This was first posted Nov. 10, 2011. I archive this for the record. But I am sure my thoughts about time have progressed considerably since this was written.
Godel's theorem and a time travel paradox
In How to Build a Time Machine (Viking 2001), the physicist Paul Davies gives the 'most baffling of all time paradoxes.' Writes Davies:
'A professor builds a time machine in 2005 and decides to go forward ... to 2010. When he arrives, he seeks out the university library and browses through the current journals. In the mathematics section he notices a splendid new theorem and jots down the details. Then he returns to 2005, summons a clever student, and outlines the theorem. The student goes away, tidies up the argument, writes a paper, and publishes it in a mathematics journal. It was, of course, in this very journal that the professor read the paper in 2010.'
Davies finds that, from a physics standpoint, such a 'self-consistent causal loop' is possible, but, 'where exactly did the theorem come from?... it's as if the information about the theorem just came out of thin air.'
Davies says many worlds proponent David Deutsch, author of The Fabric of Reality and a time travel 'expert,' finds this paradox exceptionally disturbing, since information appears from nowhere, in apparent violation of the principle of entropy.
This paradox seems well suited to Godel's main incompleteness theorem, which says that a sufficiently rich formal system if consistent, must be incomplete.
Suppose we assume that there is a formal system T -- a theory of physics -- in which a sentence S can be constructed describing the mentioned time travel paradox.
If S strikes us as paradoxical, then we may regard S as the Godel sentence of T. Assuming that T is a consistent theory, we would then require that some extension of T be constructed. An extension might, for example, say that the theorem's origin is relative to the observer and include a censorship, as occurs in other light-related phenomena. That is, the professor might be required to forget where he got the ideas to feed his student.
But, even if S is made consistent, there must then be some other sentence S', which is not derivable from T'.
Of course, if T incorporates the many worlds view, S would likely be consistent and derivable from T. However, assuming T is a sufficiently vigorous mathematical formalism, there must still be some other sentence V that may be viewed as paradoxical (inconsistent) if T is viewed as airtight.
How old is a black hole?
Certainly less than the age of the cosmos, you say.
The black hole relativistic time problem illustrates that the age of the cosmos is determined by the yardstick used.
Suppose we posit a pulsar pulsing at the rate T, and distance D from the event horizon of a black hole. Our clock is timed to strike at T/2, so that pulse A has occurred at T=0. We now move the pulsar closer to the event horizon, again with our clock striking at what we'll call T'/2. Now because of the gravitational effect on observed time, the time between pulses is longer. That is T' > T, and hence T'=0 is farther in the past than T=0.
Of course, as we push the pulsar closer to the event horizon, the relative time TN, becomes asymptotic to infinity (eternity). So, supposing the universe was born 15 billion years ago in the big bang, we can push our pulsar's pulse A back in time beyond 15 billion years ago by pushing the pulsar closer to the event horizon.
No matter how old we make the universe, we may always obtain a pulse A that is older than the cosmos.
Yes, you say, but a real pulsar would be ripped to shreds and such a happening is not observable. Nevetherless, the general theory of relativity requires that we grant that time calculations can yield such contradictions.
Anthropic issues
A sense of awe often accompanies the observation: 'The conditions for human (or any) life are vastly improbable in the cosmic scheme of things.'
This leads some to assert that the many worlds scenario answers that striking improbability, since in most other universes, life never arose and never will.
I point out that the capacity for the human mind to examine the cosmos is perhaps 2.5 x 104 years old, against a cosmic time scale of 1.5 x 109. In other words, we have a ratio of 2.5(104)/1.5(109) = 1.6/105.
In other words, humanity is an almost invisible drop in the vast sea of cosmic events.
Yet here we are! Isn't that amazing?! It seems as though the cosmos conspired to make our little culture just for us, so we could contemplate its vast mysteries.
However, there is the problem of the constants of nature. Even slight differences in these constants would, it seems, lead to universes where complexity just doesn't happen. Suppose that these constants depend on initial cosmic conditions which have a built-in random variability. In that case, the existence of a universe with just the right constants for life (in particular, humanity) to evolve is nothing short of miraculously improbable. Some hope a grand unified theory will resolve the issue. Others suggest that there is a host of bubble universes, most of which are not conducive to complexity, and hence the issue of improbability is removed (after all, we wouldn't be in one of the barren cosmoses). For more on this issue, see the physicist-writers John Barrow, Frank Tipler and Paul Davies.
At any rate, it doesn't seem likely that this drop will last long, in terms of cosmic scales, and the same holds for other such tiny drops elsewhere in the cosmos.
Even granting faster-than-light 'tachyon radio,' the probability is very low that an alien civilization exists within communications range of our ephemeral race. That is, the chance of two such drops existing 'simultaneously' is rather low, despite the fond hopes of the SETI crowd.
On the other hand, Tipler favors the idea that once intelligent life has evolved, it will find the means to continue on forever.
Anyway, anthropomorphism does seem to enter into the picture when we consider quantum phenomena: a person's physical reality is influenced by his or her choices.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Einstein, Sommerfeld and the Twin Paradox
A version of this article appeared Monday, October 28, 2013. The essay originally
appeared on Angelfire ca. 2005.
This paper was updated Dec. 10, 2009, Oct. 28, 2013. A minor addition citing
Henry Stapp was made Feb. 21, 2019.
Please use the control f function for easy access to points on this paper.
Please notify me of errors at Krypto46 attt Protonmail dottt commm
The paradox
Einstein's groundbreaking 1905 relativity paper, "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies," contained a fundamental inconsistency which was not addressed until 10 years later, with the publication of his paper on gravitation.
Many have written on this inconsistency, known as the "twin paradox" or the "clock paradox" and more than a few have not understood that the "paradox" does not refer to the strangeness of time dilation but to a logical inconsistency in what is now known as the special (for "special case") theory of relativity.
Among those missing the point: Max Born in his book on special relativity (1), George Gamow in an essay and Roger Penrose in Road to Reality (2), and, most recently, Leonard Susskind in The Black Hole War (3).
Among those who have correctly understood the paradox are topologist Jeff Weeks (zz2) and science writer Stan Gibilisco (4), who noted that the general theory of relativity resolves the problem. Isaac Asimov showed a good grasp of the paradox (3a), which he resolved by appeal to actual acceleration, while off-handedly exonerating Einstein of an oversight. (Not all of Asimov's arguments regarding the paradox are, however, persuasive.)
Dave Goldberg, a Drexel physics professor, correctly interprets the paradox in his book The Universe in the Rearview Mirror (zz1) and addresses a number of points raised in a previous version of this essay, coincidentally including correction of some (non-crucial) claims that I seem to have got wrong (and which I may or may not have excised).
As far back as the 1960s, the British physicist Herbert Dingle (5) called the inconsistency a "regrettable error" and was deluged with "disproofs" of his assertion from the physics community. Yet every "disproof" of the paradox that I have seen uses acceleration, an issue not addressed by Einstein until the general theory of relativity. It was Einstein who set himself up for the paradox by favoring the idea that only purely relative motions are meaningful, writing that various examples "suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest." [Electrodynamics translated by Perett and Jeffery and appearing in a Dover (1952) reprint.] In that paper, he also takes pains to note that the term "stationary system" is a verbal convenience only (7).
[It should be noted that Dingle's 1949 attempt at relativistic physics left Einstein bemused (6).]
But later in Elect., Einstein offered the scenario of two initially synchronized clocks at rest with respect to each other. One clock then travels around a closed loop, and its time is dilated with respect to the at-rest clock when they meet again. In Einstein's words: "If we assume that the result proved for a polygonal line is also valid for a continuously curved line, we arrive at this result: If one of two synchronous clocks at A is moved in a journey lasting t seconds, then by the clock which has remained at rest the traveled clock on its arrival at A will be 1/2tv2/c2 slow."
Clearly, if there is no preferred frame of reference, a contradiction arises: when the clocks meet again, which clock has recorded fewer ticks?
Both in the closed loop scenario and in the polygon-path scenario, Einstein avoids the issue of acceleration. Hence, he does not explain that there is a property of "real" acceleration that is not symmetrical or purely relative and that that consequently a preferred frame of reference is implied, at least locally.
The paradox stems from the fact that one cannot say which velocity is higher without a "background" reference frame. In Newtonian terms, the same issue arises: if one body is accelerating away from the other, how do we know which body experiences the "real" force? No answer is possible without more information, implying a background frame.
In comments published in 1910, the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, a proponent of relativity theory, "covers" for the new paradigm by noting that Einstein didn't really mean that time dilation was associated with purely relative motion, but rather with accelerated motion; and that hence relativity was in that case not contradictory. Sommerfeld wrote: "On this [a time integral and inequality] depends the retardation of the moving clock compared with the clock at rest. The assertion is based, as Einstein has pointed out, on the unprovable assumption that the clock in motion actually indicates its own proper time; i.e. that it always gives the time corresponding to the state of velocity, regarded as constant, at any instant. The moving clock must naturally have been moved with acceleration (with changes of speed or direction) in order to be compared with the stationary clock at world-point P. The retardation of the moving clock does not therefore actually indicate 'motion,' but 'accelerated motion.' Hence this does not contradict the principle of relativity." [Notes appended to Space and Time, a 1908 address by Herman Minkowski, Dover 1952, Note 4.]
However, Einstein's 1905 paper does not tackle the issue of acceleration and more to the point, does not explain why purely relative acceleration would be insufficient to meet the facts. The principle of relativity applies only to "uniform translatory motion" (Elect. 1905).
Neither does Sommerfeld's note address the issue of purely relative acceleration versus "true" acceleration, perhaps implicitly accepting Newton's view (below). And, a review of various papers by Einstein seems to indicate that he did not deal with this inconsistency head-on, though in a lecture-hall discussion ca. 1912, Einstein said that the [special] theory of relativity is silent on how a clock behaves if forced to change direction but argues that if a polygonal path is large enough, accelerative effects diminish and (linear) time dilation still holds.
On the other hand, of course, he was not oblivious to the issue of acceleration. In 1910, he wrote that the principle of relativity meant that the laws of physics are independent of the state of motion, but that the motion is non-accelerated. "We assume that the motion of acceleration has an objective meaning," he said. [The Principle of Relativity and its Consequences in Modern Physics, a 1910 paper reproduced in Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Hebrew University, Princeton University Press.]
In that same paper Einstein emphasizes that the principle of relativity does not cover acceleration. "The laws governing natural phenomena are independent of the state of motion of the coordinate system to which the phenomena are observed, provided this system is not in accelerated motion." Clearly, however, he is somewhat ambiguous about small accelerations and radial acceleration, as we see from the lecture-hall remark and from a remark in Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity (1915) about a "familiar result" of special relativity whereby a clock on a rotating disk's rim ticks slower than a clock at the origin.
General relativity's partial solution
Finally, in his 1915 paper on general relativity, Einstein addressed the issue of acceleration, citing what he called "the principle of equivalence." That principle (actually, introduced prior to 1915) said that there was no real difference between kinematic acceleration and gravitational acceleration. Scientifically, they should be treated as if they are the same.
So then, Einstein notes in Foundation, if we have system K and another system K' accelerating with respect to K, clearly, from a "Galilean" perspective, we could say that K was accelerating with respect to K'. But, is this really so?
Einstein argues that if K is at rest relative to K', which is accelerated, the observer on K cannot claim that he is being accelerated -- even though, in purely relative terms, such a claim is valid. The reason for this rejection of Galilean relativity: We may equally well interpret K' to be kinematically unaccelerated though the "space-time territory in question is under the sway of a gravitational field, which generates the accelerated motion of the bodies" in the K' system. This claim is based on the principle of equivalence which might be considered a modification of his previously posited principle of relativity. By the relativity principle, Einstein meant that the laws of physics can be cast in invariant form so that they apply equivalently in any unformly moving frame of reference. (For example, |vb - va| is the invariant quantity that describes an equivalence class of linear velocities.)
By the phrase "equivalence," Einstein is relating impulsive acceleration (for example, a projectile's x vector) to its gravitational acceleration (its y vector). Of course, Newton's mechanics already said that the equation F = mg is a special case of F = ma but Einstein meant something more: that local spacetime curvature is specific for "real" accelerations -- whether impulsive or gravitational.
Einstein's "equivalence" insight was his recognition that one could express acceleration, whether gravitational or impulsive, as a curvature in the spacetime continuum (a concept introduced by Minkowski). This means, he said, that the Newtonian superposition of separate vectors was not valid and was to be replaced by a unitary curvature. (Though the calculus of spacetime requires specific tools, the concept isn't so hard to grasp. Think of a Mercator map: the projection of a sphere onto a plane. Analogously, general relativity projects a 4-dimensional spacetime onto a Euclidean three-dimensional space.)
However, is this "world-line" answer the end of the problem of the asymmetry of accelerated motion?
The Einstein of 1915 implies that if two objects have two different velocities, we must regard one as having an absolutely higher velocity than the other because one object has been "really" accelerated.
Yet one might conjecture that if two objects move with different velocities wherein neither has a prior acceleration, then the spacetime curvature would be identical for each object and the objects' clocks would not get out of step. But such a conjecture would violate the limiting case of special relativity (and hence general relativity); specifically, such a conjecture would be inconsistent with the constancy of the vacuum velocity of light in any reference frame.
So then, general relativity requires that velocity differences are, in a sense, absolute. Yet in his original static and eternal cosmic model of 1917, there was no reason to assume that two velocities of two objects necessarily implied the acceleration of one object. Einstein introduced the model, with the cosmological constant appended in order to contend with the fact that his 1915 formulation of GR apparently failed to account for the observed mass distribution of the cosmos. Despite the popularity of the Big Bang model, a number of cosmic models hold the option that some velocity differences needn't imply an acceleration, strictly relative or "real."
Einstein's appeal to spacetime curvature to address the frame of reference issue is similar to Newton's assertion that an accelerated body requires either an impulse imputed to it or the gravitational force. There is an inherent local physical asymmetry. Purely relative motion will not do.
Frank Close points out that in the quantum arena, unlike in SR, superconductivity shows that there is an absolute state of rest, That is, he writes, the superconductor is at rest relative to the electron but not the converse (9).
Einstein also brings up the problem of absolute relative motion in the sense of Newton's bucket. Einstein uses two fluid bodies in space, one spherical, S1 and another an ellipsoid of revolution, S2. From the perspective of "Galilean relativity," one can as easily say that either body is at rest with respect to the other. But, the radial acceleration of S2 results in a noticeable difference: an equatorial bulge. Hence, says Einstein, it follows that the difference in motion must have a cause outside the system of the two bodies.
Of course Newton in Principia Mathematica first raised this point, noting that the surface of water in a rapidly spinning bucket becomes concave. This, he said, demonstrated that force must be impressed on a body in order for there to be a change in acceleration. Newton also mentioned the issue of the fixed stars as possibly of use for a background reference frame, though he does not seem to have insisted on that point. He did however find that absolute space would serve as a background reference frame.
It is noteworthy that Einstein's limit c can be used as an alternative to the equatorial bulge argument. If we suppose that a particular star is sufficiently distant, then the x component of its radial velocity (which is uniform and linear) will exceed the velocity of light. Such a circumstance being forbidden, we are forced to conclude that the earth is spinning, rather than the star revolving around the earth. We see that, in this sense, the limit c can be used to imply a specific frame of reference. At this point, however, I cannot say that such a circumstance suffices to resolve the clock paradox of special relativity.
Interestingly, the problem of Newton's bucket is quite similar to the clock paradox of special relativity. In both scenarios, we note that if two motions are strictly relative, what accounts for a property associated with one motion and not the other? In both cases, we are urged to focus on the "real" acceleration.
Newton's need for a background frame to cope with "real" acceleration predates the 19th century refinement of the concept of energy as an ineffable, essentially abstract "substance" which passes from one event to the next. That concept was implicit in Newton's Principia but not explicit and hence Newton did not appeal to the "energy" of the object in motion to deal with the problem. That is, we can say that we can distinguish between two systems by examining their parts. A system accelerated to a non-relativistic speed nevertheless discloses its motion by the fact that the parts change speed at different times as a set of "energy transactions" occur. For example, when you step on the accelerator, the car seat moves forward before you do; you catch up to the car "because" the car set imparts "kinetic energy" to you.
But if you are too far away to distinguish individual parts or a change in the object's shape, such as from equatorial bulge, your only hope for determining "true" acceleration is by knowing which object received energy prior to the two showing a relative change in velocity. Has the clock paradox gone away?
The general theory undermined two claims of the 1905 special theory, according to Henry Stapp[x1], a quantum physicist. One was the Machian and "logical positivist" claim that only verifiable (testable) assertions should be accepted in physics. The other was the absence in nature of a preferred sequence of nows. "Furthermore, the universe we are living in has a global preferred reference frame, which defines instantaneous "nows" empirically. This frame has recently [1990s] been empirically specified to within several parts per million."
In other words, the original concept of "relative" has been somewhat modified. Velocities cannot be strictly relative to one another because, on the basis of a non-eternal Big Bang theory, each velocity must have received an infusion of energy ("true" acceleration) that brought it to its present level. Yet, the constancy of the velocity of light means that motions are still relative with respect to an observer.
Relativity of simultaneity
(Adapted from Wikipedia 02.21.2019.)
A popular picture for understanding the relativity of simultaneity is provided by a thought experiment similar to those suggested by Daniel Frost Comstock in 1910 and Einstein in 1917.
Consider one observer midway inside a speeding train car and another observer standing on a platform as the train moves past.
A flash of light goes off at the center of the car just as the two observers pass each other. For the observer on board the train, the front and back of the car are at fixed distances from the light source and as such, according to this observer, the light will reach the front and back of the car at the same time.
But, for the observer standing on the platform, the rear of the car is moving (catching up) toward the point at which the flash shone, and the front of the car is moving away from it. As the speed of light is finite and the same in all directions for all observers, the light headed for the back of the train will have less distance to cover than the light headed for the front. Thus, the flashes of light will strike the ends of the car at different times for that observer.
Curiously, it can happen that an observer cannot determine which spacetime event (as in two flashes of light) occurred first. Einstein and other relativists found no threat to strict causality in this fact, however. They assumed that it was always the case that an observer in the correct position could determine which event was first, thus preserving a necessary aspect of causality. Later Einstein could not accept the limitations on causality imposed by quantum mechanics. Yet, his own relativity theory at least posed a question as to the supposed universality of physical causality. In addition, his groundbreaking paper on the photo-electric effect extended the quantum hypothesis so as to make light corpuscles a plausible idea, an idea which in turn already undercut assumptions of reality and causality of classical physics.
In addition, Goedel's discovery of solutions to GR's equation that yielded closed time loops (a rocket could notionally fly into its own past) was dismissed by Einstein as not corresponding to physical reality. Yet Goedel argued that such a solution implied the non-reality of time -- a conclusion that obliterates standard mechanical causality.
Does GR resolve the clock paradox?
In any case, we now come to the question as to whether GR resolves the clock paradox.
GR resolves the paradox non-globally, in that Einstein now holds that some accelerations are not strictly relative, but functions of a set of curvatures. Hence one can posit the loop scenario given in Electrodynamics and say that only one body can have a higher absolute angular velocity with respect to the other because only one must have experienced an acceleration that distorts spacetime differently from the other.
To be consistent, GR must reflect this asymmetry. That is, suppose we have two spaceships separating along a straight line whereby the distance between them increases as a constant velocity. If ship A's TV monitor says B's clock is ticking slower than A's and ship B's TV monitor says A's clock is ticking slower than B's, there must be an objective difference, nevertheless.
The above scenario is incomplete because the "real" acceleration prior to the opening of the scene is not given. Yet, GR does not tell us why a "real" acceleration must have occurred if two bodies are moving at different velocities.
So yes, GR partly resolves the clock paradox and, by viewing the 1905 equations for uniform motion as a special case of the 1915 equations, retroactively removes the paradox from SR, although it appears that Einstein avoided pointing this out in 1915 or thereafter.
However, GR does not specify a global topology (cosmic model) of spacetime, though Einstein struggled with this issue. The various solutions to GR's field equations showed that no specific cosmic model followed from GR. The clock paradox shows up in the Weeks model of the cosmos, with local space being Euclidean (or rather Minkowskian). As far as this writer knows, such closed space geodesics cannot be ruled out on GR grounds alone.
Jeff Weeks, in his book The Shape of Space (zz3), points out that though physicists commonly think of three cosmic models as suitable for GR, in fact there are three classes of 3-manifolds that are both homogenous and isotropic (cosmic information is evenly mixed and looks about the same in any direction). Whether spacetime is mathematically elliptic, hyperbolic or euclidean, there are many possible global topologies for the cosmos, Weeks says.
One model, described by Weeks in the article linked above, permits a traveler to continue straight in a closed universe until she arrives at the point of origin. Again, to avoid contradiction, we are required to accept a priori that an acceleration that alters a world line has occurred.
Other models have the cosmic time axis following hyperbolic or elliptical geometry. Originally, one suspects, Einstein may have been skeptical of such an axis, in that Einstein's abolishment of simultaneity effectively abolished the Newtonian fiction of absolute time. But physicist Paul Davies, in his book About Time, argued that there is a Big Bang oriented cosmic time that can be approximated quite closely.
Kurt Goedel's rotating universe model left room for closed time loops, such that an astronaut who continued on a protracted space flight could fly into his past. This result prompted Godel to question the reality of time in general relativity. Having investigated various solutions of GR equations, Goedel argued that a median of proper times of moving objects, which James Jeans had thought to serve as a cosmic absolute time, was not guaranteed in all models and hence should be questioned in general.
Certainly we can agree that Goedel's result shows that relativity is incomplete in its analysis of time.
Mach's principles
Einstein was influenced by the philosophical writings of the German physicist Ernst Mach, whom he cites in Foundations.
According to Einstein (1915) Mach's "epistomological principle" says that observable facts must ultimately appear as causes and effects. Mach believed that the brain organizes sensory data into knowledge and that hence data of scientific value should stem from observable, measurable phenomena. This philosophical viewpoint was evident in 1905 when Einstein ruthlessly ejected the Maxwell-Lorentzian ether from physics.
Mach's "epistomological principle" led Mach to reject Newtonian absolute time and absolute space as unverifiable and made Einstein realize that the Newtonian edifice wasn't sacrosanct. However, in 1905 Einstein hadn't replaced the edifice with something called a "spacetime continuum." Curiously, later in his career Einstein impishly but honestly identified this entity as "the ether."
By rejecting absolute space and time, Mach also rejected the usual way of identifying acceleration in what is known as Mach's principle: Version A. Inertia of a ponderable object results from a relationship of that object with all other objects in the universe.
Version B. The earth's equatorial bulge is not a result of absolute rotation (radial acceleration) but is relative to the distant giant mass of the universe.
For a few years after publication of Foundations, Einstein favored Mach's principle, even using it as a basis of his "cosmological constant" paper, which was his first attempt to fit GR to a cosmic model, but was eventually convinced by the astronomer Wilem de Sitter (zz4) to abandon the principle. In 1932 Einstein adopted the Einstein-de Sitter model that posits a cosmos with a global curvature that asymptotically zeroes out over eternity. The model also can be construed to imply a Big Bang, with its ordered set of accelerations.
A bit of fine-tuning
We can fine-tune the paradox by considering the velocity of the center of mass of the twin system. That velocity is m1v/m1 + m2. So the CM velocity is larger when the moving mass is the lesser and the converse. Letting x be a real greater than 1 we have two masses xm and m. The algebra reveals there is a factor (x/x+1) > 1/(x+1). The CM velocity for earth moving at 0.6c with respect to a 77kg astronaut is very close to 0.6c. For the converse, however, that velocity is about 2.3 meters per femto-second.
If we like, we can use the equation
E = mc2(1-v2/c2)1/2
to obtain the energies of each twin system.
If the earth is in motion and the astronaut at rest, my calculator won't handle the quantity for the energy. If the astronaut is in motion with the earth at rest, then E = 5.38*1041J.
But the paradox is restored as soon as we set m1 equal to m2.
Notes on the principle of equivalence
Now an aside on the principle of equivalence. Can it be said that gravitational acceleration is equivalent to kinematic acceleration? Gravitational accelerations are all associated with the gravitational constant G and of the form g = Gm/r2. Yet it is easy to write expressions for accelerations that cannot be members of the gravitational set. If a is not constant, we fulfill the criterion. If in rx, x =/= 2, there will be an infinity of accelerations that aren't members of the gravitational set.
At any rate, Einstein's principle of equivalence made a logical connection between a ponderable object's inertial mass and its gravitational mass. Newton had not shown a reason that they should be exactly equal, an assumption validated by acute experiments. (A minor technicality: Einstein and others have wondered why these masses should be exactly equal, but, properly they meant why should they be exactly proportional? Equality is guaranteed by Newton's choice of a gravitational constant. But certainly, min = kmgr, with k equaling one because of Newton's choice.)
Also, GR's field equations rest on the premise (Foundation) that for an infinitesimal region of spacetime, the Minkowskian coordinates of special relativity hold. However, this 1915 assumption is open to challenge on the basis of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (ca. 1925), which sets a finite limit on the precision of a measurement of a particle's space coordinate given its time coordinate.
Einstein's Kaluza-Klein excursion
In Subtle is the Lord Abraham Pais tells of a period in which Einstein took Klein's idea for a five-dimensional spacetime and reworked it. After a great deal of effort, Einstein offered a paper which took Klein's ideas presented as his own, on the basis that he had found a way to rationalize obtaining the five-dimensional effect while sticking to the conventional perceptual view of space and time denoted 3D+T (making one wonder what he thought of his own four-dimensional spacetime scheme).
A perplexed Pais notes that a colleague dismissed Einstein's work as unoriginal, and Einstein then quickly dropped it (7). But reformulation of the ideas of others is exactly what Einstein did in 1905 with the special theory. He presented the mathematical and physical ideas of Lorenz, Fitzgerald and Poincare, whom he very likely read, and refashioned them in a manner that he thought coherent, most famously by rejecting the notion of ether as unnecessary.
Yet it took decades for Einstein to publicly acknowledge the contribution of Poincare, and even then, he let the priority matter remain fuzzy. Poincare's work was published in French in 1904, but went unnoticed by the powerful German-speaking scientific community. As a French-speaking resident of Switzerland, it seems rather plausible that the young patent attorney read Poincare's paper.
But, as Pais pointed out, it was Einstein's interpretation that made him the genius of relativity. And yet, that interpretation was either flawed, or incomplete, as we know from the twin paradox.
Apologies for footnotes being out of order. Use the control f function. Any repetitions or other oddities below may be a result of a Blogger malfunction, which I have been unable to correct.
1. Einstein's Theory of Relativity by Max Born (Dover 1962).
2. Road to Reality by Roger Penrose (Random House 2006).
3. The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind (Little Brown 2009).
3a. Understanding Physics (Dorset Press 1988 reprint of three 1966 volumes) by Isaac Asimov. See Vol. 2.
4. Understanding Einstein's Theories of Relativity by Stan Gibilisco (Dover reprint of the 1983 edition).
7. In his biography of Einstein, 'Subtle is the Lord':The science and the life of Albert Einstein (Oxford 1983), physicist Abraham Pais mentions the "clock paradox" in the 1905 Electrodynamics paper but then summarily has Einstein resolve the contradiction in a paper presented to the Prussian Academy of Physics after the correct GR paper of 1915, with Einstein arguing that acceleration ends the paradox, which Pais calls a "misnomer." I don't recall the Prussian Academy paper, but it should be said that Einstein strongly implied the solution to the contradiction in his 1915 GR paper. Later in his book, Pais asserts that sometime after the GR paper, Einstein dispatched a paper on what Pais now calls the "twins paradox" but Pais uncharacteristically gives no citation.
5. Though Dingle seems to have done some astronomical work, he was not -- as a previous draft of this page said -- an astronomer, according to Harry H. Ricker III. Dingle was a professor of physics and natural philosophy at Imperial College before becoming a professor of history and the philosophy of science at City College, London, Ricker said. "Most properly he should be called a physicist and natural philosopher since his objections to relativity arose from his views and interpretations regarding the philosophy of science."
6. Dingle's paper "Scientific and Philosophical Implications of the Special Theory of Relativity" appeared in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (Library of Living Philosophers 1949). Dingle used this forum to propound a novel extension of special relativity that contained serious logical flaws. Einstein, in a note of response, said Dingle's paper made no sense to him.
8. See for example Max Von Laue's paper in the Schilpp volume.
9. The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum field theory and the hunt for an orderly universe by Frank Close (Basic Books 2011).
zz1. The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality by Dave Goldberg (Dutton 2013).
zz2. Topologist Jeff Weeks on the twin paradox
http://www.math.uic.edu/undergraduate/mathclub/talks/Weeks_AMM2001.pdf
zz3. The Shape of Space by Jeff Weeks (Marcel Dekker 1985).
zz4. Michel Janssen's paper
https://netfiles.umn.edu/users/janss011/home%20page/rel-of-grav-field.pdf
x1. Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics, 3rd Edition by Henry P. Stapp (Springer 2009).
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
What hath 'Waverley' wrought?
The Waverley problem is outlined by
Philosophy Professor Thomas C. Ryckman's excellent page
https://www2.lawrence.edu/fast/ryckmant/Russell's%20Theory%20of%20Descriptions.htm
on three of Bertrand Russell's puzzles for his Theory of Descriptions.
Russell observed that a sentence like,
(1) George IV wished to know whether Scott is the author of 'Waverley'
might well be true, even though
(2) George IV wished to know whether Scott is Scott
was no doubt false while, in fact,
(3) Scott was the (initially anonymous) author of Waverley
was true.
But if (1) is true, then it would appear that George IV was uncertain about the truth of (3) and if (2) were true, it would appear that George IV was uncertain about the truth of
(4) Scott is Scott
As Kurt Goedel observed [1],
Russell pointed out [2] that his 1903 Theory of Descriptions is summarized by two definitions, written in logical symbolism, in Principia Mathematica (PM), which began publication in 1910. There the logician uses the existential quantifier and its "scope" (that part of the assertion to which the quantifier applies), along with the "exactly one" quantifier.
Let us put the problem thus:
George IV wished to know whether x = y.
But certainly the king did not wish to know whether y = y.
And yet x = y if and only if y = y.
So doesn't this suggest that His Highness actually did desire to know whether (x = y) <--> (y = y)?
I.e., George IV wished to know whether x = y, but not whether y = y -- even though (x = y) --> (y = y).
When Russell posed this question in 1903, he and Whitehead had yet to launch the revolution in logic wrought by Principia Mathematica. But by raising such questions in his early Theory of Descriptions and in PM, Russell sparked logicians to try to be more precise by what is intended by such words as identity, equality, equivalence and tautology. Various definitions and axioms have been used since.
Tarski [2a] gives Leibniz credit for this definition of equality or identity: x = y if and only if every property of x is held by y and every property of y is held by x.
Yet how does this differ from an equivalence, whereby x <--> y? In many cases, according to our position, equality and equivalence are indistinguishable.
For many writers, it is usual to apply the equivalence relation to constructs variously known as formulas, sentences, statements, propositions, predicates and sentential functions. These are the assertions in which a verb is implicit or explicit. For example, P may be the assertion 'x = y.' So we might write Ax Ey (x = y). So that assertion means "there is some y that is equal to any x."
Here, x and y are "bound" variables (i.e., they relate to the quantifiers).
Now though one ordinarily applies the equivalence relation to two assertions, P and Q, it is not customary to apply equivalence either to the variables of P(x,y) or of the terms of P(x,y), as in, say, P(x,t), where t is an instantiation of y (sometimes referred to as a "constant").
So then 'x = y' means that x and y are to be construed as interchangeable. That is, iff an instantiation of x is t, then an instantiation of y is t.
But, suppose x and y are variables representing assertions? In that case, we could properly write x <--> y.
Yet Russell's descriptions are verb-less "subjects" or "objects." How can descriptions then be construed as subject to equivalency? In the sense that if x is a description, then it is assumed that either 'x exists' or 'x doesn't exist.'
So the variables x and y of P(x,y) that are ordinarily said to be subject to the identity relation '=', are in our view first subject to the equivalence relation '<-->' -- where identity implies equivalence, but not the converse.
Note that all true assertions of an axiom-based theory are equivalent, in the context of the overall theory. For most, n/(n+1) <--> (n+1)/(n+2) is intuitively apparent. But '1 <--> pi' is not at all obvious. Another example: once we have established the set of natural numbers N -- perhaps by the von Neumann method -- we have that 1 <--> 2 and, further, 7 <--> 181.
So if we say description x <--> description y, we do not necessarily mean that they are identical.
Another example of non-identical equivalence: lim n-->inf. n/(n+1) = 1; lim n-->inf. (n+1)/n = 1. f(n) <--> f(n+1) but f(n) = f(n+1) only in the limit. Of course, we haven't bothered to offer a formal proof that f(n) <--> f(n+1), but if desired, the reader may do so, using some adequate number theory.
That is, we see that at any finite n, f(n) implies f(n+1) if and only if f(n+1) implies f(n) even though f(n) =/= f(n+1) except in the limit.
The Tarski/Leibniz identity definition fits nicely here: all properties held by f(n)'s limit point are held by f(n+1)'s limit point, and the converse. Yet, the non-identical curves approaching this point are equivalent in the sense that each intersects the other at infinity.
So, speaking loosely for a moment, King George had the "curve" x and the "curve" y and wished to know whether they intersected, thus establishing identity. He was uninterested in whether f(y) = y, as this fixed point provided no new information.
Well, how is the king to know whether "curves" x and y intersect? How is he to know whether x = y? Suppose he knows that Scott cannot be ruled out as the author of Waverley. In that case, Waverley implies a set of which Scott is a member and Scott is a member of a set that implies Waverley. So the asserted existence of the novel W strictly implies the asserted existence of the set S. Even so, the set S does not equal the novel W.
But the king in this case in fact wishes to know whether the author of Waverley and Scott pose an identity, which is here indistinguishable from an equivalence. That is, the king is curious as to whether it is so that the anonymous writer has all Scott's properties if and only if Scott has all the anonymous writer's properties.
This simple point brings us forthwith to the notion of deduction, as used by mathematicians and logicians. Rigorous deduction ordinarily requires a set of axioms (some systems include "axiom schema" which are tailored to questions of infinity). That is, we are to use a chain of modus ponens, or implication arrows, or nand connectives (they're all equivalent) to establish the truth value of a claim. This process is cited in the Deduction Theorem, which the reader can find online or in a number of logic textbooks.
The Deduction Theorem is required by our limited minds. If one had a large enough mind, one would not need to prove a claim holds by running through a chain of modus ponens. One could see the chain of reasoning and result all at once. An analogy can be drawn from the case of those people who can read a sentence in one glance as opposed to the majority who read word by word. And we also face the caveat of Goedel's proof that PM and related systems contain assertions that show that the Deduction Theorem can be put into a non-linear loop.
Well, we have discussed identity and equivalence. What about tautology? (Russell's protege, Wittgenstein, was among the first to use truth tables, as well as adopting the word tautology for logical redundancy, though it had long been used to imply rhetorical redundancy.z1)
A tautology describes the situation in which there are no false possibilities for a proposition. All truth table possibilities hold.
For example, the formula P --> (Q --> P) is always true. We simply rewrite this as
~P v (~Q v P), which is,
~P v ~Q v P = (P v ~P) v ~Q
Without resort to a truth table, we can see easily that, no matter what value P or Q has, the formula above always holds.
