand how this is possible.  Thus your 'not yet understand' is not accurate. As Colin McGinn, head honcho of the mysterian materialists, puts it, "My thesis is that consciousness depends on an unknowable natural property of the brain." (The Mysterious Flame, p. 28,emphasis added)  Someone who holds that with the advance of neuroscience we will eventually solve the mind-body problem is not a mysterian.

The mysterian materialist position is that mental activity just is brain activity.  If that is actually so, then it is possibly so whether or not we can render intelligible to ourselves how it is so.  For McGinn, we will never render this intelligible because it is impossible to do so.  The mind-body problem is "perfectly genuine" (212) but has never been solved and is indeed insoluble because "our minds are not equipped to solve it, rather as the cat's mind is not up to discovering relativity theory or evolution by natural selection." (212)

You  are right: my impossibility is his actuality.  For him, the proposition that some physical states have content is true but a mystery.  So he asserts what he takes to be a well-defined and possibly true proposition -- *Some physical states have content* -- but also asserts that the question of how this proposition is possible will not ever, and cannot ever, be answered due to the limitations of our cognitive architecture.

My claim is that there is no well-defined proposition before us, or rather that there is no proposition before us that could be true.  There is the sentence 'Some physical states have content' but this sentence expresses no proposition  that could be true.  It's a little like 'Some color is a sound.'  That sentence does not express a proposition that could be true.  I don't believe you would credit the sort of  mysterian who maintains that it is true that some colors are sounds, and therefore possibly true, despite our inability to explain how it is true.  You would laugh out of the room the guy who said it was true but a mystery.  You would say, 'Get out of here, you are talking nonsense.'

How do we know it is nonsense?  We know this by thinking attentively about colors and sounds and by grasping that a color is not the sort of item that could be a sound.  Similalrly, we know it is nonsense to identify a memory of Boston with a brain state by thinking attentively of both and grasping that the one is not the sort of item that could be identical to the other.  (Because the one has content while the other doesn't so the two cannot be identical by the Indiscernibility of Identicals.)

Moving from content to qualia, I would say 'This smell of burnt garlic is identical to some brain state of mine' is on all fours with 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination.'  It can't be so, and for a very deep reason: the very electro-chemical and other vocabulary (axons, dendrites, synapses, diffusion of sodium ions, voltage differentials, etc.) cannot be meaningfully combined with the vocabulary of phenomenology..  When you combine them you get nonsense.  The resulting propositions -- if you want to call them that -- cannot be true.

Isn't "No physical state has content", in this context at least, question-begging?

I don't believe I am simply begging the question.  It is more complicated than that.  It may help if I lay out both the mysterian and my argument.

Mysterian Argument

1. Mental activity is just brain activity. (Naturalist assumption)
2. We cannot understand how mental states could be identical to brain states.
Therefore
3. This inability to understand does not reflect an objective impossibility but an irremediable limitation in our cognitive architecture:  our minds are so structured that we will never be able to understand the mind-body link.

My Argument

2. We cannot understand how mental states could be identical to brain states.
~3. This inability reflects an objective impossibility.
Therefore
~1. Mental activity is not just brain activity.

The deep underlying issue here seems to be this:  Is our inability to understand how such-and-such is broadly-logically possible a sufficient reason for denying that such-and-such is objectively broadly-logically possible? To put it another way, the issue is whether there could be true mysteries, where a mystery is a proposition that by our best lights must appear either to be or to entail a broadly-logical contradiction.

This issue lies deeper than the naturalism issue.

Comments

[Malcolm Pollack]

Hi Bill, and thanks for taking this up again. I remember disputing this with you at your Powerblogs site, long ago.

The distinction you make about the pure mysterian position is clarifying. I must say, though, that I find it hard to understand why anyone would commit to such a stance. McGinn may well be right about this one really being forever beyond us, but I can't imagine how he or anyone else could know that.

You wrote:

How do we know it is nonsense? We know this by thinking attentively about colors and sounds and by grasping that a color is not the sort of item that could be a sound.

But no amount of thinking attentively about the human brain is sufficient for this, because we flatter ourselves too much if we think we know exactly what consciousness is and how it arises, or that we know enough about the physical world-system to list with exhaustive certainty what effects it can and can't produce. (After all, long ago we might have denied with equal confidence that a 'merely' physical system could defeat a master at chess, or that a flat black box, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and with no visible connection to any external object, could produce an immediate effect on the other side of the world.)

If you protest that consciousness, being immaterial, is different in kind from these examples, the materialist will reply that the aspects of the physical world that now allow us to call Hong Kong with our cell phones would long ago have seemed quite immaterial too. If you respond that consciousness differs further in that it is purely subjective, the materialist will ask just how you can be so sure that it is downright impossible for any physical system to instantiate subjective awareness, given our non-exhaustive understanding of the physical world. If after that you simply insist that it is just obviously so, then the materialist will say "Well, it isn't obvious to me; you're just asserting what you had sought to demonstrate."

On the other side of the balance, there are many good reasons to suspect that the conscious mind really is the product of the brain's activity: we see that various mental states can reliably be induced by stimulating particular regions of the brain, that consciousness and its contents can be altered (or even deleted and restored) by changing the physical state of the brain mechanically or chemically, etc.

It is certainly true that so far we have no idea at all how matter can possibly give rise to subjective consciousness; we can't even imagine what a physical theory of consciousness would look like. But a proposition like "some physical systems are conscious" (I hope it is not a digression to focus on consciousness rather than intentionality here) hardly strikes materialists as obvious nonsense. It may of course be false, but to insist that it is not even comprehensible -- that it is on all fours with something like 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination' -- assumes, I think, knowledge about the ontology of consciousness, and about the limitations of the physical world, that we simply don't have.

Your last paragraph sharpens the question very nicely:

The deep underlying issue here seems to be this: Is our inability to understand how such-and-such is broadly-logically possible a sufficient reason for denying that such-and-such is objectively broadly-logically possible? To put it another way, the issue is whether there could be true mysteries, where a mystery is a proposition that by our best lights must appear either to be or to entail a broadly-logical contradiction.

To the materialist, then, a conscious brain entails no broadly-logical contradiction: it confronts us, instead, with our ignorance, with the limits of our understanding. To the non-mysterian, this ignorance may or may not be remediable; there is simply no way for us to know.

Do forgive me for the length of this comment. I know pith is paramount here at MP.