Maverick Philosopher

Intellectual Integrity and the Appeal to Mystery

Bradley Schneider writes,

. . . while we're on the subject of divine simplicity, I would be interested in your thoughts on the following dilemma.  Suppose you are strongly persuaded by philosophical arguments that, if God exists, God must be simple, i.e., some version of DDS must be true.  Otherwise, if God were composite, He would not be absolute and therefore would not be God.  At the same time, you appreciate the problem of modal collapse.  That is, you appreciate that DDS appears to imply modal collapse.  Suppose further that you are convinced that modal fatalism cannot be true, i.e,. the world that we inhabit is both ontologically and modally contingent.  Question: Can you, with intellectual integrity, believe in or have faith in God's existence in this scenario?  It seems to me that you can if you accept the following:  (a) DDS is true; (b) DDS does not imply modal collapse; and (c) the reason DDS does not imply modal collapse is a mystery beyond human comprehension.  

 

Is that a reasonable position or an intellectual evasion?  Put another way:  There are obviously some philosophical assertions that are so demonstrably incoherent or contradictory that one cannot hold them with intellectual integrity, e.g., "There is no truth," "I have no beliefs," etc.  Is the belief that [DDS does not imply modal collapse and the reason is a mystery] analogous to such beliefs?  When is it reasonable to believe in something that you don't understand? 

 

Well, Bradley, you are asking the right questions.  The central question, I take it, is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity.

 

To affirm mysterianism is to affirm that there are mysteries.  But what is a mystery?

Mystery-1:  A proposition which, if true, is knowable, presently unknown, and interesting to know, but the interest of which evaporates upon being known.  For example, the proposition Jimmy Hoffa's body was fed through a wood chipper is, if true, knowable, unknown, interesting to know but such that, if it came to be known, then the question of the final disposition of Hoffa's body would be settled and would no longer be interesting or a mystery.  The aim of scientific research is to banish mysteries in this first sense of 'mystery.'   Perhaps we could say that this is the Enlightenment Project in a nutshell: to de-mystify the world.  The presupposition that guides the project is that nothing is intrinsically mysterious or impervious in principle to being understood; there are no mysteries in reality.  Accordingly, all mystery is parasitic upon our ignorance which, in principle, can be overcome.

Mystery-2:  A proposition which, if true, cannot by us in this life be known to be true, and cannot even be known by us in this life to be logically-possibly true, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and is of the highest interest to us, but whose interest would in no way be diminished should we come to know it.

An example of mystery-2 is the doctrine of the Trinity as understood by Roman Catholics (but not just by them).  The Trinity is an exclusively revealed truth; hence it cannot be known by us by natural means.  What's more, it cannot even be known by us to be free of logical contradiction and thus logically possible.  Our finite intellects cannot see into its logical possibility let alone into its actual truth.  We cannot understand how it is possible.  But what is actual is possible whether or not we have the power to understand how it is possible. 

(Compare: motion is possible because actual, whether or not the Zenonian arguments to the contrary can be adequately answered.  Someone who is convinced by the Zenonian arguments, but who refuses to deny the reality of motion, is a mysterian about the reality of motion.  He is saying: Motion must appear to us as logically impossible; yet motion is actual and therefore possible  despite our inability to explain how it is possible. This mysterian could easily grant that the irrefutability ofthe Zenonian arguments is excellent evidence of the unreality of motion but still insist that motion is real.  He might say: the considerations of our paltry intellects must give way before the massive evidence of the senses: you can see that I am wagging my finger at you now. The evidence of the senses trumps all arguments no matter how compelling they seem. Similarly, the believer in the triune God could say that God's revelation trumps all merely human animadversions.)

So from the fact that the Trinity appears to us in our present state as contradictory, and thus as logically impossible, it does not follow that it is not true.  For it could be like this:  given our unalterable ('hard-wired') cognitive architecture, certain revealed truths must appear to us as contradictory when the propositions which must so appear are not only in themselves not contradictory, but are also actually true!

The philosophical mysterian is a person who holds that there are mysteries in the second sense.  Is Colin McGinn a mysterian in this sense? 

McGinn 'takes it on faith' as a teaching of the scientific magisterium that all mental activity is brain activity. He no more questions this than a believing Catholic questions the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence, etc.   It just seems obvious to him and therefore a thesis that cannot be reasonably questioned.  Of course mental activity is brain activity!  What the hell else could it be?  You think and feel with your brain not with some 'spook in the skull' (my coinage) or "ghost in the machine." (Ryle) There is one world, this physical world, and we are physical parts of it. And so consciousness, self-consciousness, qualia, intentionality, conscience must all be reducible without remainder to physical processes and states.

But there are powerful arguments which I have rehearsed many times why qualia and object-directed mental states cannot be physical states.  Confronted with these arguments, McGinn goes mysterian.  He grants their force and then says something like this:

It is incomprehensible to us how consciousness could be a brain process.  But it is a brain process.  It is just that our unalterable cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to see into this truth.  It is true and therefore possibly true even though we cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true due to our cognitive limitations.

As I read McGinn, these limitations are in our human case unalterable.  And so I read McGinn as a mysterian in much the same sense that a theological mysterian is a mysterian.  What is common to the doctor angelicus and the decidedly less than angelic McGinn is a commitment to the thesis that there are true, non-contradictory propositions that we humans by our very nature are not equipped to understand as either true or non-contradictory.  Access denied!  We have no access to certain truths because of our cognitive make-up. 

This leaves open the possibility for McGinn that there be extraterrestrials who are equipped to grasp mind-brain identity.  And it leaves open for Aquinas the possibility that there be angelic intellects who are equipped to grasp and wholly understand Trinity,  God-Man identity (the Incarnation) and how Jesus Christ could ascend into  heaven soul and body!

But let's return to  the doctrine of the Trinity. We are assuming that it is apparently contradictory, and that attempts to relieve the apparent contradictoriness fail.  See The Logic of the Trinity Revisited in which I spell out the doctrine, show the (apparent) contradiction, and rebut a couple of quick responses to it. Now consider the following position:

 

The Trinity doctrine appears contradictory to us (ectypal) intellects, and must so appear in our present state due to cognitive limitations endemic in our sublunary, and presumably fallen, condition. (Sin has noetic consequences.) In reality, however, the doctrine is internally consistent and each of its component propositions is true.  It is just that we cannot understand, in our present state, how the doctrine could be true. So, in our present postlapsarian and pre-salvific state, the Trinity must remain a mystery.  The claim is not that the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction; there are no true contradictions, pace Graham Priest and his tiny band of dialetheists.  The claim is that the Trinity doctrine is true and non-contradictory, but not such as to be understandable as true and non-contradictory by us in this life. On the contrary, it must appear to us as contradictory and false in this life.

 

Following Dale Tuggy, we may call the position I have just sketched positive mysterianism.  In critique of it, Tuggy says this:

 

Positive mysterianism must leap this hurdle: if this Dogma [Trinity] resolutely appears contradictory, doesn’t that give us a strong reason to think it false? How then, [can] this admission be part of a defense of the rationality of believing in this Dogma?

The admission is that the doctrine appears contradictory to us.  But this admission is not part of the defense of the rationality of believing the doctrine. Presumably, only a latter-day Tertullian would defend the rationality of belief in a doctrine on the ground of the doctrine's appearing absurd, i.e., logically contradictory, or actually being absurd.  No one will say, "It is rational for me to believe that p precisely because, after careful and protracted consideration, it appears to me that p is or entails a logical contradiction."

 

The positive mysterian (PM) is not defending the doctrine on the ground that it appears contradictory. The PM is defending the doctrine on the ground that what appears contradictory might not be contradictory. The PM, in other words, is appealing to the possibility that there are certain non-contradictory truths that must appear to us in our present state as contradictory.

 

Is that possibility one that can be dismissed at the outset?  Can one be objectively certain that there cannot be truths that are reasonable to affirm but must appear to us as contradictory?

 

The PM can grant to Tuggy that, in general, a doctrine's appearing to be contradictory is a strong reason for thinking it false while insisting that the appearance of contradictoriness does not entail the reality of contradictoriness.  A strong reason needn't be a rationally compelling reason. Can Tuggy & Co. be objectively certain that the Trinity doctrine is contradictory and necessarily false simply on the basis of its appearing to be such to us in our present state?  No, they can't be certain. So there is the possibility that the doctrine is really true despite being apparently contradictory.

 

'But then couldn't any old crazy doctrine be defended  in this way?" 

 

There are philosophers who take the eliminativist line that consciousness is an illusion. This is a crazy view that refutes itself straightaway: nothing is an illusion except to consciousness; hence, the crazy view presupposes the very thing it proposes to eliminate. Well, could one give a mysterian defense of the crazy view? I don't see how. We have direct Cartesian evidence that consciousness exists and cannot be an illusion.

 

Philosophy is long, but blog is short. So I need to wrap this up. The question is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity.  My tentative answer is that one may reasonably affirm positive mysterianism.  

Rationalistic Fideism, Mysterianism, Misology, and Divine Simplicity

I want to thank the perspicacious Lukas Novak for helping me in my endless quest to know myself.  Professor Novak comments:

Is Bill a Gnostic?

Well, I am not sure about the precise meaning of this epithet, but to me Bill appears as a strange amalgam of a rationalist and a fideist. The rationalist comes first and sets up certain rather strict requirements on the contents of faith -- so that everything that does not fit in comes out as "incoherent" or "incomprehensible". Then, entre fideist and says that we nevertheless are still justified in believing these contents because we can justifiably assume that our intellect is so incompetent.

To me, this puts too much confidence in our reason in the first stage and too little in the last. It seems to me that Bill is always too eager to conclude that there is an impasse, an insoluble problem, a contradiction etc. in a given particular case. In this, he seems to be putting way too much confidence in his reasonings. The overall, habitual outcome of this is, however, the exact opposite: a significantly diminished confidence in the competence of our intellect as such. (This reminds me of the mechanism of how "misology" is generated, in Plato's Phaedo.)

We were discussing ecclesiology and the Incarnation, but at the moment I am revising my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  Divine Simplicity entry, so I want to shift over to this topic since similar structural patterns emerge.  What follows is a section I will add to the entry, one on a recent paper by Eleonore Stump of St. Louis University. Professor Stump is a distinguished Aquinas scholar and defender of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS).