And so King George's mind was not so large that he could at a glance determine whether x = y is a tautology. Yet it certainly was large enough to determine that y = y is a tautology -- although we can in fact prove that y = y is tautological. That is, "=" implies "<-->" (but not the converse), and so we have y = y implies y <--> y. So y --> y & y --> y. Hence, (~y v y) & (~y v y), which holds for all truth table possibilities. (We have not reduced this last to ~y v y because that would introduce circularity into the proof.)
Of course, our proof relies on the rules of transformation of logical connectives. But a similar proof could have been supplied using either modus ponens arrows only or nand connectives only. This would seem like folderol to His Majesty, but it helps us see more clearly what is at issue in Russell's Waverley problem.
We have belabored the obvious, you say. Yes, but in doing so, we have made more precise our notions of identity, equality, equivalence and tautology. In addition, we have argued for the use of the equivalence relation for the variables of assertions, though then of course we wander into the issue of exactly what constitutes "first order predicate calculus" versus "second order predicate calculus." This last is left for further philosophical efforts.
Another take on this issue is the use of ordered pairs. Consider the set of people who may be writers, as in x e X. As each set is defined by its elements, each element differs from the next and so must have some specific property. If X were singleton, the king wouldn't be curious -- whatever the specific property. If not, then the king is aware that there is some element x that has the property "Scott" and another element y e Y with the property "sole author of Waverly."
So we have a set of ordered pairs, as in X X Y, with elements < x, k >, where k is the constant denoted as the "author of Waverly."
Thus the king's puzzlement is represented by the fact that the set X is non-singleton. He is asking which instantiation of x pairs with k, or which element of X X Y can be expressed as a true assertion, as in f(x,k).
Also see Morris Weitz [3] for a useful discussion of negations and the clarification of the Waverley puzzle and G.E. Moore [4] for a diligent, but largely outdated, overview.
1. "Reply to Criticisms" by K. Goedel in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (The Library of Living Philosophers 1946), Paul Arthur Schilpp ed.
2. "Russell's Mathematical Logic" by B. Russell in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (The Library of Living Philosophers 1946), Paul Arthur Schilpp ed.
2a. Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of the Deductive Sciences by Alfred Tarski (Dover 1995 reprint of Oxford second edition 1946).
3. "Analysis and the Unity of Russell's Philosophy" by M. Weitz in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (The Library of Living Philosophers 1946), Paul Arthur Schilpp ed.
4. "Russell's 'Theory of Descriptions' " by G.E. Moore in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (The Library of Living Philosophers 1946), Paul Arthur Schilpp ed.
z1. A footnote in Elements of Symbolic Logic by Hans Reichenbach (Macmillan 1947) tells us:
https://www2.lawrence.edu/fast/ryckmant/Russell's%20Theory%20of%20Descriptions.htm
on three of Bertrand Russell's puzzles for his Theory of Descriptions.
Russell observed that a sentence like,
(1) George IV wished to know whether Scott is the author of 'Waverley'
might well be true, even though
(2) George IV wished to know whether Scott is Scott
was no doubt false while, in fact,
(3) Scott was the (initially anonymous) author of Waverley
was true.
But if (1) is true, then it would appear that George IV was uncertain about the truth of (3) and if (2) were true, it would appear that George IV was uncertain about the truth of
(4) Scott is Scott
As Kurt Goedel observed [1],
The problem is: what do the so-called descriptive phrases (i.e., phrases as, e.g., "the author of Waverley " or "the king of England") denote or signify and what is the meaning of sentences in which they occur? The apparently obvious answer that, e.g., "the author of Waverley" signifies Walter Scott, leads to unexpected difficulties. For, if we admit the further apparently obvious axiom, that the signification of a composite expression, containing constituents which have themselves a signification, depends only on the signification of these constituents (not on the manner in which signification is expressed), then it follows that the sentence "Scott is the author of Waverley signifies the same thing as "Scott is Scott."The ambiguities or apparent ambiguities of the English language in fact helped drive Russell's goal of formulating a more precise symbolical language that turned out to include the "exactly one" quantifier.
Russell pointed out [2] that his 1903 Theory of Descriptions is summarized by two definitions, written in logical symbolism, in Principia Mathematica (PM), which began publication in 1910. There the logician uses the existential quantifier and its "scope" (that part of the assertion to which the quantifier applies), along with the "exactly one" quantifier.
Let us put the problem thus:
George IV wished to know whether x = y.
But certainly the king did not wish to know whether y = y.
And yet x = y if and only if y = y.
So doesn't this suggest that His Highness actually did desire to know whether (x = y) <--> (y = y)?
I.e., George IV wished to know whether x = y, but not whether y = y -- even though (x = y) --> (y = y).
When Russell posed this question in 1903, he and Whitehead had yet to launch the revolution in logic wrought by Principia Mathematica. But by raising such questions in his early Theory of Descriptions and in PM, Russell sparked logicians to try to be more precise by what is intended by such words as identity, equality, equivalence and tautology. Various definitions and axioms have been used since.
Tarski [2a] gives Leibniz credit for this definition of equality or identity: x = y if and only if every property of x is held by y and every property of y is held by x.
Yet how does this differ from an equivalence, whereby x <--> y? In many cases, according to our position, equality and equivalence are indistinguishable.
For many writers, it is usual to apply the equivalence relation to constructs variously known as formulas, sentences, statements, propositions, predicates and sentential functions. These are the assertions in which a verb is implicit or explicit. For example, P may be the assertion 'x = y.' So we might write Ax Ey (x = y). So that assertion means "there is some y that is equal to any x."
Here, x and y are "bound" variables (i.e., they relate to the quantifiers).
Now though one ordinarily applies the equivalence relation to two assertions, P and Q, it is not customary to apply equivalence either to the variables of P(x,y) or of the terms of P(x,y), as in, say, P(x,t), where t is an instantiation of y (sometimes referred to as a "constant").
So then 'x = y' means that x and y are to be construed as interchangeable. That is, iff an instantiation of x is t, then an instantiation of y is t.
But, suppose x and y are variables representing assertions? In that case, we could properly write x <--> y.
Yet Russell's descriptions are verb-less "subjects" or "objects." How can descriptions then be construed as subject to equivalency? In the sense that if x is a description, then it is assumed that either 'x exists' or 'x doesn't exist.'
So the variables x and y of P(x,y) that are ordinarily said to be subject to the identity relation '=', are in our view first subject to the equivalence relation '<-->' -- where identity implies equivalence, but not the converse.
Note that all true assertions of an axiom-based theory are equivalent, in the context of the overall theory. For most, n/(n+1) <--> (n+1)/(n+2) is intuitively apparent. But '1 <--> pi' is not at all obvious. Another example: once we have established the set of natural numbers N -- perhaps by the von Neumann method -- we have that 1 <--> 2 and, further, 7 <--> 181.
So if we say description x <--> description y, we do not necessarily mean that they are identical.
Another example of non-identical equivalence: lim n-->inf. n/(n+1) = 1; lim n-->inf. (n+1)/n = 1. f(n) <--> f(n+1) but f(n) = f(n+1) only in the limit. Of course, we haven't bothered to offer a formal proof that f(n) <--> f(n+1), but if desired, the reader may do so, using some adequate number theory.
That is, we see that at any finite n, f(n) implies f(n+1) if and only if f(n+1) implies f(n) even though f(n) =/= f(n+1) except in the limit.
The Tarski/Leibniz identity definition fits nicely here: all properties held by f(n)'s limit point are held by f(n+1)'s limit point, and the converse. Yet, the non-identical curves approaching this point are equivalent in the sense that each intersects the other at infinity.
So, speaking loosely for a moment, King George had the "curve" x and the "curve" y and wished to know whether they intersected, thus establishing identity. He was uninterested in whether f(y) = y, as this fixed point provided no new information.
Well, how is the king to know whether "curves" x and y intersect? How is he to know whether x = y? Suppose he knows that Scott cannot be ruled out as the author of Waverley. In that case, Waverley implies a set of which Scott is a member and Scott is a member of a set that implies Waverley. So the asserted existence of the novel W strictly implies the asserted existence of the set S. Even so, the set S does not equal the novel W.
But the king in this case in fact wishes to know whether the author of Waverley and Scott pose an identity, which is here indistinguishable from an equivalence. That is, the king is curious as to whether it is so that the anonymous writer has all Scott's properties if and only if Scott has all the anonymous writer's properties.
This simple point brings us forthwith to the notion of deduction, as used by mathematicians and logicians. Rigorous deduction ordinarily requires a set of axioms (some systems include "axiom schema" which are tailored to questions of infinity). That is, we are to use a chain of modus ponens, or implication arrows, or nand connectives (they're all equivalent) to establish the truth value of a claim. This process is cited in the Deduction Theorem, which the reader can find online or in a number of logic textbooks.
The Deduction Theorem is required by our limited minds. If one had a large enough mind, one would not need to prove a claim holds by running through a chain of modus ponens. One could see the chain of reasoning and result all at once. An analogy can be drawn from the case of those people who can read a sentence in one glance as opposed to the majority who read word by word. And we also face the caveat of Goedel's proof that PM and related systems contain assertions that show that the Deduction Theorem can be put into a non-linear loop.
Well, we have discussed identity and equivalence. What about tautology? (Russell's protege, Wittgenstein, was among the first to use truth tables, as well as adopting the word tautology for logical redundancy, though it had long been used to imply rhetorical redundancy.z1)
A tautology describes the situation in which there are no false possibilities for a proposition. All truth table possibilities hold.
For example, the formula P --> (Q --> P) is always true. We simply rewrite this as
~P v (~Q v P), which is,
~P v ~Q v P = (P v ~P) v ~Q
Without resort to a truth table, we can see easily that, no matter what value P or Q has, the formula above always holds.
And so King George's mind was not so large that he could at a glance determine whether x = y is a tautology. Yet it certainly was large enough to determine that y = y is a tautology -- although we can in fact prove that y = y is tautological. That is, "=" implies "<-->" (but not the converse), and so we have y = y implies y <--> y. So y --> y & y --> y. Hence, (~y v y) & (~y v y), which holds for all truth table possibilities. (We have not reduced this last to ~y v y because that would introduce circularity into the proof.)
Of course, our proof relies on the rules of transformation of logical connectives. But a similar proof could have been supplied using either modus ponens arrows only or nand connectives only. This would seem like folderol to His Majesty, but it helps us see more clearly what is at issue in Russell's Waverley problem.
We have belabored the obvious, you say. Yes, but in doing so, we have made more precise our notions of identity, equality, equivalence and tautology. In addition, we have argued for the use of the equivalence relation for the variables of assertions, though then of course we wander into the issue of exactly what constitutes "first order predicate calculus" versus "second order predicate calculus." This last is left for further philosophical efforts.
Another take on this issue is the use of ordered pairs. Consider the set of people who may be writers, as in x e X. As each set is defined by its elements, each element differs from the next and so must have some specific property. If X were singleton, the king wouldn't be curious -- whatever the specific property. If not, then the king is aware that there is some element x that has the property "Scott" and another element y e Y with the property "sole author of Waverly."
So we have a set of ordered pairs, as in X X Y, with elements < x, k >, where k is the constant denoted as the "author of Waverly."
Thus the king's puzzlement is represented by the fact that the set X is non-singleton. He is asking which instantiation of x pairs with k, or which element of X X Y can be expressed as a true assertion, as in f(x,k).
Also see Morris Weitz [3] for a useful discussion of negations and the clarification of the Waverley puzzle and G.E. Moore [4] for a diligent, but largely outdated, overview.
1. "Reply to Criticisms" by K. Goedel in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (The Library of Living Philosophers 1946), Paul Arthur Schilpp ed.
2. "Russell's Mathematical Logic" by B. Russell in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (The Library of Living Philosophers 1946), Paul Arthur Schilpp ed.
2a. Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of the Deductive Sciences by Alfred Tarski (Dover 1995 reprint of Oxford second edition 1946).
3. "Analysis and the Unity of Russell's Philosophy" by M. Weitz in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (The Library of Living Philosophers 1946), Paul Arthur Schilpp ed.
4. "Russell's 'Theory of Descriptions' " by G.E. Moore in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (The Library of Living Philosophers 1946), Paul Arthur Schilpp ed.
z1. A footnote in Elements of Symbolic Logic by Hans Reichenbach (Macmillan 1947) tells us:
Truth tables were used by L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Harcour, Brace, New York, 1922, p. 93, and by E.L. Post, Amer. Journal of Math., XLIII, 1921, p. 163. Materially, the definition of propositional operations in terms of truth or falsehood was used earlier, for instance, in B. Russell and A.N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, Vol. I, 1910, p. 6-8. Furthermore, C.S. Pierce employed this definition...
Friday, August 4, 2017
Cosmosis essays subject to revision
I believe in taking advantage of current technology, meaning I am at liberty to revise my essays even years after the fact.
On the one hand, it seems responsible to me to update essays as better information becomes available to me. On the other hand, it seems to me to be an excellent idea to delete and, if need be, rewrite sections that are foolishly emotional, or which contain inappropriate (from my standpoint) imagery.
It is too much trouble to try to keep copies of each revision. So if you wish to check earlier versions of my essays, try finding them at another hosting service, or even on another Google/Blogger blog.
Also the url tracking service changedetection.com tells you what changes have been made to this blog or to specific pages (you must use the proper url) on this blog.
Ghost slips Ryle's grasp
The Concept of Mind
(Oxford 1949) by Gilbert Ryle.
Apologies for the odd footnote numbering, as in [1xx] and so forth. Use of the control f function will be very helpful. I have given up keeping the footnotes in order -- which, for computer documents, is an unnecessary custom.
I have been updating this article regularly since it was first posted in August 2017 and the original is barely recognizable in the current version. More revisions are possible. This essay should be regarded as a work in progress. Any lumpiness will be smoothed out in future.
A very useful supplement to this critique is the essay "Conversation with Gilbert Ryle" in Modern British Philosophy by Bryan Magee.[zw7]
By PAUL CONANT
How does one exorcise a ghost from a machine? l First we must dispense with the idea that man is a machine. He is, one infers, a determinate system that is not crudely mechanical. By dispensing with the "bogy of mechanism" we are in a position to carefully define our terms, dodging various "category mistakes," so that we can safely cast out the ghost.
This summarizes, as I understand it, the line of reasoning laid down by Ryle in his book, The Concept of Mind, published in 1949. Ryle was a professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford. In my estimate, Ryle is mistaken because -- judging by the content of his book -- he had virtually no knowledge of science or mathematics. Also, he admitted that he had never studied any psychology,[zw7] even though the histories of philosophy and psychology show the two topics to be very closely interleaved. Notwithstanding, a legend persists that Ryle has solved the Cartesian mind-body problem. I aim to convince the modern reader that he did no such thing.
At issue is Ryle's comprehension of the term mechanism. As a philosophical concept, mechanism is often applied specifically to the mind, implying only physical causes for mental activity, as opposed to dualism, which implies non-physical causes of cognition. Physicalism, discussed below, should be regarded as a purportedly more sophisticated form of mechanistic materialism.
Why take Ryle to task seven decades after his book was published? Well, just as he wished to debunk the Cartesian myth of "the ghost in the machine" many years after Descartes wrote, so it seems necessary to debunk the legend that Ryle successfully exorcised the ghost by showing that Descartes and his followers had fallen into one or more "category errors." In fact, it is Ryle who erred with his muddled understandings of mechanism [1x], determinism and free will.
It is straightforward that the fact that Ryle erred cannot be taken to imply that Descartes was correct.
Ryle's attack on Cartesian dualism is deftly summarized in a Wikipedia article that includes this observation:
How does one exorcise a ghost from a machine? l First we must dispense with the idea that man is a machine. He is, one infers, a determinate system that is not crudely mechanical. By dispensing with the "bogy of mechanism" we are in a position to carefully define our terms, dodging various "category mistakes," so that we can safely cast out the ghost.
This summarizes, as I understand it, the line of reasoning laid down by Ryle in his book, The Concept of Mind, published in 1949. Ryle was a professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford. In my estimate, Ryle is mistaken because -- judging by the content of his book -- he had virtually no knowledge of science or mathematics. Also, he admitted that he had never studied any psychology,[zw7] even though the histories of philosophy and psychology show the two topics to be very closely interleaved. Notwithstanding, a legend persists that Ryle has solved the Cartesian mind-body problem. I aim to convince the modern reader that he did no such thing.
At issue is Ryle's comprehension of the term mechanism. As a philosophical concept, mechanism is often applied specifically to the mind, implying only physical causes for mental activity, as opposed to dualism, which implies non-physical causes of cognition. Physicalism, discussed below, should be regarded as a purportedly more sophisticated form of mechanistic materialism.
Why take Ryle to task seven decades after his book was published? Well, just as he wished to debunk the Cartesian myth of "the ghost in the machine" many years after Descartes wrote, so it seems necessary to debunk the legend that Ryle successfully exorcised the ghost by showing that Descartes and his followers had fallen into one or more "category errors." In fact, it is Ryle who erred with his muddled understandings of mechanism [1x], determinism and free will.
It is straightforward that the fact that Ryle erred cannot be taken to imply that Descartes was correct.
Ryle's attack on Cartesian dualism is deftly summarized in a Wikipedia article that includes this observation:
Ryle rejects Descartes' theory of the relation between mind and body, on the grounds that it approaches the investigation of mental processes as if they could be isolated from physical processes. In order to demonstrate how this theory may be misleading, he explains that knowing how to perform an act skillfully may not only be a matter of being able to reason practically but may also be a matter of being able to put practical reasoning into action. Practical actions may not necessarily be produced by highly theoretical reasoning or by complex sequences of intellectual operations. The meaning of actions may not be explained by making inferences about hidden mental processes, but it may be explained by examining the rules that govern those actions.
According to Ryle, mental processes are merely intelligent acts. There are no mental processes that are distinct from intelligent acts. The operations of the mind are not merely represented by intelligent acts, they are the same as those intelligent acts. Thus, acts of learning, remembering, imagining, knowing, or willing are not merely clues to hidden mental processes or to complex sequences of intellectual operations, they are the way in which those mental processes or intellectual operations are defined. Logical propositions are not merely clues to modes of reasoning, they are those modes of reasoning.
Ryle concedes[zw7] that dualism did not originate with Descartes, but argues that Descartes "put nice firm edges or labels" on dualism. Shakespeare and the Bible didn't say that the mind and the body are two different substances, though they sometimes implied that they were, Ryle says, whereas Descartes said that that was the case.
Bryan Magee summarizes Ryle's Concept thus:
Bryan Magee summarizes Ryle's Concept thus:
We tend to think of a person as consisting of a body and a mind, but it's a complete mistake to think of the mind as if it were an entity that exists and performs actions and has experiences and a history, in the way that the body exists and performs actions and has experiences and a history. 'Mind' isn't a name for that kind of thing at all: it's simply a generic term for certain categories of behavior, performance, disposition, occurrence and so on. There is no non-material entity that has or does certain things. Still less, therefore, is any such entity invisibly operating the body from inside.[zw7]
Two decades after Concept appeared, Ryle said that he had committed some "howlers" in that book. His material on motivations and imagination needed revision, he told Magee.[zw7] Also, Ryle said if given the chance he would cancel much material concerning the intellect and replace it with his newer insights. Yet, what Concept has to say on intellect and related topics "don't give me a guilty conscience."
Whatever Ryle might or might not have written at a later point, our job is to critique the book (and not criticize the man).
In particular, the concept of mind that Ryle wishes to debunk is the Greek idea of soul as mind, or psyche -- and clearly, if no mind exists, then neither does an immortal soul. So, before further addressing Ryle's ideas, let us digress briefly on the notion of soul and some related concepts.
Whatever Ryle might or might not have written at a later point, our job is to critique the book (and not criticize the man).
In particular, the concept of mind that Ryle wishes to debunk is the Greek idea of soul as mind, or psyche -- and clearly, if no mind exists, then neither does an immortal soul. So, before further addressing Ryle's ideas, let us digress briefly on the notion of soul and some related concepts.
O soul o mio
What is the soul? Of course this has long been a question of compelling force. The concept of soul, which he takes as synonymous to mind, is Ryle's target. He aims to delegitimize the concept of mind/soul as a category mistake. In that case, we had better have some idea of what these terms may mean.
In a discussion of ancient Egyptian beliefs, the anthropologist E.O. James wrote,
In a discussion of ancient Egyptian beliefs, the anthropologist E.O. James wrote,
From very early times each individual was believed to have an invisible immortal "soul" or ghost which often assumed the form of a bird with a human head, that either survived death or came into existence at the time of the dissolution. To this conception of the ba that of the ka was eventually added. [1xaa]
Such representations, it seems obvious, served the purpose of words. So the image-word, or description, is equivalent to this description: "the something associated with a human that flies away upon death." Immortality follows from the idea that the spirit continues after death.
James also observed,
James also observed,
To what extent these highly complex interpretations of the constitution and survival of human personality can be regarded as of prehistoric origin and significance is difficult to say. The conception of the ka as a vital essence, a guardian spirit and an alter ego would seem to represent very ancient and primitive connotations, as does the ghostly ba of the dead man.
The fact that human spirit life can be construed to arise from early attempts to structure the world does not of course imply that there is no spirit world. It is safe to say that later thinkers used these primitive ideas to convey their thoughts on what we may see as alternate reality.
In early times, some thought the spirit simply evaporated. Others thought the spirit must stay with a body that was intact in one place underground in order to "rest." Otherwise it would be condemned to wander aimlessly, with no prospect of rest. Moreover, some generalized the concept of underground burial to an underground realm, which later was further generalized into high-sky realms, and so forth.
I agree with a number of scholars that the notion of gods in part emerged from the animism that early man imputed to the planets, the sun and the moon. This, in turn, would lead to generalizations of pantheons of beings on high, whether on Mount Olympus or elsewhere out of human reach. In addition, we can also conjecture that early tribes elevated ancestors to the status of gods by this progression: a splinter group has survived with only young people to lead the way. They make decisions based on "Father said this..." and "Father said that..." The next generation acquires this custom, which is often useful for settling disputes. "Father" becomes very much de-concretized over the generations, living on as but a memory core and an abstraction.
We see a remnant of this cultural meme in modern ancestor worship in the Far East and elsewhere.
As human bands merged, one would expect a political agreement to assure the acceptance of the guiding god of the other band, leading to pantheons. (This effect is quite obvious in Indic history and proto-history -- and of course pantheism is implicit in the projection of human tendencies onto celestial objects.)
Father's status was always high, but now he has become disembodied as a spirit (or granted a super-body with super-hero powers). Now if such a belief train is welded to the belief train that Father's spirit lives on somewhere in the underworld or elsewhere, the status of "god" is virtually assured. (Curiously, though the concept of underworld did not always connote the sinister; that connotation gained popularity because of the underground/underworld association with death, which most people feared and hence saw as sinister.)
In addition, we have the early custom of burial of the dead, possibly for sanitation reasons but also no doubt to spare relatives excessive grief. Children might be told "your brother has gone to live in a nice place underground." Over time such a children's tale becomes a basic belief. The custom of covering graves with stones doubtless arose in part to serve as grave-markers, perhaps so that relatives could be consoled with the notion that their loved one was resting comfortably below ground.
Even so, very importantly, the stones were placed to prevent animals from digging up the remains and eating them. Why would such a happenstance worry Paleolithic humans? It seems more than plausible that the custom arose in order to make sure the loved one's rest was undisturbed. An added worry was that if the remains were eaten and-or scattered the person would no longer exist and the spirit would have no home.
In early Egypt and Greece, write philosophers Solomon and Higgins [1xaaa], the human soul was a "somewhat pathetic being incapable of existing in any significant sense unless it was embodied." And for the Greek pluralist Democritus, the soul was not much of anything, just another atom or combination of atoms.
"But with Pythagorus and Orphic cults, the soul took on new significance," they write. "It may have still needed a body, but it found new ones, through reincarnation. And with Pythagorus, Socrates and then Plato, the soul became the seat of the intellect as well as of virtue." For Plato, the soul became part of the World of Forms and perforce eternal. On the other hand, Aristotle saw the soul as the essence that belongs to everything alive. In the case of man, that essence is encapsulated by the concept of rationality. This soul/essence does not survive death, but is intrinsic to the body.
In the views of Plato, we see some correspondence with the ideas of the soul given in the Gospels and in the writings of Christian philosophers.
Christian philosophical (as opposed to intuitive) conceptions of the soul were strongly influenced by Augustine, whose ideas in turn were influenced by Plato and Plotinus.
As Justin Hannegan [1xbbb] observes:
In early times, some thought the spirit simply evaporated. Others thought the spirit must stay with a body that was intact in one place underground in order to "rest." Otherwise it would be condemned to wander aimlessly, with no prospect of rest. Moreover, some generalized the concept of underground burial to an underground realm, which later was further generalized into high-sky realms, and so forth.
I agree with a number of scholars that the notion of gods in part emerged from the animism that early man imputed to the planets, the sun and the moon. This, in turn, would lead to generalizations of pantheons of beings on high, whether on Mount Olympus or elsewhere out of human reach. In addition, we can also conjecture that early tribes elevated ancestors to the status of gods by this progression: a splinter group has survived with only young people to lead the way. They make decisions based on "Father said this..." and "Father said that..." The next generation acquires this custom, which is often useful for settling disputes. "Father" becomes very much de-concretized over the generations, living on as but a memory core and an abstraction.
We see a remnant of this cultural meme in modern ancestor worship in the Far East and elsewhere.
As human bands merged, one would expect a political agreement to assure the acceptance of the guiding god of the other band, leading to pantheons. (This effect is quite obvious in Indic history and proto-history -- and of course pantheism is implicit in the projection of human tendencies onto celestial objects.)
Father's status was always high, but now he has become disembodied as a spirit (or granted a super-body with super-hero powers). Now if such a belief train is welded to the belief train that Father's spirit lives on somewhere in the underworld or elsewhere, the status of "god" is virtually assured. (Curiously, though the concept of underworld did not always connote the sinister; that connotation gained popularity because of the underground/underworld association with death, which most people feared and hence saw as sinister.)
In addition, we have the early custom of burial of the dead, possibly for sanitation reasons but also no doubt to spare relatives excessive grief. Children might be told "your brother has gone to live in a nice place underground." Over time such a children's tale becomes a basic belief. The custom of covering graves with stones doubtless arose in part to serve as grave-markers, perhaps so that relatives could be consoled with the notion that their loved one was resting comfortably below ground.
Even so, very importantly, the stones were placed to prevent animals from digging up the remains and eating them. Why would such a happenstance worry Paleolithic humans? It seems more than plausible that the custom arose in order to make sure the loved one's rest was undisturbed. An added worry was that if the remains were eaten and-or scattered the person would no longer exist and the spirit would have no home.
In early Egypt and Greece, write philosophers Solomon and Higgins [1xaaa], the human soul was a "somewhat pathetic being incapable of existing in any significant sense unless it was embodied." And for the Greek pluralist Democritus, the soul was not much of anything, just another atom or combination of atoms.
"But with Pythagorus and Orphic cults, the soul took on new significance," they write. "It may have still needed a body, but it found new ones, through reincarnation. And with Pythagorus, Socrates and then Plato, the soul became the seat of the intellect as well as of virtue." For Plato, the soul became part of the World of Forms and perforce eternal. On the other hand, Aristotle saw the soul as the essence that belongs to everything alive. In the case of man, that essence is encapsulated by the concept of rationality. This soul/essence does not survive death, but is intrinsic to the body.
In the views of Plato, we see some correspondence with the ideas of the soul given in the Gospels and in the writings of Christian philosophers.
Christian philosophical (as opposed to intuitive) conceptions of the soul were strongly influenced by Augustine, whose ideas in turn were influenced by Plato and Plotinus.
As Justin Hannegan [1xbbb] observes:
In lieu of the full Platonic doctrine, Augustine describes the soul as a “composite of two substances, a soul and a body.” Man is two things together, united into a single living unity. According to Augustine’s most mature definition, “Man is a rational substance consisting of soul and body.”
At death, however, the soul is separated, and remains in existence on its own until the resurrection of the dead, when it is reunited with the body.
Concerning eight contentious words:
Soul, anima, mind, spirit, psyche, self, nous, logos
(Please check The Online Etymology Dictionary for more information on these words.)
Soul is apparently derived from an old North European word for sea, based on the notion that the human essence came from and returned to the sea (or lake). English translators of the New Testament used soul for the Greek word psyche, which originally meant breath. Yet the English spirit also originally meant breath. We then see the interplay of the words soul, mind, spirit, psyche. Then we also have the point that self and mind converge over time.
Soul can also be equivalent to the Latin anima, which implies, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "living being, soul, mind, disposition, passion, courage, anger, spirit, feeling." In turn, anima is derived from "to breathe." The dictionary notes, "For sense development in Latin, compare Old Norse andi: "breath, breathing; current of air; aspiration in speech; soul, spirit, spiritual being." (Carl Jung in 1923 popularized the word anima, which he used in a special theoretical sense.)
Mind derives from North European words for memory and thought. The etymological trail points to the Sanskrit manus, meaning purpose and intentionality, which is to say mind. In addition, it has been conjectured that the English man also traces back to manus. One can see the attractiveness of such a possibility, considering how closely the two meanings interleave.
The word self apparently has little in the way of an evolution of ideas behind it, though of course there is a morphological evolution. That is to say, a person intuitively grasps the notion of center of life, which in the context of the social group is then extended to others. The concept seems to be axiomatic to the origin of language. One can see how easily the notions of mind and self became interchanged.
We may notice that it is often the case that mind, self, spirit and soul are not always distinguished, a theme that is noticeable in the Old Testament.
The people of Judah/Judea, long under Persian and Greek authority, picked up the Grecian-Egyptian concept of soul along with various Zoroastrian and pseudo-Zoriastrian ideas, which were over time woven into Jewish religious thought, amplifying but never quite subsuming their concept of spirit.
As Christianity developed, there emerged the tandem notion that while the spirit animates the body, the soul controls the person's moral life, and is the essence of the person that God looks upon. Even so, just as one concept seems to have emerged from the other, later both concepts were -- in the minds of many ordinary Christians -- fused together.
Christian theology used various Greek concepts as springboards. Christian thinkers -- from Jesus onward -- impregnated these concepts with new meaning. The soul was something that could perish in the abyss, suffer eternal damnation or enjoy eternal life. How such an entity could be part of a physically deterministic process was indeed a puzzle once the Newtonian paradigm had taken hold.
Of the other fraught words, we find that the Pythagorean psyche is indistinguishable from the Pythagorean soul, except that on transmigration, the soul forgets the details of its previous corporeal existence, although this then implies that the soul is something more fundamental than what we tend to call the mind. As Ryle points out, the term psychology derives from a time in the Newtonian era when it was assumed the mind could not be governed by Newtonian mechanics and so must be governed by something else, which is to say something "spiritual."
How does the self differ from the mind, if it does? As the self concept has been undergoing a tough revisionist working-over by experts in cognition, there is no clear-cut answer. One might suggest that the conscious I would serve that role -- except that Ryle is very skeptical of the notion of consciousness (reflecting the old materialism of such thinkers as the Enlightenment's Baron d'Holbach who saw "self-motivation" as a delusion and maintained that if one examines motives for an action closely enough, one will always find that the action was beyond one's control).
We should also take note of the Greek word nous, which, like psyche can be translated mind. In philosophy, the word was used for that which reasons as opposed to the reasoning itself. Thus nous might be viewed as a compartment of psyche. That is to say, nous was regarded as peculiar to man. [1xxb]
Nous certainly seems to imply the intentionality of Franz Brentano. These days, intentionality seems to mean that consciousness implies externalities; consciousness is the focus on something. Is there an intentionality beyond the need for organic homeostasis (which then wouldn't be altogether conscious), as in a soul's thirst for God?
And we have logos, a word used by Greek thinkers for the cosmic organizing principle. Pythagorus and Heraclitus equated logos with nous (or reason).
Ryle has not reported on any of these distinctions and shades of meaning when talking about mind, although he may well have argued that these subtleties were irrelevant to his argument.
Soul, anima, mind, spirit, psyche, self, nous, logos
(Please check The Online Etymology Dictionary for more information on these words.)
Soul is apparently derived from an old North European word for sea, based on the notion that the human essence came from and returned to the sea (or lake). English translators of the New Testament used soul for the Greek word psyche, which originally meant breath. Yet the English spirit also originally meant breath. We then see the interplay of the words soul, mind, spirit, psyche. Then we also have the point that self and mind converge over time.
Soul can also be equivalent to the Latin anima, which implies, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "living being, soul, mind, disposition, passion, courage, anger, spirit, feeling." In turn, anima is derived from "to breathe." The dictionary notes, "For sense development in Latin, compare Old Norse andi: "breath, breathing; current of air; aspiration in speech; soul, spirit, spiritual being." (Carl Jung in 1923 popularized the word anima, which he used in a special theoretical sense.)
Mind derives from North European words for memory and thought. The etymological trail points to the Sanskrit manus, meaning purpose and intentionality, which is to say mind. In addition, it has been conjectured that the English man also traces back to manus. One can see the attractiveness of such a possibility, considering how closely the two meanings interleave.
The word self apparently has little in the way of an evolution of ideas behind it, though of course there is a morphological evolution. That is to say, a person intuitively grasps the notion of center of life, which in the context of the social group is then extended to others. The concept seems to be axiomatic to the origin of language. One can see how easily the notions of mind and self became interchanged.
We may notice that it is often the case that mind, self, spirit and soul are not always distinguished, a theme that is noticeable in the Old Testament.
The people of Judah/Judea, long under Persian and Greek authority, picked up the Grecian-Egyptian concept of soul along with various Zoroastrian and pseudo-Zoriastrian ideas, which were over time woven into Jewish religious thought, amplifying but never quite subsuming their concept of spirit.
As Christianity developed, there emerged the tandem notion that while the spirit animates the body, the soul controls the person's moral life, and is the essence of the person that God looks upon. Even so, just as one concept seems to have emerged from the other, later both concepts were -- in the minds of many ordinary Christians -- fused together.
Christian theology used various Greek concepts as springboards. Christian thinkers -- from Jesus onward -- impregnated these concepts with new meaning. The soul was something that could perish in the abyss, suffer eternal damnation or enjoy eternal life. How such an entity could be part of a physically deterministic process was indeed a puzzle once the Newtonian paradigm had taken hold.
Of the other fraught words, we find that the Pythagorean psyche is indistinguishable from the Pythagorean soul, except that on transmigration, the soul forgets the details of its previous corporeal existence, although this then implies that the soul is something more fundamental than what we tend to call the mind. As Ryle points out, the term psychology derives from a time in the Newtonian era when it was assumed the mind could not be governed by Newtonian mechanics and so must be governed by something else, which is to say something "spiritual."
How does the self differ from the mind, if it does? As the self concept has been undergoing a tough revisionist working-over by experts in cognition, there is no clear-cut answer. One might suggest that the conscious I would serve that role -- except that Ryle is very skeptical of the notion of consciousness (reflecting the old materialism of such thinkers as the Enlightenment's Baron d'Holbach who saw "self-motivation" as a delusion and maintained that if one examines motives for an action closely enough, one will always find that the action was beyond one's control).
We should also take note of the Greek word nous, which, like psyche can be translated mind. In philosophy, the word was used for that which reasons as opposed to the reasoning itself. Thus nous might be viewed as a compartment of psyche. That is to say, nous was regarded as peculiar to man. [1xxb]
Nous certainly seems to imply the intentionality of Franz Brentano. These days, intentionality seems to mean that consciousness implies externalities; consciousness is the focus on something. Is there an intentionality beyond the need for organic homeostasis (which then wouldn't be altogether conscious), as in a soul's thirst for God?
