This is the tenth part of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine at those links. The next couple of posts will cover the remainder of chapter 5, which is devoted to several now-traditional philosophical problems. Dr. Feser attributes the existence of these problems to the subscription to the Mechanical philosophy, and claims they do not exist for Aristotelians. By far the longest of these discussions is on the mind-body problem.
Before digging into the details below the fold, I want to comment on a couple of overall themes that start to emerge in the rest of the book here. The first is Dr. Feser's repeated claims that these problems do not surface for Aristotelians. These claims are offered without evidence and do not bear close scrutiny. The second is on the increasing role of eliminative materialism as a foe. In many ways, eliminative materialism plays the role for Dr. Feser that he claims Paley plays for the New Atheists, something to knock around and ridicule, while claiming it is the true version of materialism. I’m not surprised to see a partisan use a tactic he complains about other partisans using, of course.
This section begins with some information on Descartes, who was well-respected for both his natural and mathematical abilities. Dr. Feser seems to think that Descartes is best remembered for his philosophical contribution, although as a mathematician, I would disagree. Every student who progresses to Algebra in high school learns about Cartesian coordinates, certainly many more than will wind up reading Descartes philosophical works. Not that this is necessarily a good thing.
Dr. Feser's position
Key to the understanding of mind-body dualism is notion of an object, for example an apple, having primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities would be those that are objectively measurable, secondary qualities would be our subjective experiences, and might vary from observer to observer. For example, any two people could weigh the apple and get the same weight, but one person might see a red apple and another, color-blind person might see a gray apple. Or, given a bucket of water, two people would measure it to the same temperature, but the same person might experience the water as being warm if they had just had their hand in an ice bucket or cool if they just had their hand in hot dishwater. Weight and temperature are the primary, mechanistic qualities while color and warmth are the secondary, common-sense properties. The part of the person that observes and records these secondary properties is the mind. That we have a mind that controls the body is mind-body dualism.
Since secondary properties are not objective in nature, they can't be reduced to material things, so they can not be present just in the brain/nerves. The mind gets defined as the part that is not measurable or objective, so it can't be reduced to material operations. Capabilities like intentionality (the ability to think about things) show that the reduction of the mind to the material is a "conceptual impossibility". This is because such capabilities show a sense of final causality, but the brain itself can have none, under the Mechanical philosophy.
Meanwhile, those who subscribe to mechanism find themselves without a coherent conception of matter. Secularism has no positive content to offer, it is purely a rejection of religion. Mechanism offers nothing but the denial of formal and final causes. Since the mind requires formal and final causes to exist, materialism's attempts to explain the mind are really attempts to eliminate it. This makes eliminative materialism (the position that there is no mind) the only "honest" form of materialism.
Thus, if you adopt a mechanical conception of the world, as Descartes did, the mind becomes a separate entity removed from the brain, present in a separable soul, sometimes derisively referred to as the ghost in the machine. This soul would nonetheless have to generate mechanical effects, and take information from mechanical sources, thus violating the conservation of energy. Dr. Feser disapproves of the notion of the soul violating the laws of physics. However, since under the Aristotelian view, the soul is the form of the body, all of these issues are removed. The soul is no longer separate from the body.
My response
Firstly, I disagree with this definition of the mind. It is an entirely negative definition, defining the mind by what it is not. You might refer to this as a mind-of-the-gaps. This allows Dr. Feser to rig the game; any phenomenon that does get explained objectively is no longer a part of the mind. We now have physical explanations for both color-blindness and why the perception of warmth depends upon prior experiences. If we had a consistent, unchanging definition of the mind that included things like color-blindness and warmth, we could say we have explained a small part of the mind by explaining why these things happen. With Dr. Feser's mind-of-the-gaps, the domain of the mind shrinks instead. This is what allows him to say eliminative materialism is the only honest version: his mind-of-the-gaps would indeed be eliminated if we could explain all human thoughts in material terms. That doesn't mean that what we normally consider the mind would be eliminated, though.
I find it believable that we have no coherent conception of matter, that it is treated like a brute fact. You have to have a few starting points, and 'matter exists, and behaves in the following ways' seems as good as any of them to me. I also agree that atheism/secularism, per se, has nothing to offer past a rejection of religion. Pretty much the only thing atheists have in common is no religion. It's almost like not having a religion is the definition of atheism, or something.
Finally, while I agree that Descartes dualism violates the conservation of energy, I don't find that a particularly important point and certainly not one Dr. Feser should be pointing a finger at. First, laws of physics are only true until they are not. If the law is violated, you make an exception or re-write the law, which is how science works. Second, Dr. Feser's First Cause is an immaterial being that imports energy into the cosmos every single second in order to sustain formal and final causes. His position regarding the conservation of energy is worse than Descartes, if anything. Further, the Aristotelian position concerning the effect of the mind on the body requires that the immaterial form (the mind) merge with the immaterial universal (of a triangle. for example) to create physical effects (a teacher drawing a triangle). Thus, Dr. Feser's mind-body interactions offer exactly the same ghost-in-the-machine and non-conservation-of-energy problems as Descartes conception. His position offers no improvement on this at all.