4.4 Stump's Quantum Metaphysics

Like Dolezal, Eleonore Stump thinks of God as self-subsistent Being (esse). If God is absolutely simple, and not just simple in the uncontroversial sense of lacking material parts, then God must be self-subsistent Being. God is at once both Being and something that is. He has to be both. If he were Being (esse) but not a being (id quod est), he could not enter into causal relations. He could not do anything such as create the world, intervene in its operations, or interact with human persons. Such a God would be "religiously pernicious." (Stump 2016, 199) Indeed, if God were Being but not a being, then one could not sensibly maintain that God exists. For if Being is other than every being, then Being is not. (It is instructive to note that Martin Heidegger, the famous critic of onto-theology, who holds to the "ontological difference" of Being (Sein) from every being (Seiendes) ends up assimilating Being to Nothing (Nichts).) On the other hand, if God were a being among beings who merely has Being but is not (identically) Being, then he would not be absolutely transcendent, worthy of worship, or ineffable. Such a God would be "comfortingly familiar" but "discomfiting anthropomorphic." (Miller 1996, 3)

The problem, of course, is to explain how God can be both Being and something that is. This is unintelligible to the discursive intellect. Either Being is other than beings or it is not. If Being is other than beings, then Being cannot be. If Being just is beings taken collectively, then God is a being among beings and not the absolute reality. To the discursive intellect the notion of self-subsistent Being is contradictory. One response to the contradiction is simply to deny divine simplicity. That is a reasonable response, no doubt. But might it not also be reasonable to admit that there are things that human reason cannot understand, and that one of these things is the divine nature? "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) As I read Stump, she, like Dolezal, makes a mysterian move, and she, like Dolezal (2011, 210, fn 55), invokes wave-particle duality. We cannot understand how light can be both a wave phenomenon and also particulate in nature, and yet it is both:

What kind of thing is it which has to be understood both as a wave and as a particle? We do not know. That is, we do not know the quid est of light. [. . .] Analogously, we can ask: What kind of thing is it which can be both esse and id quod est? We do not know. The idea of simplicity is that at the ultimate metaphysical foundation of reality is something that has to be understood as esse —but also as id quo est. We do not know what this kind of thing is either. (Stump 2016, 202)

Stump, E., 2016, “Simplicity and Aquinas's Quantum Metaphysics” in Gerhard Krieger, ed. Die Metaphysik des Aristoteles im Mittelalter: Rezeption und Transformation, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 191–210.

Dolezal, J. E., 2011, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications.

Miller, B., 1996, A Most Unlikely God, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press.

Now for my apologia.

Novak's characterization of me as both a rationalist and a fideist is basically accurate.  And yes, the rationalist comes first with exacting requirements. Let me try to illustrate this with DDS.  God is the absolute reality, a stupendously rich reality who transcends creatures not only in his properties, but also in his mode of property-possession, mode of existence, mode of necessity, and mode of uniqueness. God is uniquely unique. Such a being cannot be a being among beings. He is uniquely unique in that he alone is self-subsistent Being. Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.

One can reason cogently to this conclusion. Unfortunately, the conclusion is apparently self-contradictory.  The verbal formula does not express a proposition that the discursive intellect can 'process' or 'compute.' It is unintelligible to said intellect.  For the proposition the formula expresses appears to be self-contradictory. Stump agrees as do the opponents of DDS.

Now there are three ways to proceed. 

1) We can conclude, as many distinguished theists do, that the apparent contradictions are real and that God is not absolutely simple, that DDS is a 'mistake.'  See Hasker, William, 2016, “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 699-725.  For Hasker, DDS involves category mistakes, logical failures, and a dehumanization of God.  (One mistake Hasker himself makes is to think that a defender of DDS can only tread the via negativa and must end up embracing radical agnosticism about the nature of God. Stump has some interesting things to say in rebuttal of this notion. See Stump 2016, 195-198.)

In short: God is not reasonably believed to be simple.

2) A second way is the mysterian way.  The conjunction of God is esse and God is id quod est is an apparent contradiction.  But it is not a real contradiction. Characteristic of the mysterian of my stripe is the further claim that the structure of the discursive intellect makes it impossible for us to see that the contradiction is merely apparent.

In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple despite the ineliminable apparent contradictions that this entails because, as Stump puts it, "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) To put the point more generally, it is reasonable to confess the infirmity of human reason with respect to certain questions, and unreasonable to place an uncritical faith in its power and reach.  This is especially unreasonable for those who accept the Fall of man and the noetic consequences of sin.

Besides, if God is not a being among beings, then one might expect the discursive intellect to entangle itself in contradictions when it tries to think the Absolute Reality.  God, as Being itself, cannot be subsumed under any extant category of beings. 

3) A third way is by maintaining that the apparent contradictions can be shown to be merely apparent by the resources of the discursive intellect. In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple, and all considerations to the contrary can be shown to rest on errors and failures to make certain distinction.

What is my argument against (3)? Simply that the attempts to defuse the contradictions fail, and not just by my lights.  Almost all philosophers, theists and atheists alike, judge the notion of a simple God to be contradictory.

What is my argument against (1)? Essentially that those who take this line do not appreciate the radical transcendence of God. This point has been argued most forcefully by Barry Miller (1996).  Theists who reject divine simplicity end up with an anthropomorphic view of God.

As for Novak's charge of misology or hatred of reason and argument, I plead innocent. One who appreciates the limits of reason, and indeed the infirmity of reason as we find it in ourselves here below, cannot be fairly accused of misology. Otherwise, Kant would be a misologist.  I will turn the table on my friend by humbly suggesting that his doxastic security needs sometimes get the better of him causing him to affirm as objectively certain what is not at all objectively certain, but certain only to him.  For example he thinks it is epistemically certain that there are substances. I disagree.

But I want to confess to one charge. Lukas writes, "It seems to me that Bill is always too eager to conclude that there is an impasse, an insoluble problem, a contradiction, etc."  It may be that I am too zealous in my hunt for aporiai.  But I am deeply impressed by the deep, protracted, and indeed interminable disagreement of philosophers through the ages over every substantive question.  My working hypothesis for the metaphilosophy book I am trying to finish is that the core problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble by us.  And then I try to figure out what philosophy can and should be if that is the case, whether it should end in mystical silence -- that is where Aquinas ended up! -- or fuel a Pyrrhonian re-insertion into the quotidian and a living of life adoxastos, or give way to religious faith, or something else.

Footnote 190 in Vlastimil Vohánka, Modality, Logical Probability, and the Trinity: A Defence of Weak Skepticism

To put it oxymoronically, I am seriously toying with taking a mysterian line with respect to such Christian dogmas as Trinity and Incarnation.  To this end, I need to come to grips with our Czech friend Vlastimil Vohánka's footnote 190 on pp. 79-80 of his 2011 dissertation.  This subject-matter is difficult, so put on your thinking caps.  I will first quote the entire footnote, and then report on what I make of it.

190 WMST [Weak Modal Skepticism about the Trinity Doctrine] is rather a (part of a) meta-theory of the Trinity than a (part of a) theory of the Trinity. It‘s a position in the epistemology of the belief in the Trinity. According to WMST, the Trinity doctrine is a mystery, in a sense. In which sense?

Dale Tuggy distinguishes the following senses: (i) a proposition not known before divine revelation of it, but which has now been revealed by God and is known to some; (ii) a proposition which cannot be known independently of divine revelation, but which has now been revealed by God and is known to some; (iii) a proposition we don‘t completely understand; (iv) a true proposition we can‘t explain; (v) a true proposition we can‘t fully or adequately explain; (vi) an unintelligible proposition, the meaning of which can‘t be grasped; (vii) a true proposition which one should believe even though it seems, even after careful reflection, to be logically and/or otherwise impossible and thus false. See D. Tuggy ―The Unfinished Business of Trinitarian Theorizing,‖ Religious Studies 39, No. 2 (2003), pp. 175-176; and D. Tuggy, ―Trinity,‖ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), E. N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/trinity (accessed October 14, 2011), # 4.

Tuggy does not specify the modality of his 'cannot.' Taking it as psychological impossibility, we may plausibly say that if the Trinity doctrine is logically possible, WMST implies the doctrine is a mystery in the sense (iii). WMST leaves the issue of other senses of 'mystery' open even under the assumption of logical possibility of the doctrine. Under the assumption that the Trinity doctrine is true, WMST implies the doctrine is a mystery in the senses (iii) and (v).

Further, WMST implies mysterianism about the Trinity, in Tuggy‘s sense of the word. Mysterianism about the Trinity says that the true theory of the Trinity must, given our present epistemic limitations, to some degree lack meaning which we can understand or lack meaning which seems to us logically possible. Cf. D. Tuggy, ―Trinity,‖ op. cit., # 4. The implication by WMST of what Tuggy (ibid.) calls as positive mysterianism is much less clear. By this sort of mysterianism, he means the claim that the true theory of the Trinity must seem to us logically impossible. But there‘s some distance between (psychologically) necessary absence of evident (logical) possibility and (psychologically) necessary appearance of (logical) impossibility. WMST also does not seem to imply the position labeled by Tuggy as negative mysterianism: the claim that the true theory of the Trinity cannot seem logically possible and cannot seem logically impossible. (Ibid.) If the Trinity doctrine, in my sense, exhausted the true theory of the Trinity, then negative mysterianism would imply WMST. But it still would be contentious to assert that the converse holds, too, because the appearance of logical impossibility might be (psychologically)possible under WMST. Finally, it‘s worth noting that although positive mysterianism and negative mysterianism are incompatible, there‘s still a middle ground between them. A mysterian could hold – against both of the two contraries – that the Trinity doctrine need not, but can seem logically impossible; or that the Trinity doctrine need not seem logically impossible, but can seem logically possible.

Let's see if I can clarify this in my own terms.  

Positive mysterianism (PM): this is the epistemological meta-thesis that the Trinity doctrine, given our present cognitive limitations, must appear to us as logically impossible.

Negative mysterianism:(NM): this is the epistemological meta-thesis that the Trinity doctrine, given our present cognitive limitations, cannot seem to us logically possible and cannot seem to us logically impossible.  