And we have logos, a word used by Greek thinkers for the cosmic organizing principle. Pythagorus and Heraclitus equated logos with nous (or reason).
Ryle has not reported on any of these distinctions and shades of meaning when talking about mind, although he may well have argued that these subtleties were irrelevant to his argument.
E pluribus unum?
Modern scientists, atheistical or not, are virtually all monists, if we mean by monism a single organizing principle for all that is, whereby all that is is composed of elemental bits of stuff.
These days, monads may well be regarded as bits of energy whose bounds are limited by Planck's constant, a physicalist point of view in tune with the history of that term, but somewhat dissimilar to Leibniz's monads and Russell's neutral monism (see below in this section) [zzz1]. The logos, in modern terms, would be described as that which is represented by the set of mathematical relations among such units. At present, rival monads are assumed for quantum theory and relativity theory, but everyone has faith that ultimately the rival monads will vanish as a better, unifying set of relations is discoveredzzz10. Pluralism is a heresy of Science.
Note the possibility that events in our cosmos can seem unrelated causally -- as we have from spacelike separation under relativity theory. Yet, these days we would not regard these two regions of spacetime as monads because we assume some kind of harmony via the presumed four-dimensional spacetime block or via some other topological object, meaning that scientific monism points to something that transcends ordinary causality.
Hardly anyone these days even contemplates that there could be more than one organizing principle for the all of existence. Physicists are dead certain that there must be -- even if only in an unattainable Platonic sense -- a Theory of Everything, representing a logos that accounts for all change in the cosmos. Underlying this assumption is the notion that the "laws" of physics are constant everywhere in the cosmos.
In my sense of the term, early Greek monists were not always fully monistic, seeing different laws applying to the earth and the high-sky realm. Similarly, although early non-monists posited a cosmos composed of more than one substance or essence, each of which mingled while marching to different drummers, they did not accept that such an eventuality then implied more than one logos. That is to say, each subset of "elements" of the cosmos would require an organizing principle to give the relations among the elements of the subset. To say differently would mean there is no cohesion among things; that is, all would be without form and void.
Properly, monism says that the cosmos is constituted by a single elementary substance. Thus, Cartesian dualism refers to the two cosmos-pervading substances of inert matter and thought. Strictly, though Leibniz is often viewed as a monist, Leibniz's "Monadology" gives a pluralistic system, as each monad is fundamentally different, not interacting with the others (of course one could say that their pre-established harmony set by God implies a higher monism). An example of a true monist is Spinoza, who posits a single all-pervading substance unifying Nature (or, equivalently for him, God).
The pluralist Democritus believed in the atomic theory, whereby all things are composed of basic particles suspended in a void. Yet how are they composed? The coherence required by his theory implies an organizing principle, but that was not obvious at the time. "Spacetime" and mass-energy equivalence were of course unfamiliar ideas. The enigma of human experience, as brought out by Parmenides and ably demonstrated by Zeno, implies a logos, or transcendent organizing principle, to reconcile the fundamental paradoxes of existence. These paradoxes are not resolved by pluralism because a structured world cannot dispense with the idea of coherence.
Let us say we have two independent logoses. That case would mean the two are not subdivisions of a higher logos. So then, the intersection of the sets associated with each logos would not only be null, but there would be no relations controlling interactions between the two different types of elements (or monads). That is to say, if a Type 1 element encounters a Type 2 element, no rule exists as to how they must interact. Hence, they must be essentially invisible to each other. They simply never interact, or, if they do, their interaction must be utterly random, meaning that we would have a tough time with such chaos or that such chaotic interactions are at such a low level or so rare that they are undetectable. So then two such sets would in effect represent non-interacting "parallel universes." As far as a human observer is concerned, the other universe is irrelevant. She or he always must assume a logos. In other words, for a human being, monism is required, although it is possible that some theologies may say otherwise. Leibniz dealt with this issue by saying that his "windowless" monads had been synchronized in advance by God.
In Hegel's view, "If objects are regarded only as self-enclosed totalities, they cannot act on one another. Regarded in this way, they are the same as the monads, which, precisely for that reason, were thought of as having no influence on each other. But the concept of a monad is for just this reason a deficient reflection." [zw11]
As for Descartes' mind-body theory, that also implies what is regarded as an unacceptable dualism. Yet, the duality is even so subsumed by a greater monism, whereby Descartes' God is the logos who hides the relations that must exist between the laws of inert, but motive matter, and the soul, or mind. In any case, if we regard monads as bits of stuff, then we may well fall into the contradiction described above. Moreover, from the perspective of a modern observer, because any relations between the phenomenal world and a purported spirit world are hidden, the the two universes may be taken to be de facto non-intersecting; i.e., assumption of a spirit realm becomes vulnerable to the charge of irrelevancy.
On the other hand -- perhaps in hope of evading the spirit-connoting cosmological anthropic principle -- a number of scientists are quite open to the possibilities of non-interacting "bubble" universes or of a fantastic continual unrolling of some gigantic number of universes in accord with the Everett-De Witt interpretation of quantum theory. That is to say, these scientists are open to the existence of such entities, even though their existence is essentially irrelevant, the idea being that there is no provable interaction between this sub-cosmos and some other. Yet, it would be quite acceptable for theory-guided experimentalists to try to seek at least clues of interactions with another sub-cosmos, even though for historical and cultural reasons it is seen as very bad form to seek clues of existence of a veiled spirit sub-cosmos.
At this juncture we should consider Kant's idea (and Plato's) of the phenomenal versus the noumenal worlds. Because of how our brains process input data into perceptions, we are only familiar, via our senses, with the world of appearances. We can never fully know the "thing in itself" behind its appearance. Moreover, although modern technology and theory may draw the curtain back a tad here and there, there still must always be a medium between one's mind and the "thing in itself." I would go further and argue that we don't even know whether an apparent thing is one-to-one with some noumenal "thing" -- although some sort of noumenal realm is surely implied by our existential necessities. Think of the characters in the film The Matrix not knowing that they were actually living out computer-controlled lucid dreams.
The phenomenal and noumenal worlds represent two sets that do intersect, although we dare not claim they are in one-to-one correspondence. Yet, even now science has made little progress in discovering the set of relations between these two worlds, although the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and "quantum weirdness" have opened some eyes to such an intersection of worlds. It may even be that the phenomenal world is a projection from some "higher" existence. Even so, both worlds must be two sides of the same coin and thus a single logos is required.
Parts of my analysis here are open to the challenge that in general the logos of the monists implied final cause (purpose) and a great intelligence of some sort. Yet such a logos was not construed by the Greek thinkers as implying a God who intervenes in human affairs. Thus, from a human perspective, it is a matter of indifference whether this logos is physical, expressing a mindless natural order, or whether it is a great mind that transcends nature. So then, I believe we are justified in asserting that our world requires a logos, whatever its ultimate essence.
These days, monads may well be regarded as bits of energy whose bounds are limited by Planck's constant, a physicalist point of view in tune with the history of that term, but somewhat dissimilar to Leibniz's monads and Russell's neutral monism (see below in this section) [zzz1]. The logos, in modern terms, would be described as that which is represented by the set of mathematical relations among such units. At present, rival monads are assumed for quantum theory and relativity theory, but everyone has faith that ultimately the rival monads will vanish as a better, unifying set of relations is discoveredzzz10. Pluralism is a heresy of Science.
Note the possibility that events in our cosmos can seem unrelated causally -- as we have from spacelike separation under relativity theory. Yet, these days we would not regard these two regions of spacetime as monads because we assume some kind of harmony via the presumed four-dimensional spacetime block or via some other topological object, meaning that scientific monism points to something that transcends ordinary causality.
Hardly anyone these days even contemplates that there could be more than one organizing principle for the all of existence. Physicists are dead certain that there must be -- even if only in an unattainable Platonic sense -- a Theory of Everything, representing a logos that accounts for all change in the cosmos. Underlying this assumption is the notion that the "laws" of physics are constant everywhere in the cosmos.
In my sense of the term, early Greek monists were not always fully monistic, seeing different laws applying to the earth and the high-sky realm. Similarly, although early non-monists posited a cosmos composed of more than one substance or essence, each of which mingled while marching to different drummers, they did not accept that such an eventuality then implied more than one logos. That is to say, each subset of "elements" of the cosmos would require an organizing principle to give the relations among the elements of the subset. To say differently would mean there is no cohesion among things; that is, all would be without form and void.
Properly, monism says that the cosmos is constituted by a single elementary substance. Thus, Cartesian dualism refers to the two cosmos-pervading substances of inert matter and thought. Strictly, though Leibniz is often viewed as a monist, Leibniz's "Monadology" gives a pluralistic system, as each monad is fundamentally different, not interacting with the others (of course one could say that their pre-established harmony set by God implies a higher monism). An example of a true monist is Spinoza, who posits a single all-pervading substance unifying Nature (or, equivalently for him, God).
The pluralist Democritus believed in the atomic theory, whereby all things are composed of basic particles suspended in a void. Yet how are they composed? The coherence required by his theory implies an organizing principle, but that was not obvious at the time. "Spacetime" and mass-energy equivalence were of course unfamiliar ideas. The enigma of human experience, as brought out by Parmenides and ably demonstrated by Zeno, implies a logos, or transcendent organizing principle, to reconcile the fundamental paradoxes of existence. These paradoxes are not resolved by pluralism because a structured world cannot dispense with the idea of coherence.
Let us say we have two independent logoses. That case would mean the two are not subdivisions of a higher logos. So then, the intersection of the sets associated with each logos would not only be null, but there would be no relations controlling interactions between the two different types of elements (or monads). That is to say, if a Type 1 element encounters a Type 2 element, no rule exists as to how they must interact. Hence, they must be essentially invisible to each other. They simply never interact, or, if they do, their interaction must be utterly random, meaning that we would have a tough time with such chaos or that such chaotic interactions are at such a low level or so rare that they are undetectable. So then two such sets would in effect represent non-interacting "parallel universes." As far as a human observer is concerned, the other universe is irrelevant. She or he always must assume a logos. In other words, for a human being, monism is required, although it is possible that some theologies may say otherwise. Leibniz dealt with this issue by saying that his "windowless" monads had been synchronized in advance by God.
In Hegel's view, "If objects are regarded only as self-enclosed totalities, they cannot act on one another. Regarded in this way, they are the same as the monads, which, precisely for that reason, were thought of as having no influence on each other. But the concept of a monad is for just this reason a deficient reflection." [zw11]
As for Descartes' mind-body theory, that also implies what is regarded as an unacceptable dualism. Yet, the duality is even so subsumed by a greater monism, whereby Descartes' God is the logos who hides the relations that must exist between the laws of inert, but motive matter, and the soul, or mind. In any case, if we regard monads as bits of stuff, then we may well fall into the contradiction described above. Moreover, from the perspective of a modern observer, because any relations between the phenomenal world and a purported spirit world are hidden, the the two universes may be taken to be de facto non-intersecting; i.e., assumption of a spirit realm becomes vulnerable to the charge of irrelevancy.
On the other hand -- perhaps in hope of evading the spirit-connoting cosmological anthropic principle -- a number of scientists are quite open to the possibilities of non-interacting "bubble" universes or of a fantastic continual unrolling of some gigantic number of universes in accord with the Everett-De Witt interpretation of quantum theory. That is to say, these scientists are open to the existence of such entities, even though their existence is essentially irrelevant, the idea being that there is no provable interaction between this sub-cosmos and some other. Yet, it would be quite acceptable for theory-guided experimentalists to try to seek at least clues of interactions with another sub-cosmos, even though for historical and cultural reasons it is seen as very bad form to seek clues of existence of a veiled spirit sub-cosmos.
At this juncture we should consider Kant's idea (and Plato's) of the phenomenal versus the noumenal worlds. Because of how our brains process input data into perceptions, we are only familiar, via our senses, with the world of appearances. We can never fully know the "thing in itself" behind its appearance. Moreover, although modern technology and theory may draw the curtain back a tad here and there, there still must always be a medium between one's mind and the "thing in itself." I would go further and argue that we don't even know whether an apparent thing is one-to-one with some noumenal "thing" -- although some sort of noumenal realm is surely implied by our existential necessities. Think of the characters in the film The Matrix not knowing that they were actually living out computer-controlled lucid dreams.
The phenomenal and noumenal worlds represent two sets that do intersect, although we dare not claim they are in one-to-one correspondence. Yet, even now science has made little progress in discovering the set of relations between these two worlds, although the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and "quantum weirdness" have opened some eyes to such an intersection of worlds. It may even be that the phenomenal world is a projection from some "higher" existence. Even so, both worlds must be two sides of the same coin and thus a single logos is required.
Parts of my analysis here are open to the challenge that in general the logos of the monists implied final cause (purpose) and a great intelligence of some sort. Yet such a logos was not construed by the Greek thinkers as implying a God who intervenes in human affairs. Thus, from a human perspective, it is a matter of indifference whether this logos is physical, expressing a mindless natural order, or whether it is a great mind that transcends nature. So then, I believe we are justified in asserting that our world requires a logos, whatever its ultimate essence.
What's the matter, Bert?
Another non-materialist or pseudo-materialist approach to the mind-body problem is neutral monism. In his 1921 book, The Analysis of Mind [zu1], Bertrand Russell adopted this notion after coming to see that his previous dualist philosophy was flawed. Russell's neutral monism says that existence is made up of monads (single basic essences) that can be assembled by perception in a physical sense or can be assembled by perception in a mental sense. This seems to take care of the need to look inside some black box that shows how molecular interactions are transformed into thoughts. Nevertheless, Russell's "heavily qualified" neutral monism has not survived and so materialism/physicalism is these days the only non-religious monistic theory available to replace it. [2c][zzz1]
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, neutral was meant to specify monads that were neither perceptual (as with Leibniz) nor material (as with numerous others). In light of positions taken in his many writings, it is mildly plausible that Russell did not mean to say "neutral monism" but in fact meant "neutral monadism," such that more than one monad could constitute reality (see below: The Scientific Outlook).
Insert added 02.21.2019
That notion, I am now convinced, should not be taken seriously. Rather, I suggest, Russell intended the modifier neutral to imply a monism stripped of any notions of God, religion or the spiritual. In several places over the years, he wrote that he thought philosophers tended to adopt monism as a means of expressing their religious beliefs and sentiments. Thus Russell's off-and-on preference for pluralism. Yet, Russell could not avoid facing up to the point that the mind-body problem could not, it seemed, be resolved in dualistic or pluralistic conceptions of existence. There was nothing for it but to accept that the mind-body problem implied some sort of a unified system of existence. Thus: neutral monism. His later distaste for that term was most likely not a disavowal of the need for unity in existence, but a rejection of any imputation of religious associations the term might prompt. Still, we must note a 1931 relapse into pluralism (discussed below), which has all the earmarks of a (possibly dishonest) propaganda maneuver in a book written as an answer to scientist "mystics."
The Russell of 1921 concedes that "old-fashioned materialism" is debunked by Einstein's general theory of relativity. In fact, says Russell, physics does not assume the existence of matter (hard little objects). "The view that seems to me to reconcile the materialistic tendency of [behaviorist] psychology is the view of William James and the American new realists, according to which the 'stuff' of the world is neither mental nor material, but a 'neutral stuff,' out of which both are constructed." [zu1][ztt2] (Despite this nod to James, Russell was to carry out a longterm feud with James and other pragmatist philosophers.)
Previously, in a 1918 book, Russell shows that he was halt between two opinions concerning monism.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, neutral was meant to specify monads that were neither perceptual (as with Leibniz) nor material (as with numerous others). In light of positions taken in his many writings, it is mildly plausible that Russell did not mean to say "neutral monism" but in fact meant "neutral monadism," such that more than one monad could constitute reality (see below: The Scientific Outlook).
Insert added 02.21.2019
That notion, I am now convinced, should not be taken seriously. Rather, I suggest, Russell intended the modifier neutral to imply a monism stripped of any notions of God, religion or the spiritual. In several places over the years, he wrote that he thought philosophers tended to adopt monism as a means of expressing their religious beliefs and sentiments. Thus Russell's off-and-on preference for pluralism. Yet, Russell could not avoid facing up to the point that the mind-body problem could not, it seemed, be resolved in dualistic or pluralistic conceptions of existence. There was nothing for it but to accept that the mind-body problem implied some sort of a unified system of existence. Thus: neutral monism. His later distaste for that term was most likely not a disavowal of the need for unity in existence, but a rejection of any imputation of religious associations the term might prompt. Still, we must note a 1931 relapse into pluralism (discussed below), which has all the earmarks of a (possibly dishonest) propaganda maneuver in a book written as an answer to scientist "mystics."
The Russell of 1921 concedes that "old-fashioned materialism" is debunked by Einstein's general theory of relativity. In fact, says Russell, physics does not assume the existence of matter (hard little objects). "The view that seems to me to reconcile the materialistic tendency of [behaviorist] psychology is the view of William James and the American new realists, according to which the 'stuff' of the world is neither mental nor material, but a 'neutral stuff,' out of which both are constructed." [zu1][ztt2] (Despite this nod to James, Russell was to carry out a longterm feud with James and other pragmatist philosophers.)
Previously, in a 1918 book, Russell shows that he was halt between two opinions concerning monism.
I have naturally a bias in favor of the theory of neutral monism because it exemplifies Occam’s razor. I always wish to get on in philosophy with the smallest possible apparatus, partly because it diminishes the risk of error, because it is not necessary to deny the entities you do not assert, and therefore you run less risk of error the fewer entities you assume. The other reason – perhaps a somewhat frivolous one – is that every diminution in the number of entities increases the amount of work for mathematical logic to do in building up things that look like the entities you used to assume. Therefore the whole theory of neutral monism is pleasing to me, but I do find so far very great difficulty in believing it.ztt1Yet, despite neutral monism's lure, the Russell of 1918 found it wanting.
I think it is extremely difficult, if you get rid of consciousness altogether, to explain what you mean by such a word as “this,” what it is that makes the absence of impartiality. You would say that in a purely physical world there would be a complete impartiality. All parts of time and all regions of space would seem equally emphatic. But what really happens is that we pick out certain facts, past and future and all that sort of thing; they all radiate out from “this,” and I have not myself seen how one can deal with the notion of “this” on the basis of neutral monism. I do not lay that down dogmatically, only I do not see how it can be done. I shall assume for the rest of this lecture that there are such facts as beliefs and wishes and so forth. It would take me really the whole of my course to go into the question fully. Thus we come back to more purely logical questions from this excursion into psychology, for which I apologize.ztt1
That is to say, Russell revised his previous belief that the monist trend in philosophy originates with religious mystics who wish to systematize their intuitions of oneness with all, a trend which Russell opposed on ground that in philosophy intuition is inferior to reasoning.[zu1a]
In support of Russell's view, we note that the British Hegelian J.M.E. McTaggart, in a discussion of the definition of "God," underscored the monist position of religiously oriented philosophers.[zt1]
The usage [of the term "God"] in philosophy, however, is sometimes different from the usage in theology. In philosophy we have high authority including Spinoza and Hegel for a different practice. God is frequently defined by philosophers as the true reality, of whatever nature that reality may be, provided only that it possesses some sort of unity, and is not a mere chaos. If the word is used in this way, every person, except absolute sceptics or the most extreme pluralists, must be said to believe that a God exists. The question of the existence of God, on this definition, becomes very trivial. The important question is not whether there is a God, but what sort of nature he, or it, possesses.
If the usage of theology and philosophy differ, which ought to give way? It seems to me that it should be philosophy.
From the atheist McTaggart's remarks, one can see the basis for the oft-repeated claim that Spinoza and Hegel were de facto atheists. J.N. Findlay, for example, says that despite cloaking himself in "orthodox-sounding language," Hegel saw theism "in all its forms as an imaginative distortion of final truth."[zn1]
As late as 1918, Russell, inspired by his former student Ludwig Wittgenstein, favored an approach to philosophy that was "atomistic, as opposed to the monistic logic of the people who more or less follow Hegel." Specifically, "When I say that my logic is atomistic, I mean that I share the common-sense belief that there are many separate things; I do not regard the apparent multiplicity of the world as consisting merely in phases and unreal divisions of a single indivisible Reality."[zu2]
James, like the younger Russell, was a foe of monism, preferring a pluralistic universe. James's pluralism was so "radical" it lacked coherence, being a "turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility." [zzz2]
By 1931, it seems, Russell had reverted to a Jamesian pluralism. I am not altogether certain whether there was an inconsistency in his thinking or whether he had consciously ditched his monism -- but see below; evidently Russell's intention was to refute the pro-Deist conclusions of the philosopher-scientists Arthur Eddington and James Jeans. It is noteworthy that Whitehead once quipped that Russell was a Platonic dialog with himself.[zzz13])
In The Scientific Outlook, Russell writes,
As late as 1918, Russell, inspired by his former student Ludwig Wittgenstein, favored an approach to philosophy that was "atomistic, as opposed to the monistic logic of the people who more or less follow Hegel." Specifically, "When I say that my logic is atomistic, I mean that I share the common-sense belief that there are many separate things; I do not regard the apparent multiplicity of the world as consisting merely in phases and unreal divisions of a single indivisible Reality."[zu2]
James, like the younger Russell, was a foe of monism, preferring a pluralistic universe. James's pluralism was so "radical" it lacked coherence, being a "turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility." [zzz2]
By 1931, it seems, Russell had reverted to a Jamesian pluralism. I am not altogether certain whether there was an inconsistency in his thinking or whether he had consciously ditched his monism -- but see below; evidently Russell's intention was to refute the pro-Deist conclusions of the philosopher-scientists Arthur Eddington and James Jeans. It is noteworthy that Whitehead once quipped that Russell was a Platonic dialog with himself.[zzz13])
In The Scientific Outlook, Russell writes,
Academic philosophers, ever since the time of Parmenides, have believed that the world is a unity. This view has been taken over from them by clergymen and journalists, and its acceptance has been considered the touchstone of wisdom. The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that this is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love. Indeed, there is little but prejudice and habit to be said for the view that there is a world at all.”[zzz12]
In that same 1931 book, Russell denounces the use of what today is called quantum weirdness to justify theological notions, taking particular aim at Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, whom he accused of harking back to old philosophical ideas -- implying the scientists were outside their specialty. The book, written for educated laymen, drops a hint of Russell's "neutral monism" without using that phrase.
The dualism of mind and matter is out of date: matter has become more like mind, and mind has become more like matter, than seemed possible at an earlier stage of science. One is led to suppose that what really exists is something intermediate between the billiard-balls of old-fashioned materialism and the soul of old-fashioned psychology. [zzz20]
In addition, the philosopher argued, this intermediate region is composed of mind/matter events somewhat akin to the idea of Whitehead, from whom he obtained that perspective.
Events and all that world stuff
Three decades later, Russell, like Whitehead, still speaks of reality as being composed of events, as opposed to the spatial points and temporal instants of standard physics. Also like Whitehead, Russell relates events to perception.
Three key ideas, he says, summarize his stance:
Events and all that world stuff
Three decades later, Russell, like Whitehead, still speaks of reality as being composed of events, as opposed to the spatial points and temporal instants of standard physics. Also like Whitehead, Russell relates events to perception.
Three key ideas, he says, summarize his stance:
The first is that the entities that occur in mathematical physics are not part of the stuff of the world, but are constructions composed of events and taken as units for the convenience of the mathematician. The second is that the whole of what we perceive without inference belongs to our private world. In this respect, I agree with Berkeley. The starry heaven that we know in visual sensation is inside us. The external starry heaven that we believe in is inferred. The third point is that the causal lines that enable us to be aware of a diversity of objects, though there are some lines everywhere, are apt to peter out like rivers in the sand. That is why we do not at all times perceive everything.[zzz14]
Following a lengthy discourse, Russell claims that "the stuff of the world consists of things like whiteness, rather than objects having the property of being white," and adds that this conclusion requires the "rejection of minds and bits of matter as the stuff out of which the world is built." [zzz14]
In that 1959 book, Russell outlines "the theory which is called 'Neutral Monism' -- as if he is distancing himself from the term he had used in The Analysis of Matter, while sticking to the theory's essentials. If one discards the "subject" and "consciousness," but only views things functionally, it "becomes possible to regard both a mind and a piece of matter as logical constructions formed out of materials not differing vitally and sometimes actually identical." Russell adds, "It became possible to think that what the physiologist regards as matter in the brain is actually composed of thoughts and feelings, and that the difference between mind and matter is merely one of arrangement."
In another book published in 1959, Russell writes that William James "did not go on to work out the full implications of his theory" against consciousness, "but those who followed his suggestion came to replace the old dualistic theories by a 'neutral monism,' which states that there is only one kind of basic stuff in the world." Russell does not draw attention to his own period as a neutral monist.[zt2]
Russell went on to explore the ramifications of this, to use my term, multiplex view in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.[zzz15]
Why, you say, so much fuss about Russell's efforts to see beyond the veil into the mystery of human existence? After all, this essay is supposed to be a critique of Ryle, not Russell. I reply that it seems a bit doubtful that Ryle could have ever solved the alleged mind-body problem, given the earnest efforts of a philosopher of Russell's stature.
Russell distinguishes four main types of theory pertaining to truth or some equivalent idea. They are, in turn, the theory that:
In that 1959 book, Russell outlines "the theory which is called 'Neutral Monism' -- as if he is distancing himself from the term he had used in The Analysis of Matter, while sticking to the theory's essentials. If one discards the "subject" and "consciousness," but only views things functionally, it "becomes possible to regard both a mind and a piece of matter as logical constructions formed out of materials not differing vitally and sometimes actually identical." Russell adds, "It became possible to think that what the physiologist regards as matter in the brain is actually composed of thoughts and feelings, and that the difference between mind and matter is merely one of arrangement."
In another book published in 1959, Russell writes that William James "did not go on to work out the full implications of his theory" against consciousness, "but those who followed his suggestion came to replace the old dualistic theories by a 'neutral monism,' which states that there is only one kind of basic stuff in the world." Russell does not draw attention to his own period as a neutral monist.[zt2]
Russell went on to explore the ramifications of this, to use my term, multiplex view in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.[zzz15]
Why, you say, so much fuss about Russell's efforts to see beyond the veil into the mystery of human existence? After all, this essay is supposed to be a critique of Ryle, not Russell. I reply that it seems a bit doubtful that Ryle could have ever solved the alleged mind-body problem, given the earnest efforts of a philosopher of Russell's stature.
Russell distinguishes four main types of theory pertaining to truth or some equivalent idea. They are, in turn, the theory that:
1. Substitutes warranted assertibility for truth, as favored by John Dewey and the pragmatists.
2. Substitutes probability for truth, as favored by Hans Reichenbach.
3. Defines truth as coherence, as favored by "Hegelians and certain logical positivists."
4. Is called by Russell the correspondence theory of truth, according to which the truth of basic propositions depends on their relation to some occurrence, and the truth of other propositions depends on their syntactical relations to basic propositions.
This last item, Russell divides into two forms, the epistemological theory, which rejects the absolute law of the excluded middle
(that traditional rule says that no middle truth value such as indeterminate is permitted), and the logical theory, which accepts it.
So, in 1938 the epistemological theory (after the intuitionist mathematical philosopher L.E.J. Brouwer) says that the assertion "There is a mountain on the dark side of the moon" has no truth value, as, at that time, there was no way to determine the truth of that proposition. The logical theory would say that, regardless of verifiability, the statement was either true or false.
(The logical theory was so named because logicians tend to accept the exclusion law, not because the epistemological theory was less worthy of metaphysical consideration.)
After a lengthy analysis, Russell comes out in favor of the logical theory, not on ground that it could be definitively established, but on ground that, to him, it seemed the most inherently reasonable. After all, he says, no one really believes pure empiricism.
It may be wondered whether Russell, by adopting the logical theory, hasn't committed himself to a logos and its associated monism. In various logic-based formal systems, the theory is based on a set of axioms (which I would say is equivalent to the logos) which is permitted no contradictions in derived statements. As Russell well knows, one contradiction springing from axioms falsifies the theory. Thus, a physical theory of the cosmos must be coherent. Further, should we not assume that Russell's percepto-physical theory of existence must be coherent, with undecidable assertions still holding a Platonic truth value "laid up in heaven"? In other words, to my mind, a pluralistic universe should obey the Brouwerian notion of rejection of the law of excluded middle.
To be clear, we note that by his term coherence theory of truth, Russell is referring to those who advocate some formal system that only requires consistency, as opposed to its terms having a basis in perceived facts, where facts is an axiomatic term that covers bits of reality and formal logical assertions. The correspondence theory requires truths to correspond to facts -- but does it require universe-wide formal consistency? Russell is unclear on this point, and yet, as we have noted, one can imagine two or more "fact-based" monistic systems, though it is hard to conceive how they could relate.q1
Even so, Russell's diffidence on neutral monism, I suggest, might be justified by his observation that entropy, as bolstered by quantum indeterminacy, pushes the arrow of time in one direction.[zzz14] That is to say, if causality/determinism is not complete, then the cosmos might lack full coherence and so be pluralistic.
The puzzle of Russell's shifts may have to do with the philosopher's singular notion of substance. The universal substance is not matter, the monist Russell argues, but small events, whereby a point on a relativistic spacetime diagram represents an event (though Russell says his system requires an event to have a minimum finite size). Yet upon reviewing Russell's chapter "Neutral Monism and Physics," [2ee] I come away uncertain as to what precisely the philosopher means by monism. In another chapter, in fact, he says that for him substance need not be indestructible [2ee], an idea that does indeed suggest a non-absolute monism, leaving him free to argue for pluralism in "mental" relations, whereby Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason need not hold: brute isolated truths are possible. (Elsewhere he sees the notion of substance as outdated.) [zt3]
After "fruitful" discussions with Carnap in 1938-1939, Russell notes that he was "as regards to method, more in sympathy with the logical positivists than with any other existing school," adding: "I differ from them, however, in attaching more importance than they do to the work of Berkeley and Hume." [zzz15]
Despite this nod to civility, Russell controverts Carnap on the underlying ideas behind his concept of verifiability. "Verification confirms the more doubtful by means of the less doubtful, and is therefore inapplicable to the least doubtful, viz. judgments of perception."[zzz15]
Even on so basic a notion as thing, Russell counters Carnap:After a lengthy analysis, Russell comes out in favor of the logical theory, not on ground that it could be definitively established, but on ground that, to him, it seemed the most inherently reasonable. After all, he says, no one really believes pure empiricism.
It may be wondered whether Russell, by adopting the logical theory, hasn't committed himself to a logos and its associated monism. In various logic-based formal systems, the theory is based on a set of axioms (which I would say is equivalent to the logos) which is permitted no contradictions in derived statements. As Russell well knows, one contradiction springing from axioms falsifies the theory. Thus, a physical theory of the cosmos must be coherent. Further, should we not assume that Russell's percepto-physical theory of existence must be coherent, with undecidable assertions still holding a Platonic truth value "laid up in heaven"? In other words, to my mind, a pluralistic universe should obey the Brouwerian notion of rejection of the law of excluded middle.
To be clear, we note that by his term coherence theory of truth, Russell is referring to those who advocate some formal system that only requires consistency, as opposed to its terms having a basis in perceived facts, where facts is an axiomatic term that covers bits of reality and formal logical assertions. The correspondence theory requires truths to correspond to facts -- but does it require universe-wide formal consistency? Russell is unclear on this point, and yet, as we have noted, one can imagine two or more "fact-based" monistic systems, though it is hard to conceive how they could relate.q1
Even so, Russell's diffidence on neutral monism, I suggest, might be justified by his observation that entropy, as bolstered by quantum indeterminacy, pushes the arrow of time in one direction.[zzz14] That is to say, if causality/determinism is not complete, then the cosmos might lack full coherence and so be pluralistic.
The puzzle of Russell's shifts may have to do with the philosopher's singular notion of substance. The universal substance is not matter, the monist Russell argues, but small events, whereby a point on a relativistic spacetime diagram represents an event (though Russell says his system requires an event to have a minimum finite size). Yet upon reviewing Russell's chapter "Neutral Monism and Physics," [2ee] I come away uncertain as to what precisely the philosopher means by monism. In another chapter, in fact, he says that for him substance need not be indestructible [2ee], an idea that does indeed suggest a non-absolute monism, leaving him free to argue for pluralism in "mental" relations, whereby Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason need not hold: brute isolated truths are possible. (Elsewhere he sees the notion of substance as outdated.) [zt3]
After "fruitful" discussions with Carnap in 1938-1939, Russell notes that he was "as regards to method, more in sympathy with the logical positivists than with any other existing school," adding: "I differ from them, however, in attaching more importance than they do to the work of Berkeley and Hume." [zzz15]
Despite this nod to civility, Russell controverts Carnap on the underlying ideas behind his concept of verifiability. "Verification confirms the more doubtful by means of the less doubtful, and is therefore inapplicable to the least doubtful, viz. judgments of perception."[zzz15]
It is because I regard single observations as supplying our factual premisses that I cannot admit, in the statement of such premisses, the notion of thing, which involves some degree of persistence, and can, therefore, only be derived from a plurality of observations. The view of Carnap, which allows the concept of thing in the statement of factual premisses, seems to me to ignore Berkeley and Hume, not to say Heraclitus. [zzz15]
Interestingly, Ryle's attack on dualism mirrors James's 1904 assault on the concept of consciousness (which Ryle treats as equivalent, or nearly so, to mind).
Pragmatist James threw down the gauntlet and urged that the concept of consciousness be discarded, on grounds that at bottom it implied a mere ghost. Thoughts, on the other hand, do exist but the word consciousness does not stand for an entity but rather for a function. Yet, it should be recognized that James's resolution of the dualism problem (not to be confused with Jamesian pluralism) went farther than Ryle's reinterpretation of basic notions of philosophy. [zzv1]
"My thesis is," James says, "that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known."
Moreover, James emphasizes, "Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition." Russell picked up on James's ideas, which he placed under the umbrella term neutral monism. (It is quite evident that James's 1904 solution of the dualism problem appears to contradict his radical anti-monism views, which in 1908 James said he had held for two decades.)
Be that as it may, Russell's view of physicalism may be gathered from this statement in his book The Analysis of Matter: "It is obvious that a man who can see can see things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not part of physics." [2ee]
Morris Weitz goes on to note Russell's observation that the quantum behavior of the electron and its implications for causality "interposes a veto upon materialistic dogmatism." This is quite a shrewd point, considering that quantum theory had not yet been put in proper order by Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Dirac. Even now, scientists avert their gaze from a related point made by Russell that it is possible that "the minute phenomena of the brain which make all the difference to mental phenomena belong to the region where physical laws no longer determine definitely what must happen." This remark came several years before Schroedinger proposed his cat-in-the-box thought experiment. [2e]
Physics, and its usual correlate, naive realism (things are what they seem to be "out there") leads to a contradiction, Russell points out. "Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false." [zzz15]
A materialist form of monism was favored by J.B.S. Haldane, one of the originators of the modern synthesis that was said to have reconciled the Darwinian natural selection model of evolution with the Mendelian theory of heritable traits. The noted British socialist and atheist was opposed to simplistic materialism as a basis for the understanding of the world. In his The Causes of Evolution (Longmans, Green 1932) he wrote that his "main prejudice is in favor of monism," although he believed that an updated materialism, along with absolute idealism and Russell's neutral monism, was monistic. Haldane quotes Lenin to argue that updated versions of materialism had become "distinctly idealistic."