Unfortunately, we will be seeing more of Dr. Feser's playing fast-and-loose with definitions, his claims to offer improvements where there are none, his attempts to force diverse theoretical concepts into a single point of view, and his equivocations in the rest of the series. That seems to be all the book has left to offer.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
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5 comments:
I'm not sure this response gets to the heart of Feser's point. It is important to remember that Aristotle never denies the brain (or whatever physical organ he would pinpoint) to be a necessary contributor to sensory-consciousness. The question is whether material explanations are sufficient. In the color blind example, certainly we can show that one person's neurological processes are working differently than another's, or whatever. The question however is, why does anyone see any color at all? Why does anyone SEE at all? The actual experience of warmth, color, etc. seems clearly to be something different than the colorless, etc. movements of matter and neuronal processes, even if the latter clearly seem to play a role in the process. Indeed, "mind-of-the-gaps" characterization is misled, it seems, precisely because the mind as the Aristotelian views it is not merely filling in a missing link in the chain of efficient causality--it is posited, if you will, to explain an aspect of conscious experience that differs in QUALITY from nonconscious material processes. It is a "gaps" explanation in that it is posited to explain something, BUT the "gap" it fills, it seems, could in principle never be explained by material processes alone. It's not like seeing a billiard ball move and then positing "God moved it" until we identify the prior ball. It doesn't fill in a gap within a particular "plane" of explanation--rather, it tries to reveal that conscious experience differs IN KIND from what are otherwise taken to be fundamentally unconscious material processes.
On the other hand, Feser does acknowledge in his book on mind that one could have a naturalism of sorts to account for consciousness, but it is one that would have to regard consciousness as a fundamental aspect of nature/reality, much as in parallelistic metaphysics such as Spinoza's. Mind is not the result of "unmindful" material processes, nor even vice versa. Reality has both a mental and material manifestation, or pole, or whatever, if you will, not as separate "substantial" realities, but as basic distinct features of a single reality which can be characterized neither singly as "material" or "mental." I personally consider this alternative much more formidable to Aristotelianism than strictly materialist accounts, though I am not convinced it is any more coherent or complete than the Aristotelian account. Discerning the basis for adjudicating between these two accounts seem to be a great challenge indeed.
Anonymous,
Thank you for your well-written comments.
It seems to me that your comments hinge on the notion that qualia, intentionality, etc. are phenomena that entail aspects that are so different from the "mechanical" aspects of the brain that the latter can never be used to explain the former. This may well be true, I have no proof to offer aginst it. On the other hand, I see no proof in favor of it.
As for whether a naturalistic version of the mind involves a different fundamental aspect of reality, I actualy could see a version that tolls the two together as differing expressions of the same reality. To provide a crude example, I would look at two CDs. One holds music, the other a software program. The basic physical charateristics of the discs are identical. they have the same weight, the same composition, quite possibly even the same number of 1s and 0s stored. Are the difference between these discs in the material or the mental pole?
Further, do the programs that run on the discs exhibit something of the same kind as qualia, on a much more primitive level? Does anyone think music is really of the same quality of existence that a string of 1s and 0s represents?
You can't get round that by saying the CD player adds something, because an MP3 player has the same storage format (1s and 0s), and does need an external interpreter.
Again, a crude analogy. However, if our brains contain the equivalent of the strings of 1s and 0s, and the equivalent of an interpreter, maybe that's all they need to produce the metaphorical music (i.e., qualia, intentionality, etc.). Really, until you can show why such a thing is impossible, you truly are relying on a "mind-of-the-gaps" argument.
I don't think Feser thinks that the "...First Cause is an immaterial being that imports energy into the cosmos every single second in order to sustain formal and final causes."
That is, I don't think Feser thinks that God is importing energy. I think he thinks that God is importing continuation of existence and ongoing validity of formal and final causation and logical consistency and stuff like that.
I don't think Feser thinks that, if God stopped doing this, the universe would go on as it was for a moment and then gradually encounter an energy deficit and start to go cold and dark.
I think that Feser thinks that, if God stopped importing existence, the universe would immediately undergo a total and catastrophic failure to exist.
And if He continued importing existence but stopped importing the validity of, say, final causation, then the universe would exist, but every physical process from the quantum level up would suddenly cease to have any predictable outcome: Adding a neutron to a hydrogen atom would either do nothing, or cause it to turn into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias. Or, if He withdrew creation's share in His intrinsic logical consistency, then in all of creation, A would suddenly be both B and Not-B at the same time and in the same way.
Or something like that.
So, I don't see that, in Feser's view, God's relationship with creation has any relevance to conservation of energy.
One other observation. You say, "Further, the Aristotelian position concerning the effect of the mind on the body requires that the immaterial form (the mind) merge with the immaterial universal (of a triangle, for example) to create physical effects (a teacher drawing a triangle). Thus, Dr. Feser's mind-body interactions offer exactly the same ghost-in-the-machine and non-conservation-of-energy problems as Descartes conception. His position offers no improvement on this at all."
But your talk of merging the immaterial form which is the rational soul with the the body is exactly what A-T says isn't needed because it's already there, unless the body is a dead corpse, in which case there won't be much thinking about triangles going on. And the form of the triangle, if present in the imagination or the memory, is present in one of the powers of the intellect which A-T explicitly states is dependent upon the matter of the brain. So in that case one would expect to see the relevant neurons firing and of course the relevant energy would not be imported from another dimension, but would come from last night's steak dinner.
R.C.,
I think that Feser thinks that, if God stopped importing existence, the universe would immediately undergo a total and catastrophic failure to exist.
In other words, all the mass-energy would disappear. There would be a complete lack of existence of energy, which lack is only compensated by the energy God pumps in.
And the form of the triangle, if present in the imagination or the memory, is present in one of the powers of the intellect which A-T explicitly states is dependent upon the matter of the brain. So in that case one would expect to see the relevant neurons firing and of course the relevant energy would not be imported from another dimension, but would come from last night's steak dinner.
Again, if the body were responsible for memory and imagination, then they end when the body dies.
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