What is the force of the 'must' and the 'cannot' in (PM) and (NM)?  Following Vohanka, we can take the modal terms as referring to psychological necessity and psychological impossibility, respectively.  Thus on PM we can't help but find the doctrine to be logically impossible. In this sense it must appear to us as logically impossible. This is due to the actual constitution of our minds, a constitution  which may be metaphysically contingent.  

But who are we?  You could say human animals, but I prefer to say discursive intellects or ectypal intellects whether biologically human or not.  There may be some extraterrestrial non-human mysterians out there. 

And what is meant by 'present' cognitive limitations'? I take 'present' wide open so as to cover our entire embodied existence or perhaps our entire embodied fallen existence. Our present cognitive limitations are our limitations 'here below' to use an old-fashioned religious phrase or our limitations 'here and now.' We should hold open the possibility that in our prelapsarian state we did not suffer from our present cognitive limitations.

Disjunctive Mysterianism (DM): "[Disjunctive] mysterianism about the Trinity says that the true theory of the Trinity must, given our present epistemic limitations, to some degree lack meaning which we can understand or lack meaning which seems to us logically possible.

Vlastimil tells us that according to WMST, the Trinity doctrine is a mystery, in a sense.  In what sense? In a sense that implies (DM). It seems to me that Vlastimil's attitude toward the Trinity doctrine is not one of skepticism or doubt; what he is doing is making a non-skeptical claim about the intelligibility to us of the Trinity doctrine.  (Needless to say, the doctrine and the Trinity itself, the reality behind the doctrine if there is one, must be distinguished.)

It may help to distinguish five possible attitudes towards a proposition:

1) Accept as true.
2) Reject as false.
3) Reject as meaningless.
4) Suspend judgment as to whether either true or false.  
5) Suspend judgment as to whether either meaningful or meaningless. (The epoche of the Pyrrhonists.)

(5), when applied to the Trinitarian proposition, is the attitude according to which one suspends judgment on the question as to whether or not one even has a (Fregean) proposition before one's mind when one intones or hears the Trinitarian formula or verbalism, "There is one God in three divine persons."

The last two, (4) and (5), are forms of skepticism.

Let the proposition be: There is one God in three divine persons.

It seems to me that my and V's attitude to the Trinitarian proposition is none of the above five. 

I am inclined to accept (PM) while V. is apparently accepting (DM).  Both of us are making non-skeptical claims about the intelligibility to us (not in itself) of the Trinitarian proposition.

Does this seem right?  

Ancora Una Volta: "Reasoned Mysterianism"

Dr. Vito Caiati writes (minor edits, formatting, and bolding added),

I thank you for your online response (Reasoned Mysterianism: A Defense of an Aphoristic Provocation) to my recent email.  In it you offer an impressive, rigorous defense of “reasoned mysterianism” that has impelled me to think more deeply on this subject, so much so, in fact, that I spent part of the night awake in bed ruminating over your argument.  Both it and your aphorism of July 21 (The Believing Philosopher) lead me to repeat what I wrote in my first email to you last February: “You have helped me sharpen and deepen by thinking on many questions, and you have made me more assured in turning away from easy or comforting answers.”

In this spirit, I will take up the invitation made in your email of yesterday and respond.  In doing so, I would like to draw a clearer distinction between a “reasoned belief” and a “reasoned mysterianism” by referring to your statement,

Vito mentions the leap of faith. As I see it, there is no avoiding such a leap when it comes to ultimate questions. There is no possibility of proof or demonstration hereabouts.  One can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, for example. So if, on the basis of arguments for or against the existence of God, one comes to believe in God or not, there will be a leap of faith either way.

I fully agree with what you say here because while the affirmations of God’s existence or the existence and immortality of the soul cannot be proven, they can be reasonably held. In holding the former, for example, one gives assent to one or more philosophical arguments or calls on other forms of evidence, while acknowledging the powerful arguments and evidence against this belief. But here, most would agree that we are not dealing with what “to the discursive intellect must appear contradictory”; rather, while the intellectual challenges are so enormous that certainty is beyond our grasp and, as you correctly point out, that a leap of faith is required, we respect the intellectual limitations imposed on us by our “cognitive architecture.”

For me, this is the important point: that we not go beyond these limitations however much we would like to do so.  Therefore, I agree that “reasoning about God and the soul, etc. is precisely reasoning in justification of a leap of faith or else in justification of a leap of disbelief.” In such matters, the absence of “certainty” is no hurdle for me in affirming the existence of God, which I do. 

However, while I grant that “it may well be that there are certain objects and states of affairs and phenomena whose internal possibility we cannot discern due to our irremediable cognitive limitations. [And that] Apparent contradictoriness would then not argue unreality,” I hold that such objects and states of affairs are best left alone.  If the objects and states of affairs of “reasoned belief,” such as God’s existence, remain as open and debated today as they were in the distant past and as cloudy to the human mind, what can we possibly know of those shrouded in absolute mystery and apparent contradiction? Here, it seems mere hubris to make a leap of faith; rather, is it not better to acknowledge the mystery and grasp what aspects of the Unknown, albeit small, that reasoned belief permits?  Why not be content with the latter and leave the rest to God, who, after all, either intended or permits our having a constrained “cognitive architecture”?  

The misery of our ignorance, perhaps the greatest evil, is not to be undone by mere conjecture and hope, however well intended. Thus, while I agree that we must choose, I think that the possible choices are quite circumscribed. 

REPLY

I will begin on a note of deep agreement: the misery of our ignorance is indeed a great, and perhaps the greatest, evil. It surprises me that this is not usually mentioned when people recount the evils of the human predicament. Surely it is awful that we are almost totally in the dark about the ultimate whence, whither, and wherefore, and that bitter controversy rages on every side.  To my mind the human condition is indeed a predicament, a 'situation' deeply unsatisfactory, the solution to which is either impossible or, if possible, then such as to require a radical revision of the way we live.

Now on to the meat of our disagreement. 

For most of my philosophical life I have held the position sketched by Vito Caiati according to which only what we can see to be rationally acceptable may be accepted.   So if, by my best efforts, I cannot bring myself to see how a religious dogma satisfies the exigencies of reason, then I ought not accept it.

But lately I have been re-examining this position. Such re-examination is in the spirit of philosophy as critical reflection that spares nothing, not even itself. There is nothing unphilosophical in questioning the reach of reason.*  Note that this questioning remains within philosophy: from within philosophy one can question philosophy and raise the possibility that philosophy can be and perhaps must be supplemented ab extra. 

One type of supplementation is via divine revelation.  Now philosophy cannot prove the fact of divine revelation, nor can it validate the specific contents of a putative revelation, but it can reasonably allow for the possibility of divine revelation. Without quitting the sphere of immanence it can allow for the possibility of an irruption into this sphere of salvific truths that we need but cannot access by our own powers.

Vito will grant me that it is reasonable to believe that God exists.  If so, it is reasonable to believe that there is a transcendent Person capable of revealing himself to man.  I would argue that the possibility of revelation is built into the concept of God.  Our concept of God is a concept of a personal being who could, if he so desired, reveal himself to his creatures in specific ways, via prophets who leave written records, or even by revealing himself in person in a special man who somehow is an, or rather the, incarnation of God.  Our possession of such a concept of God is of course no guarantee that there is such a God.   But without straying from the precincts of philosophy one can articulate such a concept.

This implies that it is reasonable to be open to the possibility of receiving 'information' of the highest importance to us and our ultimate well-being from a transcendent Source lying beyond the human horizon. This possibility is one that we can validate from within our own resources and thus without appeal to divine revelation.

One who grants the existence of a personal God cannot foreclose on the possibility of the receipt of such 'information.' To foreclose on it one would have to adopt some form of naturalism or else a non-personal conception of God.  Spinoza's deus sive natura, for example, is clearly not up to the task of transmitting any saving truths to us.

Now suppose some of these bits of 'information' or revealed truths are beyond our ken not only in the sense that we cannot validate them as true from within our immanence, but also in the sense  that we cannot validate them as possibly true. That is, we can generate no insight into their logical possibility. Suppose they appear, and indeed must appear, logically impossible to us within our present (fallen) state.  The idea is not that they are logically impossible in themselves, but that they must appear logically impossible to us due to our current 'cognitive architecture.'

Supposing all this, would it be reasonable to take Vito's advice and leave these putative truths of revelation alone, on the ground that it would be hubris to make a leap of faith in their direction when, by our own best lights, and after protracted examination, they appear logically impossible?

It is not clear to me that it would.  For then the measly creature would be valuing his intellectual integrity over the possibility of an eternity of bliss.

There might well be more hubris is setting up ourselves as arbiters as to what is possible and what is not. Weak-minded as we are, who are we to judge what is possible and what is not? If God exists, then we are his creatures. We are in the inferior position and ought to listen to God's teachings and commands whether or not they pass muster by our criteria, and especially since our ultimate happiness is at stake. 

If we really understand what is meant by 'God,' and we believe that God exists -- which I admit itself requires a leap beyond what we can legitimately claim strictly to know -- then how can we insist that God, his actions, his commands, and his revelations satisfy the exigencies of our puny intellects in order to be admissible?

There is much more to be said, but I have gone on long enough for one post. 

________________

* Think of the academic and the Pyrrhonian skeptics, the empiricists, the critical philosophy of Kant, phenomenology with its anti-dialectical orientation and invocation of the given, logical positivism, and the ordinary language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein.

A Reasoned Mysterianism? Defense of an Aphoristic Provocation

 This just in from Dr. Vito Caiati:

I write because I am confused about yesterday’s short post The Believing Philosopher, in which you state, “The religious belief of a believing philosopher is a reasoned belief, and even if his belief extends to the acceptance of mysteries that to the discursive intellect must appear contradictory, his is a reasoned mysterianism.” I understand and fully assent to the first clause regarding “reasoned belief,” but I am struggling to grasp the meaning of the concluding clause regarding “a reasoned mysterianism.” 