Haldane thought that scientific advances had shown that plainly physical phenomena could be interpreted as mind-like phenomena -- thus, his monism. He wrote that "monism has the advantage that if it is wrong it will ultimately lead to self-contradiction, whereas dualistic systems, which purport to give a less complete account of the world, are therefore less susceptible to disproof." It is not apparent whether Haldane really meant monism as opposed to monadism.
Another biology-minded thinker and atheist, Thomas Nagel, sees a form of neutral monism, yet to be developed, as a way out of the contradictions evident to him in the standard materialist worldview. [2xz] Nagel has expressed skepticism that natural selection accounts for the human mind.
My view is that what Russell and others are suggesting is that we think of a multiplex coding of the stuff of existence. That is to say, the stuff's information is encrypted and susceptible to being decoded with two distinct codes (analogous to Epicurus's two types of atoms). Code A will yield information in a clearly physical sense. Code B in an obviously mental sense. How this would relate to the quantum measurement problem is something for monists to come to terms with.
Neither Russell nor Whitehead were the first to propose such a multiplex view. Decades earlier Schopenhauer had advocated a similar idea. "I say that between the act of will and the bodily action there is no causal connection whatever; on the contrary, the two are directly one and the same thing perceived in a double way, namely in self-consciousness or the inner sense as an act of will, and simultaneously in external brain-perception as bodily action."[zw3]
Incidentally, Russell's view of Hegel as an idealist who thought that everything "is in the mind'" was in error, says Robert Solomon. In "an ironic twist," Russell mischaracterized Hegel's view, which held for a "dual-aspect" theory of consciousness, not unlike Russell's own theory.[zw4][zw9]
Russell however makes no such error in his late-career Wisdom of the West, which contains an acute discussion of Hegel's merits and demerits.[zt2]
Pragmatist James threw down the gauntlet and urged that the concept of consciousness be discarded, on grounds that at bottom it implied a mere ghost. Thoughts, on the other hand, do exist but the word consciousness does not stand for an entity but rather for a function. Yet, it should be recognized that James's resolution of the dualism problem (not to be confused with Jamesian pluralism) went farther than Ryle's reinterpretation of basic notions of philosophy. [zzv1]
"My thesis is," James says, "that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known."
Moreover, James emphasizes, "Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition." Russell picked up on James's ideas, which he placed under the umbrella term neutral monism. (It is quite evident that James's 1904 solution of the dualism problem appears to contradict his radical anti-monism views, which in 1908 James said he had held for two decades.)
Be that as it may, Russell's view of physicalism may be gathered from this statement in his book The Analysis of Matter: "It is obvious that a man who can see can see things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not part of physics." [2ee]
Morris Weitz goes on to note Russell's observation that the quantum behavior of the electron and its implications for causality "interposes a veto upon materialistic dogmatism." This is quite a shrewd point, considering that quantum theory had not yet been put in proper order by Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Dirac. Even now, scientists avert their gaze from a related point made by Russell that it is possible that "the minute phenomena of the brain which make all the difference to mental phenomena belong to the region where physical laws no longer determine definitely what must happen." This remark came several years before Schroedinger proposed his cat-in-the-box thought experiment. [2e]
Physics, and its usual correlate, naive realism (things are what they seem to be "out there") leads to a contradiction, Russell points out. "Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false." [zzz15]
A materialist form of monism was favored by J.B.S. Haldane, one of the originators of the modern synthesis that was said to have reconciled the Darwinian natural selection model of evolution with the Mendelian theory of heritable traits. The noted British socialist and atheist was opposed to simplistic materialism as a basis for the understanding of the world. In his The Causes of Evolution (Longmans, Green 1932) he wrote that his "main prejudice is in favor of monism," although he believed that an updated materialism, along with absolute idealism and Russell's neutral monism, was monistic. Haldane quotes Lenin to argue that updated versions of materialism had become "distinctly idealistic."
Haldane thought that scientific advances had shown that plainly physical phenomena could be interpreted as mind-like phenomena -- thus, his monism. He wrote that "monism has the advantage that if it is wrong it will ultimately lead to self-contradiction, whereas dualistic systems, which purport to give a less complete account of the world, are therefore less susceptible to disproof." It is not apparent whether Haldane really meant monism as opposed to monadism.
Another biology-minded thinker and atheist, Thomas Nagel, sees a form of neutral monism, yet to be developed, as a way out of the contradictions evident to him in the standard materialist worldview. [2xz] Nagel has expressed skepticism that natural selection accounts for the human mind.
Why not take the development of the human intellect as a probable counterexample to the law that natural selection explains everything, instead of forcing it under the law with improbable speculations unsupported by evidence? ...In any case, the latter-day neutral monists were picking up on a theme laid down by Epicurus, much of whose philosophy is reflected in modern atheistical views. Epicurus taught that the world and everything in it, including gods, were material objects composed of colliding atoms. Further, human bodies are composed of heavy atoms, whereas lighter, swifter atoms account for sensation and thinking -- thus his idea that humans are motivated by the pleasure principle, rather than by divine light. [zzm1]
What, I will be asked, is my alternative? Creationism? The answer is I don't have one, and I don't need one in order to reject all existing proposals as improbable. One should not assume that the truth about this matter has already been conceived of -- or hold onto a view just because no one can come up with a better alternative. Belief isn't like action. One doesn't have to believe anything, and to believe nothing is not to believe something.QW1
My view is that what Russell and others are suggesting is that we think of a multiplex coding of the stuff of existence. That is to say, the stuff's information is encrypted and susceptible to being decoded with two distinct codes (analogous to Epicurus's two types of atoms). Code A will yield information in a clearly physical sense. Code B in an obviously mental sense. How this would relate to the quantum measurement problem is something for monists to come to terms with.
Neither Russell nor Whitehead were the first to propose such a multiplex view. Decades earlier Schopenhauer had advocated a similar idea. "I say that between the act of will and the bodily action there is no causal connection whatever; on the contrary, the two are directly one and the same thing perceived in a double way, namely in self-consciousness or the inner sense as an act of will, and simultaneously in external brain-perception as bodily action."[zw3]
Incidentally, Russell's view of Hegel as an idealist who thought that everything "is in the mind'" was in error, says Robert Solomon. In "an ironic twist," Russell mischaracterized Hegel's view, which held for a "dual-aspect" theory of consciousness, not unlike Russell's own theory.[zw4][zw9]
Russell however makes no such error in his late-career Wisdom of the West, which contains an acute discussion of Hegel's merits and demerits.[zt2]
Mind your mindless mind
Now the question is, how does Ryle go about debunking the myth of the ghost in the machine? People who believe in something called a mind are making a category mistake, as in asking which member of a rugby team covers "team spirit." Team spirit is not a thing, but a word that tells about a process that emerges from the various members.[zxv1]
And yet, we shall see that Ryle makes a very serious "category mistake" (a term he made popular [1xx]) by having an infirm grasp of the notions of mechanism, determinism and free will.
(At this point, a technicality: Philosophical systems have traditionally been broken down into categories, which are the highest, most inclusive classes of areas of contemplation. The idea that such systematization is realistic has become controversial, as described here:
(On categories
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/categories/
(By category, Ryle seems to mean simply class or set, although one might agree that the concepts he addresses tend to fall under the general notion of philosophical category. At one point, the journalist Bryan Magee asked Ryle what his categories were, but Ryle's answer focused on the importance of what he meant by category error while not giving any particular categories.[zw7])
Well then, what is the Cartesian category mistake? Ryle uses Gibbon's Decline and Fall for an illustration. It may be that Gibbon assiduously followed the rules of English grammar in the composition of this work, but those rules did not ordain what he would write about. Two different sorts of causes may coexist. Similarly, argues Ryle, "The discoveries of physical science no more rule out life, sentience, purpose or intelligence from presence in the world than do the rules of grammar say anything about style or logic." If Ryle were writing today, he might say that the basic physical causes within the brain do not mean we cannot talk of higher-level causes, as today's cognitive experts do in fact talk.
So one category mistake, we are left to infer, is the assumption that non-physical process is required for mental activity. But then we have this: "Men are not machines, not even ghost-ridden machines. They are men -- a tautology worth remembering." When Ryle "solves" the mind-body dualism by proclaiming that man is not a machine -- is not some sort of Newtonian clockwork -- we quickly see that he has not properly defined the word "machine." A broad interpretation of the term, I suggest, is that of a dynamical system that maintains homeostasis for a period of time using various negative feedback "control" subsystems. Of course such terminology was rare in his day; still, he did not come up with an equivalent definition. If, as it is supposed, a man comes into existence and lives only as a result of physical forces, his body -- including his brain -- is fairly defined as belonging to the class called "machine." The brain in this conception is what today we would describe as an onboard computer directing actions of the body's subsystems.
And if Ryle is wrong on this point (although in a time before most academics had even heard of computers or "electronic brains"), why should we consider the remainder of his argument trustworthy -- as he lays out for us something that nearly everyone but he took to be a form of behaviorism?
The debt owed by Ryle to the behaviorist school of psychology is apparent in the words of John B. Watson: [zzw1]
And yet, we shall see that Ryle makes a very serious "category mistake" (a term he made popular [1xx]) by having an infirm grasp of the notions of mechanism, determinism and free will.
(At this point, a technicality: Philosophical systems have traditionally been broken down into categories, which are the highest, most inclusive classes of areas of contemplation. The idea that such systematization is realistic has become controversial, as described here:
(On categories
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/categories/
(By category, Ryle seems to mean simply class or set, although one might agree that the concepts he addresses tend to fall under the general notion of philosophical category. At one point, the journalist Bryan Magee asked Ryle what his categories were, but Ryle's answer focused on the importance of what he meant by category error while not giving any particular categories.[zw7])
Well then, what is the Cartesian category mistake? Ryle uses Gibbon's Decline and Fall for an illustration. It may be that Gibbon assiduously followed the rules of English grammar in the composition of this work, but those rules did not ordain what he would write about. Two different sorts of causes may coexist. Similarly, argues Ryle, "The discoveries of physical science no more rule out life, sentience, purpose or intelligence from presence in the world than do the rules of grammar say anything about style or logic." If Ryle were writing today, he might say that the basic physical causes within the brain do not mean we cannot talk of higher-level causes, as today's cognitive experts do in fact talk.
So one category mistake, we are left to infer, is the assumption that non-physical process is required for mental activity. But then we have this: "Men are not machines, not even ghost-ridden machines. They are men -- a tautology worth remembering." When Ryle "solves" the mind-body dualism by proclaiming that man is not a machine -- is not some sort of Newtonian clockwork -- we quickly see that he has not properly defined the word "machine." A broad interpretation of the term, I suggest, is that of a dynamical system that maintains homeostasis for a period of time using various negative feedback "control" subsystems. Of course such terminology was rare in his day; still, he did not come up with an equivalent definition. If, as it is supposed, a man comes into existence and lives only as a result of physical forces, his body -- including his brain -- is fairly defined as belonging to the class called "machine." The brain in this conception is what today we would describe as an onboard computer directing actions of the body's subsystems.
And if Ryle is wrong on this point (although in a time before most academics had even heard of computers or "electronic brains"), why should we consider the remainder of his argument trustworthy -- as he lays out for us something that nearly everyone but he took to be a form of behaviorism?
The debt owed by Ryle to the behaviorist school of psychology is apparent in the words of John B. Watson: [zzw1]
The Freudians have made more or less of a "metaphysical entity" out of the censor. They suppose that when wishes are repressed they are repressed into the "unconscious," and that this mysterious censor stands at the trapdoor lying between the conscious and the unconscious. Many of us do not believe in a world of the unconscious (a few of us even have grave doubts about the usefulness of the term consciousness), hence we try to explain censorship along ordinary biological lines. We believe that one group of habits can "down'" another group of habits -- or instincts. In this case our ordinary system of habits -- those we call expressive of our '"real selves'"Moreover,
-- inhibit or quench (keep inactive or partially inactive) those habits and instinctive tendencies which belong largely in the past.
It is among these frustrated impulses that I would find the biological basis of the unfulfilled wish. Such 'wishes' need never have been 'conscious,' and need never have been suppressed into Freud's realm of the unconscious. It may be inferred from this that there is no particular reason for applying the term 'wish' to such tendencies.
Much of Ryle's philosophy is strongly prefigured by Russell, who incorporated James's and Watson's views into his 1921 treatise on the concept of mind.[zu1]
Indeed, Ryle's theory has come to fall under such rubrics as logical, analytical or conceptual behaviorism. Yet, is it really safe to ignore what goes on between the ears?
Notes one text: "Ryle's behaviorism presumes that we can explain everything there is about mental events by looking solely at sensory input and behavioral output." Hoping to himself avoid falling into a category mistake, the text says, "Ryle ignores everything that takes place between the input and output." [1xya]
Thomas Nagel sums up Ryle (and others) thus:
Indeed, Ryle's theory has come to fall under such rubrics as logical, analytical or conceptual behaviorism. Yet, is it really safe to ignore what goes on between the ears?
Notes one text: "Ryle's behaviorism presumes that we can explain everything there is about mental events by looking solely at sensory input and behavioral output." Hoping to himself avoid falling into a category mistake, the text says, "Ryle ignores everything that takes place between the input and output." [1xya]
Thomas Nagel sums up Ryle (and others) thus:
One strategy for putting the mental into the physical world picture is conceptual behaviorism, offered as an analysis of the real nature of mental concepts. This was tried in several versions. Mental phenomena were identified variously with behavior, behavioral dispositions, or forms of behavioral organization. In another version, associated with Ryle and inspired by Wittgenstein, mental phenomena were not identified with anything, either physical or nonphysical; the names of mental states and processes were said not to be referring expressions. Instead, mental concepts were explained in terms of their observable behavioral conditions of application -- behavioral criteria or assertability conditions rather than behavioral truth conditions. [2xz]
Bryan Magee, who knew Ryle, writes, "Gilbert Ryle was a person of life-enhancing intellectual brilliance, but he had no inner life worth speaking of," adding that this deficit "was a standing joke among his friends."[zw1]
At one point in an interview by Magee, Ryle bristled: "What I want to do is to throw a brick at you for saying 'inside'." So-called "inner life" is no different from "exterior life," Ryle insisted. Things that one says internally, for example, can just as well be said aloud. It is here that we see Ryle attempting to abolish any mystery by insisting that purported inner life is just another worldly phenomenon.
When Pythagorus was working on the Pythagorean theorem, he was in fact talking to himself, with such sentences as, "The square on this side plus the square on that side would not equal the square on this third side." Ryle argued, "We hanker to say that besides, the noises, the words, phrases etc. that he produces... there is something else that Pythagorus is doing as well," such as trying to solve a problem.[zw7] But, if Pythagorus stopped verbalizing to himself, he would no longer be working on the problem, which will have vanished. One wonders, however, what goes on between sentences that prods the thinker to go from one sentence/idea to the next. It seems that part of thinking must be non-verbal.
Be that as it may, let us attempt to be charitable, and grant that Ryle meant that physics involves more than billiard balls or, that is to say, more than gravity plus Newton's laws of motion. We can surmise that Ryle objected to Hobbes's mechanistic view of man on grounds that Hobbes saw a human as a Newtonian clockwork. Yet, there is more to the cosmos than Newtonian (really, Laplacian) clockworks. Most of the universe, in Ryle's view, is composed of non-machine, non-clockwork systems, such as the systems of organic life.
Agreed. This is certainly so -- especially if we mean that Newtonian clockworks do not include the electrodynamics of Faraday and Maxwell (to say nothing of 20th Century physics).
So, to be fair, one may be rid of the "bogy" of (Hobbesian) mechanics by observing that humans are not ruled by mechanics. Yet they do follow some organic model of physical law. If this sounds suspect, you are on your toes. True, Ryle does not use the phrase "organic model of physical law," but that is certainly what he means. So we now are faced with one of those mysterious "occult" processes he detests so much. But that is not all. Ryle would have us realize that most phenomena in the cosmos are non-mechanical and aperiodic. I take it that he means that aperiodic systems are perforce non-mechanical. So what he really means is the syllogism: nonlinear systems are not machines, a human is a nonlinear system, therefore a human is not a machine. (The word physicalism is irrelevant here, as Ryle does not resort to it in Concept.)
Hence we are left to assume that as there is no machine, there is no need for a ghostly pilot.
Ryle is taken to task in a book by the philosopher Karl Popper.[q2]
"Materialists have welcomed [Concept] as expounding their creed," Popper writes. "Yet Ryle is decidedly not a materialist (in the sense of the principle of physicalism). Of course, he is no dualist, but he is definitely not a physicalist or a monist." How so? Popper spotlights this assertion by Ryle: "Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to being a ghost in the machine ... There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man."
So then, Popper remarks, "The quesion arises, what does Ryle wish to deny when he says that man is not a 'ghost in a machine'? If it is his intention to deny the view of Homer according to whom the psyche -- a shade resembling the body -- survives the body, one could not object. But it was Descartes who most clearly rejected this semi-materialist view of human consciousness; and Ryle calls the myth which he rejects the 'Cartesian myth'."
In a footnote, Popper writes, "The myth, as others have also remarked, is hardly to be ascribed to Descartes. It is, if anything, a popular ancient legend, rather than a philosophical and 'fairly new fangled legend,' as Ryle ... calls it."
Popper goes on to argue that though it looks as if Ryle attempted to outlaw consciousness, he hadn't succeeded because he let slip in references to "my" sensations and feelings.
At one point in an interview by Magee, Ryle bristled: "What I want to do is to throw a brick at you for saying 'inside'." So-called "inner life" is no different from "exterior life," Ryle insisted. Things that one says internally, for example, can just as well be said aloud. It is here that we see Ryle attempting to abolish any mystery by insisting that purported inner life is just another worldly phenomenon.
When Pythagorus was working on the Pythagorean theorem, he was in fact talking to himself, with such sentences as, "The square on this side plus the square on that side would not equal the square on this third side." Ryle argued, "We hanker to say that besides, the noises, the words, phrases etc. that he produces... there is something else that Pythagorus is doing as well," such as trying to solve a problem.[zw7] But, if Pythagorus stopped verbalizing to himself, he would no longer be working on the problem, which will have vanished. One wonders, however, what goes on between sentences that prods the thinker to go from one sentence/idea to the next. It seems that part of thinking must be non-verbal.
Be that as it may, let us attempt to be charitable, and grant that Ryle meant that physics involves more than billiard balls or, that is to say, more than gravity plus Newton's laws of motion. We can surmise that Ryle objected to Hobbes's mechanistic view of man on grounds that Hobbes saw a human as a Newtonian clockwork. Yet, there is more to the cosmos than Newtonian (really, Laplacian) clockworks. Most of the universe, in Ryle's view, is composed of non-machine, non-clockwork systems, such as the systems of organic life.
Agreed. This is certainly so -- especially if we mean that Newtonian clockworks do not include the electrodynamics of Faraday and Maxwell (to say nothing of 20th Century physics).
So, to be fair, one may be rid of the "bogy" of (Hobbesian) mechanics by observing that humans are not ruled by mechanics. Yet they do follow some organic model of physical law. If this sounds suspect, you are on your toes. True, Ryle does not use the phrase "organic model of physical law," but that is certainly what he means. So we now are faced with one of those mysterious "occult" processes he detests so much. But that is not all. Ryle would have us realize that most phenomena in the cosmos are non-mechanical and aperiodic. I take it that he means that aperiodic systems are perforce non-mechanical. So what he really means is the syllogism: nonlinear systems are not machines, a human is a nonlinear system, therefore a human is not a machine. (The word physicalism is irrelevant here, as Ryle does not resort to it in Concept.)
Hence we are left to assume that as there is no machine, there is no need for a ghostly pilot.
Ryle is taken to task in a book by the philosopher Karl Popper.[q2]
"Materialists have welcomed [Concept] as expounding their creed," Popper writes. "Yet Ryle is decidedly not a materialist (in the sense of the principle of physicalism). Of course, he is no dualist, but he is definitely not a physicalist or a monist." How so? Popper spotlights this assertion by Ryle: "Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to being a ghost in the machine ... There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man."
So then, Popper remarks, "The quesion arises, what does Ryle wish to deny when he says that man is not a 'ghost in a machine'? If it is his intention to deny the view of Homer according to whom the psyche -- a shade resembling the body -- survives the body, one could not object. But it was Descartes who most clearly rejected this semi-materialist view of human consciousness; and Ryle calls the myth which he rejects the 'Cartesian myth'."
In a footnote, Popper writes, "The myth, as others have also remarked, is hardly to be ascribed to Descartes. It is, if anything, a popular ancient legend, rather than a philosophical and 'fairly new fangled legend,' as Ryle ... calls it."
Popper goes on to argue that though it looks as if Ryle attempted to outlaw consciousness, he hadn't succeeded because he let slip in references to "my" sensations and feelings.
Get down and bogy
In other words, Ryle is saying we are not robots -- because, one must infer, of non-linearity. Granted, Ryle shows no familiarity with the concept of non-linear dynamics (as in non-linear differential equations) and while it is true that this field of study did not become well known until the chaos craze of the 1970s, Ryle's spurning of routine mathematics and science does him a disservice. Moreover, as would be expected of a non-scientist of that era, his book shows no awareness of the quantum measurement problem.
Russell sharply criticized Ryle for his scientific ignorance.
Russell sharply criticized Ryle for his scientific ignorance.
Professor Ryle's attitude to science is curious. He no doubt knows that scientists say things which they believe to be relevant to the problems he is discussing, but he is quite persuaded that the philosopher need pay no attention to science. He seems to believe that a philosopher need not know anything scientific beyond what was known in the time of our ancestors when they dyed themselves with woad. It is this attitude that enables him to think that the philosopher should pay attention to the way in which uneducated people speak and should treat with contempt the sophisticated language of the learned. [zzz17]
Ryle defended himself by arguing that he didn't necessarily need scientific knowledge in order to do philosophy. For example, anyone has experience of perception and needn't know about rods and cones in the eye to talk intelligently about perception. That is to say, "I don't need to know things that I don't in fact know about rods and cones in order to know things about, e.g., overlooking misprints, which is an optical thing that I often do; or misjudging the speed of cars, which is another optical thing that i often do; or misrecognizing people's faces, which is another optical thing that I very seldom do. The facts of perception with which I was occupied are facts about which I know and you know pretty well everything we need to know."[zw7]
Agreed that one can have a discussion about perception without being a neurologist. Yet, one would expect that it would have been worthwhile to have had some familiarity with the developments in cognitive sciences. The lack of scientific comprehension means that Ryle could not even understand many of his contemporary philosophers, such as Russell, Whitehead, Popper, Ayer etc. In turn, that means he could not examine or justify his background metaphysics, that gray area of assumptions about the nature of "the real world."
Ryle exemplifies what Bryan Magee calls the "Oxford Philosophy" which dominated the school during the mid twentieth century. Magee expends a substantial sum of energy denouncing as being a minor blind alley this mode of philosophizing, which put much emphasis on "ordinary language." The plain language philosophers were in general uninformed about science, Magee notes.[zw1]
Herewith a statement that casts some light on the professor's scientific knowledge:
"The old error of treating the term Force as denoting an occult force-exerting agency has been given up in the physical sciences, but its relatives survive in many theories of mind and are perhaps only moribund in biology."
Presumably, the sage is referring to the Minkowski-Einstein spacetime continuum, whereby gravity is considered a field disturbance with waves traveling at a finite speed, rather than being thought of as Newton's action at a distance, which was believed to occur instantaneously. Yet Ryle was unaware that in his day "spooky action at a distance" was bedeviling quantum mechanics, as it still does. To suggest that "action at a distance" has been cast out without mentioning the quantum entanglement controversy -- instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" -- implies that his knowledge was limited.
Granted, there is a bare possibility that he was referring to the use of energy equations that replace the notion of force with another occult notion, energy, but the result is the same: lack of awareness of the occult -- sometimes called "weird" -- properties of quantum theory.
Ryle's implication here of course is that biologists should keep pace with physics and reject any need for an "occult" non-physical cause, such as an animating spirit. That point of view is today, and was before the sage's birth, widely believed among scientists and intellectuals. This belief, however, is simply a belief, an article of faith, if you will. These days some believe artificial intelligence will soon give strong support to Ryle's vision -- but an assertion that sentience needs nothing non-physical is not a proof. (Obviously, the notion that sentience does require something non-physical has been widely believed but no consensus exists on that claim either.)
In any case, one might contend that by rejecting mechanism, Ryle has embraced physicalism. Ryle does not use this word [1a] that refers to a successor concept for 19th Century materialism and, from what I can gather, has been commonly used to mean 20th Century materialism, whereby matter and energy are equivalent and we take into account developments in electromagnetic theory. Physicalism, in this sense, doesn't replace the machine paradigm for mental activity; what we have is simply an admission that clocks can have electronic circuits. Whether we say mechanism, materialism or physicalism, we mean that mental activities are all ordained by physical causes. All three approaches converge on the requirement of a black box somewhere between physical causes and mind or mental action.
Please see Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
The idea of mechanism strongly correlates with the older form of materialism, whereby bits of dead matter were flung about after collisions. In the new materialism, subatomic energy is held to be equivalent to a bit of matter; that is to say, energy held some sort of existence of its own; it became an entity, like matter. Replacing the force/matter paradigm was the energy paradigm. So the tendency would have been to ditch a mechanistic theory of mind, in the Cartesian sense, and usher in a physicalist theory based on energetics. Ryle, however, has not done this, having been evidently ignorant on the finer points of physics.
This distinction is made the more obscure by the term "quantum mechanics," which came into vogue in the 1920s and which has little similarity to the macro-mechanics of Newton.
Even so, it is evident that Ryle's form of physicalism is based on idiosyncratic assumptions about physics that, in principle, shed little light.
Strictly speaking, physicalism is a notion introduced by Rudolf Carnap [1b] [1aa] and like-minded members of the Vienna Circle. It was a name for an updated philosophical language of science. For Carnap, physicalism proposed a function between the sentences of psychology and the sentences of physics [zzz7]. That is to say, psychology is simply a disguised form of physics. Later in his career Carnap appeared to have toned down that conceptualization, according to A.J. Ayer, a fellow logical positivist [zzz8].
By 1940, Russell challenges Carnap's thesis, arguing that the word or corresponds to psychological states but is not used in the basic propositions of physics. Yet, "it is an observable fact that people sometimes believe disjunctions." The same holds for the "second-order" logic words not, some and all, which do not appear in the "object language." Hence, "we cannot accept one possible interpretation of the thesis which Carnap calls physicalism, which maintains that all science can be expressed in the language of physics." Moreover, "we must bear in mind that, prima facie logical words, though not necessary in describing physical facts, are indispensable for the description of certain mental facts." [zzz15]
The attack on 19th century materialism was launched early in the 20th century by A.N. Whitehead, who was dissatisfied with the philosophic and mathematical basis of Laplacian materialism. [1bb] (Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a trailblazing work of mathematical logic.)
Calculus may be useful for calculation, according to Whitehead, but its assumptions are not a good ground for philosophy. One should not think of an occurrence as implying a mechanistic chain of frozen points (as in the contiguous points on a line). That picture may serve well enough for scientific needs, but it does not accurately capture the reality -- which is, that the cosmos is composed of events that are part of some organic whole. That whole includes human experience, such as poetical feeling, as in the suffuse experience of a sunset or of a wondrous bit of literature. Bare scientific analysis is insufficient to capture these organic parcels of reality. [1xaaa] [zzz5]
In any case, we might infer that Ryle was what has come to be known as a functionalist, but that suggestion is another red herring; it also tends to befuddle rather than clarify.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes functionalism as "the theory that mental states are more like mouse traps than they are like diamonds. That is, what makes something a mental state is more a matter of what it does, not what it is made of. This distinguishes functionalism from traditional mind-body dualism, such as that of René Descartes, according to which minds are made of a special kind of substance, the res cogitans (the thinking substance)."
To this writer, functionalism relates closely to "emergent behavior" metaphors, such as the gas law or the differential equation giving minimum population prior to species extinction. Functionalism, as generally understood, requires physicalism. Both, some would argue, are based on a doctrine disparagingly known as "scientismzq0.
Be that as it may, it is clear that when Ryle asserts that men are not machines, he does not mean to say that a Designer is implied. When he condemns "the bogy of mechanism," he is not trying to toss out determinism; yet precisely what sort of determinism he is implying is open to question. Regardless of the fact that many these days prefer to describe the world statistically -- correlation, not causation -- we have to deal with determinism, or its lack. Here are the options.
1. Determinism (Laplacian)
a. periodic and fairly predictable
b. nonlinear, possibly chaotic, and pseudorandom
2. Randomness (intrinsic randomness in which outcomes are partly acausal)
3. Oracle-ism (Turing)
By oracle-ism, we mean "ghostly" origins of thought, word and deed; origins that lack what is regarded as physical cause, such as an "oracle machine" that could, notionally, decide the halting problem.
The world has been thought to be governed by any one of options 1 or 3 but these days we have quantum mechanics requiring 1 and 2. We cannot be sure that all three options might not be necessary, even though option 3 (non-physical causation) is often dismissed as "unscientific." (An entire essay can be written on the question of whether science is scientific.)
Despite Ryle's attempts throughout his book at better definitions, he has missed important definitions concerning the three options above. So he has not succeeded in resolving the mind-body problem by barring the concept of machine, as he implicitly defines the word.
I suppose he might have argued that the posited duality is false because mind and body are facets of a whole, although direct holism is not specified, nor any sort of Gestalt effect, nor an emergent quality; he does, however, expend much effort on what he regards as potentially misleading characterizations of mind that lend credence to the notion of ghost (spirit or soul). In fact, I would say that Ryle's discussion is sorely troubled by a lack of depth on the issues of causation and perception. Thus, he does not see that he is being "occult" -- to use his term -- where he waves his hands to get past the little gap in his theory.
It is noteworthy that Ryle was hardly the first to attempt to cast out the bogey of mind/self. Hume denied the existence of the self, espousing I suppose a sort of functionalism.
Agreed that one can have a discussion about perception without being a neurologist. Yet, one would expect that it would have been worthwhile to have had some familiarity with the developments in cognitive sciences. The lack of scientific comprehension means that Ryle could not even understand many of his contemporary philosophers, such as Russell, Whitehead, Popper, Ayer etc. In turn, that means he could not examine or justify his background metaphysics, that gray area of assumptions about the nature of "the real world."
Ryle exemplifies what Bryan Magee calls the "Oxford Philosophy" which dominated the school during the mid twentieth century. Magee expends a substantial sum of energy denouncing as being a minor blind alley this mode of philosophizing, which put much emphasis on "ordinary language." The plain language philosophers were in general uninformed about science, Magee notes.[zw1]
Herewith a statement that casts some light on the professor's scientific knowledge:
"The old error of treating the term Force as denoting an occult force-exerting agency has been given up in the physical sciences, but its relatives survive in many theories of mind and are perhaps only moribund in biology."
Presumably, the sage is referring to the Minkowski-Einstein spacetime continuum, whereby gravity is considered a field disturbance with waves traveling at a finite speed, rather than being thought of as Newton's action at a distance, which was believed to occur instantaneously. Yet Ryle was unaware that in his day "spooky action at a distance" was bedeviling quantum mechanics, as it still does. To suggest that "action at a distance" has been cast out without mentioning the quantum entanglement controversy -- instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" -- implies that his knowledge was limited.
Granted, there is a bare possibility that he was referring to the use of energy equations that replace the notion of force with another occult notion, energy, but the result is the same: lack of awareness of the occult -- sometimes called "weird" -- properties of quantum theory.
Ryle's implication here of course is that biologists should keep pace with physics and reject any need for an "occult" non-physical cause, such as an animating spirit. That point of view is today, and was before the sage's birth, widely believed among scientists and intellectuals. This belief, however, is simply a belief, an article of faith, if you will. These days some believe artificial intelligence will soon give strong support to Ryle's vision -- but an assertion that sentience needs nothing non-physical is not a proof. (Obviously, the notion that sentience does require something non-physical has been widely believed but no consensus exists on that claim either.)
In any case, one might contend that by rejecting mechanism, Ryle has embraced physicalism. Ryle does not use this word [1a] that refers to a successor concept for 19th Century materialism and, from what I can gather, has been commonly used to mean 20th Century materialism, whereby matter and energy are equivalent and we take into account developments in electromagnetic theory. Physicalism, in this sense, doesn't replace the machine paradigm for mental activity; what we have is simply an admission that clocks can have electronic circuits. Whether we say mechanism, materialism or physicalism, we mean that mental activities are all ordained by physical causes. All three approaches converge on the requirement of a black box somewhere between physical causes and mind or mental action.
Please see Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
The idea of mechanism strongly correlates with the older form of materialism, whereby bits of dead matter were flung about after collisions. In the new materialism, subatomic energy is held to be equivalent to a bit of matter; that is to say, energy held some sort of existence of its own; it became an entity, like matter. Replacing the force/matter paradigm was the energy paradigm. So the tendency would have been to ditch a mechanistic theory of mind, in the Cartesian sense, and usher in a physicalist theory based on energetics. Ryle, however, has not done this, having been evidently ignorant on the finer points of physics.
This distinction is made the more obscure by the term "quantum mechanics," which came into vogue in the 1920s and which has little similarity to the macro-mechanics of Newton.
Even so, it is evident that Ryle's form of physicalism is based on idiosyncratic assumptions about physics that, in principle, shed little light.
Strictly speaking, physicalism is a notion introduced by Rudolf Carnap [1b] [1aa] and like-minded members of the Vienna Circle. It was a name for an updated philosophical language of science. For Carnap, physicalism proposed a function between the sentences of psychology and the sentences of physics [zzz7]. That is to say, psychology is simply a disguised form of physics. Later in his career Carnap appeared to have toned down that conceptualization, according to A.J. Ayer, a fellow logical positivist [zzz8].
By 1940, Russell challenges Carnap's thesis, arguing that the word or corresponds to psychological states but is not used in the basic propositions of physics. Yet, "it is an observable fact that people sometimes believe disjunctions." The same holds for the "second-order" logic words not, some and all, which do not appear in the "object language." Hence, "we cannot accept one possible interpretation of the thesis which Carnap calls physicalism, which maintains that all science can be expressed in the language of physics." Moreover, "we must bear in mind that, prima facie logical words, though not necessary in describing physical facts, are indispensable for the description of certain mental facts." [zzz15]
The attack on 19th century materialism was launched early in the 20th century by A.N. Whitehead, who was dissatisfied with the philosophic and mathematical basis of Laplacian materialism. [1bb] (Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a trailblazing work of mathematical logic.)
Calculus may be useful for calculation, according to Whitehead, but its assumptions are not a good ground for philosophy. One should not think of an occurrence as implying a mechanistic chain of frozen points (as in the contiguous points on a line). That picture may serve well enough for scientific needs, but it does not accurately capture the reality -- which is, that the cosmos is composed of events that are part of some organic whole. That whole includes human experience, such as poetical feeling, as in the suffuse experience of a sunset or of a wondrous bit of literature. Bare scientific analysis is insufficient to capture these organic parcels of reality. [1xaaa] [zzz5]
In any case, we might infer that Ryle was what has come to be known as a functionalist, but that suggestion is another red herring; it also tends to befuddle rather than clarify.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes functionalism as "the theory that mental states are more like mouse traps than they are like diamonds. That is, what makes something a mental state is more a matter of what it does, not what it is made of. This distinguishes functionalism from traditional mind-body dualism, such as that of René Descartes, according to which minds are made of a special kind of substance, the res cogitans (the thinking substance)."
