Strawson's Vacuous Materialism

In Does Matter Think? I wrote:

. . . I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers.  Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think.  But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand.  And that is my point.  You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations . . . .

I now add that I am using 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian sense that covers all intentional or object-directed experiences; but I also hold that non-intentional experiences are unintelligible to us on the basis of current physics.  My thesis is that, given what we know about the physical world from current physics, it it unintelligible that the phenomena of mind, whether intentional or non-intentional, be wholly material in nature.

I grant that what is unintelligible to us might nevertheless be the case.  But if such-and-such is unintelligible to us, then that is a fairly good reason to believe that it is not possibly the case.  A theological example may help clarify the dialectical situation.  Christians believe that God became man.  Some will say that this is impossible in the strongest possible sense: logically impossible, i.e., in contravention of the Law of Non-Contradiction.  For what the doctrine implies is that one person has both human and divine attributes, that one person is both passible and impassible, omniscient and non-omnisicent, etc.  One response, a mysterian response, is to say that the doctrine of the Incarnation is true, and that therefore it is logically possible.  The fact, if it is fact, that the Incarnation is unintelligible to us -- where 'unintelligible' means: not understandable as possibly true in a broadly logical sense --  does not show that the doctrine is impossible, but that it is a mystery: a true proposition that we, due to our limitations, cannot understand.

A materialist can make the same sort of move in one of two ways.  He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, or he can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential.  The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

In the Comments Vlastimil V. asked:

But, what exactly, according to you, is matter in the sense we currently understand? And does matter so conceived really exclude, a priori, that it thinks? About this the physicalist would love to hear more details.

It is matter as understood by current physics.  And yes, one can know a priori that matter so conceived cannot think or feel. Note that I am not saying that matter anyhow conceived can be known a priori to be such that it cannot think or feel.  I admit the very vague, very abstract, epistemic  (and perhaps only epistemic) possibility that God or some super-intelligent extraterrestrial or even human being far in the future could get to the point of understanding how an experiential item like a twinge of pain could be purely material or purely physical.  But this is really nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms.  It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving. 

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the irreducibly mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is irreducibly mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the mind-body problem is insoluble.

Comments

[Vlastimil Vohánka]

Bill,

You say, "one can know a priori that matter so conceived cannot think or feel."

May I see the argument?

More specifically, may I see a good argument for the following claim? No pain is a physical particle, a field of force, an n-dimensional manifold, a string as conceived in string theories, or a combination of these (and nothing else).

If you argue that (a) none of these physical items is subjective (i.e., exhausted in their appearing, if their appear at all) but (b) pain is, don't you beg, in (b), the question against the physicalist? The physicalist hypothesis is that there is more to pain than what appears: its physical, albeit hidden, nature.

[entirelyuseless]

As I previously said, "matter in the sense we currently understand," if it means that it includes only things discussed by mathematical physics, does not include many things that real matter obviously has.

Apart from that, if you object that "If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means," then a person can equally object that it is unintelligible to think that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as immaterial beings, I have no idea what this means.

In other words, the problem is that subjective experiences cannot be described from a third-person point of view at all, not that they cannot be described as material objects in particular. They can't be described as immaterial objects either.

And I agree that subjective experience will never be exhaustively described from a third-person point of view. But I do not agree that it is not an objective reality, i.e. a "third-person thing".

[Bill Vallicella]

V,

1. Every pain has a first-person ontology.
2. Every physical item has a third-person ontology.
3. Nothing having a first-person ontology has a third-person ontology.
Therefore
4. No pain is a physical item.

(The jargon will be familiar if you have read Searle.)

You will of course say that this begs the question. And I will return the compliment: you are begging the question against me. But I am in a better position since I am not illicitly inflating 'physical' to cover both mental and physical items.

Give me an argument that justifies this inflation.

>>The physicalist hypothesis is that there is more to pain than what appears: its physical, albeit hidden, nature.<<

You understand, I hope, that by pain here we mean the pain quale, the felt pain, the pain as a Feiglian raw feel, as a phenomenological datum under phenomenological reduction, as a Nagelian what-it-is-like, the pain precisely as it is lived through and experienced by a subject and in just the manner in which the subject experiences it.

That item has no hidden nature. If you think it does, prove it! You are going beyond the given, so isn't the onus probandi on you?

[Vlastimil Vohánka]

Bill,

Thanks, but no. I do not beg the question against you. For I do not _claim_ that (3) _is_ false, or that pain _has_ a hidden, physical nature. I, rather, want to see a good argument that it does not have it, or that (3) is true. Until that moment, I don't regard your previous argument as a good one.

Quote Searle if necessary.

[Bill Vallicella]

(3) is innocent until proven guilty. Give an argument against it.

In any case, where are you coming from? Which authors are you basing yourself on?

[Bedarz Iliaci]

Physical particles, a field of forces, n-dimensional strings etc are formal objects that are defined in physical theories. Physical theories are arrived at after long chains of inference whose starting point is registering of some thing by a person. By "thing" is meant any directly perceived object such as everyday objects we are familiar with.

Many people disregard the logical priority of "things" and instead ground their world-conception on the entities that are posited in physical theories. So quite apart from subjective mental phenomena such as pain, even "things" can not be fully explained or understood by quarks, electrons and strings. The physical theories are designed to capture only the quantitative aspects of the things and leave other aspects untouched.

[Vlastimil Vohánka]

Bill,

Why is (3) innocent until proven guilty?

I am coming from McGinn. See the reference in my "Mysterianism about Consciousness and the Trinity", nt. 15.

[Crude]

For I do not _claim_ that (3) _is_ false, or that pain _has_ a hidden, physical nature. I, rather, want to see a good argument that it does not have it, or that (3) is true. Until that moment, I don't regard your previous argument as a good one.

If you make no claims about 3 whatsoever, you're incapable of mounting criticism against 3 - that would require claims. All you've given is a statement of your personal psychology. The argument remains standing, because nothing's been said to criticize it.

I'll add, appeals to a 'hidden nature' seem to be suicidal for the physicalist. The only way it makes sense to appeal to such a thing is to argue that our knowledge of the world, particularly this thing called 'the physical', is or likely is radically incomplete. So incomplete that it's no longer clear that what 'the physical' really is would fail to cash out in ways normally regarded as non-physicalist.

[Vlastimil Vohánka]

Crude,

I claim neither that (3) is true, nor that (3) is false.

But here's a meta-claim of mine that might finally provoke somebody to offer a positive argument for (3):

There's no good argument for (3).

Why? Because there's no good argument against this claim: Some n-dimensional manifold, or some string as conceived in string theories, or some combination of these, has a first-person ontology.

There are only good arguments against this claim: Some physical particle or some combination of physical particles has a first-person ontology.