Specifically, I am troubled by the notion of “a reasoned mysterianism” in cases where “believing philosophers” affirm a mystery “that to the discursive intellect must appear contradictory,” when such a mystery depends on the acceptance of one or more other such mysteries. For example, take the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation or the non-scholastic, Orthodox doctrine of the true and real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Now in either case, “believing philosophers” who adhere to traditional Christian belief uphold that what appears, smells, feels, and tastes like bread or wine is, in fact, the actual body and blood of Christ. That the human senses completely contradict this belief is a contradictory datum the existence of which is reconciled through the notion of “mystery.” But this mystery requires a prior assent to yet other mysteries, such as those which affirm (1) the supernatural power of Jesus at the Last Supper to transform common foodstuffs into his body and blood; (2) the transfer of this power to the Apostles, mere human beings; (3) and its subsequent transfer to the myriad of bishops of ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern times, who have in turn (4) passed it onto an even greater number of priests. All of this, of course, requires belief in (5) the Incarnation, the appearance on Earth of the Second Person of the Trinity as one of Jesus’ two natures, but as you have so often eloquently argued, that Christian doctrine is certainly one that baffles the discursive intellect. An acceptance to this mystery requires, in turn, an accent [assent] to (6) the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, with all the logical knots that come with it. We have here a very long chain of mystery.

This is all very schematic and rough, but when I think of how hard it is to affirm theism alone with any sort of confidence, given the powerful evidence and arguments against this belief, I am at a loss to see how a believing philosopher who affirms anything like traditional Christian faith does so because of a “reasoned mysterianism.”  I may well be wrong, but I see so much mystery that reason, at best, justifies what is in fact a leap of faith.  On what epistemological foundation does “reasoned mysterianism” stand? Religious experience?  Revelation?  I do not necessarily deny either of these sources of knowledge, but as you so well know, they are highly problematical and controversial. 

As you can see, I am confused by all this. My befuddlement may well simply stem from my entirely amateur status in these matters, but I wanted to raise the issue with you in any case. If what I have to say is not worthy of comment, simply ignore it.

An aphorism, to be such, must be brief, and cannot supply reasons on its own behalf. One of its purposes is to stimulate thought in the reader. I see that my aphorism has done just that. While an aphorism cannot come armed with reasons, on pain of ceasing to be an aphorism, a good aphorism has reasons behind it.  A good aphorism is like the tip of an iceberg with the tip being the aphorism itself and the iceberg being the mass of supporting reasons and considerations. I will now try to explain what I mean by "reasoned mysterianism."

But first I want to register my agreement with Vito's insightful assertion that acceptance of a particular mystery often rests on a prior acceptance of other mysteries. To telescope his extended example, acceptance of the Incarnation presupposes a prior acceptance of the Trinity.  Vito and I also seem to agree that these doctrines (in their orthodox formulations) are an affront to the discursive intellect.  I mean that they appear to the discursive intellect as logically contradictory either in themselves or in their implications. Now I have discussed this in detail elsewhere, but perhaps a quick rehearsal is in order.  Here is a little argument that will appeal to a unitarian theist like my friend Dale Tuggy. 

a. The Second Person of the Trinity and the man Jesus differ property-wise. 
b.  Necessarily, for any x, y, if x, y differ property-wise, i.e., differ in respect of even one property, then x, y are numerically different, i.e., not numerically identical.  (Indiscernibility of Identicals)
Therefore
c. The Second Person of the Trinity and Jesus are not numerically identical, i.e., are not one and the same.

Let's focus just on this little argument.  The argument is clearly valid in point of logical form: the conclusion follows from the premises.  And the premises are true.  (a) is true as a matter of orthodox -- miniscule 'o' -- Christian teaching.  (b) is the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle whose intellectual luminosity is as great as any.  But the conclusion contradicts orthodox Christian teaching according to which God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, became man, i.e., became identical to a flesh and blood man with a body and a soul, in Jesus of Nazareth at a particular time in an obscure outpost of the Roman empire.

Some will conclude that the Incarnation is logically impossible.  Others will insist that if we make the right distinctions we can evade arguments like the above.  My considered opinion is that these evasive maneuvers do not work. I can't go into this now.  One thing is clear: it remains a matter of controversy whether orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalism is logically possible.  And similarly, mutatis mutandis, for the orthodox Trinitarian doctrine.

A. One view, then, is that these doctrines are logically impossible, not just for us but in themselves, and therefore cannot be true.  And if they cannot be true, and we see that they cannot be true, then we ought not, on an adequate ethics of belief, accept them, which is to say: we are morally required to reject them.

B. A second view is that the doctrines in question are logically possible and can be seen to be such if we are careful in our use of terms and make all the right distinctions.  The doctrines would then be rationally acceptable in the sense that they would satisfy the canons of the discursive intellect.  

C. A third view is the dialetheist one according to which there are true contradictions.  I mention this only for the sake of classificatory completeness.

D. A fourth view is mysterianism. The theological doctrines in question are logically possible, and indeed true, in themselves and this despite the fact that they appear to us in our present state as contradictory, or even must appear to us in our present state as contradictory. On mysterianism, our cognitive architecture is such as to disallow any insight into how the doctrines in questions are logically possible.

Theological mysterianism  has an analog in the philosophy of mind.  Many today are convinced naturalists. It seems evident to them that there is but one world, this physical world, and that we are wholly physical parts of it.  Our consciousness life in all its richness is rooted in brain activity and impossible without it.  

Now take the naturalist conviction and conjoin it to the intellectually honest admission that we have no idea at all how it is so much as possible for a wholly material being to think and enjoy conscious states.  The conjunction of the Conviction and the Admission generates a mysterian position according to which one affirms as true a proposition that one cannot understand as possibly true, a proposition that for us is and most likely will remain unintelligible, namely, the proposition that we are wholly material beings susceptible of exhaustive natural-scientific explanation who nonetheless think, feel, love, make moral demands, feel subject to them, etc.

This mysterianism is an epistemological position  according to which our contingent but unalterable make-up makes it impossible for us ever to understand how it is possible for us to think and be conscious.  The claim is not that thought and consciousness are mysterious because they are non-natural phenomena; the claim is that they are wholly natural but not understandable by us.  Our cognitive architecture (a phrase I believe Colin McGinn employs) blocks our epistemic access to those properties the understanding of which would render intelligible to us how we can be both wholly material and yet the  subjects of intentional and non-intentional mental states.

Mysterianism as a general strategy rests on a fairly solid foundation.  First of all, it is a self-evident modal axiom that actuality entails possiblity.  It is also self-evident that if x is possible, then it does not follow that we are in a position to understand how x is possible.  So it may well be that there are certain objects and states of affairs and phenomena whose internal possibility we cannot discern due to our irremediable cognitive limitations.  Apparent contradictoriness would then not argue unreality.

And so the apparent contradictoriness of Trinity and Incarnation would not argue their impossibility and unreality.

When I speak of "reasoned mysterianism" I am not just employing an oxymoron for literary effect, the way Nietzsche does in his brilliant aphorism, "Some men are born posthumously."   I am suggesting that the mysterianism I have just sketched can be reasoned to, and rationally supported.  Mysterianism is a position that can be reasonably held.  The idea is that it can be reasonably held that there are true propositions the internal possibility of which our finite discursive reason cannot discern and which must appear to us in our present state as internally impossible. It is not irrational to point out the limits of reason. It would be irrational not to. 

Vito mentions the leap of faith. As I see it, there is no avoiding such a leap when it comes to ultimate questions. There is no possibility of proof or demonstration hereabouts.  One can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, for example. So if, on the basis of arguments for or against the existence of God, one comes to believe in God or not, there will be a leap of faith either way.  Of course, I do not claim that what I just asserted can be proven; but I do claim that I can plausibly support these convictions with good reasons.  A reason can be good without being rationally compelling.

It seems to me that reasoning about God and the soul, etc. is precisely reasoning in justification of a leap of faith or else in justification of a leap of disbelief.

As for religious experiences, they prove nothing. (Indeed, not even mundane  sense experiences prove the existence of their intentional objects. My current visual experiencings of -- or AS OF in the patois of the truly persnickety philosopher -- books and papers and the trees and mountains outside my study window do not prove the extramental reality of any of these things.)

But evidence needn't get the length of proof to count as evidence.

As for divine revelation, the problem is how to distinguish a putative revelation from a genuine one.  I worry this bone with the help of Josiah Royce in Josiah Royce and the Religious Paradox.

Perhaps what Vito wants is certainty. But the only certainty worth wanting is objective, not subjective, and it cannot be had here below.  In this life there is no rest, only road.  The destination, fog enshouded, remains in doubt, though glimpsed now and again.  Lucubration  must come to an end and one has to decide, each for himself, what one will believe and how one will live.

Two Senses of 'Mystery' and McGinn's Mysterianism

Joel Hunter writes,

In the context of an exchange between a Catholic and a Protestant, I came across a quote of Gerard Manley Hopkins that reminded me of your posts on mysterianism.

 

You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also. This happens in some things; to you, in religion. But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty; without certainty, without formulation, there is no interest … The clearer the formulation, the greater the interest. At bottom, the source of interest is the same in both cases, in your mind and in ours; it is the unknown, the reserve of truth beyond what the mind reaches and still feels to be behind. But the interest a Catholic feels is, if I may say so, of a far finer kind than yours.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges

This made me wonder whether mind-body mysterians like McGinn are really of the second type. If one holds that our inability to understand how a mental state could be a brain state is because of a natural limitation on our cognitive powers, like our inability to smell things that a dog can smell, then we might yet hold that this mystery is of type 1 - an "interesting uncertainty." One way that a materialist like McGinn might hold that consciousness is a type 1 mystery is to argue that, as with other of our physical powers, say vision, we could develop ways to augment our cognitive powers to understand thoughts we cannot (yet) think. The recent movie Lucy tangentially explores this.

Also, there's always the alien hypothesis, which seems to interest some very bright people, like Hawking. Intellectually, we may be bonobos compared to a more advanced race in the universe, whose cognitive powers far surpass our own, and for whom the solution to the mind-body problem is discussed and proven in the first year of their grade school. Of course, this is nothing more than an alien-of-the-gaps conjecture.

..............................................

BV responds:

In the Hopkins passage, which I find very obscure, two senses of 'mystery' are distinguished. They seem to me to be as follows.

Mystery-1:  A proposition which, if true, is knowable, presently unknown, and interesting to know, but the interest of which evaporates upon being known.  For example, the proposition Jimmy Hoffa's body was fed through a wood chipper is,  if true, knowable, unknown, interesting to know but such that, if it came to be known, then the question of the final disposition of Hoffa's body would be settled and would no longer be interesting.  A more timely example:  The singer Prince's death came about as a result of his opioid addiction in tandem with a grueling work schedule.  The aim of research is to banish mysteries in this first sense of 'mystery.' 