To this writer, functionalism relates closely to "emergent behavior" metaphors, such as the gas law or the differential equation giving minimum population prior to species extinction. Functionalism, as generally understood, requires physicalism. Both, some would argue, are based on a doctrine disparagingly known as "scientismzq0.
Be that as it may, it is clear that when Ryle asserts that men are not machines, he does not mean to say that a Designer is implied. When he condemns "the bogy of mechanism," he is not trying to toss out determinism; yet precisely what sort of determinism he is implying is open to question. Regardless of the fact that many these days prefer to describe the world statistically -- correlation, not causation -- we have to deal with determinism, or its lack. Here are the options.
1. Determinism (Laplacian)
a. periodic and fairly predictable
b. nonlinear, possibly chaotic, and pseudorandom
2. Randomness (intrinsic randomness in which outcomes are partly acausal)
3. Oracle-ism (Turing)
By oracle-ism, we mean "ghostly" origins of thought, word and deed; origins that lack what is regarded as physical cause, such as an "oracle machine" that could, notionally, decide the halting problem.
The world has been thought to be governed by any one of options 1 or 3 but these days we have quantum mechanics requiring 1 and 2. We cannot be sure that all three options might not be necessary, even though option 3 (non-physical causation) is often dismissed as "unscientific." (An entire essay can be written on the question of whether science is scientific.)
Despite Ryle's attempts throughout his book at better definitions, he has missed important definitions concerning the three options above. So he has not succeeded in resolving the mind-body problem by barring the concept of machine, as he implicitly defines the word.
I suppose he might have argued that the posited duality is false because mind and body are facets of a whole, although direct holism is not specified, nor any sort of Gestalt effect, nor an emergent quality; he does, however, expend much effort on what he regards as potentially misleading characterizations of mind that lend credence to the notion of ghost (spirit or soul). In fact, I would say that Ryle's discussion is sorely troubled by a lack of depth on the issues of causation and perception. Thus, he does not see that he is being "occult" -- to use his term -- where he waves his hands to get past the little gap in his theory.
It is noteworthy that Ryle was hardly the first to attempt to cast out the bogey of mind/self. Hume denied the existence of the self, espousing I suppose a sort of functionalism.
There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity...
Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them...
I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. [zw5]
In other words, if the self is that which perceives, why are we so often unconscious of it in the midst of perception?
Hans Reichenbach reminds us of a war of the worlds that has been going on for well over two millennia.
A 'holistic' in the head
Ryle may have been misled by a philosophical movement known as organicism, which tried to overcome "unscientific" vitalism and bothersome scientific physico-chemical reductionism by appealing to holistic behaviors.
Vitalism, says Whitehead, was meant as a compromise between the materialst doctrine that the body is sole initiator of the mind's content and the denial of that claim. "For if the volition affects the state of the body, then the molecules in the body do not blindly run. If the volition does not affect the state of the body, the mind is left in its uncomfortable position."[zzz5]. To evade that paradox, the vitalists permit random motion within inert matter but limit such randomness in living matter. Whitehead rejects that solution, and substitutes his own rather arcane process ideas.
The philosopher C.D. Broad points out that the term mechanism is saddled with a confusion of meanings, but then proposes the idea of emergent vitalism in order to attack the machine paradigm while, up to a point, preserving physical determinism. Broad notes that mechanism tended to loose usage.[1x]
The former engineering student believed that his emergent vitalism trumps biological mechanism but realized that this vitalism, whereby elemental living matter emerges from non-living matter, seems to imply the existence of a deity -- though he thought of himself as neither religious nor anti-religious.
In retirement the philosopher wrote that his interest in psychic phenomena stemmed from the fact that "I feel in my bones that the orthodox scientific account of man as an undesigned calculating-machine, and of non-human nature as a wider mechanism which turns out such machines among its other products is fantastic nonsense, which no one in his senses could believe unless he kept it in a water-tight compartment away from all his other experiences and activities and beliefs." [1xyaa]
Ludwig Bertalanffy [2x], a founder of general systems theory, favored the holistic approach to systems, whereby their overall behaviors result from the constraints on physico-chemical interactions. In fact, he found a differential equation that can be applied to systems.
During the 1940s, Bertalanffy's insight was sometimes viewed as bolstering organicism. The biophysicist Joseph Needham [2xx] wrote that Bertalanffy was a "technically well-informed" luminary in a "great movement of modern thought which sought to base a philosophical world view on ideas originating from biology rather than from the classical physics." Needham continued:
Vitalism, says Whitehead, was meant as a compromise between the materialst doctrine that the body is sole initiator of the mind's content and the denial of that claim. "For if the volition affects the state of the body, then the molecules in the body do not blindly run. If the volition does not affect the state of the body, the mind is left in its uncomfortable position."[zzz5]. To evade that paradox, the vitalists permit random motion within inert matter but limit such randomness in living matter. Whitehead rejects that solution, and substitutes his own rather arcane process ideas.
The philosopher C.D. Broad points out that the term mechanism is saddled with a confusion of meanings, but then proposes the idea of emergent vitalism in order to attack the machine paradigm while, up to a point, preserving physical determinism. Broad notes that mechanism tended to loose usage.[1x]
The former engineering student believed that his emergent vitalism trumps biological mechanism but realized that this vitalism, whereby elemental living matter emerges from non-living matter, seems to imply the existence of a deity -- though he thought of himself as neither religious nor anti-religious.
In retirement the philosopher wrote that his interest in psychic phenomena stemmed from the fact that "I feel in my bones that the orthodox scientific account of man as an undesigned calculating-machine, and of non-human nature as a wider mechanism which turns out such machines among its other products is fantastic nonsense, which no one in his senses could believe unless he kept it in a water-tight compartment away from all his other experiences and activities and beliefs." [1xyaa]
Ludwig Bertalanffy [2x], a founder of general systems theory, favored the holistic approach to systems, whereby their overall behaviors result from the constraints on physico-chemical interactions. In fact, he found a differential equation that can be applied to systems.
During the 1940s, Bertalanffy's insight was sometimes viewed as bolstering organicism. The biophysicist Joseph Needham [2xx] wrote that Bertalanffy was a "technically well-informed" luminary in a "great movement of modern thought which sought to base a philosophical world view on ideas originating from biology rather than from the classical physics." Needham continued:
It fused once again what Descartes had put asunder. It was Descartes, as [Joseph] Woodger acutely said, who introduced the practice of calling organisms machines, with the unfortunate consequence that transcendent mechanics had to be invented to drive them. Organicism, if not obscurantist, was bound to be the death of "vitalism" as well as of "mechanism." It was likely to be the death of animism [spirit pervades all] too...
Woodger was a theoretical biologist and philosopher.
Holism advocate Whitehead of course did not have in mind the brand of organicism that came to be known as systems theory, but it is noteworthy that Ryle used a somewhat vague concept of organism to justify dispensing with the notion of man as mechanism. The parallel with Whitehead is evident (though it must be conceded that at several points Whitehead refers to his system as organic mechanism, as opposed to materialistic mechanism).
Whitehead, in his onslaught against "scientific materialism," laments that Newtonian physics, while highly laudable, had "ruined philosophy" by dividing it into three camps. "There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind." [zzz4]
Whitehead's philosophy of organism, also known as process philosophy or panpsychism, replaces mind-matter dualism with a single cosmic process such that mind and body are interrelated. So mind and "external reality" run together, each influencing the other as integral parts of a universal whole, in some ways similar, he says, to the monads of Leibniz and the monistic substance of Spinoza [zzz5][zzz6]. Whitehead's ideas do correspond with substantial aspects of systems theory, though he believed that living organisms hold the truth about reality.
In his philosophy of science, Whitehead says, organism takes the place of matter as the unifying concept. "For this purpose, the mind involved in the materialist theory dissolves into a function of organism. The psychological field then exhibits what an event is in itself. Our bodily event is an unusually complex type of organism and consequently includes cognition. Further, space and time, in their most concrete signification, become the locus of events. An organism is the realisation of a definite shape of value. The emergence of some actual value depends on limitation which excludes neutralising cross-lights. Thus an event is a matter of fact which by reason of its limitation is a value for itself; but by reason of its very nature it also requires the whole universe in order to be itself.
"Importance depends on endurance. Endurance is the retention through time of an achievement of value. What endures is identity of pattern, self-inherited. Endurance requires the favourable environment. The whole of science revolves around this question of enduring organisms." [zzz5]
Writing soon after the Great War that had claimed his son's life, Whitehead laments,
"The doctrine of minds, as independent substances, leads directly not merely to private worlds of experience, but also to private worlds of morals. The moral intuitions can be held to apply only to the strictly private world of psychological experience. Accordingly, self-respect, and the making the most of your own individual opportunities, together constituted the efficient morality of the leaders among the industrialists of [recent times]. The western world is now suffering from the limited moral outlook of the three previous generations." [zzz5]
(Among current exponents of process philosophy is the noted theologian David Ray Griffin, who has written several books indicting the U.S. 9/11 investigations as elaborate coverups of treason.)
On Whitehead's process philosophy
https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/The_Philosophy_of_Organism
See the footnote Wu1 for another remark by Whitehead.
Certainly Ryle had nothing so "occult" under consideration, though he could well have been under the influence of the systems theory ideas inherent in Whitehead's scenario.
As Whitehead's onetime partner Russell notes tartly: "Mechanism is another of the matters that he treats with cavalier dogmatism. When he speaks of it, he seems to be thinking of the old-fashioned billiard-ball mechanism and to think that since physicists have abandoned this, they have abandoned mechanism. He never gives any reason for rejecting mechanism in the modern sense of the word." [zzz17] A bit before Ryle published Concept, Russell criticized the holistic notion that the organism is the fundamental unit of life, arguing that of course parts usually have no independent existence, but that that did not necessarily imply that at bottom inorganic physical and chemical processes do not account for all the effects -- including mental -- of the entire system.[zzz21]
It is not obvious whether Ryle was aware that the German idealist Schelling saw "reality as not so much like a machine as like a single great big living organism, and is therefore better understood as a quasi-organic developmental process rather than as something mechanical..." [zw1]
In fact it was Schelling's idealist predecessor Hegel who placed the emphasis on organicism rather than mechanism, as he considered life science to be of a higher form than physics. So for Hegel, mechanical processes were inferior to biological processes. He did not agree with Descartes that all biological processes, except for the human, are mechanical. But, says Robert Solomon [zw4], Hegel's point was that biological processes are essentially teleological (purpose-driven, or characterized by function). The idea is that analysis of the many parts of a living organism fails to capture the Gestalt of the object. (Of course, one could say the same of any machine or even of some natural system, such as a star.)
In any case, we can see how Ryle could have slipped up. It was thought by some that machines were reducible to standard physical components but that organisms were not, and further that much of nature is more like an organism than a machine. The errors here stem from the meanings of the words "machine," "organism," "system," "mechanism."
A machine is characterized by the work, a physical measure, that it does. The machine is reducible to its components. In fact, it is in principle possible to break the machine down into nested subsystems until we get to the level of molecules. If we don't count indeterminacy at the quantum level, all changes within subsystems are determined by physical properties (as quantified in "laws").
A system -- whether organic or not -- that is "open" and taking in energy is subject to the same entropy limits as a machine that is burning fuel. The same laws of physics hold. If we are viewing the system's output energy, this is equivalent to work, which is not physically different from the work of a machine. A system regulated by negative feedback is either a machine built by someone or a machine built by no one. Still, it takes the mind of an observer to notice that the presumably accidental machine is converting "diffuse" energy to vectored energy (work). For example, the sun's gravity is doing work on the planets to (so far) keep them in elliptical orbits.
We have linear versus non-linear systems, meaning systems governed by non-feedback or feedback differential or difference equations. A thermostat has negative feedback, and maintains homeostasis. A microphone too close to an amplifier speaker sets up a positive feedback loop with an attractor at infinity (except that physical constraints bar infinite energy). All organisms use negative feedback (they are constrained to survive), but that of itself does not disqualify them from being machines. Moreover, like machines, organisms are composed of nested subsystems that reduce to the molecular level; an organism puts out work in the same sense as does a machine.
By all this, a mechanism is a "machine" or "system" or "organism" for converting energy into work. That mechanism's most interesting properties may be found via differential equations that, for the sake of clarity, smear out the information from the myriads of molecular collisions typical of many systems.
In other words, Descartes did not necessarily err in calling organisms machines [2xy] and further, one cannot get rid of the mechanism and machine concepts by simply appealing to holism, whatever one may think of Whitehead's artful attempt. The issue remains that if apparent free will is a macro-effect of the brain system, we still face the point that the will is not free, but ruled from below. The systems approach, then, can only account -- if it does -- for the illusion of freedom. Regardless of many attempts, no one has overcome Kant's assessment that if all reality is in fact mechanical, we could not without contradiction claim that the will of the human soul is free and yet "subject to natural necessity -- that is, not free."
It should be noted that Whitehead's system was meant to replace the concept of matter -- in the form of inert particles aimlessly knocking each other about the cosmos -- with the concept of organism, whereby events cannot be reduced to exact points in space and time. I cannot say I quite grasp how the idea of strict determinism is affected by Whitehead's system, in which an electron has a different character in a living organism than outside it [xxx6]. In any case, Ryle's notion of organism was, in comparison with the subtlety of Whitehead, poorly defined.
James Lovelock's Gaia is sometimes called Earth systems science. One may look at the whole to see that the parts interact with one another in such a way as to make it an iffy endeavor to separate cause from effect. So if we reduce Gaia to components, we are getting an incomplete, and even misleading, picture. Nevertheless, all these parts are believed to interact with each other according to physical determinism. Lovelock's idea that Gaia qualifies as a living organism is controversial. Similarly, the idea that non-living matter becomes living as a result of physico-chemical processes is, even today, controversial. The fact that these physical processes might coalesce into systems construed to be alive is dogma today, but that dogma still has serious critics, such as Thomas Nagel [2xz].
At this juncture, we offer a point that can possibly be counted in Ryle's favor. For me, the problematical nature of Descartes' system may be discerned by his claim that all non-human sentient animals are automatons, clockworks propelled about by purely mechanical actions. This stems from the Cartesian idea that the soul of man, or Reason, is a divine quality unique to humans. Yet, it is apparent that at least some "higher" mammals appear to have problem-solving capacity. In that case, why could not man's problem-solving capacity also be purely mechanistic? -- suggesting that the dualistic approach may be not only unsatisfactory to mechanists but to some of their opponents as well.
Holism advocate Whitehead of course did not have in mind the brand of organicism that came to be known as systems theory, but it is noteworthy that Ryle used a somewhat vague concept of organism to justify dispensing with the notion of man as mechanism. The parallel with Whitehead is evident (though it must be conceded that at several points Whitehead refers to his system as organic mechanism, as opposed to materialistic mechanism).
Whitehead, in his onslaught against "scientific materialism," laments that Newtonian physics, while highly laudable, had "ruined philosophy" by dividing it into three camps. "There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind." [zzz4]
Whitehead's philosophy of organism, also known as process philosophy or panpsychism, replaces mind-matter dualism with a single cosmic process such that mind and body are interrelated. So mind and "external reality" run together, each influencing the other as integral parts of a universal whole, in some ways similar, he says, to the monads of Leibniz and the monistic substance of Spinoza [zzz5][zzz6]. Whitehead's ideas do correspond with substantial aspects of systems theory, though he believed that living organisms hold the truth about reality.
In his philosophy of science, Whitehead says, organism takes the place of matter as the unifying concept. "For this purpose, the mind involved in the materialist theory dissolves into a function of organism. The psychological field then exhibits what an event is in itself. Our bodily event is an unusually complex type of organism and consequently includes cognition. Further, space and time, in their most concrete signification, become the locus of events. An organism is the realisation of a definite shape of value. The emergence of some actual value depends on limitation which excludes neutralising cross-lights. Thus an event is a matter of fact which by reason of its limitation is a value for itself; but by reason of its very nature it also requires the whole universe in order to be itself.
"Importance depends on endurance. Endurance is the retention through time of an achievement of value. What endures is identity of pattern, self-inherited. Endurance requires the favourable environment. The whole of science revolves around this question of enduring organisms." [zzz5]
Writing soon after the Great War that had claimed his son's life, Whitehead laments,
"The doctrine of minds, as independent substances, leads directly not merely to private worlds of experience, but also to private worlds of morals. The moral intuitions can be held to apply only to the strictly private world of psychological experience. Accordingly, self-respect, and the making the most of your own individual opportunities, together constituted the efficient morality of the leaders among the industrialists of [recent times]. The western world is now suffering from the limited moral outlook of the three previous generations." [zzz5]
(Among current exponents of process philosophy is the noted theologian David Ray Griffin, who has written several books indicting the U.S. 9/11 investigations as elaborate coverups of treason.)
On Whitehead's process philosophy
https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/The_Philosophy_of_Organism
See the footnote Wu1 for another remark by Whitehead.
Certainly Ryle had nothing so "occult" under consideration, though he could well have been under the influence of the systems theory ideas inherent in Whitehead's scenario.
As Whitehead's onetime partner Russell notes tartly: "Mechanism is another of the matters that he treats with cavalier dogmatism. When he speaks of it, he seems to be thinking of the old-fashioned billiard-ball mechanism and to think that since physicists have abandoned this, they have abandoned mechanism. He never gives any reason for rejecting mechanism in the modern sense of the word." [zzz17] A bit before Ryle published Concept, Russell criticized the holistic notion that the organism is the fundamental unit of life, arguing that of course parts usually have no independent existence, but that that did not necessarily imply that at bottom inorganic physical and chemical processes do not account for all the effects -- including mental -- of the entire system.[zzz21]
It is not obvious whether Ryle was aware that the German idealist Schelling saw "reality as not so much like a machine as like a single great big living organism, and is therefore better understood as a quasi-organic developmental process rather than as something mechanical..." [zw1]
In fact it was Schelling's idealist predecessor Hegel who placed the emphasis on organicism rather than mechanism, as he considered life science to be of a higher form than physics. So for Hegel, mechanical processes were inferior to biological processes. He did not agree with Descartes that all biological processes, except for the human, are mechanical. But, says Robert Solomon [zw4], Hegel's point was that biological processes are essentially teleological (purpose-driven, or characterized by function). The idea is that analysis of the many parts of a living organism fails to capture the Gestalt of the object. (Of course, one could say the same of any machine or even of some natural system, such as a star.)
In any case, we can see how Ryle could have slipped up. It was thought by some that machines were reducible to standard physical components but that organisms were not, and further that much of nature is more like an organism than a machine. The errors here stem from the meanings of the words "machine," "organism," "system," "mechanism."
A machine is characterized by the work, a physical measure, that it does. The machine is reducible to its components. In fact, it is in principle possible to break the machine down into nested subsystems until we get to the level of molecules. If we don't count indeterminacy at the quantum level, all changes within subsystems are determined by physical properties (as quantified in "laws").
A system -- whether organic or not -- that is "open" and taking in energy is subject to the same entropy limits as a machine that is burning fuel. The same laws of physics hold. If we are viewing the system's output energy, this is equivalent to work, which is not physically different from the work of a machine. A system regulated by negative feedback is either a machine built by someone or a machine built by no one. Still, it takes the mind of an observer to notice that the presumably accidental machine is converting "diffuse" energy to vectored energy (work). For example, the sun's gravity is doing work on the planets to (so far) keep them in elliptical orbits.
We have linear versus non-linear systems, meaning systems governed by non-feedback or feedback differential or difference equations. A thermostat has negative feedback, and maintains homeostasis. A microphone too close to an amplifier speaker sets up a positive feedback loop with an attractor at infinity (except that physical constraints bar infinite energy). All organisms use negative feedback (they are constrained to survive), but that of itself does not disqualify them from being machines. Moreover, like machines, organisms are composed of nested subsystems that reduce to the molecular level; an organism puts out work in the same sense as does a machine.
By all this, a mechanism is a "machine" or "system" or "organism" for converting energy into work. That mechanism's most interesting properties may be found via differential equations that, for the sake of clarity, smear out the information from the myriads of molecular collisions typical of many systems.
In other words, Descartes did not necessarily err in calling organisms machines [2xy] and further, one cannot get rid of the mechanism and machine concepts by simply appealing to holism, whatever one may think of Whitehead's artful attempt. The issue remains that if apparent free will is a macro-effect of the brain system, we still face the point that the will is not free, but ruled from below. The systems approach, then, can only account -- if it does -- for the illusion of freedom. Regardless of many attempts, no one has overcome Kant's assessment that if all reality is in fact mechanical, we could not without contradiction claim that the will of the human soul is free and yet "subject to natural necessity -- that is, not free."
It should be noted that Whitehead's system was meant to replace the concept of matter -- in the form of inert particles aimlessly knocking each other about the cosmos -- with the concept of organism, whereby events cannot be reduced to exact points in space and time. I cannot say I quite grasp how the idea of strict determinism is affected by Whitehead's system, in which an electron has a different character in a living organism than outside it [xxx6]. In any case, Ryle's notion of organism was, in comparison with the subtlety of Whitehead, poorly defined.
James Lovelock's Gaia is sometimes called Earth systems science. One may look at the whole to see that the parts interact with one another in such a way as to make it an iffy endeavor to separate cause from effect. So if we reduce Gaia to components, we are getting an incomplete, and even misleading, picture. Nevertheless, all these parts are believed to interact with each other according to physical determinism. Lovelock's idea that Gaia qualifies as a living organism is controversial. Similarly, the idea that non-living matter becomes living as a result of physico-chemical processes is, even today, controversial. The fact that these physical processes might coalesce into systems construed to be alive is dogma today, but that dogma still has serious critics, such as Thomas Nagel [2xz].
At this juncture, we offer a point that can possibly be counted in Ryle's favor. For me, the problematical nature of Descartes' system may be discerned by his claim that all non-human sentient animals are automatons, clockworks propelled about by purely mechanical actions. This stems from the Cartesian idea that the soul of man, or Reason, is a divine quality unique to humans. Yet, it is apparent that at least some "higher" mammals appear to have problem-solving capacity. In that case, why could not man's problem-solving capacity also be purely mechanistic? -- suggesting that the dualistic approach may be not only unsatisfactory to mechanists but to some of their opponents as well.
Hans Reichenbach reminds us of a war of the worlds that has been going on for well over two millennia.
It is well known how the different philosophical systems divide into [the] two groups of "other-world philosophies" and "this-world philosophies," into transcendence and immanence systems. Plato in his allegory of the men in the cave who see the shadows of passers-by on the wall and take them for real beings, has created a poetic image for philosophies of the first group, at the same time giving his doctrine of ideas a far-framed intellectual formulation of transcendentalism; besides his system, religious and rationalistic philosophies of all kinds have expressed in various forms the idea of a supernatural world "behind" the world we live in. The second group is characterized by such names as materialism, empiricism, sensationalism. It is as old and young as the first, and the history of philosophy from the time of the Greeks up to our days represents a constant struggle between these two fundamental conceptions. JD1
One might reply to Reichenbach (along with Ryle and many others) that the assumption that the universe operates as an unconscious Mechanism is no more logical than the assumption that the universe operates as the thoughts of an acutely conscious Mind. As Kant observed, we run up against extremes here and are left to choose which view we believe holds. The fact that nature is analyzable in mechanical terms does not mean there is no transcendent reality. Consider the Klein bottle. If our cosmos were such a topological object, we would find it very difficult to detect it from within. A number of physicists do in fact think that the cosmos is an unbounded finite region. Such a topological object would "transcend" our ordinary perspective on what constitutes reality. So if "physical" transcendence is plausible, what debars spiritual transcendence -- other than a certain habit of physicalist thinking?
J.N. Findlay writes that Hegel saw the metaphysics of the Deism of the Enlightenment as equivalent to the metaphysics of religious faith. In the form of Deism, the Enlightenment "gives its phenomenal order the backing of an étre Supreme, concerning whom nothing determinate can be said: this Absolute merely differs in name from the religious Absolute which is likewise "unsearchable in all its ways and unreachable in its being. Alternatively, in the form of Materialism, it sees the backing of all sensuous differences in an invisible, inaudible, tasteless substance called Matter: this Matter is identical with the être Supreme just mentioned, its only difference consisting in the standpoint from which we approach it."[zn1]
Today, those in the physicalist camp doubtless see the Higgs field as the invisible substance of the cosmos, arguing there is more evidence for it than for some omnipotent God, Yet, we could say that that field, along with some cosmic topology, accounts for everything, thus making it equivalent to Robespierre's Deist conception.
It is curious that modern quantum physics lends credence to the Hegelian view of partial determinism. George di Giovanni observes:
J.N. Findlay writes that Hegel saw the metaphysics of the Deism of the Enlightenment as equivalent to the metaphysics of religious faith. In the form of Deism, the Enlightenment "gives its phenomenal order the backing of an étre Supreme, concerning whom nothing determinate can be said: this Absolute merely differs in name from the religious Absolute which is likewise "unsearchable in all its ways and unreachable in its being. Alternatively, in the form of Materialism, it sees the backing of all sensuous differences in an invisible, inaudible, tasteless substance called Matter: this Matter is identical with the être Supreme just mentioned, its only difference consisting in the standpoint from which we approach it."[zn1]
Today, those in the physicalist camp doubtless see the Higgs field as the invisible substance of the cosmos, arguing there is more evidence for it than for some omnipotent God, Yet, we could say that that field, along with some cosmic topology, accounts for everything, thus making it equivalent to Robespierre's Deist conception.
'I compute, therefore I think,' I think
Robots might "think" about each other, or about you, for that matter. If they use some theory of mind to assess the probability of what another robot, or you, might do, that might qualify as thinking.
When two robots signal each other, one can fairly say -- as engineers in fact do say -- that they talk to each other. If, however, we grant this, doesn't it follow that when the robot's CPU is fielding various internal signals and prioritizing them that it talks to itself? Yet such chatter would be difficult to admit as entailing consciousness.
John Searle's Chinese room argument makes this point.
A robot may indeed use thought-like routines, as in:
"Priority: get recharged, scan for outlets; target sighted but recharge comes first."
[Here I have used English "code" to represent the bot's internal signals.]
Would you regard the robot as conscious, as opposed to mimicking consciousness? The trickiness of my question possibly justifies some of Ryle's skepticism for the words mind and consciousness, skepticism expressed by Alan Turing, who likewise doubted the existence of a soul, in the religious sense. Does the central processor have periods in which a strong feedback loop (or loops) is being used, say, for an analysis of a difficult problem? Modern AI engineering gives the answer as yes. Yet, could it "spontaneously" look at its exterior casing in a mirror and say, cheerfully, "Hi, Rob"? to itself.[2]. So then, perhaps spirits are unnecessary, and we would be entitled to say they should go the way of the ether. Even so, without more data than given by Ryle or current thinkers, such an assertion is essentially a statement of faith.
In "A Coffehouse Conversation" in The Mind's I [2a], Douglas Hofstadter has a character say this:
John Searle's Chinese room argument makes this point.
A robot may indeed use thought-like routines, as in:
"Priority: get recharged, scan for outlets; target sighted but recharge comes first."
[Here I have used English "code" to represent the bot's internal signals.]
Would you regard the robot as conscious, as opposed to mimicking consciousness? The trickiness of my question possibly justifies some of Ryle's skepticism for the words mind and consciousness, skepticism expressed by Alan Turing, who likewise doubted the existence of a soul, in the religious sense. Does the central processor have periods in which a strong feedback loop (or loops) is being used, say, for an analysis of a difficult problem? Modern AI engineering gives the answer as yes. Yet, could it "spontaneously" look at its exterior casing in a mirror and say, cheerfully, "Hi, Rob"? to itself.[2]. So then, perhaps spirits are unnecessary, and we would be entitled to say they should go the way of the ether. Even so, without more data than given by Ryle or current thinkers, such an assertion is essentially a statement of faith.
In "A Coffehouse Conversation" in The Mind's I [2a], Douglas Hofstadter has a character say this:
The way I see it, consciousness has got to come from a precise pattern or organization -- one that we haven't yet figured out how to describe in any detailed way. But I believe we will gradually come to understand it. In my view consciousness requires a certain way of mirroring the external universe internally, and the ability to respond to that external reality on the basis of the internally represented model. And then in addition, what's really crucial for a conscious machine is that it should incorporate a well-developed and flexible self-model. And it's there that all existent programs, including the best chess-playing ones, fall down.
This decades-old view, I would say, remains fairly representative of views current today among AI enthusiasts.
Yet, let us note that what we have here is not science, but a creed.
1. Consciousness is a consequence of some unknown, but physical (as understood by physicists) process.
2. All will be revealed some day.
So what we have is a phenomenon, or epiphenomenon, that is "occult," operating by unknown means. In that case, let's be plain that giving consciousness a scientific-sounding name adds nothing to our knowledge. We might as well call it a spirit or a soul or what you will.
A big question is why consciousness? Why should a smart car not drive you safely about without being conscious? And, really, a souped-up smart-bot could have multiple competing goals that support some primary goal, so as to appear to a human as terribly cunning, if not intelligent. Why would it need consciousness? Why assume it will emerge from the bot's internal architecture? No need for it.
I hasten to concede that a serious fallacy or two does not mean Ryle's book has no value (Plato's Socratic dialogs are riddled with examples of fallacious logic). Yet even so, one must have nagging doubts about a book -- in which definitions of terms are held to be of crucial importance -- that contains definitions that show little comprehension of the scientific matters that are at the very heart of the subject at hand.
Ryle's approach is known as "the philosophy of ordinary language," a subject I have not delved into in this critique. Yet I would say that, though it is laudable to attempt to craft careful definitions of terms, that attempt is vitiated when key definitions -- as for machine and mechanism -- are fuzzy.
Though ordinary language philosophy had been energized by Russell's contributions to logic, says John Shosky [zzz16], Russell was distinctly averse to it.
After a very careful study of The Concept of Mind, Russell in 1958 reviewed it[zzz17] and found it wanting, notes Shosky.
Saying he was "somewhat surprised" by Ryle's emphasis on Cartesian dualism, Russell points out that this notion was rejected by Malebranche, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hegel and William James. "I cannot think of any philosophers of repute who accept it in the present day, except Marxists and Catholic theologians, who are compelled to be old-fashioned by the rigidities of their respective creeds."
Ryle's denial that there are mental happenings makes Russell bristle. Ryle, he says, "never explains, or seems to think it necessary to explain, what is the difference between brittle and intelligent that makes the latter mental and the former not," adding: "A plain man would say that brittle denotes a disposition of bodies and intelligent denotes a disposition of minds -- in fact, that the two adjectives apply to different kinds of 'stuff.' But it is not open to Professor Ryle to say this, and I do not quite know what he would say. Professor Ryle backs up his rejection of all mental 'stuff' by denying that, in principle, there is anything that a man can know about himself which another cannot know unless he is told."
Russell skewers Ryle on that claim, calling it an "astonishingly slap-dash" assertion that is refuted by the case of dreaming. "Except in the Book of Exodus, it is generally accepted that one man cannot know what another dreams unless he is told. But Professor Ryle has nothing to say about dreams."
Similarly, Russell tasks Ryle on imagined objects. "If I shut my eyes and imagine a horse, there is no horse in the room. But it is one thing to imagine a horse and another to imagine a hippopotamus. Something happens when I imagine the one, and something else happens when I imagine the other. What can it be that is happening in these two cases? Professor Ryle states explicitly (page 161) that there are no such things as mental happenings. Where perception is concerned, he contents himself with naive realism: I perceive a horse, and the horse is out there. It is not a 'mental' horse. But when I imagine a horse, it is not out there, and yet the occurrence is not the same as imagining a hippopotamus. I should have thought it as obvious as anything can be that something is happening in me and cannot be known to anybody else unless I do something overt to let it be known what it is that I am imagining." [See Ryle's answer in Modern British Philosophy.]
Some months later, Ryle, as editor of Mind, refused to have Ernest Gellner's book Words and Things [zzz18] reviewed in the journal on grounds that Gellner's criticisms were "abusive." Russell, who had written the preface to that book, defended Gellner in a letter to The Times of London, sparking a furious spate of letters on the role of philosophy and editorial judgment.[zzz16]
In general, Russell strongly disagrees with Ryle's school of ordinary language philosophers, who claim that "common speech is good enough, not only for daily life, but also for philosophy."
On the contrary, Russell argues that "common speech is full of vagueness and inaccuracy, and that any attempt to be precise and accurate requires modification of common speech both as regards vocabulary and as regards syntax. Everybody admits that physics and chemistry and medicine each require a language which is not that of everyday life. I fail to see why philosophy, alone, should be forbidden to make a similar approach towards precision and accuracy." [zzz14]
Ryle countered [zw7] that technical terms tend to degrade over a few years, after which their influence in philosophy is bad. When couched in technical terms, a philosopher's arguments tend to go astray, Ryle maintained. The use of technical terms serves as a smokescreen [think Hegel], making it difficult to catch a philosopher's errors, Ryle said.
Moreover, Russell was antagonistic to Wittgenstein, whose later work inspired Ryle and the ordinary language advocates. Russell had come to regard Wittgenstein's early influence on him as not altogether beneficial, and to view Wittgenstein's later work as "completely unintelligible." If Wittgenstein's viewpoint in Philosophical Investigations is true, then "philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and, at worst, an idle tea-table amusement." [zzz19]
The agnostic philosopher Karl Popper, who like Russell scorned the linguistic philosophers, opposed the machine paradigm.
Yet, let us note that what we have here is not science, but a creed.
1. Consciousness is a consequence of some unknown, but physical (as understood by physicists) process.
2. All will be revealed some day.
So what we have is a phenomenon, or epiphenomenon, that is "occult," operating by unknown means. In that case, let's be plain that giving consciousness a scientific-sounding name adds nothing to our knowledge. We might as well call it a spirit or a soul or what you will.
A big question is why consciousness? Why should a smart car not drive you safely about without being conscious? And, really, a souped-up smart-bot could have multiple competing goals that support some primary goal, so as to appear to a human as terribly cunning, if not intelligent. Why would it need consciousness? Why assume it will emerge from the bot's internal architecture? No need for it.
I hasten to concede that a serious fallacy or two does not mean Ryle's book has no value (Plato's Socratic dialogs are riddled with examples of fallacious logic). Yet even so, one must have nagging doubts about a book -- in which definitions of terms are held to be of crucial importance -- that contains definitions that show little comprehension of the scientific matters that are at the very heart of the subject at hand.
Ryle's approach is known as "the philosophy of ordinary language," a subject I have not delved into in this critique. Yet I would say that, though it is laudable to attempt to craft careful definitions of terms, that attempt is vitiated when key definitions -- as for machine and mechanism -- are fuzzy.
Though ordinary language philosophy had been energized by Russell's contributions to logic, says John Shosky [zzz16], Russell was distinctly averse to it.
After a very careful study of The Concept of Mind, Russell in 1958 reviewed it[zzz17] and found it wanting, notes Shosky.
Saying he was "somewhat surprised" by Ryle's emphasis on Cartesian dualism, Russell points out that this notion was rejected by Malebranche, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hegel and William James. "I cannot think of any philosophers of repute who accept it in the present day, except Marxists and Catholic theologians, who are compelled to be old-fashioned by the rigidities of their respective creeds."
Ryle's denial that there are mental happenings makes Russell bristle. Ryle, he says, "never explains, or seems to think it necessary to explain, what is the difference between brittle and intelligent that makes the latter mental and the former not," adding: "A plain man would say that brittle denotes a disposition of bodies and intelligent denotes a disposition of minds -- in fact, that the two adjectives apply to different kinds of 'stuff.' But it is not open to Professor Ryle to say this, and I do not quite know what he would say. Professor Ryle backs up his rejection of all mental 'stuff' by denying that, in principle, there is anything that a man can know about himself which another cannot know unless he is told."
Russell skewers Ryle on that claim, calling it an "astonishingly slap-dash" assertion that is refuted by the case of dreaming. "Except in the Book of Exodus, it is generally accepted that one man cannot know what another dreams unless he is told. But Professor Ryle has nothing to say about dreams."
Similarly, Russell tasks Ryle on imagined objects. "If I shut my eyes and imagine a horse, there is no horse in the room. But it is one thing to imagine a horse and another to imagine a hippopotamus. Something happens when I imagine the one, and something else happens when I imagine the other. What can it be that is happening in these two cases? Professor Ryle states explicitly (page 161) that there are no such things as mental happenings. Where perception is concerned, he contents himself with naive realism: I perceive a horse, and the horse is out there. It is not a 'mental' horse. But when I imagine a horse, it is not out there, and yet the occurrence is not the same as imagining a hippopotamus. I should have thought it as obvious as anything can be that something is happening in me and cannot be known to anybody else unless I do something overt to let it be known what it is that I am imagining." [See Ryle's answer in Modern British Philosophy.]
Some months later, Ryle, as editor of Mind, refused to have Ernest Gellner's book Words and Things [zzz18] reviewed in the journal on grounds that Gellner's criticisms were "abusive." Russell, who had written the preface to that book, defended Gellner in a letter to The Times of London, sparking a furious spate of letters on the role of philosophy and editorial judgment.[zzz16]
In general, Russell strongly disagrees with Ryle's school of ordinary language philosophers, who claim that "common speech is good enough, not only for daily life, but also for philosophy."
On the contrary, Russell argues that "common speech is full of vagueness and inaccuracy, and that any attempt to be precise and accurate requires modification of common speech both as regards vocabulary and as regards syntax. Everybody admits that physics and chemistry and medicine each require a language which is not that of everyday life. I fail to see why philosophy, alone, should be forbidden to make a similar approach towards precision and accuracy." [zzz14]
Ryle countered [zw7] that technical terms tend to degrade over a few years, after which their influence in philosophy is bad. When couched in technical terms, a philosopher's arguments tend to go astray, Ryle maintained. The use of technical terms serves as a smokescreen [think Hegel], making it difficult to catch a philosopher's errors, Ryle said.
Moreover, Russell was antagonistic to Wittgenstein, whose later work inspired Ryle and the ordinary language advocates. Russell had come to regard Wittgenstein's early influence on him as not altogether beneficial, and to view Wittgenstein's later work as "completely unintelligible." If Wittgenstein's viewpoint in Philosophical Investigations is true, then "philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and, at worst, an idle tea-table amusement." [zzz19]
The agnostic philosopher Karl Popper, who like Russell scorned the linguistic philosophers, opposed the machine paradigm.
As Joseph Popper-Lynkeus once put it, every time a man dies, a whole universe is destroyed. (One realizes this when one identifies oneself with the man.) Human beings are irreplaceable; and in being irreplaceable they are clearly very different from machines. They are capable of enjoying life, and they are capable of suffering, and of facing death consciously. They are selves; they are ends in themselves, as Kant said.
This view seems to me incompatible with the materialist doctrine that men are machines.[zw6]
In line with Russell's complaint that Ryle has a "slap-dash" approach to important points, I note that
Ryle gives short shrift to Hobbes as a crude mechanist who propounded an inadequate theory of mind. Yet Ryle expends no energy on this point. Had he done so, I am afraid he would have had difficulty showing why his deterministic non-mechanics is superior to Hobbes's deterministic mechanics. Not only this, Ryle does not realize that his non-mechanical determinism is itself mystical -- mystical unless we very generously give him the benefit of the doubt.
It is curious that modern quantum physics lends credence to the Hegelian view of partial determinism. George di Giovanni observes:
According to Hegel’s mature position, the notion that it is possible to determine anything in nature absolutely makes no sense, for the simple reason that things of nature do not perfectly control their own becoming and are therefore susceptible to a potentially infinite number of external influences. Perfect determination is possible only in the ideal realm of the concept. So far as nature is concerned, determination will always be relative and reformable, according to limits which are to be determined by the physical sciences. This, I take it, is what Hegel means by the Ohnmacht der Natur, “the impotence of nature,” in §250 of [Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline]...[zw10]
[Hegel believed in the merger of opposites toward a higher synthesis, thus such baffling ideas as this:
["Being and non-being are the same; therefore it is the same whether this house is or is not, whether these hundred dollars are part of my fortune or not. This inference from, or application of, the proposition completely alters its meaning. The proposition contains the pure abstractions of being and nothing; but the application converts them into a determinate being and a determinate nothing. But as we have said, the question here is not of determinate being," though perhaps it is relevant that in his Science of Logic, Hegel says that the Eastern mystic attains to a "dull, empty consciousness" which is Being."[zw11]. ]
According to W.T. Stace, Hegel spoke of two modes of mentation appropriate to philosophy: Understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft). Understanding describes here the activity of standard logic, which includes the rule of the excluded middle. Reason on the other hand merges opposites into a whole, as in thesis implying antithesis and both implying a "higher" synthesis. Reason can see that pure Being and Nothing are identical and that they imply Becoming.[zxd0] (At some point, I will post a small discussion of Hegelian reason.)
["Being and non-being are the same; therefore it is the same whether this house is or is not, whether these hundred dollars are part of my fortune or not. This inference from, or application of, the proposition completely alters its meaning. The proposition contains the pure abstractions of being and nothing; but the application converts them into a determinate being and a determinate nothing. But as we have said, the question here is not of determinate being," though perhaps it is relevant that in his Science of Logic, Hegel says that the Eastern mystic attains to a "dull, empty consciousness" which is Being."[zw11]. ]
According to W.T. Stace, Hegel spoke of two modes of mentation appropriate to philosophy: Understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft). Understanding describes here the activity of standard logic, which includes the rule of the excluded middle. Reason on the other hand merges opposites into a whole, as in thesis implying antithesis and both implying a "higher" synthesis. Reason can see that pure Being and Nothing are identical and that they imply Becoming.[zxd0] (At some point, I will post a small discussion of Hegelian reason.)
Mindless freedom?
Ryle writes extensively about volition, trying to show that there is no such thing as a volitional act -- which could imply infinite regress if the so-called volition is itself an act. It is so that a number of modern writers tend to agree that free will is a delusion [3], but I suggest that Ryle has been no more successful than many in examining the issue of freedom to act versus being an automaton. By discounting the machine metaphor, presumably the sage means to suggest that a human's "decisions" are not utterly determinate. I gather that he means higher order rules can grant a human something like free will. In order, however, to get to that point, we need something more than provided by the don (although perhaps he does hint at it with his Gibbon analogy). That is to say, higher order rules may emerge, Gestalt-like, from a system. For example, the "macro" behavior of gases and liquids emerges from the statistically characterized behavior of multitudes of atoms.
When Ryle denies that a human is a machine, nevertheless the professor is, I believe, accepting the idea that the universe is a dynamical system akin to a machine which, even so, produces organically deterministic humans. He is oblivious that his confusion about determinism implies a "semi-determinism" (for want of a better word), or that is to say, an abridgment of the physical cause-and-effect notion entailed by a Newtonian/Darwinian worldview. Even if higher level rules yield a pseudo "free will," it remains the case that, underneath it all, the human is no more than a very sophisticated robot. Non-Aristotlean cause-and-effect really is a shorthand for empirically based physical "laws." Of course, it is not so easy to say that the universe necessarily obeys such laws; perhaps they express a fairly accurate means of predicting human perceptions, but who knows how it all really works?
Not only was Ryle willfully ignorant about physics, he demonstrated little awareness of the field of psychology in spite of the fact that one could argue that his book shows him to be an idiosyncratic psychological theorist. He does in fact refer to behaviorism in a not-unfriendly note while scorning introspectivist psychologists for connecting the dots in any way they like. This explains why he paid almost no heed to unconscious processes that precede supposed volitions.
Further, he claimed, it is a "logical solecism" to speak of someone's knowing this, or choosing that. "The person himself knows this and chooses that, though the fact that he does so can, if desired, be classified as a mental fact about that person."
This sort of utterance leads one to see Ryle as holding a behaviorist point of view. The holism of mental process and action knock away the need for a cloud-like conscious mind hanging about the head.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett takes what I assess as an emergence view of free will. In his 2013 book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, for example, he argues that there is practical free will. One would assume then there must be some impractical free will, which he doesn't identify. The idea that free will implies human automatons who are not responsible for what they do stems from the "rookie mistake" of "confusing the manifest image" with what we might call the "folk ideology of the manifest image." I think Dennett's real charge is that scientists who deny free will are being excessively reductionist.
A person, argues Dennett, should be treated as though she has free will and is somewhat responsible for her actions; otherwise that person is likely to believe she can't much help what she does and begin behaving badly.
And here we arrive at the concept of belief. But the full determinist would say that belief arises from physical processes. A response would be that de facto free will stems from higher level rules that emerge from lower-level physical interactions -- again using the analogy of gas laws and properties being determined, to a great extent, by collisions of myriads of atoms.
Still, don't we have another creed here?
Physical processes somehow give rise to conscious decisions. One day, all will be revealed.
Dennett, who has written extensively on consciousness, evolution and religion, believes I daresay that he has expunged God from reality as an unscientific hypothesis. Yet he faces the dilemma that both with God and without God, there is a black box that connects physics to free will. The idea that scientists will one day pry open the black box and any nested black boxes within is simply Dennett's article of faith, and nothing more.
If, as Ryle and his forerunners argue, consciousness does not exist as an entity but only as a function, then we can expect that Ryle would have seen the notion of a human faculty for higher Reason as of no account, another ghostly apparition. It is to be doubted that he would have accepted such a faculty of immediate insight into moral and mathematical truths, which is not the same as the ability to reckon, as in the solving of a puzzle via a series of observations and logical inferences.
Numerous modern philosophers, including Dennett and Russell, have likewise ignored this old distinction, no doubt on ground that such a faculty tends to imply a non-materialist or non-physicalist -- i.e. mystical -- concept.
John S. Uebersax makes a a case for not using a single word, reason, to cover both meanings. He suggests Reason and rationality, while noting that the Greek nous and dianoia have tended to acquire meanings that correspond to his proposals.
Higher Reason and Lower Reason
http://john-uebersax.com/plato/pdf/Higher_Reason_and_Lower_Reason.pdf
Similarly, John Dewey sees the relatively new term "intelligence" as a source of confusion. If that word were used as a "synonym for what one important school of past ages called 'reason' or 'pure intellect'," no confusion would arise. "But the word names something very different from what is regarded as the highest organ or 'faculty' for laying hold of ultimate truths. It is a shorthand designation for great and ever-growing methods of observation, experiment and reflective reasoning which have in a very short time revolutionized the physical and, to a considerable extent, the physiological conditions of life, but which have not as yet been worked out for application to what is itself distinctively and basically human. [zzw3]
Robert C. Solomon notes,
When Ryle denies that a human is a machine, nevertheless the professor is, I believe, accepting the idea that the universe is a dynamical system akin to a machine which, even so, produces organically deterministic humans. He is oblivious that his confusion about determinism implies a "semi-determinism" (for want of a better word), or that is to say, an abridgment of the physical cause-and-effect notion entailed by a Newtonian/Darwinian worldview. Even if higher level rules yield a pseudo "free will," it remains the case that, underneath it all, the human is no more than a very sophisticated robot. Non-Aristotlean cause-and-effect really is a shorthand for empirically based physical "laws." Of course, it is not so easy to say that the universe necessarily obeys such laws; perhaps they express a fairly accurate means of predicting human perceptions, but who knows how it all really works?
Not only was Ryle willfully ignorant about physics, he demonstrated little awareness of the field of psychology in spite of the fact that one could argue that his book shows him to be an idiosyncratic psychological theorist. He does in fact refer to behaviorism in a not-unfriendly note while scorning introspectivist psychologists for connecting the dots in any way they like. This explains why he paid almost no heed to unconscious processes that precede supposed volitions.
Further, he claimed, it is a "logical solecism" to speak of someone's knowing this, or choosing that. "The person himself knows this and chooses that, though the fact that he does so can, if desired, be classified as a mental fact about that person."
This sort of utterance leads one to see Ryle as holding a behaviorist point of view. The holism of mental process and action knock away the need for a cloud-like conscious mind hanging about the head.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett takes what I assess as an emergence view of free will. In his 2013 book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, for example, he argues that there is practical free will. One would assume then there must be some impractical free will, which he doesn't identify. The idea that free will implies human automatons who are not responsible for what they do stems from the "rookie mistake" of "confusing the manifest image" with what we might call the "folk ideology of the manifest image." I think Dennett's real charge is that scientists who deny free will are being excessively reductionist.
A person, argues Dennett, should be treated as though she has free will and is somewhat responsible for her actions; otherwise that person is likely to believe she can't much help what she does and begin behaving badly.
And here we arrive at the concept of belief. But the full determinist would say that belief arises from physical processes. A response would be that de facto free will stems from higher level rules that emerge from lower-level physical interactions -- again using the analogy of gas laws and properties being determined, to a great extent, by collisions of myriads of atoms.
Still, don't we have another creed here?
Physical processes somehow give rise to conscious decisions. One day, all will be revealed.
Dennett, who has written extensively on consciousness, evolution and religion, believes I daresay that he has expunged God from reality as an unscientific hypothesis. Yet he faces the dilemma that both with God and without God, there is a black box that connects physics to free will. The idea that scientists will one day pry open the black box and any nested black boxes within is simply Dennett's article of faith, and nothing more.
If, as Ryle and his forerunners argue, consciousness does not exist as an entity but only as a function, then we can expect that Ryle would have seen the notion of a human faculty for higher Reason as of no account, another ghostly apparition. It is to be doubted that he would have accepted such a faculty of immediate insight into moral and mathematical truths, which is not the same as the ability to reckon, as in the solving of a puzzle via a series of observations and logical inferences.
Numerous modern philosophers, including Dennett and Russell, have likewise ignored this old distinction, no doubt on ground that such a faculty tends to imply a non-materialist or non-physicalist -- i.e. mystical -- concept.
John S. Uebersax makes a a case for not using a single word, reason, to cover both meanings. He suggests Reason and rationality, while noting that the Greek nous and dianoia have tended to acquire meanings that correspond to his proposals.
Higher Reason and Lower Reason
http://john-uebersax.com/plato/pdf/Higher_Reason_and_Lower_Reason.pdf
Similarly, John Dewey sees the relatively new term "intelligence" as a source of confusion. If that word were used as a "synonym for what one important school of past ages called 'reason' or 'pure intellect'," no confusion would arise. "But the word names something very different from what is regarded as the highest organ or 'faculty' for laying hold of ultimate truths. It is a shorthand designation for great and ever-growing methods of observation, experiment and reflective reasoning which have in a very short time revolutionized the physical and, to a considerable extent, the physiological conditions of life, but which have not as yet been worked out for application to what is itself distinctively and basically human. [zzw3]
Robert C. Solomon notes,
Kant had distinguished between "understanding" and "reason" as the two "faculties" of the human mind which deal with concepts: the first is concerned wholly with the application of concepts to experience, the second is involved in an odd collection of tasks, including the formulation of "practical" principles, and the more suspicious tasks of metaphysics and theology. What reason can not do is provide us with knowledge about the phenomenal world, according to Kant, because it has no experiential basis. The distinction [became] the key to German Idealism, and Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all came to champion reason and disparage understanding, since reason contra Kant, is supposed to be the faculty which gives knowledge of the world "in-itself," as understanding does not." [zw4]Further, says Solomon,
The confrontation of "reason" and "understanding" ... is not just a battle of words; it is a basic battle of viewpoints about the nature of reality. Reason is the faculty of synthesis; it sees interconnections, comprehends the place of a thing or of an event in the larger picture, understands purposes; understanding is rather the faculty of analysis, breaking things down to see the interrelation of the parts. Reason is championed by those thinkers who insist on seeing the world as activity...
(I quickly note that in order to see interconnections and comprehend something's place in a larger picture, one must conduct at least some analysis, even if of a rough sort.)
As Anthony Quinton notes:
As Anthony Quinton notes:
There is an old distinction, inherited ultimately from Kant, between reason and understanding. Understanding is the method of thought used by scientists, by historians, and even more by ordinary men in their practical dealings with the world around them. But reason is thought of as a higher kind of thinking, and what for the Absolute Idealist [such as Kant and Hegel] is characteristic or definitive of the philosopher is that he employs reason. Now this is a very antquated notion in some ways ... The idea is that the philosopher with his special method of reason can find out the truth about reality, while ordinary men deal only in appearance.[zw8]
[One might draw an analogy of a person who solves a math problem using a ready-made algorithm versus one who solves a math problem through creative use of his powers of analysis. The two forms of thinking are related, but by no means identical.]
Cosmic con game?
So all this is to say that a deterministic system, the universe, fathering a partly
non-deterministic system, the human, is rather an odd notion.
Of course, the quantum wave
equation is mathematically precise, predicting exactly where the wave
will be. But, as soon as the wave is detected, the wave's function
vanishes and we have a particle that lands -- within constraints --
utterly randomly. Quantum weirdness is even today mind-blowing stuff. Nevertheless,
clearly Ryle could have argued that in principle it is possible for a
deterministic system to produce a non-deterministic subsystem
(
we are of course
ignoring the vexing issue of observer-quantum interaction).
Then, we cannot say that Ryle's inadvertent implication that man is part ghost is altogether ludicrous. In this vein, it is curious that some favor a determinate model for the source of all thought when we have an example of a system that cannot be altogether determinate in the Turing sense: the universe -- which cannot be modeled as a Turing machine or Boolean circuit. What determines what specific machine, or computation, it is?
Please see my paper
The cosmos cannot be modeled as a Turing machine
To elucidate, let us consider the point that the general Church-Turing thesis says that whatever is in principle computable can be in principle computed by a Turing machine. Now, a physical machine has an input (raw material and fuel) and an output (refined material or vectored energy). The machine's design and settings (instructions) correspond to a Turing algorithm and the output corresponds to a Turing computation. So then, if the universe cannot be modeled as a Turing machine, it cannot in fact be modeled as a machine at all -- even though many physicists seem to assume that it can be. In other words, if one then denies that the cosmos is, en toto, a deterministic system, then we have in principle a natural object that is -- granting the Church-Turing thesis -- no machine. Hence, one may then argue that some natural objects in the universe, whether they be large cosmic entities or men, might not after all be machines.
(By this, physicalists would need to come up with a theory that uses some topological solution, along with proposed field and string theories. That is to say, a topological solution would need at the very least to account for the chicken-or-the-egg causality problem. One can dismiss that problem, but then one is left with neither a machine nor a hyper-machine.)
In fact, if, as James and (at times) Russell assert, the cosmos is pluralistic, it becomes impossible to conceive of it in machine-like terms. A machine on its own is surely a monistic contraption, in which all components form a unified, functional whole. So pluralism leaves bits of "irrational" acausality. Again, if the cosmos is no machine, why must all its components be machines? There is no clear reason for that assumption.
If it is required that Nature be construed as one vast machine, then the cosmos is super-natural. The contrapositive also holds. If the cosmos is not super-natural, Nature is no machine. In that case, Nature is not monist, but pluralist, meaning the laws of physics are not identical everywhere. So much for the Copernican principle.
We also find that a non-deist monist conception of Nature is correlated with a machine conception of Nature, whereby the laws of physics provide the single organizing logos and, probably, some quantum/relativistic field provides the universal substance. Can a non-deist monist view of Nature be found that conforms with a non-machine view of Nature? This notion seems highly implausible, leaving us the view that the cosmos is -- accepting the uniformity of the laws of physics -- super-natural. For those who wish to dissociate from the notion of deism -- regarding deism as an importation of animism into the natural order -- we can say that the universe is hyper-natural rather than supernatural.
A related point: Admittedly, Claude Shannon's groundbreaking work would have been unknown to the Oxford sage, but what excuse is there for the many modern writers who overlook the issue of a human being's complexity in terms of information (bits, that is)?
I suggest that the information in a single human being exceeds the information in the observable cosmos minus the human race (along with any other intelligent species that may be out there). Perhaps you counter that chaotic or nearly chaotic dynamical systems, such as large weather systems, have comparable information loads. Yet a further scrutiny of "information" will demonstrate our point. Biologists tell us that the human body is composed of numerous hierarchical subsystems. We can model these roughly as a tree graph. The top system has n major subsystems. Each of these has some other number of subsystems, and so on, down to the molecular level. So if we guess that, on average, each system has 10 subsystems, we find there are 10n systems in a human body. How many hierarchies n there are, I don't know. Let's take a ballpark guess of 50.
This gives 1050 subsystems, each of which has an information load. Let us guess the average information load per subsystem to be a very conservative 1000 bits. Then we have 10(50,000) bits for one human being, a very large number indeed.
An excellent estimate was given by an Australian, Derek Muller, who calculated that the information in the human genetic code is a lowly 1.5 gigabytes of data. When multiplied by 40 trillion cells, we get 60 zetabytes of information. This means, according to a 2014 Daily Mail report, that the entire code -- before multiplying -- could be stored on a standard DVD, and is the equivalent to around 6,709 books, or 300 pages with 360,000 characters. Simply multiplying the information load in the genome by the number of cells does not, however, really address the hierarchy issue. If we take 1.5 gigabytes as our initial input and scale up, hierarchically, we then get an enormous load -- as in perhaps 10(109 x 50), which exceeds 10(1010) bits, a fantastic number.
Please see Daily Mail report
DNA information estimated
I would argue that in spite of the fact that the cosmos has numerous subsystems, none needs the information power of human or animal brains in order to stay alive. It takes a high degree of organization (information) for that purpose. If we look to physical law in terms of conservation of energy, a great deal of our world is explainable. Yet "energy," from a mathematical viewpoint, is a relation. It provides a useful way of bypassing Newtonian time/motion calculations. The kinetic energy equation, K = 1/2kmv2, permits us to avoid tedious Newtonian methods. Also, Einstein's
E = mc2 nicely encapsulates a vast swath of modern physics. So, yes, energy explains much -- but nothing explains energy. As Richard Feynman said, there's nothing it to it, really.
Of course, one might counter that non-material is not the same as non-physical. Non-material forces might exist that are yet part of a physical world. Yet, as we can define neither non-material nor non-physical, we have no way of distinguishing immaterial, but supposedly physical, forces from the now unfashionable vital spirits.
And Zeno strikes again: motion is some sort of fiction. Yet those who agree with Zeno that change itself is an illusion must never get hungry. If the brain manufactures the purported material world, would that not suggest -- a la Goedel -- that the brain cannot on its own know whence it came?
For Descartes the problem was reconciling the new physical paradigm of mechanics with the Christian belief in an incorporeal soul. Ryle, equating mind, soul and psychological self as synonyms, argued that "the mind" is not a specific entity, and hence not a thing that could possess immortality.
"My mind" is not an organ or operative, but an "ability or proneness to do certain things," Ryle argues. In fact, even the word mind makes it possible to make "improper conjunctions, disjunctions and cause-effect propositions."
Modern writers tend to argue that Descartes' dualistic thesis created a major point of confusion, but that Ryle had got rid of that perplexity. Ryle's true legacy is simply his pithy "ghost" aphorism. (Interestingly, in English, the word "ghost" is synonymous with "spirit" but by Ryle's time a certain degree of contempt had attached to the former term.)
Ryle's aphorism was adopted by Arthur Koestler, whose 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine accounted for the ghostliness with a materialist theory of emergence that deployed something he called holons. You may regard Koestler's work as pseudo-science, but then we must also agree that pseudo-science underpins Ryle's curious brand of holistic behaviorism. (Ryle and others dispute that he was a behaviorist, but the dispute is over a word that perhaps is inadequately defined.)
We can see the parallel between Ryle's phrase and the venerable deus ex machina, meaning "god via the machine." In ancient Greece, a crane was used to suspend a god above the stage in order to bring the story to a dramatic conclusion.
In English literature, the phrase represents a plot device whereby something or someone shows up in the nick of time to resolve a difficulty.
John Sergeant, in Solid philosophy asserted against the fancies of the Ideists, commented in 1697:
"Nor is it at all allowable in Philosophy, to bring in a Deus è Machiná at every turn, when our selves are at a loss to give a Reason for our Thesis." [zzz9]
Assuredly Ryle sees the ghost in the machine idea to be an impermissible deus ex machina.
Then, we cannot say that Ryle's inadvertent implication that man is part ghost is altogether ludicrous. In this vein, it is curious that some favor a determinate model for the source of all thought when we have an example of a system that cannot be altogether determinate in the Turing sense: the universe -- which cannot be modeled as a Turing machine or Boolean circuit. What determines what specific machine, or computation, it is?
Please see my paper
The cosmos cannot be modeled as a Turing machine
To elucidate, let us consider the point that the general Church-Turing thesis says that whatever is in principle computable can be in principle computed by a Turing machine. Now, a physical machine has an input (raw material and fuel) and an output (refined material or vectored energy). The machine's design and settings (instructions) correspond to a Turing algorithm and the output corresponds to a Turing computation. So then, if the universe cannot be modeled as a Turing machine, it cannot in fact be modeled as a machine at all -- even though many physicists seem to assume that it can be. In other words, if one then denies that the cosmos is, en toto, a deterministic system, then we have in principle a natural object that is -- granting the Church-Turing thesis -- no machine. Hence, one may then argue that some natural objects in the universe, whether they be large cosmic entities or men, might not after all be machines.
(By this, physicalists would need to come up with a theory that uses some topological solution, along with proposed field and string theories. That is to say, a topological solution would need at the very least to account for the chicken-or-the-egg causality problem. One can dismiss that problem, but then one is left with neither a machine nor a hyper-machine.)
In fact, if, as James and (at times) Russell assert, the cosmos is pluralistic, it becomes impossible to conceive of it in machine-like terms. A machine on its own is surely a monistic contraption, in which all components form a unified, functional whole. So pluralism leaves bits of "irrational" acausality. Again, if the cosmos is no machine, why must all its components be machines? There is no clear reason for that assumption.
If it is required that Nature be construed as one vast machine, then the cosmos is super-natural. The contrapositive also holds. If the cosmos is not super-natural, Nature is no machine. In that case, Nature is not monist, but pluralist, meaning the laws of physics are not identical everywhere. So much for the Copernican principle.
We also find that a non-deist monist conception of Nature is correlated with a machine conception of Nature, whereby the laws of physics provide the single organizing logos and, probably, some quantum/relativistic field provides the universal substance. Can a non-deist monist view of Nature be found that conforms with a non-machine view of Nature? This notion seems highly implausible, leaving us the view that the cosmos is -- accepting the uniformity of the laws of physics -- super-natural. For those who wish to dissociate from the notion of deism -- regarding deism as an importation of animism into the natural order -- we can say that the universe is hyper-natural rather than supernatural.
A related point: Admittedly, Claude Shannon's groundbreaking work would have been unknown to the Oxford sage, but what excuse is there for the many modern writers who overlook the issue of a human being's complexity in terms of information (bits, that is)?
I suggest that the information in a single human being exceeds the information in the observable cosmos minus the human race (along with any other intelligent species that may be out there). Perhaps you counter that chaotic or nearly chaotic dynamical systems, such as large weather systems, have comparable information loads. Yet a further scrutiny of "information" will demonstrate our point. Biologists tell us that the human body is composed of numerous hierarchical subsystems. We can model these roughly as a tree graph. The top system has n major subsystems. Each of these has some other number of subsystems, and so on, down to the molecular level. So if we guess that, on average, each system has 10 subsystems, we find there are 10n systems in a human body. How many hierarchies n there are, I don't know. Let's take a ballpark guess of 50.
This gives 1050 subsystems, each of which has an information load. Let us guess the average information load per subsystem to be a very conservative 1000 bits. Then we have 10(50,000) bits for one human being, a very large number indeed.
An excellent estimate was given by an Australian, Derek Muller, who calculated that the information in the human genetic code is a lowly 1.5 gigabytes of data. When multiplied by 40 trillion cells, we get 60 zetabytes of information. This means, according to a 2014 Daily Mail report, that the entire code -- before multiplying -- could be stored on a standard DVD, and is the equivalent to around 6,709 books, or 300 pages with 360,000 characters. Simply multiplying the information load in the genome by the number of cells does not, however, really address the hierarchy issue. If we take 1.5 gigabytes as our initial input and scale up, hierarchically, we then get an enormous load -- as in perhaps 10(109 x 50), which exceeds 10(1010) bits, a fantastic number.
Please see Daily Mail report
DNA information estimated
I would argue that in spite of the fact that the cosmos has numerous subsystems, none needs the information power of human or animal brains in order to stay alive. It takes a high degree of organization (information) for that purpose. If we look to physical law in terms of conservation of energy, a great deal of our world is explainable. Yet "energy," from a mathematical viewpoint, is a relation. It provides a useful way of bypassing Newtonian time/motion calculations. The kinetic energy equation, K = 1/2kmv2, permits us to avoid tedious Newtonian methods. Also, Einstein's
E = mc2 nicely encapsulates a vast swath of modern physics. So, yes, energy explains much -- but nothing explains energy. As Richard Feynman said, there's nothing it to it, really.
Of course, one might counter that non-material is not the same as non-physical. Non-material forces might exist that are yet part of a physical world. Yet, as we can define neither non-material nor non-physical, we have no way of distinguishing immaterial, but supposedly physical, forces from the now unfashionable vital spirits.
And Zeno strikes again: motion is some sort of fiction. Yet those who agree with Zeno that change itself is an illusion must never get hungry. If the brain manufactures the purported material world, would that not suggest -- a la Goedel -- that the brain cannot on its own know whence it came?
For Descartes the problem was reconciling the new physical paradigm of mechanics with the Christian belief in an incorporeal soul. Ryle, equating mind, soul and psychological self as synonyms, argued that "the mind" is not a specific entity, and hence not a thing that could possess immortality.
"My mind" is not an organ or operative, but an "ability or proneness to do certain things," Ryle argues. In fact, even the word mind makes it possible to make "improper conjunctions, disjunctions and cause-effect propositions."
Modern writers tend to argue that Descartes' dualistic thesis created a major point of confusion, but that Ryle had got rid of that perplexity. Ryle's true legacy is simply his pithy "ghost" aphorism. (Interestingly, in English, the word "ghost" is synonymous with "spirit" but by Ryle's time a certain degree of contempt had attached to the former term.)
Ryle's aphorism was adopted by Arthur Koestler, whose 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine accounted for the ghostliness with a materialist theory of emergence that deployed something he called holons. You may regard Koestler's work as pseudo-science, but then we must also agree that pseudo-science underpins Ryle's curious brand of holistic behaviorism. (Ryle and others dispute that he was a behaviorist, but the dispute is over a word that perhaps is inadequately defined.)
We can see the parallel between Ryle's phrase and the venerable deus ex machina, meaning "god via the machine." In ancient Greece, a crane was used to suspend a god above the stage in order to bring the story to a dramatic conclusion.
In English literature, the phrase represents a plot device whereby something or someone shows up in the nick of time to resolve a difficulty.
John Sergeant, in Solid philosophy asserted against the fancies of the Ideists, commented in 1697:
"Nor is it at all allowable in Philosophy, to bring in a Deus è Machiná at every turn, when our selves are at a loss to give a Reason for our Thesis." [zzz9]
Assuredly Ryle sees the ghost in the machine idea to be an impermissible deus ex machina.
Death of crazy horse
Let us, for completeness, flog a dead horse here.
Logically, part of Ryle's argument is the triviality that
Logically, part of Ryle's argument is the triviality that
"[not-machine and ghost] implies that [machine and ghost]" is false.
Yet, this statement in no way requires that a ghost's
existence be false.
If, however, we join most modern writers and assume that the machine paradigm is correct, we cannot infer from [not-(machine and ghost)] that [not-ghost] holds.
Descartes was puzzled about how the soul animated the body and where it was located, conjecturing that it was in the head's pituitary gland that employed a physically acausal process to operate the brain-body machinery. These days, cognitive science has demonstrated just how much conscious "decision-making" depends on specific physical brain functions. Yet, some still wonder, could there also be a "something" that is father to the thought that might be characterized as "action at a distance"? Is it possible that this ghost, while intimately interlinked with the physical brain, is of a non-physical nature? That question has not been answered. Yes, modern physicalists object that the ghost's existence is not at present a testable conjecture, but it does not follow that such a notion can never find empirical support.
Just as Descartes argued a priori that the ghost must inhabit the machine, many these days argue a priori that a ghost does not inhabit the machine.
Genetic engineering is perhaps the most convincing evidence against any form of vitalism, that the assumptions of Darwinists, philosophers like Ryle and much of the intelligentsia have been borne out. Yet long before I wrote the linked essay
Toward a Signal Model of Perception
there were words of caution. Harold J. Morowitz pointed out in 1980 that the reductionists' unrelenting drive toward a purely physicalist (i.e., electronic-materialist) view of life was confounded by the finding of modern physics that basic physical effects require the mind of an observer, as shown by the constancy of the velocity of light relative to the observer and by the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. (Morowitz specialized in the origin of life and was a foe of creationism and its close cousin, vitalism.)
As discussed in my paper,
The Many Worlds of Probability, Reality and Cognition
this loop implies a noumenal world, of which we may catch glimpses by new technical experiments or, possibly, by other means.
In Douglas Hofstadter's reply [4] to Morowitz, Hofstadter argues, while citing no supporting evidence, that artificial intelligence can be designed that does not take into account the conundrums of relativity and quantum physics. At this, it might be worthwhile to pause. So, supposing that consciousness influences physical outcomes, it would be possible to design a machine that does not influence physical outcomes by the act of observation. If this last were to hold, then it would still, if we accept Hofstadter's premise, be possible to design non-human, and quite possibly non-conscious, intelligent systems. We would guess such a machine would be an extraordinarily layered and sophisticated calculator, but it is doubtful the machine would "know" anything, as evidenced by the fact that it's "observation" would not affect measurement.
Or if we thought we had imbued the gizmo with consciousness, how would we test for such "awareness"? One way would be to see whether its "knowledge" influenced outcomes. The problem with that idea is that it -- conscious or not -- would become part of the measurement device for one of us, just as Wigner's friend does.
Thus, it appears that consciousness -- a word Ryle frowns upon -- is something for which it would be very hard to find an objective test. An extremely sophisticated calculator could mimic all the outward signs of consciousness. Alan Turing's paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, is meant to rebut arguments that, in principle, a machine could not mimic human intelligence. Turing does allow, however, that a Rhine-type test for telepathy might identify the machine. (Hostadter and Dennett pan Turing's acceptance of the statistical results in a short response that is more polemic than reasoned argument.) Yet, suppose the interrogator was unconsciously psychokinetic, muses Turing. In that case, he might affect the telepathy statistics in favor of the machine.
These afterthoughts seem, at first blush, ridiculous. Still, they are only so if one assumes out of hand that so-called psi phenomena are a result of deliberate trickery or a naive tendency to connect dots wrongly. As Morowitz wrote, the apparent continuous loop between the observer and physical events poses intriguing questions for investigators.
If, however, we join most modern writers and assume that the machine paradigm is correct, we cannot infer from [not-(machine and ghost)] that [not-ghost] holds.