Mystery-2:  A proposition which, if true, cannot by us in this life be known to be true, and cannot even be known by us in this life to be logically-possibly true, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and is of the highest interest to us, but whose interest would in no way be diminished should we come to know it.

An example is the doctrine of the Trinity as understood by Roman Catholics (but not just by them).  The Trinity is an exclusively revealed truth; hence it cannot be known by us by natural means.  What's more, it cannot even be known by us to be free of logical contradiction and thus logically possible.  Our finite intellects cannot see into its logical possibility let alone into its actual truth.  We cannot understand how it is possible.  But what is actual is possible whether or not we have the power to understand how it is possible.  (Compare: motion is possible because actual, whether or not the Zenonian arguments to the contrary can be adequately answered.)

So from the fact that the Trinity appears to us in our present state as contradictory, and thus as logically impossible, it does not follow that it is not true.  For it could be like this:  given our unalterable ('hard-wired') cognitive architecture, certain revealed truths must appear to us as contradictory when the propositions which must so appear are not only in themselves not contradictory, but are also actually true!

One sort of mysterian is a person who holds that there are mysteries in the second sense.  Is Colin McGinn a mysterian in this sense? 

McGinn 'takes it on faith' that all mental activity is brain activity. He no more questions this than a believing Catholic questions the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence, etc.   It just seems obvious to him and therefore a thesis that cannot be reasonably questioned.  Of course mental activity is brain activity!  What the hell else could it be?  You think and feel with your brain, not your johnson, and certainly not with some 'spook in the skull' (my coinage) or "ghost in the machine." (Ryle) 

But there are powerful arguments which I have rehearsed many times why qualia and object-directed mental states cannot be physical states.  Confronted with these arguments, McGinn goes mysterian.  He grants their force and then says something like this:

It is incomprehensible to us how consciousness could be a brain process.  But it is a brain process.  It is just that our unalterable cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to see into this truth.  It is true and therefore possibly true even though we cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true due to our cognitive limitations.

As I read McGinn, these limitations are in our human case  unalterable.  And so I read McGinn as a mysterian in much the same sense that a theological mysterian is a mysterian.  What is common to the doctor angelicus and the decidedly less than angelic McGinn is a commitment to the thesis that there are true, non-contradictory propositions that we humans by our very nature are not equipped to understand as either true or non-contradictory.

This leaves open the possibility for McGinn that there be extraterrestrials who are equipped to grasp mind-brain identity.  And it leaves open for Aquinas the possibility that there be angelic intellects who are equipped to grasp  God-Man identity (the Incarnation) and how Jesus Christ could ascend into  heaven soul and body!

It would be very interesting to hear what James Anderson and Dale Tuggy have to say about this.  They have gone far deeper into the mysteries of mysterianism than I have.

Filed under: Mysterianism

Galen Strawson Versus Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

(This is a repost from February 2013 slightly emended, except for an addendum added today.  Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere.  You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode just once do you?) 

.....................

A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights.  Or, to revert to the metaphor of that post, I took a shovel to his bull.  I am happy to see that Galen Strawson agrees that it is just nonsense to speak of consciousness as an illusion.  Strawson's trenchant review of Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness is here.  Unfortunately, I cannot see that Strawson has shed much light either, at least judging from the sketch of his position presented in the just-mentioned review:

There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. We know exactly what consciousness is; we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case." You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.

"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.

One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.

The main point of Strawson's first paragraph is surely correct: we know what consciousness is in the most direct and  unmistakable way possible: we experience it, we live through it, we are it.  We know it from our own case, immediately, and we know it better than we know anything else.  If Dennett doesn't know what a sensory quale is, then perhaps the cure is to administer a sharp kick to his groin.  Feel that, Dan?  That's a quale.  (I am assuming, of course, that Dennett is not a 'zombie' in the technical sense in which that term is used in philosophy of mind discussions.  But I can't prove he isn't.  Perhaps that is the problem. If he were a zombie, then maybe all his verbal behavior would be understandable.)

In the second paragraph Strawson rejects an assumption and he makes one himself.  He rejects the assumption that we know enough about the intrinsic nature of matter to know that a material being cannot think.    The assumption he makes is that we are wholly physical beings.  So far I understand him.  It could be that (it is epistemically possible that) this stuff inside my skull is the thinker of my thoughts.  This is epistemically possible because matter could have hidden powers that we have yet to fathom. On our current understanding of matter it makes no bloody sense to maintain that matter thinks; but that may merely reflect our ignorance of the intrinsic nature of matter.  So I cannot quickly dismiss the notion that matter thinks in the way I can quickly dismiss the preternaturally boneheaded notion that consciousness is an illusion.

I agree with Strawson's first paragraph; I understand the second; but I am flabbergasted by the third.  For now our man waxes dogmatic and postures as if he KNOWS that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon.  How does he know it?  Obviously, he doesn't know it.  It is a mere conjecture, an intelligible conjecture, and perhaps even a reasonable one.  After all it might be (it is epistemically possible that) the matter of our brains has occult powers that physics has yet to lay bare, powers that enable it to think and feel.  I cannot exclude this epistemic possibility, any more than Strawson can exclude the possibility that thinkers are spiritual substances.  But to conjecture that things might be thus and so is not to KNOW that they are thus and so.  All we can claim to KNOW is what Strawson asseverates in his first paragraph.

Here is Strawson's  argument in a nutshell:

1. We know the intrinsic nature of consciousness from our own case.

2. We know that consciousness is a form of matter.

Ergo

3.  There is nothing mysterious about consciousness or about how matter gives rise to consciousness; nor is there any question whether consciousness is wholly physical; the only mystery concerns the intrinsic nature of matter.

The problem with this argument is premise (2).  It is pure bluster: a wholly gratuitous assumption, a mere dogma of naturalism.  I can neutralize the argument with this counterargument:

4. If (1) & (2), then brain matter has occult powers.

5. We have no good reason to assume -- it is wholly gratuitous to assume -- that brain matter has occult powers.

Therefore

6. We have no good reason to assume that both (1) and (2) are true.

7. We know that (1) is true.

Therefore

8. We have good reason to believe that (2) is false. 

Further Thoughts: Strawsonian Theology? (20 September 2015)

Strawson tells us that he is assuming that we are "wholly physical beings."  Now a proposition cannot be true or false unless it is meaningful.  But what does it even mean to say that we are wholly physical beings given that this entails that some wholly physical beings are conscious and self-conscious?  What does 'physical' mean if beings as richly endowed with mentality as we are count as "wholly physical"?  There is a semantic problem here, and it looks to be a failure of contrast.  'Physical' contrasts with 'mental' and has a specific meaning in virtue of this contrast.  And vice versa. So if nothing is mental, then nothing is physical in the specific contrastive sense that lends 'bite' and interest to the thesis that we are wholly physical.  To put it another way, if nothing is mental and everything is physical including us with our richly endowed inner lives, then the claim that we are wholly physical is not particularly interesting.    It is nearly vacuous if not wholly vacuous.  It has been evacuated of its meaning by a failure of contrast.  If we are wholly physical in an umbrella sense that subsumes the contrastive senses of 'physical' and 'mental,' then Strawson has merely papered over the problem of how the mental and the physical are related when these terms are taken in their specific senses.

Suppose Einstein and his blackboard are both wholly physical.  We still have to account for the fact that one of them is conscious and entertains thoughts while the other isn't and doesn't.  That is a huge difference.  What Strawson has to say is that  in us thinking and feeling beings powers of matter are exercised that are not exercised in other, less distinguished clumps of matter.  Hidden in the bosom of matter are powers that a future physics may lay bare and render intelligible.

But if Strawson widens his concept of matter to cover both thinking and nonthinking matter,  does he have a principled way to prevent an even further widening?

If minds like ours are wholly physical, why can't God be wholly physical?  God is a mind too.  Presumably God cannot be wholly physical because God is not in space and is not subject to physical decomposition.  But if we can be wholly physical despite the fact that we think and are conscious -- if there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out thought and consciousness -- then perhaps there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out material beings that have no spatial location and are not subject to physical decomposition.

If an advanced physics will reveal how meat heads like us can think, then perhaps there are other properties and possibilities of matter hitherto undreamt of.  Consider Christ's Ascension, body and soul, into heaven. Christ's Ascension is not a dematerialization: he ascends bodily into a purely spiritual, nonphysical, 'dimension.' Without losing his (resurrected) body, Christ ascends to the Father so that, after the Ascension, the Second Person of the Trinity acquires Christ's resurrected body. On our ordinary way of thinking, this is utterly unintelligible.  God is pure spirit, pure mind.  How can Christ  ascend bodily into heaven, and without divesting himself of his body,  enter into the unity of the purely spiritual Trinity?  It is unintelligible to us because it issues in a formal-logical contradiction: God is wholly nonphysical and also in part physical.  A mysterian would say it is a mystery.  It happened, so it's possible, and this regardless of its unintelligibility to us. 

On Strawson's approach there needn't be any mystery here:  some parcels of matter have amazing powers.  For example, we are wholly material and yet we think and feel.  It is truly amazing that we should be thinking meat!  If so, God might be a parcel of matter that thinks, feels, and -- without prejudice to his physicality -- has no spatial location and is not subject to physical decomposition. If so, the Ascension is comprehensible: Christ ascends bodily to join the physical Trinity.  It is just that he sheds his particular location and his physical mutability.  He remains what he was on earth, an embodied soul. 

The same could be said of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven.  She too entered bodily into heaven.  On a Strawsonian theology, this might be rendered intelligible without mysterianism.

To sum up.  If matter actually thinks and feels  in us, as Strawson holds, then he has widened the concept of matter to embrace both 'ordinary' matter and sentient, thinking, 'spiritual' matter.  But then what principled way would Strawson have to prevent a further widening of the concept of matter so that it embraces God, disembodied souls, angels, and what not?

Mysterian Materialism and Mysterian Trinitarianism

Here are some thoughts that may provoke a fruitful discussion with Vlastimil Vohanka on the topic of mysterianism in the philosophy of mind and in theology.  He kindly sent me his rich and stimulating paper, "Mysterianism about Consciousness and the Trinity."  The paper is available here along with other works of his.  His view is that a mysterian line is defensible in both the philosophy of mind and in Trinitarian theology.  I have some doubts.