Descartes was puzzled about how the soul animated the body and where it was located, conjecturing that it was in the head's pituitary gland that employed a physically acausal process to operate the brain-body machinery. These days, cognitive science has demonstrated just how much conscious "decision-making" depends on specific physical brain functions. Yet, some still wonder, could there also be a "something" that is father to the thought that might be characterized as "action at a distance"? Is it possible that this ghost, while intimately interlinked with the physical brain, is of a non-physical nature? That question has not been answered. Yes, modern physicalists object that the ghost's existence is not at present a testable conjecture, but it does not follow that such a notion can never find empirical support.
Just as Descartes argued a priori that the ghost must inhabit the machine, many these days argue a priori that a ghost does not inhabit the machine.
Genetic engineering is perhaps the most convincing evidence against any form of vitalism, that the assumptions of Darwinists, philosophers like Ryle and much of the intelligentsia have been borne out. Yet long before I wrote the linked essay
Toward a Signal Model of Perception
there were words of caution. Harold J. Morowitz pointed out in 1980 that the reductionists' unrelenting drive toward a purely physicalist (i.e., electronic-materialist) view of life was confounded by the finding of modern physics that basic physical effects require the mind of an observer, as shown by the constancy of the velocity of light relative to the observer and by the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. (Morowitz specialized in the origin of life and was a foe of creationism and its close cousin, vitalism.)
As discussed in my paper,
The Many Worlds of Probability, Reality and Cognition
this loop implies a noumenal world, of which we may catch glimpses by new technical experiments or, possibly, by other means.
In Douglas Hofstadter's reply [4] to Morowitz, Hofstadter argues, while citing no supporting evidence, that artificial intelligence can be designed that does not take into account the conundrums of relativity and quantum physics. At this, it might be worthwhile to pause. So, supposing that consciousness influences physical outcomes, it would be possible to design a machine that does not influence physical outcomes by the act of observation. If this last were to hold, then it would still, if we accept Hofstadter's premise, be possible to design non-human, and quite possibly non-conscious, intelligent systems. We would guess such a machine would be an extraordinarily layered and sophisticated calculator, but it is doubtful the machine would "know" anything, as evidenced by the fact that it's "observation" would not affect measurement.
Or if we thought we had imbued the gizmo with consciousness, how would we test for such "awareness"? One way would be to see whether its "knowledge" influenced outcomes. The problem with that idea is that it -- conscious or not -- would become part of the measurement device for one of us, just as Wigner's friend does.
Thus, it appears that consciousness -- a word Ryle frowns upon -- is something for which it would be very hard to find an objective test. An extremely sophisticated calculator could mimic all the outward signs of consciousness. Alan Turing's paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, is meant to rebut arguments that, in principle, a machine could not mimic human intelligence. Turing does allow, however, that a Rhine-type test for telepathy might identify the machine. (Hostadter and Dennett pan Turing's acceptance of the statistical results in a short response that is more polemic than reasoned argument.) Yet, suppose the interrogator was unconsciously psychokinetic, muses Turing. In that case, he might affect the telepathy statistics in favor of the machine.
These afterthoughts seem, at first blush, ridiculous. Still, they are only so if one assumes out of hand that so-called psi phenomena are a result of deliberate trickery or a naive tendency to connect dots wrongly. As Morowitz wrote, the apparent continuous loop between the observer and physical events poses intriguing questions for investigators.
Soft in the head
These days one might argue that the mind-body problem is to be summarized as the mind-brain problem. If the brain is the hardware, then does it follow that the mind is the software? A problem with this analogy is that the software must update itself continuously; yet I would say this problem is largely solvable through the use of negative feedback subprograms. One might then argue that the software indeed inhabits the hardware and is, in fact, a distinct entity. Yet Ryle spent much of his book trying to dissuade us from the view that mind, as a distinct entity, makes much sense. Rather, what we call "mind" is a collective term for various behaviors.
Of course, the software-hardware conundrum appeared after Ryle wrote, but even so we have a near-counterexample to his notion that the mind is not a specific entity that inhabits anything.
To be more precise, a software program certainly is a ghost in the hardware. It exists as a something, but if one were to look inside the machinery, the program would be difficult to locate without the special testing tools used by computer experts. All one would see is a hodgepodge of microcircuits.
On the other hand, to credit Ryle, we do see that the "mind" -- software -- exists and operates according to physical law. Of course a caveat to that concession is that neither the hardware nor the software got there by accident. Both were designed. In other words, when we use the computer metaphor to talk about minds, we find that, rather than having solved our problem, we have simply pushed it back.
A relevant question is: if the mind "inhabits" the body, then why is it that the turning off of brain functions results in noticeable personality changes, or why is the mind so different during REM sleep than when fully conscious? Using the software analogy, we can imagine shutting off subroutines to get a markedly different "entity." [5] Despite the vast sea of literature on the mind/Self/ego problem, the puzzle remains elusive. Why is it unreasonable to suppose that behind the "conscious mind" is a spirit that animates not only the body, but consciousness? A spirit that runs deeper than the animalistic infant that lurks in the human unconscious seeking its way? [6] If we have no means of physically defining consciousness, why is it supposedly dead certain that such a physical solution will be found -- particularly in light of Morowitz's observation?
Ryle knew nothing of all that. His means of coping with consciousness was to deny it as a valid term.
"Consciousness" was, he says, imported to play in the material world the part played by light in the (non-Hobbesian?) mechanical world. The myth of consciousness is a piece of "para-optics." To Ryle, a myth is a mistaken interpretation of facts; the dots have been wrongly connected. Still, one can perhaps imagine a seemingly fully alert AI robot losing consciousness by degrees as its power is reduced and as various subsystems are shut down. Once the machine has been fully turned off, few would think that its spirit or soul had left -- although, granted, we can conceive of someone getting the disquieting impression that the robot had lost "consciousness."
Still, Ryle does not knock "phosphorescent" theories of consciousness in order to understand what that word might mean; his real aim is to show that the process represented by the word requires no spiritual assistance.
Now, to give Ryle his due, let us turn again to the Gestalt concept.
If we take the mind to be a physical epiphenomenon (beware, this word is a source of philosophical controversy), we must revert to the concept of a human as an automaton, where "free will" is a robotic delusion, notwithstanding that conscious "decisions" are part of the feedback control system. Still, spontaneous attraction and love for another person do not seem altogether physical, even taking emotional feedbacks into account. If one denies the automaton theory (that is to say, that the brain and behavior of a human being can, in principle, be replicated by artificial intelligence), then there is nothing for it but to accept a non-physical ghost in the robot. This is a point which no amount of wrangling can resolve. If we believe, however, that robots cannot act humanly on quantum measurement, it seems unlikely they would ever be able to experience love. (I say that knowing that technically I have committed a non sequitur.)
Of course, the software-hardware conundrum appeared after Ryle wrote, but even so we have a near-counterexample to his notion that the mind is not a specific entity that inhabits anything.
To be more precise, a software program certainly is a ghost in the hardware. It exists as a something, but if one were to look inside the machinery, the program would be difficult to locate without the special testing tools used by computer experts. All one would see is a hodgepodge of microcircuits.
On the other hand, to credit Ryle, we do see that the "mind" -- software -- exists and operates according to physical law. Of course a caveat to that concession is that neither the hardware nor the software got there by accident. Both were designed. In other words, when we use the computer metaphor to talk about minds, we find that, rather than having solved our problem, we have simply pushed it back.
A relevant question is: if the mind "inhabits" the body, then why is it that the turning off of brain functions results in noticeable personality changes, or why is the mind so different during REM sleep than when fully conscious? Using the software analogy, we can imagine shutting off subroutines to get a markedly different "entity." [5] Despite the vast sea of literature on the mind/Self/ego problem, the puzzle remains elusive. Why is it unreasonable to suppose that behind the "conscious mind" is a spirit that animates not only the body, but consciousness? A spirit that runs deeper than the animalistic infant that lurks in the human unconscious seeking its way? [6] If we have no means of physically defining consciousness, why is it supposedly dead certain that such a physical solution will be found -- particularly in light of Morowitz's observation?
Ryle knew nothing of all that. His means of coping with consciousness was to deny it as a valid term.
"Consciousness" was, he says, imported to play in the material world the part played by light in the (non-Hobbesian?) mechanical world. The myth of consciousness is a piece of "para-optics." To Ryle, a myth is a mistaken interpretation of facts; the dots have been wrongly connected. Still, one can perhaps imagine a seemingly fully alert AI robot losing consciousness by degrees as its power is reduced and as various subsystems are shut down. Once the machine has been fully turned off, few would think that its spirit or soul had left -- although, granted, we can conceive of someone getting the disquieting impression that the robot had lost "consciousness."
Still, Ryle does not knock "phosphorescent" theories of consciousness in order to understand what that word might mean; his real aim is to show that the process represented by the word requires no spiritual assistance.
Now, to give Ryle his due, let us turn again to the Gestalt concept.
If we take the mind to be a physical epiphenomenon (beware, this word is a source of philosophical controversy), we must revert to the concept of a human as an automaton, where "free will" is a robotic delusion, notwithstanding that conscious "decisions" are part of the feedback control system. Still, spontaneous attraction and love for another person do not seem altogether physical, even taking emotional feedbacks into account. If one denies the automaton theory (that is to say, that the brain and behavior of a human being can, in principle, be replicated by artificial intelligence), then there is nothing for it but to accept a non-physical ghost in the robot. This is a point which no amount of wrangling can resolve. If we believe, however, that robots cannot act humanly on quantum measurement, it seems unlikely they would ever be able to experience love. (I say that knowing that technically I have committed a non sequitur.)
Out of the silent deep
The idea of emergence tracks back to Aristotle. In his view entelechy is that which "realizes or makes actual what is otherwise merely potential." Thus, Leibniz held, his monad concept dovetailed nicely with Aristotle's concept.
Leibniz posited monads in an attempt to escape Cartesian dualism. These soul-like essences underlie the illusion of the material world, he held, which cannot be as it appears because, he argues, space and time do not exist. Causation -- as in, how does the Cartesian immaterial soul or mind compel the material body/machine to do anything -- is a consequence of the unseen monadic world's pre-ordained harmony. [zz1]
One can see how the notion of entelechy covers very well such things as Cantor's actual infinities, the collective macro behavior of myriads of gas molecules, the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey equations and, presumably, the phenomenon of conscious awareness. In the last case however there is so far nothing to bridge the gap between smaller units and the entelechy of consciousness: no set of equations that captures the emergence of consciousness from lower levels.
I do not recall seeing in Ryle this brilliant conception of Aristotle's. Yet most of Ryle's book is implicitly dependent on the idea of entelechy, if not on some form of monism.
Hofstadter uses the word in the sense of Gestalt in his Mind's I comment on a long excerpt from The Selfish Gene by Richard Hawkins. That selection shows nicely Hawkins's view that he can imagine a whole -- a complex lifeform -- emerging from many parts. Re-reading it after many years was instructive for this writer. Dawkins wove a very compelling, lawyerly case for the possibility that consciousness, say, could have emerged by increments until voila! there it was. The jury is persuaded. Case closed. Yet closer inspection shows a very skillfully presented conjecture with many gaps in the reasoning. We are not to notice that the input values of genetic coding go into a black box that transforms the information into an output that corresponds with something wondrous to behold.
That there are many who are, like Dawkins, convinced that the black box's content can be laid bare, hardly implies that that conviction is close to realization.
Dawkins no doubt heartily approves of modern science's supposed disavowal of metaphysics -- a term sullied by the dislike of the Vienna Circle of philosophers for anything judged non-scientific. That disdain has carried down the generations, from the period when, in particular, the logician Rudolf Carnap [6a] promoted the notion that metaphysical problems were the result of a misapplication of terms, a point also made by Ludwig Wiitgenstein and later echoed by Ryle's assertion that terms could be wrongly categorized.
A basic flaw of metaphysics, argued Carnap and the logical positivists, is that metaphysicians tend to make statements that can neither be proved nor disproved within their own systems. How would one, for example, go about proving the notion of spiritual universe? Metaphysics, Carnap further held, posed statements that had the appearance of implying problems, but which in actuality were posers that violated the empirical and syntactical criteria of meaningfulness. That is to say, metaphysical questions are words strung together to create the form of meaning but not the actuality of meaning. (So much for soul, immortality and all the interesting stuff.)
Carnap took Martin Heidegger to task for his saying Das Nichts selbst nichtet ("The nothing itself nothings") from Was ist Metaphysik? Can't anyone see this is an example of vacuous humbuggery? To drive home the point, consider the sentence "Nothing is P" represented by
~(Ex)Px. If x is an instantiation of "Nothing is P" we have an absurd infinite regress. Yet I reply that merely because a statement cannot be easily fit into a symbolic formal system does not mean there is nothing worth pondering.
In addition, Carnap's attempt to avoid metaphysics (afterphysics) has only been honored in the breach by the scientific community. Consider the intense discussions of the various "many worlds" theories, of the inflationary universe and all its possible bubble universes, of the Parmenides-like spacetime block, of cyclic cosmoses, of ideas over whether time is open or shut, of strings that supposedly could unify "all" physical law, of loop quantum gravity. True, all of this speculation is aimed at "extending" physical law rather than at checking for spirit-like possibilities. It is hard, however, to imagine what physical law transcends the idea of motion in a spacetime block. How would one go about measuring change, if time and motion are both illusions that are due to our congenital misperception of something greater?
Much to Einstein's consternation when faced with the perplexities of quantum measurement, the sage of Princeton found there is no escaping metaphysics. The fact that some scientists push this problem aside as currently unresolvable demonstrates that metaphysics is for them a wall that they haven't the inclination to hurdle.
The Vienna Circle took Einstein and Ernst Mach, the 19th Century philosopher of science, to be among its forebears. Interestingly, Einstein cited Mach in his decisions to simplify physics by discarding irrelevant concepts, such as the ether. The ether was required under the old metaphysical paradigm of a cosmos that transmits action via bits of matter bumping into each other (though it was understood that the ethereal vibrating medium could not be of the ponderable-object variety).
Yet Einstein was no cheerleader for the Vienna Circle. Though he absolved Hume of responsibility, Einstein was skeptical of the modern "fear of metaphysics," which he saw as a malady that was paralleled by the old philosophical ailment of speculation with no connection to what is given through the senses. In fact, Einstein said Russell's book on epistemology, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [zzz15] appeared to suffer from this defect, and elsewhere he debated Carnap on the assumptions of the Circle. In particular, Einstein was suspicious of Russell's notion that "bundles of qualities" are to replace the "things" of the ordinary world.
Einstein cites Russell's example of two precisely matched Eiffel towers, one in Paris and one in New York. Without the use of spatio-temporal coordinates, Russell had argued, the towers would be indistinguishable and so would be "the same thing." Einstein argued that he could "see no metaphysical danger in taking the thing (the object in the sense of physics) as an independent concept into the system together with the proper spatio-temporal structure."
In other words, what is wrong with simply granting an independent existence to each tower? Doubtless, Russell could have then asked how this could be done without an observable space-time difference? (We might add that, because no two electrons are distinguishable, it does indeed become difficult to grant each independent existence without the use of space-time considerations.) Nevertheless, it must be granted that Einstein was really getting at the physical reality of each tower. That is to say, as I interpret him: why not simply accept the metaphysical idea of two different objects, without resorting to perceptual considerations? (We note that Russell says in Inquiry that he regards things to be a "metaphysical delusion," with events being the basic atoms of reality.) [2dd]
To bolster that thought, Einstein cites Russell's own paradox about naive realism. "Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false." [zzz15] I am assuming that Einstein is implying that, with such a paradox, it is rational to put "naive realism" on a metaphysical basis (i.e., the metaphysical position of common sense).
Russell's reply [2dd] shows that he appears not to have grasped that Einstein was defending naive realism, first by citing Russell's own paradox concerning science and second by lamenting the contemporary attack on metaphysics, which, Einstein was suggesting, was a necessary and not absurd underpinning for scientific (naive) realism.
In any case, Einstein's onetime favorite Mach was only one of an influential band of 19th century positivists. It was August Comte who laid down the positivist credo: "no proposition that is not finally reducible to the enunciation of a fact, particular or general, can offer any real and intelligible meaning."
John Stuart Mill nicely summarized Comte: "We have no knowledge of anything but phenomena; and our knowledge of phenomena is relative, not absolute. We know not the essence nor the real mode of production of any fact, but only its relations of other facts in the way of succession and similitude. These relations are constant, i.e., always the same in the same circumstances. The constant resemblances which link phenomena together, and the constant sequences which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are termed their laws. All phenomena without exception are governed by invariable laws, with which no volitions, either natural or supernatural, interfere. The essential nature of phenomena and their ultimate causes, whether efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable to us." [zzz11]
Once Einstein, fortified by Michaelson and Morley, had established that the ether was not needed in his system, that particular metaphysical idea was cast out. In fact James Clerk Maxwell's mathematics implied that the ether was irrelevant, but Maxwell, wedded to the old metaphysics, could not accept the idea of a waving vacuum. (Newton of course had himself suspended the materialism assumption by giving no hypothesis for the "action at a distance" seemingly implied by his gravity equations, and Einstein's ejection of Newton's simplifying assumption of absolute space does nothing to bolster the old materialist metaphysics, which included that assumption.)
Yet, curiously Einstein's "positivist" decision to oust the ether undermined that very scientific materialism so beloved of practical scientists and the latter-day positivists, who sought to save materialism with some clever tinkering. In another irony, Mach opposed the atomic theory of matter on grounds atoms were undetectable, and hence irrelevant. Yet it was Einstein whose analysis of Brownian motion, along with his unraveling of the photo-electric effect, that convinced scientists of their existence.
One perhaps should be inclined to accept that part of the positivist credo that favors not taking metaphysical axioms as gospel.
The scientific method, as mapped out by Francis Bacon, is a program for obtaining practical knowledge of Nature, being basically a means and not a metaphysical system. One might argue that both Descartes and Hobbes, among others, misused the method, along with the discoveries of Galileo and Newton, to claim a universally valid system known as materialism.
Even so, just as a metaphysical proposition may be discarded as being of vacuous merit, so might one be bolstered by the advance of scientific knowledge. Democritus and Lucretius both favored the metaphysical idea of matter being atomic. Yet, as Whitehead points out, it was John Dalton who made that speculation far more plausible, because his theory gave mathematical relations that fit well with facts discovered empirically by chemists. Dalton's proposal, at the least, could be used on an interim basis for practical science, in contrast with the ancient Greek suggestion.
Similarly, some may regard the Higgs field as the immaterial substance that holds Nature together. Yet it could be maintained that that field has far more explanatory power than the substances of the metaphysicians, precisely because its relations are quantitative and apply to all sorts of phenomena. Even so, we don't know how that field fits together with the relativistic spacetime block, which might be regarded as another universal substance underlying the material world. Do those two substances imply pluralism?; or is there, as most scientists believe, a single unifying theory (that would possibly imply a single unifying substance)?
There is a sort of materialism, interestingly, that is not fully deterministic (not robotic) that was promoted by the young Marx, though Ryle's book discloses no awareness of this fact. As Warren Breckman observes [xx30] in his excellent study, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory,
One can see how the notion of entelechy covers very well such things as Cantor's actual infinities, the collective macro behavior of myriads of gas molecules, the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey equations and, presumably, the phenomenon of conscious awareness. In the last case however there is so far nothing to bridge the gap between smaller units and the entelechy of consciousness: no set of equations that captures the emergence of consciousness from lower levels.
I do not recall seeing in Ryle this brilliant conception of Aristotle's. Yet most of Ryle's book is implicitly dependent on the idea of entelechy, if not on some form of monism.
Hofstadter uses the word in the sense of Gestalt in his Mind's I comment on a long excerpt from The Selfish Gene by Richard Hawkins. That selection shows nicely Hawkins's view that he can imagine a whole -- a complex lifeform -- emerging from many parts. Re-reading it after many years was instructive for this writer. Dawkins wove a very compelling, lawyerly case for the possibility that consciousness, say, could have emerged by increments until voila! there it was. The jury is persuaded. Case closed. Yet closer inspection shows a very skillfully presented conjecture with many gaps in the reasoning. We are not to notice that the input values of genetic coding go into a black box that transforms the information into an output that corresponds with something wondrous to behold.
That there are many who are, like Dawkins, convinced that the black box's content can be laid bare, hardly implies that that conviction is close to realization.
Dawkins no doubt heartily approves of modern science's supposed disavowal of metaphysics -- a term sullied by the dislike of the Vienna Circle of philosophers for anything judged non-scientific. That disdain has carried down the generations, from the period when, in particular, the logician Rudolf Carnap [6a] promoted the notion that metaphysical problems were the result of a misapplication of terms, a point also made by Ludwig Wiitgenstein and later echoed by Ryle's assertion that terms could be wrongly categorized.
A basic flaw of metaphysics, argued Carnap and the logical positivists, is that metaphysicians tend to make statements that can neither be proved nor disproved within their own systems. How would one, for example, go about proving the notion of spiritual universe? Metaphysics, Carnap further held, posed statements that had the appearance of implying problems, but which in actuality were posers that violated the empirical and syntactical criteria of meaningfulness. That is to say, metaphysical questions are words strung together to create the form of meaning but not the actuality of meaning. (So much for soul, immortality and all the interesting stuff.)
Carnap took Martin Heidegger to task for his saying Das Nichts selbst nichtet ("The nothing itself nothings") from Was ist Metaphysik? Can't anyone see this is an example of vacuous humbuggery? To drive home the point, consider the sentence "Nothing is P" represented by
~(Ex)Px. If x is an instantiation of "Nothing is P" we have an absurd infinite regress. Yet I reply that merely because a statement cannot be easily fit into a symbolic formal system does not mean there is nothing worth pondering.
In addition, Carnap's attempt to avoid metaphysics (afterphysics) has only been honored in the breach by the scientific community. Consider the intense discussions of the various "many worlds" theories, of the inflationary universe and all its possible bubble universes, of the Parmenides-like spacetime block, of cyclic cosmoses, of ideas over whether time is open or shut, of strings that supposedly could unify "all" physical law, of loop quantum gravity. True, all of this speculation is aimed at "extending" physical law rather than at checking for spirit-like possibilities. It is hard, however, to imagine what physical law transcends the idea of motion in a spacetime block. How would one go about measuring change, if time and motion are both illusions that are due to our congenital misperception of something greater?
Much to Einstein's consternation when faced with the perplexities of quantum measurement, the sage of Princeton found there is no escaping metaphysics. The fact that some scientists push this problem aside as currently unresolvable demonstrates that metaphysics is for them a wall that they haven't the inclination to hurdle.
The Vienna Circle took Einstein and Ernst Mach, the 19th Century philosopher of science, to be among its forebears. Interestingly, Einstein cited Mach in his decisions to simplify physics by discarding irrelevant concepts, such as the ether. The ether was required under the old metaphysical paradigm of a cosmos that transmits action via bits of matter bumping into each other (though it was understood that the ethereal vibrating medium could not be of the ponderable-object variety).
Yet Einstein was no cheerleader for the Vienna Circle. Though he absolved Hume of responsibility, Einstein was skeptical of the modern "fear of metaphysics," which he saw as a malady that was paralleled by the old philosophical ailment of speculation with no connection to what is given through the senses. In fact, Einstein said Russell's book on epistemology, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [zzz15] appeared to suffer from this defect, and elsewhere he debated Carnap on the assumptions of the Circle. In particular, Einstein was suspicious of Russell's notion that "bundles of qualities" are to replace the "things" of the ordinary world.
Einstein cites Russell's example of two precisely matched Eiffel towers, one in Paris and one in New York. Without the use of spatio-temporal coordinates, Russell had argued, the towers would be indistinguishable and so would be "the same thing." Einstein argued that he could "see no metaphysical danger in taking the thing (the object in the sense of physics) as an independent concept into the system together with the proper spatio-temporal structure."
In other words, what is wrong with simply granting an independent existence to each tower? Doubtless, Russell could have then asked how this could be done without an observable space-time difference? (We might add that, because no two electrons are distinguishable, it does indeed become difficult to grant each independent existence without the use of space-time considerations.) Nevertheless, it must be granted that Einstein was really getting at the physical reality of each tower. That is to say, as I interpret him: why not simply accept the metaphysical idea of two different objects, without resorting to perceptual considerations? (We note that Russell says in Inquiry that he regards things to be a "metaphysical delusion," with events being the basic atoms of reality.) [2dd]
To bolster that thought, Einstein cites Russell's own paradox about naive realism. "Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false." [zzz15] I am assuming that Einstein is implying that, with such a paradox, it is rational to put "naive realism" on a metaphysical basis (i.e., the metaphysical position of common sense).
Russell's reply [2dd] shows that he appears not to have grasped that Einstein was defending naive realism, first by citing Russell's own paradox concerning science and second by lamenting the contemporary attack on metaphysics, which, Einstein was suggesting, was a necessary and not absurd underpinning for scientific (naive) realism.
In any case, Einstein's onetime favorite Mach was only one of an influential band of 19th century positivists. It was August Comte who laid down the positivist credo: "no proposition that is not finally reducible to the enunciation of a fact, particular or general, can offer any real and intelligible meaning."
John Stuart Mill nicely summarized Comte: "We have no knowledge of anything but phenomena; and our knowledge of phenomena is relative, not absolute. We know not the essence nor the real mode of production of any fact, but only its relations of other facts in the way of succession and similitude. These relations are constant, i.e., always the same in the same circumstances. The constant resemblances which link phenomena together, and the constant sequences which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are termed their laws. All phenomena without exception are governed by invariable laws, with which no volitions, either natural or supernatural, interfere. The essential nature of phenomena and their ultimate causes, whether efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable to us." [zzz11]
Once Einstein, fortified by Michaelson and Morley, had established that the ether was not needed in his system, that particular metaphysical idea was cast out. In fact James Clerk Maxwell's mathematics implied that the ether was irrelevant, but Maxwell, wedded to the old metaphysics, could not accept the idea of a waving vacuum. (Newton of course had himself suspended the materialism assumption by giving no hypothesis for the "action at a distance" seemingly implied by his gravity equations, and Einstein's ejection of Newton's simplifying assumption of absolute space does nothing to bolster the old materialist metaphysics, which included that assumption.)
Yet, curiously Einstein's "positivist" decision to oust the ether undermined that very scientific materialism so beloved of practical scientists and the latter-day positivists, who sought to save materialism with some clever tinkering. In another irony, Mach opposed the atomic theory of matter on grounds atoms were undetectable, and hence irrelevant. Yet it was Einstein whose analysis of Brownian motion, along with his unraveling of the photo-electric effect, that convinced scientists of their existence.
One perhaps should be inclined to accept that part of the positivist credo that favors not taking metaphysical axioms as gospel.
The scientific method, as mapped out by Francis Bacon, is a program for obtaining practical knowledge of Nature, being basically a means and not a metaphysical system. One might argue that both Descartes and Hobbes, among others, misused the method, along with the discoveries of Galileo and Newton, to claim a universally valid system known as materialism.
Even so, just as a metaphysical proposition may be discarded as being of vacuous merit, so might one be bolstered by the advance of scientific knowledge. Democritus and Lucretius both favored the metaphysical idea of matter being atomic. Yet, as Whitehead points out, it was John Dalton who made that speculation far more plausible, because his theory gave mathematical relations that fit well with facts discovered empirically by chemists. Dalton's proposal, at the least, could be used on an interim basis for practical science, in contrast with the ancient Greek suggestion.
Similarly, some may regard the Higgs field as the immaterial substance that holds Nature together. Yet it could be maintained that that field has far more explanatory power than the substances of the metaphysicians, precisely because its relations are quantitative and apply to all sorts of phenomena. Even so, we don't know how that field fits together with the relativistic spacetime block, which might be regarded as another universal substance underlying the material world. Do those two substances imply pluralism?; or is there, as most scientists believe, a single unifying theory (that would possibly imply a single unifying substance)?
There is a sort of materialism, interestingly, that is not fully deterministic (not robotic) that was promoted by the young Marx, though Ryle's book discloses no awareness of this fact. As Warren Breckman observes [xx30] in his excellent study, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory,
whereas Democritus had imagined atoms as rigidly determined by their movement, Epicurus insisted on the possibility of undetermined motion, the "swerve" or "declination" that Marx made the keystone of his discussion. In conceiving the possibility of undetermined motion, Marx argued, Epicurus had found a way to overcome the "blind necessity" and purely materialist physics of Democritus. Epicurus could thus ascribe to atoms an "ideal" or spiritual side, a moment of "self-determination."... Finally, in Marx's positive assessment, the freedom of atomic motion in Epicurus's theory dispensed with the need for any theological explanation of being.
As we now know, Epicurus and Marx were onto something. Quantum indeterminacy could be couched as a "swerve," whereby measured particle actions are random within constraints. Yet the idea that such indeterminacy somehow implies freedom of action for human beings has not been well-received, though it has some support, for example, in some of the musings of Roger Penrose.
2c. Please see the entry "Russell's philosophy of mind: neutral monism" found in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, second edition, Richard L. Gregory, ed. I suggest further that Russell used the word neutral to imply that a Leibnizian God was unnecessary (though it should be noted that Russell suspected that Leibniz's avowed belief in God was only for public relations purposes).
2dd. "Remarks on Russell's Theory of Knowledge" by Albert Einstein in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (Library of Living Philosophers 1946).
2ee. The Analysis of Matter by Bertrand Russell (Allen and Unwin 1927).
2e. Quoted by Morris Weitz in "The Unity of Russell's Philosophy," The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (Library of Living Philosophers 1946).
2. This point differs from the ethical problem posed by babies bonding with teddy-bots used as playmates and minders.
2a. The Mind's I, Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, an anthology of papers with comments by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (Basic Books 1981).
2x. Regarding Ludwig von Bertalanffy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Bertalanffy
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bertalanffy/
2xx. See Needham in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Paul Arthur Schilpp ed. (Library of Living Philosophers 1941, 1951).
2xy. Backers of pan-psychism would see this as an error.
2xz. Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false by Thomas Nagel (Oxford 2012).
3. Curiously, even the New Testament denies free will for those who haven't been set free by the Son. The lost don't see that by serving Self, they serve Satan, the ruler of this world. The New Testament doesn't deny souls or spirits to those in bondage to sin/sorrow, unlike Ryle and modern atheists who would deny soul and spirit as a means of denying anything beyond Missouri.
4. Hofstadter commenting in Mind's I.See FN 2a.
5. Conjecture: If I can find and shut down all speech centers of the brain, I suppose we could still detect a conscious, alert person who is unable to think in a verbal fashion. And what if the left brain is shut down? Does the person remain conscious but at a "lower" level? Perhaps he cannot read nor do math but could negotiate an obstacle course.
What kind of music would he make?
6. There is some overlap in the Freudian notion of unconscious urges that drive human behavior and the Pauline notion of the Flesh.
6a. Discussion of Carnap's views on metaphysics is based on an entry on Carnap in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Crowell Collier and Macmillan 1967).
7. We concede that Ryle has been faulted for failing to give others credit for some of his ideas, but this is not of much interest to us, though we can note that he likely absorbed some of Wittgenstein's ideas while the two were at Oxford. Certainly Ryle's book shows traces of exposure to Wittgenstein. Ryle's attitude that careful definitions suffice to reduce philosophical problems to solvable puzzles reflects Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which was completed in 1945 but not published until after Ryle's book was issued. Ryle is also accused of unconsciously plagiarizing Schopenhauer.[zw2] To be fair, however, let us bear in mind A.N. Whitehead's characterization of western philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato."
zz1. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
zzz1. Please see The Analysis of Matter by Bertrand Russell (Allen and Unwin 1927) for Russell's summary of Leibniz's monad system.
zu1. The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (Allen and Unwin 1921). This book does not use the term "neutral monism" but the adoption of William James's "neutral stuff" idea shows that this is what Russell had in mind. Russell specifies "neutral monism" in The Analysis of Matter.
zu1a. Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell (Longmans, Green 1918).
zu2. From Russell's 1918 paper "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, Lecture 1: 'Facts and Propositions'," that appeared in The Monist in October 1918.)
More at The Bertrand Russell Society:
http://bertrandrussellsocietylibrary.org/
zzv1. James's essay "Does 'consciousness' exist?" is found at
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Does_%27Consciousness%27_Exist%3F
For other works by James, please see the excellent and easily accessed archive Wikisource
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:William_James
zzw1. "The Psychology of Wish Fulfilment" appears in the November 1916 issue of The Scientific Monthly, according to Bertrand Russell in The Analysis of Mind.
zzz2. From A Pluralistic Universe by William James (1909):
zzm1. Philosophy: History and Problems by Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser (McGraw Hill 2008, 7th ed.).
zzw3. From Reconstruction in Philosophy by John Dewey. First published in 1920 by Henry Holt; Enlarged edition published in 1948 by Beacon Press. The quotation comes from Dewey's 40-page introduction added to the 1948 edition.
zzz4. Science and the Modern World by A.N. Whitehead (Macmillan 1925). Here is the relevant passage:
zzz5. I have taken liberties in simplifying Whitehead in order to get at the kernel of his system. For a proper understanding, please see his Science and the Modern World, as well as Footnote zzz6 below.
zzz6. From Whitehead's Science and the Modern World:
zzz7. From "Psychology in Physical Language" (German version published in 1931) by Rudolf Carnap in Logical Positivism, ed. A.J. Ayer (Collier Macmillian 1959):
zzz8. "Editor's Introduction" in Logical Positivism, ed. A.J. Ayer (Collier Macmillian 1959).
zzz9. Cited by Gary Martin on his Phrase Finder web site.
zzz10. A monad, says Britannica, is an "elementary individual substance that reflects the order of the world and from which material properties are derived." Originally, the Pythagoreans coined the term for the name of the beginning number of a series, from which all following numbers derived. Giordano Bruno in 1591 published On the Monad, Number, and Figure in which he described three fundamental types: God, souls, and atoms. In 1714, Leibniz in his Monadologia popularized the concept of monad, with his specific characterization.
*****************************
In Leibniz’s system, monads are "basic substances that make up the universe but lack spatial extension and hence are immaterial." And "Each monad is a unique, indestructible, dynamic, soul-like entity whose properties are a function of its perceptions and appetites. Monads have no true causal relation with other monads, but all are perfectly synchronized with each other by God in a pre-established harmony. The objects of the material world are simply appearances of collections of monads."
zzz11. A System of Logic by J.S. Mill
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27942/27942-h/27942-h.html
zzz12. The Scientific Outlook by Bertrand Russell (Allen and Unwin 1931).
zzz13. Cited by Alan Wood in his appendix in My Philosophical Development by Bertrand Russell (Simon and Schuster 1959).
zzz14. My Philosophical Development by Bertrand Russell (Simon and Schuster 1959).
zzz15. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth by Bertrand Russell (W.W. Norton 1940).
zzz16. Gilbert Ryle's Debt to Bertrand Russell
http://www.linacre.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/lj3a6.pdf
by John Shosky in The Linacre Journal (No. 3, Nov. 1999).
zzz17. "What is Mind?" by Bertrand Russell in The Journal of Philosophy (01/02/1958).
zzz18. Words and Things by Ernest Gellner (Victor Gollancz 1959).
zzz19. Russell's comment appears in My Philosophical Development (Simon and Schuster 1959), page 217. Wittgenstein's posthumous Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953 by Basil Blackwell Ltd.
zzz20. Russell continues:
zzz21. Human Knowledge -- Its Scope and Limits by Bertrand Russell (Simon and Schuster 1948).
xx30. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory by Warren Breckman Cambridge 1999.
zw1. Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper by Bryan Magee (Weidenfield & Nicolson 1997).
zw2. The journalist of philosophy Bryan Magee (see footnote zw1 above) charges that Ryle's book unconsciously recycles Schopenhauer. "As a student" Ryle "read Schopenhauer, and a long time later, in his fiftieth year -- having, as he thought forgotten Schopenhauer almost entirely -- published the book that made his name, The Concept of Mnd, in which not only the central thesis but also what came to be the best known of the subsidiary theses come straight out of Schopenhauer. Of all long-dead philosophers the one who most influenced Wittgenstein was also Schopenhauer, but it is unlikely that Ryle knew that either." Even after their long friendship had cooled, Ryle remained under Wittgenstein's spell, Magee reports.