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There are different sorts of materialism about the mind, among them eliminative materialism, identity-materialism, and functionalism.  There is also mysterian materialism. Here is a little speech by a mysterian materialist:

Look, we are just complex physical systems, nothing more. And yet we think and are conscious.  Therefore, we are wholly material beings who think and are conscious.  We  cannot understand how this is possible. But what is actual is possible whether or we we are able to understand how it is possible.  So the fact that we cannot understand how it is possible that thinking and consciousness are nothing more than brain activity does not show that they are not brain activity.   It shows that the how is beyond our understanding.  What we have here, then, is a mystery: a proposition that is true  and non-contradictory despite our inability to understand how it could be true.  

What motivates this mysterian materialism?  Two things.  There is first of all the deep conviction shared by many today that there is exactly one world, this mind-independent physical world, that we are parts of it, that nothing in us is not part of it, and that it and us are wholly natural and in no respect supernatural.  This naturalist conviction implies that there is nothing special about us, that we are continuous with the rest of nature.  We are nothing special in that we have no higher origin or higher destiny.  There is no God who created us in his image and likeness.  And there is no higher happiness other than the transient and fitful happiness that some of us can eke out, if we are lucky, here below.  We are irremediably mortal and natural, like everything else that lives, and anything (conscience, consciousness, self-consciousness, ability to reason, love and longing, sensus divinitatis, etc.) that suggests otherwise is susceptible of a wholly naturalistic explanation.  Part of why people embrace the naturalist conviction is that it puts paid to central tenets of old-time religion: God, the soul, post-mortem rewards and punishments, the libertarian freedom of the will, man's being an image and likeness of God, etc.  So hostility to religion is certainly, for some, part of the psychological  (if not logical) motivation for the acceptance of the naturalist conviction.

Now take the naturalist conviction and conjoin it to the intellectually honest admission that we have no idea at all how it is so much as possible for a wholly material being to think and enjoy conscious states.  The conjunction of the Conviction and the Admission generates a mysterian position according to which one affirms as true a proposition that one cannot understand as possibly true, a proposition that for us is and most likely will remain unintelligible, namely, the proposition that we are wholly material beings susceptible of exhaustive natural-scientific explanation who nonetheless think, feel, love, make moral demands, feel subject to them, etc.

This mysterianism is an epistemological position  according to which our contingent but unalterable make-up makes it impossible for us ever to understand how it is possible for us to think and be conscious.  The claim is not that thought and consciousness are mysterious because they are non-natural phenomena; the claim is that they are wholly natural but not understandable by us.  Our cognitive architecture (a phrase I believe Colin McGinn employs) blocks our epistemic access to those properties the understanding of which would render intelligible to us how we can be both wholly material and yet the  subjects of intentional and non-intentional mental states.

Well, this mysterianism is certainly to be preferred to an eliminativism which argues from the unintelligibility of a material thing's thinking to  the nonexistence of its thinking.  But eliminativism is a lunatic position best left to the exceedingly intelligent lunatics who dreamt it up.  I won't waste any words here refuting this mindless doctrine; I have wasted words elsewhere. 

We should note that one could be a mysterian in the philosophy of mind without being a mysterian materialist. One could be a mysterian substance dualist.  Some maintain that the interaction problem dooms substance dualism.  A mysterian might hold that substance dualism is true, that mind-body interaction is unintelligible, that interaction occurs, and that our inability to understand how mind-body interaction occurs  merely shows a cognitive limitation on our part.  It seems obvious that there is nothing in the nature of mysterianism in the philosophy of mind to require that one be a mysterian materialist/physicalist/naturalist.

We should also note that one could be a mysterian in areas other than the philosophy of mind, in theology, for example.   

Mysterianism as a general strategy rests on a fairly solid foundation.  First of all, it is a self-evident modal axiom that actuality entails possiblity.  It is also self-evident that if x is possible, then it does not follow that we are in a position to understand how it is possible.  So it may well be that there are certain objects and states of affairs and phenomena whose internal possibility we cannot discern due to our irremediable cognitive limitations.  Apparent contradictoriness would then not argue unreality.

But surely there is something very strange about maintaining that there are true mysteries.  A true mystery is a true proposition that is unintelligible to us, though not unintelligible in itself. Now here is my difficulty in a nutshell. If a proposition either is or entails a broadly-logical contradiction, then I wouldn't know what I had before my mind if I had such a proposition before my mind.  And if I didn't know exactly which proposition I had before my mind, I wouldn't know exactly which proposition I was claiming was both true and mysterious.

Bear with me as I try to clarify my objection.

Before I can take a position with respect to a proposition I must know what that proposition is.  I must know the identity of the proposition.  But a proposition that strikes my mind as unintelligible is not one about whose identity I can be sure.

I count four positions or attitudes one can take toward a proposition: accept as true, reject as false, suspend judgment as to truth-value, practice epoché , ἐποχή.  Pithier still: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Withdraw.  The first three are self-explanatory.  By Withdraw I mean: take no position on whether or not there is even a proposition (ein Gedanke, a complete thought) before one's mind.  (The notion of Withdrawal is derived via Benson Mates from Sextus Empiricus.)  Withdrawal goes farther than Suspension.  To suspend is to refuse to accept or reject a well-defined proposition while accepting that there is such a proposition before one's mind.  In the state of Withdrawal I take no position on whether or not there is a well-defined proposition before my mind.  In the state of Withdrawal I have before my mind a verbal formulation, and the senses of its constituent words, but I take no position on the question whether the verbal formulation expresses a proposition.

Example.  A Trinitarian says, 'There is exactly one God in three divine persons.'  Studying the doctrine I come to the conclusion that I can attach no definite sense to it on the ground that it seems to me to entail one or more logical contradictions.   That is not a case of rejection or of suspension; it is a case of epoché.  I 'bracket' (to borrow a term  from Husserl) two questions: the question as to truth-value, and the more fundamental question as to whether or not there is even a proposition (a unified, coherent, sense-structure) before my mind as opposed to an incoherent, un-unified bunch of word-senses.

Suppose you say to me, "Snow is white and snow is not white."  Being the charitable fellow that I am known to be, I would not churlishly impute to you the assertion of a formal-logical contradiction.  I would take you to be using a contradictory form of words to express a non-contradictory proposition, perhaps, the proposition that snow is white where I didn't relieve myself, but not white where I did.  Or something like that.  The time-honored method of showing an apparent contradiction to be merely apparent is by making a distinction in respect of time, or respect, or word sense.

But if someone insists that he means literally that snow is white and snow is not white where there is no distinction in respect of time, respect, or sense of the word 'white,' then I wouldn't know what the content of the assertion was.  I wouldn't know which proposition my interlocutor was trying get across to me.  For if my interlocutor was otherwise rational,  the Principle of Charity would forbid me from imputing a contradiction to him.  I would have to practice withdrawal.

If you say with a straight face "Snow is white and snow is not white" and you are neither equivocating on any term, nor making any distinction with respect to time or respect, and I charitably refuse to impute to you the assertion of a formal-logical contradiction of the form *p & ~p,* then I must say that I have no idea at all which proposition you are trying to convey to me.  And so I naturally practice epoché with respect to your utterance.

(I grant that there is a sense in which a self-contradictory proposition -- *No dog is a dog* for example -- is intelligible (understandable): for if I did not understand the proposition I would not understand it to be self-contradictory and thus necessarily false.  What I mean by 'intelligible' here is 'understandable as broadly-logically possibly true.'  On this narrow use of 'intelligible,' a claim to the effect that no dog is a dog or that snow both is and is not white is unintelligible.)

Back to the mysterian materialist.  I must put his asseverations within the Husserlian brackets.  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, or could have content.   So no intentional state could be a physical state.  The very idea is unintelligible.  To be precise: it is unintelligible as something broadly logically possible.  The vocabularies we use when speaking of brain states and mental states respectively are radically incommensurable.  Axon, dendrite, synapse, etc. on the one hand, qualia, intentionality, content, etc. on the other.  Even if one were to know everything there is to know about the electro-chemistry and neuro-anatomy of the brain one would still have no clue as to how consciousness arises from it.  By consciousness, I mean not only qualia but intentional (object-directed) states. 

But 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 non-contradictory thought to the words.

No doubt there is an illusion of sense.  There is nothing syntactically wrong with 'Thoughts are brain states' or 'Sensory qualia are physical features of the brain.'  And the individual words have meaning.  What's more, the words taken together seem to convey a coherent thought in the way in which 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination' does not seem to convey a coherent thought.  But when the meaning is made explicit, the unintelligibility becomes manifest.

To say of a sensory quale q that it is identical to a brain state b is to say something that is unintelligible.  For if q = b, then they share all properties, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived.  But it is plain that they do not share all properties: the quale but not the brain state has a phenomenological feel, a Nagelian what it-is-like, an element of irreducible subjectivity.  Thus the materialist identity claim is seen with a just a tiny bit of reasoning to be utterly unintelligible.

If you tell me that one and the same item in my skull has both physical and phenomenological properties, then I say you have changed the subject: you now have a dual-aspect theory going.  I will then press you on what this third item is that has both physical and phenomenological features. 

Suppose you stick to the topic but make a mysterian move.  You grant me that it is unintelligible for us that q = b, but insist that it is intelligible in itself.  You say it is true in reality despite the irremediable appearance of unintelligibility.  It is true and non-contradictory in reality that  sensory qualia and  thoughts are nothing other than events or processes  transpiring inside the  skull.  You say it is true and non-contradictory that when I think about Boston that thinking is just something going on in my head, adding that it is and will remain a mystery how this could be.

My objection can be put as follows.  We have a verbal formulation (VF) such as 'Qualia are brain states.'  VF expresses the unintelligible-for-us proposition (UFUP) *Qualia are brain states.*  We are told that VF is true even though we, with our cognitive limitations, cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true.  So there must be a true intelligible-in-itself proposition (IIIP) distinct from (UFUP) to which we have no access.  How is IIIP related to VF?  It cannot be that VF expresses IIIP.  VF expresses UFUP.  So we are supposed to accept a proposition to which we have no access, a proposition that stands in no specifiable relation to VF.  But surely that I cannot do.  I cannot accept a proposition to which I have no access.

The formulations of the trinitarian theist appear to be in the same logical boat.   I am of course assuming that the logical problem of the Trinity cannot be solved on the discursive plane.  That is, one cannot solve it in the usual way by making distinctions.  If one could solve it in this way, then there would be no need to make a mysterian move.  The doctrine would be rationally acceptable as it stands, though not rationally provable since the triunity of God can be known only by revelation.

To sum up my objection.  We are offered a verbal formulation, e.g., "There is one God in three divine persons."  This verbal formulation expresses a proposition that is unintelligible to us.  (It is unintelligible to us because contradictions can be derived from it using given doctrinal elements and unquestionable notions such as the transitivity of identity.)  We are assured, however, that while the manifest proposition is unintelligible to us, the verbal formulation expresses  a second proposition that is true and intelligible in itself.  But since this proposition is inaccessible, one annot accept it, reject it, or suspend judgment with respect to it.

If you tell me that there are not two propositions, but that one and the same proposition is both unintelligible to us but intelligible in itself, then I will ask you which proposition this is.

I suppose what I am saying is that a true proposition that is a mystery is an item so indeterminate that one cannot take up any attitude to it except that of Withdrawal or epoché as I defined this term.

Patricia Churchland versus Colin McGinn on Mysterianism

It's a win for McGinn.

Here's Churchland:

The view for which McGinn is known is a jejune prediction, namely that science cannot ever solve the problem of how the brain produces consciousness. On what does he base his prediction? Flimsy stuff. First, he is pretty sure our brain is not up to the job. Why not? Try this: a blind man does not experience color, and he will not do so even when we explain the brain mechanisms of experiencing color. Added to which, McGinn says that he cannot begin to imagine what it is like to be a bat, or how conscious experience might be scientifically explained (his brain not being up to the job, as he insists). This cognitive inadequacy he deems to have universal epistemological significance.

Alongside the arrogance, here is one whopping flaw: no causal explanation for a phenomenon, such as color vision, should be expected to actually produce that phenomenon. Here is why: the neural pathways involved in visually experiencing color are not the same pathways as those involved in intellectually understanding the mechanisms for experiencing color. Roughly speaking, experiencing color depends on areas in the back of the brain (visual areas) and intellectual understanding of an explanation depends on areas in the front of the brain.

Now what does this snark and misdirection have to do with anything McGinn actually maintains?  Nothing that I can see.  Here's McGinn:

Churchland’s account of my arguments for our cognitive limitations with respect to explaining consciousness bears little relation to what I have written in several books, as anyone who has dipped into those books will appreciate. What she refers to as a “whopping flaw” in my position (and that of many others) is simply a complete misreading of what has been argued: the point is not that having a causal explanation for a phenomenon should produce that phenomenon, so that a blind man will be made to see by having a good theory of vision. The point is rather that a blind man will not understand what color vision is merely by finding out about the brain mechanisms that underlie it, since he needs acquaintance with the color experiences themselves.

Churchland 0 - McGinn 1.

The articles below should help you understand some of the issues.

Related articles

Galen Strawson versus Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn: Good News and Bad News

It's Nonsense, but it's True Nonsense!

John Searle Interviewed

Dolezal on Divine Simplicity: Does He Make a Mysterian Move?

Dr. James Dolezal kindly sent me a copy of his very recent book, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness (Pickwick, 2011).  Herewith, some quick notes and commentary based on a partial reading. 

1.  God is an absolute, or rather the absolute.  That is a non-negotiable starting point for both of us.  To uphold the divine absoluteness, however, it is necessary to think of God as ontologically simple, as devoid of metaphysical complexity and composition.  For if God is absolute, then he cannot depend on anything else for his existence or nature.  It follows that God cannot be an instance of his attributes but must be them; nor can he be an existent among existents: he must be his existence and existence itself.  Indeed, God as absolute must be ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsisting Existence.  These are hard sayings and sharp heads, Plantinga being one of them, find them incoherent.  For details and a bit of a response to Plantinga, I refer you to my Stanford Encyclopedia article.  Note also that an absolute cannot be lacking anything or in need of developing itself: it is, eternally, all that it can be.  This implies that there is no act/potency distinction in God, no unrealized powers or potentialities.  In the classical phrase, God is actus purus, pure act, wholly actual.  Dolezal puts it very well when he writes, "The consideration of God as ipsum esse subsistens and actus purus is crucial for any confession of God's absolute existence." (214)

2. But to uphold the divine absoluteness, it is also necessary that God be libertarianly free in his production of creatures.  For suppose there is something in the divine nature that necessitates God's creation.  Then God would depend on the world to be himself and to be fully actual.  He would need what is other than himself to actualize himself.  This entanglement with the relative would compromise the divine absoluteness.  God would need the world as much as the world needs God.  Each would require the other to be what it is.  (210)

3.  So God must be both simple and free to be absolute.  But it is very difficult to understand how a simple being could be free in the unconditional 'could have done otherwise' sense.    If God is simple, then he is pure act in which case he is devoid of unrealized powers, potentialities or possibilities.  To act freely, however is to act in such a way that one (unconditionally) could have done otherwise, which implies unrealized possibilities.  Now Dolezal's view if I have understood him -- and he can correct me in the ComBox if I am wrong -- is that it is not only difficult to reconcile simplicity and freedom, but impossible for us, at least in our present state.  "Though we discover strong reasons for confessing both simplicity and freedom in God, we cannot form an isomorphically adequate notion of how this is the case." (210)  In footnote 55 on the same page, Dolezal brings up wave-particle duality: light behaves both like a particle and like a wave.  We have good reason to believe that it is both despite the difficulty or impossibility of understanding  how it could be both.  On the basis of the quotation and the footnote I hope that Dolezal will forgive me for pinning the label 'mysterian' on him, at least with respect to the simplicity-freedom problem which is only one subproblem within the the divine simplicity constellation.

 4. I grant that if we have good reason to believe that p is true, and good reason to believe that q  is true, then we have good reason to believe that p and q are logically  consistent (with each other) despite an absence of understanding as to how they could be mutually consistent. What is actual is possible whether or not one can render intelligible how it is possible.  To give an example of my own, motion is actual, hence possible, despite my inability in the teeth of Zenonian considerations to understand how it is possible. Many similar examples could be given.

And so a mysterian move suggests itself:  We are justified in maintaining both that God is simple and that God is free despite the fact that after protracted effort we cannot make logical sense of this conjunction.  The fact that the conjunction  -- God is simple & God is free -- appears to us, and perhaps even necessarily appears to us, given irremediable cognitive limitations on our part, to be or rather entail  an explicit  logical contradiction is not a good reason to reject the conjunction.  The mysterian is not a dialetheist: he does not claim that there are true contradictions. Like the rest of us, the mysterian eschews them like the plague.  His point is rather that a proposition's non-episodic and chronic seeming to be a contradiction does not suffice for its rejection.  For it may well be that certain truths are inaccesible to us due to our mental limitations and defects, and that among these truths are some that appear to us only in the guise of contradictions, and must so appear.

Of course, Dolezal's  mysterian move cannot be reasonably made unless the extant attempts (by Barry Miller, Eleonore Stump, Brian Davies, et al.)  to reconcile simplicity and freedom are failures.  Since I agree with Dolezal that they are, I grant him this.

5.  So what are some possible questions/reservations?

First, if  a (conjunctive) proposition's seeming, after careful and repeated scrutiny, to be or entail an explicit logical contradiction is not sufficient evidence of its being a contradiction, what would be?  To put it another way, my inability to explain how it could be true both that p and that q does seem to be pretty good evidence that p and q are not both true.  Now  I said above that the actual is possible whether or not I can explain how it's possible.  Granted, but if I cannot explain the how, doubt is cast on the actuality.

How adjudicate between these opposing lines of argument:  A:  Because X is actual, X  is possible, whether or not anyone can explain how it is possible! B:  Because no one can explain how it is possible, it is not possible, and therefore not actual!

Second,  if all extant attempts to reconcile simplicity and freedom fail, it does not follow that there isn't a solution right over the horizon.  How can a mysterian rule out the possibiity of a future solution?  The mysterian seems committed to saying that it is impossible (at least in this life) that there be a solution.  How can he be sure of this?

Third,  if a proposition appears under careful scrutiny to be or entail a contradiction, then is there even a proposition before the mind?  If you require for my salvation that I believe that God is one and God is three, what exactly are you demanding that I believe?  Before I can affirm a proposition as true I must understand it, but how can I affirm as true a proposition that appears necessarily false?  Such a 'proposition' is arguably not a proposition at all.  (This requires development, of course . . . Richard Cartwright's Trinity paper will help you see what I am getting at.))

It's Nonsense, but it's True Nonsense!

Lawrence  Krauss writes:

Classical human reason, defined in terms of common sense notions following from our own myopic experience of reality is not sufficient to discern the workings of the Universe. If time begins at the big bang, then we will have to re-explore what we mean by causality, just as the fact that electrons can be in two places at the same time doing two different things at the same time as long as we are not measuring them is completely nonsensical, but true, and has required rethinking what we mean by particles. Similar arguments by the way imply that we often need to rethink what we actually mean by 'nothing', from empty space, to the absence of space itself.

Perhaps this passage that I just dug up answers or helps to answer the question I posed yesterday:  How can someone so intelligent spout such nonsense as I quoted Krauss as spouting?  Answer: he's a mysterian!  We have discussed mysterianism before in these pages in connection with the theologian James Anderson and in connection with the materialist philosopher of mind Colin McGinn.  With Krauss (and others of course) we find the mysterian move being made in the precincts of physics.  Marvellously manifold are the moves of mysterians!

Yesterday I quoted Krauss as saying, "Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur."  I commented:

This is just nonsense. Whatever the laws of physics are, they are not nothing. So if the laws of physics require that something arise from nothing, then the laws of physics require that something arise without there being laws of physics. [. . .]

So you've got this situation in which nothing at all exists, and then something comes into existence because the physical laws (which don't exist) "require" it.

This implies an explicit logical contradiction: the laws of physics both do and do not exist.  They do  exist because they govern the transition from nothing to something.  They do not exist because they are included in the nothing from which something arises.

Completely nonsensical (in the sense of being logically contradictory) but true nonetheless! 

Now this is either a mysterian position or a dialetheist position.  The dialetheist holds that, in reality, there are some true contradictions.  The mysterian does not hold this; he holds that there are, in reality, no true contradictions, but some propositions no matter how carefully we consider them appear to us as contradictory, or perhaps must appear to us as contradictory given our irremediable cognitive limitations.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions.  Here is one:  One task of science is to render the world intelligible to us (understandable by us).  But if natural science in one of its branches issues in propositions that are unintelligible (either because they are intrinsically contradictory or such that they appear or even must appear as contradictory to us), then how can one call this science?

Forgive me for being naive, but I would have thought that science, genuine science, cannot contain propositions that are nonsensical!  And would it not be more reasonable to take the apparent nonsensicality that crops up in the more far-out branches as a sign that something has gone wrong somewhere? 

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.

The Mysterian Materialist Speaks

There are different sorts of materialism about the mind, among them eliminative materialism, identity-materialism, and functionalism.  There is also mysterian materialism. Here is a little speech by a mysterian materialist:

Look, we are just complex physical systems, and as such wholly understandable in natural-scientific terms, if not now in full, then in the future.  And yet we think and are conscious.  Therefore, we are wholly material beings who think and are conscious.  We  cannot understand how this is possible. But it is actual, hence possible, whether or not we understand or even can understand how it is possible.  It's a mystery, but true nonetheless.

What motivates this mysterian view?  There is first of all the deep conviction shared by many today that there is exactly one world, this physical world, that we are parts of it, that nothing in us is not part of it, and that it and us are wholly understandable in terms of the natural sciences.  This naturalist conviction implies that there is nothing special about us, that we are continuous with the rest of nature.  We are nothing special in that we have no higher origin or destiny.  We are mortal, like everything else that lives, and anything (conscience, consciousness, ability to reason, sensus divinitatis, etc.) that suggests otherwise is susceptible of a wholly naturalistic explanation.  Part of why people embrace the naturalist conviction is that it puts paid to central tenets of old-time religion: God, the soul, post-mortem rewards and punishments, the libertarian freedom of the will, man's being an image and likeness of God, etc.  So hostility to religion is certainly, for some, part of the psychological  (if not logical) motivation for the acceptance of the naturalist conviction.

Now take the naturalist conviction and conjoin it to the intellectually honest admission that we have no idea at all how it is so much as possible for a wholly material being to think and enjoy conscious states.  The conjunction of the Conviction and the Admission generates a mysterian position according to which one affirms as true a proposition that one cannot understand as possibly true, namely, the proposition that we are wholly material beings  susceptible of exhaustive natural-scientific explanation who nonetheless think, feel, love, make and feel subject to moral demands, etc.

This mysterianism is an epistemological position  according to which our very make-up makes it impossible for us ever to understand how it is possible for us to think and be conscious.  The claim is not that thought and consciousness are mysterious because they are non-natural phenomena; the claim is that they are wholly natural but not understandable by us.

Well, this mysterianism is certainly to be preferred to an eliminativism which argues from the unintellibility of a material thing's thinking to  the nonexistence of its thinking.  But eliminativism is a lunatic position best left to the exceedingly intelligent lunatics who dreamt it up.

The mysterian position cannot be so readily dismissed.  But surely there is something very strange about maintaining that there are true mysteries.  If a proposition either is or entails a broadly-logical contradiction, then I wouldn't know what I had before my mind if I had such a proposition before my mind.  And if I didn't know exactly which proposition I had before my mind, I wouldn't know exactly which proposition I was claiming was both true and mysterious.

Before I can take a position with respect to a proposition I must know what the hell that proposition is.

I count four positions or attitudes one can take toward a proposition: accept as true, reject as false, suspend judgment as to truth-value, practice epoché , ἐποχή.  Pithier still: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Withdraw.  The first three are self-explanatory.  By Withdraw I mean: take no position on whether or not there is even a proposition (ein Gedanke, a complete thought) before one's mind.  (The notion is derived via Benson Mates from Sextus Empiricus.)  Withdrawal goes farther than Suspension.  To suspend is to refuse to accept or reject a well-defined proposition while accepting that there is such a proposition before one's mind.  In the state of Withdrawal I take no position on whether or not there is a well-defined proposition before my mind.

Example.  A Trinitarian says, 'There is exactly one God in three divine persons.'  Studying the doctrine I come to the conclusion that I can attach no definite sense to it on the ground that it seems to me to entail one or more logical contradictions.   That is not a case of rejection or of suspension; it is a case of epoché.  I 'bracket' (to borrow a term now from Husserl) two questions: the question as to truth-value, and the more fundamental question as to whether or not there is even a proposition (a unified, coherent, sense-structure) before my mind as opposed to an incoherent, un-unified bunch of word-senses.

Suppose you say to me, "Snow is white and snow is not white."  Being the charitable fellow that I am known to be, I would not churlishly jump to impute to you the assertion of a contradiction.  I would take you to be using a contradictory form of words to express a non-contradictory proposition, perhaps, the proposition that snow is white where I didn't relieve myself, but not white where I did.  Or something like that.  The time-honored method of showing an apparent contradiction to be merely apparent is by making a distinction in respect of time, or respect, or word sense.

But if someone insists that he means literally that snow is white and snow is not white where there is no distinction in respect of time, respect, or sense of the word 'white,' then I wouldn't know what the content of the assertion was.  I wouldn't know which proposition my interlocutor was trying get across to me.  For if my interlocutor was otherwise rational,  the principle of charity would forbid me from imputing a contradiction to him.  I would have to practice withdrawal.

And so it is with the mysterian materialist.  He bids me accept propositions that as far as 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.

No doubt there is an illusion of sense.  There is nothing syntactically wrong with 'Thoughts are brain states' or 'Sensory qualia are physical features of the brain.'  And the individual words have meaning.  What's more, the words taken together seem to convey a coherent thought in the way in which 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination' does not seem to convey a coherent thought.  But when the meaning is made explicit, the unintelligibility becomes manifest.

My thesis is that the mysterian thesis that these unintelligible claims are true but mysterious in that they cannot be understood by us to be so much as possibly true, is itself unintelligible.  For again, what is the identity of the proposition that I am supposed toaccept as both true and mysterious?

Mysterianism is the conjunction of the naturalist conviction  and the intellectually honest admission that no one has any idea of how to account for consciousness in natural-scientific terms.  Given that mysterianism is untenable for the reason I adduced, the reasonable thing to do is to jettison the naturalist conviction which, after all, is merely a conviction, a deep-seated belief that is just happening to to be getting a lot of play these days.

Here is a brief explanation of mysterianism with some references.

MACRUES, Semantic Defeaters, and Epistemic Defeaters (Peter Lupu)

(A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Editing and commentary by BV.) 

As Bill notes, we are attempting to secure and study a copy of James Anderson’s book,  Paradox in Christian Theology.  (Publication details here, including links to reviews.)  Meanwhile, I will propose here some tentative observations that Anderson’s book may or may not have addressed. These observations are inspired by the following point Bill makes in a post above as well as by some conversations we had about the subject:

“…if I cannot see that a proposition is rationally acceptable (because it appears contradictory to me) then I wouldn't know what proposition I was accepting.”

A similar point is made by Richard Cartwright in On the Logical Problem of the Trinity:  "Nor is a mystery supposed to be unintelligible, in the sense that the words in which it is expressed simply cannot be understood. After all, we are asked to believe the propositions expressed by the words, not simply that the words express some true propositions or other, we know not which."

1). Let us agree that a Trinitarian Sentence (TS) is such that

 (i) The Bible entails TS;

(ii) The surface structure (SS) of TS exhibits the logical form of a contradiction;

(iii) We are not in the position currently and may not be in the position in our present form of existence ever to construct a contradiction free formulation or deep structure (DS) for TS;

Example of a TS: "The Father is God, the Son is God, the Father is not the Son, and there is exactly one God."  The surface structure of this sentence is contradictory.

Professor Anderson and the Hyper-Inscrutability of the Trinitarian Doctrine (Peter Lupu)

(This gem is pulled up from the vasty deeps of the ComBox to where it may shine in a more fitting setting.  Minor editing, bolding, and comments in blue by BV.)

1). Let us say that a *real* contradiction is a sentence which comes out false according to every possible model (M): i.e., M = language-plus-domain-plus-interpretation, where an ‘interpretation’ is a complete and systematic assignment of extensions to the non-logical terms of the language (L). We assume that L is a well developed natural language such as English and we have a sufficiently rich domain that includes whatever entities are required to implement an interpretation that will suffice for theological purposes.

1.1) Note: We are assuming throughout classical logic in two sense: (a) the logical constants are interpreted classically; (b) there are no *real* true contradictions.

1.2) Sentence S is a *real* contradiction just in case there is no *normal model* M in which it comes out true. A normal model in this context is one which features an interpretation that assigns extensions to the non-logical terms in the usual way prior to resolving any potential ambiguities. On a realist conception of truth, S [if contradictory] has no truth-maker (T-maker) in any normal model or possible world.

2) Let us now define at least one sense of an *apparent contradiction* in model theoretic terms. Let S be a sentence expressible in L and suppose S comes out false in every normal model M. S appears to be a contradiction. Is it really a contradiction? Prof. Anderson maintains that there are sentences which are contradictory in every normal model, but are non-contradictory in some other models of L. How can that be? [Shouldn't Peter have 'false' for contradictory and 'true' for non-contradictory in the preceding sentence?  After all, in (1) we are told in effect that contradictoriness is falsehood in every model, which implies that noncontradictoriness is truth in some model.  'Contradictory in every model' is a pleonastic expression.]

Materialist Mysterianism

I wonder whether mysterianism in defense of such theological doctrines as the Trinity does not in the end backfire by making possible the philosophical justification of philosophical theses incompatible with it.  To ease our way into this line of inquiry, let us consider materialist mysterianism. 

1.  If mysterianism is an acceptable approach in theology, why can't a materialist make use of it in the philosophy of mind?  The (positive) mysterian maintains that there are true propositions which appear (and presumably must appear given our 'present' cognitive make-up) contradictory.  This is not to be confused with dialetheism, the view that there are some true contradictions.  For the mysterian there are no true contradictions, but there are some truths that must appear to us as contradictory due to our cognitive limitations.