No corroboration of Magee's belief is to be found in a quick scan of the internet.
zw3. The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, translated by E.F.J. Payne and cited in Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee (Weidenfield and Nicolson 1997).
zw4. In the Spirit of Hegel by Robert C. Solomon (Oxford 1983).
zw5. Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume.
zw6. The Self and Its Brain by Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles (Routledge and Kegan Paul (1977).
zw7. See the essay "Conversation with Gilbert Ryle" in Modern British Philosophy, which consists of a series of interviews by Bryan Magee (Secker and Warburg 1971).
zw8. See "Conversation with Anthony Quinton" in Modern British Philosophy, which consists of a series of interviews by Bryan Magee (Secker and Warburg 1971).
zw9. One of Russell's teachers was J.M.E. McTaggart, a Hegelian who argues, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, that scientific claims do not aim to express the fundamental nature of reality.
zw10. See George di Giovanni's introduction [FN 110, Page lvii] to his translation of The Science of Logic by G.W.F. Hegel (Cambridge 2010).
zw11. George di Giovanni's translation of The Science of Logic by G.W.F. Hegel (Cambridge 2010).
zt1. Some Dogmas of Religion by J.M.E. McTaggart (Edward Arnold 1906).
zt2. Wisdom of the West by Bertrand Russell (Rathbone Books 1959).
zt3. In 1918, Russell said on the subject of the "self-subsistence of particulars" that "each particular has its being independently of any other and does not depend upon anything else for the logical possibility of its existence," adding: "I compared particulars with the old conception of substance, that is to say, they have the quality of self-subsistence that used to belong to substance, but not the quality of persistence through time. A particular, as a rule, is apt to last for a very short time indeed, not an instant but a very short time. In that respect particulars differ from the old substances but in their logical position they do not."
-- from The Philosophy of Logical Atomism by Bertrand Russell (1918).
ztt1. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism by Bertrand Russell. The Open Court paperback edition of 1985 includes Russell's lectures and essay from the years 1918 and 1924. David Pears does a creditable critique in his introduction.
ztt2. In a 1924 article, "Logical Atomism," Russell expounds on neutral monism:
wu1. According to Whitehead in Process and Reality -- Corrected Edition (The Free Press 1978, based on the Gifford Lectures, 1927-28),
zxv1. Walter Kaufmann notes the similarity of Ryle's notion of category error to a point made by Hegel on the value of studying specific philosophies when studying the history of philosophy. "Whoever studied and mastered any philosophy at all, if it really is a philosophy, would master some philosophy." Those who argue otherwise, Hegel compares "with a pedantical invalid whom his doctor advises to eat fruit and who is offered cherries or plums or grapes, but who will not take any" because "none of these are fruit but merely cherries or plums or grapes." From Hegel's lectures. See Kaufmann's Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Anchor Books edition 1966), page 281.
Ryle has been quoted as saying that Hegel made no sense to him, "even as error." Kaufmann, along with John Findlay, helped restore Hegel's reputation among 20th century philosophers.
zxd0. The Philosophy of Hegel -- A Systematic Exposition by W.T. Stace (Macmillan 1924).
JD1. "Dewey's Theory of Science" by Hans Reichenbach in The Philosophy of John Dewey (Library of Living Philosophers, Paul Arthur Schilp, ed., 1939).
zn1. Hegel, a Re-Examination by J.N. Findlay (Oxford 1958).
q1. In a letter to a fellow physicist, Henry P. Stapp, Werner Heisenberg tells of his differences with Russell.
q2. The Self and Its Brain by Karl Popper and John C. Eccles (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1977).
zq0. The philosopher Thomas Nagel remarks,
QW1. The View from Nowhere, Nagel,(page 81).
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What do you know?
Quantum weirdness gives weight to idealism, the set of doctrines that asserts that reality is in the mind of the beholder and that contrasts with
mechanism/physicalism, the notion that one's mental states are products of an external, physical reality.
Useful page on idealism
http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_idealism.html
The question of how one knows there exist other minds that are not merely products of one's ideation does not rest on logical analysis, in my estimate. Knowing entails more than the actions of some highly complex Boolean circuit.
Consider the method of approximation at presenting a proof:
Step 1: An outline of the proof, with many details lacking, is given.
Step 2: That outline is refined, so as to make the logic come into focus.
Step 3: The precise proof is presented, the observer's mind having been adequately prepared.
So during and after step 1, the observer sees the basic line of reasoning. Once this has registered, he is able to see the line of reasoning toward the theorem more clearly. Finally, he grasps the concise proof, with all and only necessary details.
A mechanical proof checker would -- assuming the proof has been correctly encoded -- simply check the statements and implications of step 3. If steps 1 and 2 were lemmas needed for step 3, it would check those.
There is no need for it to see a rough idea, perhaps accompanied by an aha! before being able to grasp the next approximation and finally to see the proof. It doesn't need any help at insight because it has no insight.
So then, we have two types of knowledge. There is a knowledge of forms, such as the relations of logic and mathematics, and possibly including Platonic ideals/forms. Then there is knowledge by direct apprehension of the consciousness. Direct knowledge springs not from ordinary physical law, but from some aspect of the largely hidden, noumenal world.
Kant's concept of a noumenal self takes aim at the Cartesian contradiction of how an interior soul could push the levers of the robot it inhabits. The causal nature of reality is an aspect of the sensory world we experience, Kant argued. But beyond the world of phenomena is the world of noumena -- the "objects" behind the phenomena we detect. If I get hunger pangs and then have a bite to eat, I am responding to an inclination, and can be said to be reacting causally. Hunger caused me to eat. On the other hand, if I get hunger pangs and decide against eating, I may be exercising free will, which originates in my noumenal self, and that self interacts directly (rather than via sense perception) with the noumenal world.
Kant's general argument was meant to justify the idea of a higher, human self in a way that did not require any particular religious orientation. Moreover, he hoped that his general scheme eliminated the schizophrenic dualism of Descartes.
Be that as it may, it is evident that Ryle saw Kant's noumenal self as just another ghost. Still, it is worth noting that the "machine" paradigm troubled both philosophers greatly. Kant's metaphysical approach, however, seems to this writer to have achieved far more than Ryle's rather limited behaviorism.
Ryle likens the ghost-machine idea to a driver of a car. The driver tells the car what to do, just as the ghost tells the body what to do. Yet, a human is not like that, he says. Still, the philosopher might be impressed that today's machine-guided cars need no human drivers. Even so, a person using the car must give it directions, despite the fact that one can foresee cars preprogramed to drive at will, carrying out some major task, such as searching for criminals. Yet again we see that such analogies break down because the cars do not design themselves. The "ghost" has not been ruled out, after all.
Disturbingly, we now face the possibility of self-directed assassin robots roaming the planet -- Terminators without time travel. Driverless cars and assassin robots are used by many as a basis of the belief that a human doesn't need a soul or a spirit in order to live as a self-directed individual. What they are not facing is that, as a machine, "self-directed" is an incongruent idea. "I" doesn't make a decision, but the "I" is directed by the brain's machinery to do something, which "I" then calls a "decision" -- a decision "I" didn't make. Consciousness becomes irrelevant, about like being born with an extra finger. Talking to oneself, whether aloud or internally, is simply some evolutionary consolation system, having little or no influence on the automaton.
1b. See The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Paul Arthur Schilpp ed. (Open Court 1963), pp 50, 51.
1bb. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Useful page on idealism
http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_idealism.html
The question of how one knows there exist other minds that are not merely products of one's ideation does not rest on logical analysis, in my estimate. Knowing entails more than the actions of some highly complex Boolean circuit.
Consider the method of approximation at presenting a proof:
Step 1: An outline of the proof, with many details lacking, is given.
Step 2: That outline is refined, so as to make the logic come into focus.
Step 3: The precise proof is presented, the observer's mind having been adequately prepared.
So during and after step 1, the observer sees the basic line of reasoning. Once this has registered, he is able to see the line of reasoning toward the theorem more clearly. Finally, he grasps the concise proof, with all and only necessary details.
A mechanical proof checker would -- assuming the proof has been correctly encoded -- simply check the statements and implications of step 3. If steps 1 and 2 were lemmas needed for step 3, it would check those.
There is no need for it to see a rough idea, perhaps accompanied by an aha! before being able to grasp the next approximation and finally to see the proof. It doesn't need any help at insight because it has no insight.
So then, we have two types of knowledge. There is a knowledge of forms, such as the relations of logic and mathematics, and possibly including Platonic ideals/forms. Then there is knowledge by direct apprehension of the consciousness. Direct knowledge springs not from ordinary physical law, but from some aspect of the largely hidden, noumenal world.
Kant's concept of a noumenal self takes aim at the Cartesian contradiction of how an interior soul could push the levers of the robot it inhabits. The causal nature of reality is an aspect of the sensory world we experience, Kant argued. But beyond the world of phenomena is the world of noumena -- the "objects" behind the phenomena we detect. If I get hunger pangs and then have a bite to eat, I am responding to an inclination, and can be said to be reacting causally. Hunger caused me to eat. On the other hand, if I get hunger pangs and decide against eating, I may be exercising free will, which originates in my noumenal self, and that self interacts directly (rather than via sense perception) with the noumenal world.
Kant's general argument was meant to justify the idea of a higher, human self in a way that did not require any particular religious orientation. Moreover, he hoped that his general scheme eliminated the schizophrenic dualism of Descartes.
Be that as it may, it is evident that Ryle saw Kant's noumenal self as just another ghost. Still, it is worth noting that the "machine" paradigm troubled both philosophers greatly. Kant's metaphysical approach, however, seems to this writer to have achieved far more than Ryle's rather limited behaviorism.
No car and no driver
We would be remiss if we did not mention lifeforms other than human. For animal lifeforms with rudimentary brains there seems to be a range of levels of awareness, or, in other words, a range of levels of consciousness. Granted, thus far, no computer can attain to the neuronal complexity of a housefly, making it difficult to say whether computing complexity equivalent to a fly's would result in machine consciousness, as opposed to an automaton that mimics fly behavior perfectly.Ryle likens the ghost-machine idea to a driver of a car. The driver tells the car what to do, just as the ghost tells the body what to do. Yet, a human is not like that, he says. Still, the philosopher might be impressed that today's machine-guided cars need no human drivers. Even so, a person using the car must give it directions, despite the fact that one can foresee cars preprogramed to drive at will, carrying out some major task, such as searching for criminals. Yet again we see that such analogies break down because the cars do not design themselves. The "ghost" has not been ruled out, after all.
Disturbingly, we now face the possibility of self-directed assassin robots roaming the planet -- Terminators without time travel. Driverless cars and assassin robots are used by many as a basis of the belief that a human doesn't need a soul or a spirit in order to live as a self-directed individual. What they are not facing is that, as a machine, "self-directed" is an incongruent idea. "I" doesn't make a decision, but the "I" is directed by the brain's machinery to do something, which "I" then calls a "decision" -- a decision "I" didn't make. Consciousness becomes irrelevant, about like being born with an extra finger. Talking to oneself, whether aloud or internally, is simply some evolutionary consolation system, having little or no influence on the automaton.
Tough talk
When "I" talk to "my Self," we face the prospect of an infinite regress.
("I' as sender) --> (brain subsystem as transducer) -- > ("I" as receiver)in which case,
(Sender) --> (Transducer) --> (Sender),
yielding an infinite regress.
One might counter that the speech part of the "I" complex is distinct from the listening part of that complex. Yet prior to and during speech, "meaningful" verbalization must pour forth into the listening area, which then edits speech. So something is already listening both before and during verbalization. The speech then arcs through consciousness, being received and appreciated by a listening sector.
Even if such a program could be devised, wouldn't it be redundant for an AI automaton, which one would think could pass the Turing test without inner reflection? In the machine paradigm, the so-called Self appears to be a contradictory, or at least redundant, subsystem. Yet, most of us, when fully awake, are convinced of the existence of Self. A number of modern cognitive scientists, however, would argue that this Self is indeed a "ghost in the machine." It exists as some sort of delusion, as numerous recent brain/machine interface experiments seem to show. The expert says this while using her powers of reasoning to convince her Self of the apparent contradiction. Still, can an illusion do anything at all, let alone reflect on arcane philosophical points? That is to say, on close analysis the machine paradigm appears to break down. Of course, we are aware that mystics have long held that such irreconcilables dissolve in their non-physical theories. Whether that is so is not so easy to determine. On the other hand, we would not err to conclude that some form of non-physical theorizing could be appropriate.
In any case, we all agree that the so-called Self can believe false ideas concerning the Self, but that we can hardly fault the Self for believing in its existence. "I think, therefore I am." Yet, numerous cognitive scientists and philosophers would respond that the existence of the "I" is doubtful, and that Descartes's premise begs his conclusion. Even so, I suggest that our argument above is another way of arriving at Descartes' contention that a non-physical entity is implied by a somewhat cohesive "I."
Again: The assumption of the reality of the unitary Self leads to contradiction. Some argue that a way out of this problem is to posit the Self as a something that exceeds the sum of its parts. Reductionism fails to capture the object (the Self/mind). If the Self is a feedback-looped Boolean circuit output, it is an output that no one could guess from the initial input values. Consider the Mobius band, a single-sided surface that can be visualized as a strip of paper twisted at the ends and glued together (even though, like a line or a point, no such surface could ever be physically detected). If we examine a patch of the surface locally, it seems to have two sides: with an orthogonal vector pointing out from one side exactly matched with the negative of that vector pointing out from the other side. Anywhere we look, there are two sides. Still, if we look everywhere at once -- take in the Gestalt of the whole -- we find only one side.
Assuming that the Self cannot be solely an auto-modifying software program, it seems fair to conclude that neither is the Self entirely a machine or machine output. Ergo, it is a ghost (which may itself be controlled by some other ghost or soul). Of course, Roger Penrose's idea that the Self, or some equivalent, is an expression of quantum gravity is akin to the Mobius band metaphor. Quantum gravity, however, is at this stage not a physical theory, but is rather a group of conjectures. Further, how quantum gravity would influence the brain to produce introspection is very far from the realm of current physics. Hence, "Mobius-style" solutions at this stage only permit us to call the ghost by some more scientific-sounding name.
1xaa. Prehistoric Religion, a Study of Prehistoric Archaeology by E.O.James (Barnes & Noble, 1962).
1xaaa. A Short History of Philosophy by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (Oxford 1996).
1xbbb. "How Augustine Made Us More than Matter—and Immortal" in Homiletic & Pastoral Review (Aug. 9, 2015) by Brother Justin Hannegan, OSB.
http://www.hprweb.com/2015/08/how-augustine-made-us-more-than-matter-and-immortal/
1xxb. From WikiDiff, we have that the difference between the nouns psyche and nous is that psyche means the mind, human soul, or spirit while nous means, in philosophy, the mind or intellect, or reason, both rational and emotional.
Wikipedia reports that in philosophy, common English translations include "understanding" and "mind"; or sometimes "thought" or "reason" (in the sense of that which reasons, not the activity of reasoning). It is also often described as something equivalent to perception except that it works within the mind ("the mind's eye"). It has been suggested that the basic meaning is something like "awareness." In colloquial British English, nous also denotes "good sense," which is close to an everyday meaning it had in ancient Greece
For Aristotle, nous is the basic understanding or awareness that allows human beings to think rationally. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do. One apprehends the axiomatic truths of the sciences, he taught, by direct intellectual intuition, or nous.
In early Greek usage, nous meant wit.
The earliest surviving text that uses the word nous is the Iliad. Agamemnon says to Achilles: "Do not thus, mighty though you are, godlike Achilles, seek to deceive me with your wit (nous); for you will not get by me nor persuade me."
In early Greek uses, Homer used nous to signify mental activities of both mortals and immortals, for example what they really have on their mind as opposed to what they say aloud. It was one of several words related to thought, thinking, and perceiving with the mind. In pre-Socratic philosophy, it became increasingly distinguished as a source of knowledge and reasoning and opposed to mere sense perception, or thinking influenced by the body such as emotion. For example, Heraclitus complained that "much learning does not teach nous."
Among some Greek authors, a faculty of intelligence known as a higher mind came to be considered as a property of the cosmos as a whole.
The work of Parmenides set the scene for Greek philosophy to come and the concept of nous was central to his radical proposals. He claimed that reality as the senses perceive it is not a world of truth at all, because sense perception is so unreliable, and what is perceived is so uncertain and changeable. Instead he argued for a dualism wherein nous and related words (the verb for thinking, which describes its mental perceiving activity, noein, and the unchanging and eternal objects of this perception noēta) describe a form of perception which is not physical, but intellectual only, distinct from sense perception and the objects of sense perception.
Anaxagoras, born about 500 BC, is the first person who is definitely known to have explained the concept of a nous (mind), which arranged all other things in the cosmos in proper order, set them rotating and continued to control them to some extent, having an especially strong connection with living things. Before Anaxagoras, Empedocles, like Hesiod much earlier, described cosmic order and living things as caused by a cosmic version of love, and Pythagoras and Heraclitus, saw the ordering principle as logos, which is rendered reason in English.
1x. Please see Mechanism and its alternatives
http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/broad_mechanism.pdf
1xyaa. From Broad's "Autobiography" in The Philosophy of C.D. Broad, Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., Library of Living Philosophers, 1959.
1xya. Philosophy: History and Problems, by Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Feiser (McGraw Hill, seventh edition, 2008).
1xx. Ryle's use of categories, of course, is nothing new. Philosophers have been coming up with classes of what they consider fundamental concepts for centuries.
1a. But used by Julia Tanney in her introduction to an edition of The Concept of Mind. Rethinking Ryle: A Critical Discussion of The Concept of Mind. Reprinted here:
http://www.unige.ch/lettres/baumgartner/docs/ryle/protect/tanney.pdf
1aa. Carnap explains in Schilpp [see footnote 1b below] that the Vienna circle came up with a concept he terms physicalism in part as an antidote to the political connotations associated with materialism (and idealism). Physicalism was to supersede the outdated approach to materialism with a focus on a language of science. Originally, Carnap had favored the view of Mach and Russell that the basis for scientific speech should be phenomenalist, in the sense of "there is now a red triangle in my field of vision." Later, he came to believe the emphasis should be on material objects, in the sense of "this thing is black and heavy." Physicalism for Carnap is not about actual truth, but about how to couch scientific questions. He admits that objections were raised that "on a physicalist basis it was impossible to reach the concepts of psychology" though he found the argument unpersuasive.
According to Carnap, physicalism proposes that
One might counter that the speech part of the "I" complex is distinct from the listening part of that complex. Yet prior to and during speech, "meaningful" verbalization must pour forth into the listening area, which then edits speech. So something is already listening both before and during verbalization. The speech then arcs through consciousness, being received and appreciated by a listening sector.
Even if such a program could be devised, wouldn't it be redundant for an AI automaton, which one would think could pass the Turing test without inner reflection? In the machine paradigm, the so-called Self appears to be a contradictory, or at least redundant, subsystem. Yet, most of us, when fully awake, are convinced of the existence of Self. A number of modern cognitive scientists, however, would argue that this Self is indeed a "ghost in the machine." It exists as some sort of delusion, as numerous recent brain/machine interface experiments seem to show. The expert says this while using her powers of reasoning to convince her Self of the apparent contradiction. Still, can an illusion do anything at all, let alone reflect on arcane philosophical points? That is to say, on close analysis the machine paradigm appears to break down. Of course, we are aware that mystics have long held that such irreconcilables dissolve in their non-physical theories. Whether that is so is not so easy to determine. On the other hand, we would not err to conclude that some form of non-physical theorizing could be appropriate.
In any case, we all agree that the so-called Self can believe false ideas concerning the Self, but that we can hardly fault the Self for believing in its existence. "I think, therefore I am." Yet, numerous cognitive scientists and philosophers would respond that the existence of the "I" is doubtful, and that Descartes's premise begs his conclusion. Even so, I suggest that our argument above is another way of arriving at Descartes' contention that a non-physical entity is implied by a somewhat cohesive "I."
Again: The assumption of the reality of the unitary Self leads to contradiction. Some argue that a way out of this problem is to posit the Self as a something that exceeds the sum of its parts. Reductionism fails to capture the object (the Self/mind). If the Self is a feedback-looped Boolean circuit output, it is an output that no one could guess from the initial input values. Consider the Mobius band, a single-sided surface that can be visualized as a strip of paper twisted at the ends and glued together (even though, like a line or a point, no such surface could ever be physically detected). If we examine a patch of the surface locally, it seems to have two sides: with an orthogonal vector pointing out from one side exactly matched with the negative of that vector pointing out from the other side. Anywhere we look, there are two sides. Still, if we look everywhere at once -- take in the Gestalt of the whole -- we find only one side.
Assuming that the Self cannot be solely an auto-modifying software program, it seems fair to conclude that neither is the Self entirely a machine or machine output. Ergo, it is a ghost (which may itself be controlled by some other ghost or soul). Of course, Roger Penrose's idea that the Self, or some equivalent, is an expression of quantum gravity is akin to the Mobius band metaphor. Quantum gravity, however, is at this stage not a physical theory, but is rather a group of conjectures. Further, how quantum gravity would influence the brain to produce introspection is very far from the realm of current physics. Hence, "Mobius-style" solutions at this stage only permit us to call the ghost by some more scientific-sounding name.
The philospher's I shadow
Ryle likens the elusive "I" to the shadow of one's head that can never be caught. I note that the concept of "I" -- as in "know yourself" -- can be expanded by an examination of one's true motives, which are ordinarily repressed. On the other hand, to know oneself seems a bit like a dog chasing its tail. Undecidability theorems show that if the human brain is modeled as a Turing machine, full self-knowledge would be impossible. Ryle hadn't the competence to discuss such matters.
The best I can do to characterize Ryle's theory is to call it a peculiar brand of behavioristic holism. Had he been writing a few decades later, I suspect he would have been attracted to the notion of mind as an emergent property; yet I note he never refers to Gestalt psychology, or the notion of the whole "exceeding" the sum of the parts. Even so, he does take potshots at reductionism.
On other philosophical points of contention, I find Ryle has little to contribute. For example, echoing his onetime mentor Wittgenstein [7], he brushes off the question of solipsism with a common sense approach.
"Horse races do not stop, when I shut my eyes [how does he know that?], and vintage wines are not obliterated, when I have catarrh [the usual assumption, but is it certain?].
In the 18th Century, the Scot Thomas Reid promoted a common sense system, which, he contended, is (to use an anachronism) hard-wired into our mental processes. Reid argued that the perceptions common to men are unlikely to be deceptive. "If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them; these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd."
As Ryle maintained: "We do not ... have to rig up one theater, called 'the outside world,' to house the common objects of observation, and another, called 'the mind,' to house the objects of some monopoly observations."
In other words, our privately felt sensations -- such as pangs or twinges -- are not part of some inner reality but are in fact not really different from observed objects -- whether robins or
cheeses -- in the purported "outside world." Of course, he writes at a time when it was a bit too early to speak of the brain's part in constructing much or all of the "outside world." [Yet pangs and twinges do not seem to be higher order constructions, but direct signals from the body to the conscious mind-brain demanding some decision by "the executive."]
Admittedly, Ryle's theory regards the external and internal "worlds" as products of a false duality, and yet the don does not accept that a holistic view then ushers in the problem of solipsism, which he states as: "I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does." His solution is to be rid of specific entities called minds and to observe your behaviors. Your behaviors constitute evidence of mind.
Still, as he has no theory of how "reality" comes to be in consciousness, the sage has not addressed how he knows he is not experiencing a delusion in which other people only exist as dream-like characters. He does not see that his view implies the problem of solipsism.
I suppose Ryle might have said -- although he did not -- that the dualism of objective vs. subjective realities is a false dichotomy, that objective and subjective run together in a continuous whole, and so the puzzle is resolved by seeing that the coin has two sides. Of course, one can always make such a case, but that would not alter the fact that I feel as if I reside inside my body, specifically inside my head behind my eyes and between my ears. This perception may be an illusion, but if so, we need to know what makes it an illusion. Such issues are never addressed by the eminent don.
It seems to me that really Ryle wishes to show that words are, after all, adequate to describe reality; it's just a question of careful definition. When he was writing his book, however, logicians were already aware that such an assumption was highly unlikely to hold, with formal systems limited as to what can be represented symbolically. The theorems of Post, Tarski, Goedel, Rosser and Turing were already old news by the time The Concept of Mind was published -- though perhaps Ryle was only subliminally aware that symbolic logics are languages with precise grammars.
The don doesn't quite say that his chosen philosophical problems are resolvable with a precise and correct grammar, but his program makes no sense unless that is the case.
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger foreshadowed Ryle by two decades. There Heidegger adopts a new vocabulary in order to avoid the deep-rooted linguistic influence of Cartesian concepts. Heidegger's severe holism rejects the language of consciousness, experience and mind -- which were also seen by Ryle as deceptive terms. As a phenomenologist -- one who studies structures of consciousness as experienced from a first-person point of view -- Heidegger had no need to assume the existence of a mind in which ideas appear, nor had he a need to assume an activity known as consciousness that shines out at the world. Although Ryle does not refer to himself as a phenomenologist, he might well have done so.
Otherwise the views of Heidegger and Ryle diverge greatly.
The Oxford savant saw himself as the destroyer of an iconic concept of mind as a particular, not altogether physical thing. These days many generally agree with this iconoclasm, yet I find Ryle's attempts to redefine various qualities associated with mind unconvincing. I am sure this is partly attributable to my bias in favor of a "scientific" -- i.e., logico-mathematical -- approach, which leads me to beware disregarding any cause, including those not categorized by known laws of physics.
As for me, I might agree that a live human body is not a machine, and thus that that body may not need a ghost to inhabit and animate it. Yet it is evident that Ryle has not made his case -- but this is not the place for me to put forward my own conjectures as to how to get around the mind/body problem, if that is even possible.
The best I can do to characterize Ryle's theory is to call it a peculiar brand of behavioristic holism. Had he been writing a few decades later, I suspect he would have been attracted to the notion of mind as an emergent property; yet I note he never refers to Gestalt psychology, or the notion of the whole "exceeding" the sum of the parts. Even so, he does take potshots at reductionism.
On other philosophical points of contention, I find Ryle has little to contribute. For example, echoing his onetime mentor Wittgenstein [7], he brushes off the question of solipsism with a common sense approach.
"Horse races do not stop, when I shut my eyes [how does he know that?], and vintage wines are not obliterated, when I have catarrh [the usual assumption, but is it certain?].
In the 18th Century, the Scot Thomas Reid promoted a common sense system, which, he contended, is (to use an anachronism) hard-wired into our mental processes. Reid argued that the perceptions common to men are unlikely to be deceptive. "If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them; these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd."
As Ryle maintained: "We do not ... have to rig up one theater, called 'the outside world,' to house the common objects of observation, and another, called 'the mind,' to house the objects of some monopoly observations."
In other words, our privately felt sensations -- such as pangs or twinges -- are not part of some inner reality but are in fact not really different from observed objects -- whether robins or
cheeses -- in the purported "outside world." Of course, he writes at a time when it was a bit too early to speak of the brain's part in constructing much or all of the "outside world." [Yet pangs and twinges do not seem to be higher order constructions, but direct signals from the body to the conscious mind-brain demanding some decision by "the executive."]
Admittedly, Ryle's theory regards the external and internal "worlds" as products of a false duality, and yet the don does not accept that a holistic view then ushers in the problem of solipsism, which he states as: "I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does." His solution is to be rid of specific entities called minds and to observe your behaviors. Your behaviors constitute evidence of mind.
Still, as he has no theory of how "reality" comes to be in consciousness, the sage has not addressed how he knows he is not experiencing a delusion in which other people only exist as dream-like characters. He does not see that his view implies the problem of solipsism.
I suppose Ryle might have said -- although he did not -- that the dualism of objective vs. subjective realities is a false dichotomy, that objective and subjective run together in a continuous whole, and so the puzzle is resolved by seeing that the coin has two sides. Of course, one can always make such a case, but that would not alter the fact that I feel as if I reside inside my body, specifically inside my head behind my eyes and between my ears. This perception may be an illusion, but if so, we need to know what makes it an illusion. Such issues are never addressed by the eminent don.
It seems to me that really Ryle wishes to show that words are, after all, adequate to describe reality; it's just a question of careful definition. When he was writing his book, however, logicians were already aware that such an assumption was highly unlikely to hold, with formal systems limited as to what can be represented symbolically. The theorems of Post, Tarski, Goedel, Rosser and Turing were already old news by the time The Concept of Mind was published -- though perhaps Ryle was only subliminally aware that symbolic logics are languages with precise grammars.
The don doesn't quite say that his chosen philosophical problems are resolvable with a precise and correct grammar, but his program makes no sense unless that is the case.
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger foreshadowed Ryle by two decades. There Heidegger adopts a new vocabulary in order to avoid the deep-rooted linguistic influence of Cartesian concepts. Heidegger's severe holism rejects the language of consciousness, experience and mind -- which were also seen by Ryle as deceptive terms. As a phenomenologist -- one who studies structures of consciousness as experienced from a first-person point of view -- Heidegger had no need to assume the existence of a mind in which ideas appear, nor had he a need to assume an activity known as consciousness that shines out at the world. Although Ryle does not refer to himself as a phenomenologist, he might well have done so.
Otherwise the views of Heidegger and Ryle diverge greatly.
The Oxford savant saw himself as the destroyer of an iconic concept of mind as a particular, not altogether physical thing. These days many generally agree with this iconoclasm, yet I find Ryle's attempts to redefine various qualities associated with mind unconvincing. I am sure this is partly attributable to my bias in favor of a "scientific" -- i.e., logico-mathematical -- approach, which leads me to beware disregarding any cause, including those not categorized by known laws of physics.
As for me, I might agree that a live human body is not a machine, and thus that that body may not need a ghost to inhabit and animate it. Yet it is evident that Ryle has not made his case -- but this is not the place for me to put forward my own conjectures as to how to get around the mind/body problem, if that is even possible.
FOOTNOTES
Apologies for the peculiar footnote numbering. Use of "control f" should help1xaa. Prehistoric Religion, a Study of Prehistoric Archaeology by E.O.James (Barnes & Noble, 1962).
1xaaa. A Short History of Philosophy by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (Oxford 1996).
1xbbb. "How Augustine Made Us More than Matter—and Immortal" in Homiletic & Pastoral Review (Aug. 9, 2015) by Brother Justin Hannegan, OSB.
http://www.hprweb.com/2015/08/how-augustine-made-us-more-than-matter-and-immortal/
1xxb. From WikiDiff, we have that the difference between the nouns psyche and nous is that psyche means the mind, human soul, or spirit while nous means, in philosophy, the mind or intellect, or reason, both rational and emotional.
Wikipedia reports that in philosophy, common English translations include "understanding" and "mind"; or sometimes "thought" or "reason" (in the sense of that which reasons, not the activity of reasoning). It is also often described as something equivalent to perception except that it works within the mind ("the mind's eye"). It has been suggested that the basic meaning is something like "awareness." In colloquial British English, nous also denotes "good sense," which is close to an everyday meaning it had in ancient Greece
For Aristotle, nous is the basic understanding or awareness that allows human beings to think rationally. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do. One apprehends the axiomatic truths of the sciences, he taught, by direct intellectual intuition, or nous.
In early Greek usage, nous meant wit.
The earliest surviving text that uses the word nous is the Iliad. Agamemnon says to Achilles: "Do not thus, mighty though you are, godlike Achilles, seek to deceive me with your wit (nous); for you will not get by me nor persuade me."
In early Greek uses, Homer used nous to signify mental activities of both mortals and immortals, for example what they really have on their mind as opposed to what they say aloud. It was one of several words related to thought, thinking, and perceiving with the mind. In pre-Socratic philosophy, it became increasingly distinguished as a source of knowledge and reasoning and opposed to mere sense perception, or thinking influenced by the body such as emotion. For example, Heraclitus complained that "much learning does not teach nous."
Among some Greek authors, a faculty of intelligence known as a higher mind came to be considered as a property of the cosmos as a whole.
The work of Parmenides set the scene for Greek philosophy to come and the concept of nous was central to his radical proposals. He claimed that reality as the senses perceive it is not a world of truth at all, because sense perception is so unreliable, and what is perceived is so uncertain and changeable. Instead he argued for a dualism wherein nous and related words (the verb for thinking, which describes its mental perceiving activity, noein, and the unchanging and eternal objects of this perception noēta) describe a form of perception which is not physical, but intellectual only, distinct from sense perception and the objects of sense perception.
Anaxagoras, born about 500 BC, is the first person who is definitely known to have explained the concept of a nous (mind), which arranged all other things in the cosmos in proper order, set them rotating and continued to control them to some extent, having an especially strong connection with living things. Before Anaxagoras, Empedocles, like Hesiod much earlier, described cosmic order and living things as caused by a cosmic version of love, and Pythagoras and Heraclitus, saw the ordering principle as logos, which is rendered reason in English.
1x. Please see Mechanism and its alternatives
http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/broad_mechanism.pdf
1xyaa. From Broad's "Autobiography" in The Philosophy of C.D. Broad, Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., Library of Living Philosophers, 1959.
1xya. Philosophy: History and Problems, by Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Feiser (McGraw Hill, seventh edition, 2008).
1xx. Ryle's use of categories, of course, is nothing new. Philosophers have been coming up with classes of what they consider fundamental concepts for centuries.
1a. But used by Julia Tanney in her introduction to an edition of The Concept of Mind. Rethinking Ryle: A Critical Discussion of The Concept of Mind. Reprinted here:
http://www.unige.ch/lettres/baumgartner/docs/ryle/protect/tanney.pdf
1aa. Carnap explains in Schilpp [see footnote 1b below] that the Vienna circle came up with a concept he terms physicalism in part as an antidote to the political connotations associated with materialism (and idealism). Physicalism was to supersede the outdated approach to materialism with a focus on a language of science. Originally, Carnap had favored the view of Mach and Russell that the basis for scientific speech should be phenomenalist, in the sense of "there is now a red triangle in my field of vision." Later, he came to believe the emphasis should be on material objects, in the sense of "this thing is black and heavy." Physicalism for Carnap is not about actual truth, but about how to couch scientific questions. He admits that objections were raised that "on a physicalist basis it was impossible to reach the concepts of psychology" though he found the argument unpersuasive.
According to Carnap, physicalism proposes that
1. One scientist can confirm another's introspective thoughts by use of signaling, whether via language or other means.Carnap realizes that physicalism's premises -- which include sub-premises not listed here -- are sweeping hypotheses. Yet he counters the emergent vitalism ideas of Bergson and Broad by arguing that evolutionary theory has been validated by discovery of a continuum of processes from the inorganic to the organic worlds (though such claims have been questioned, even by biologists).
2. "All laws of nature, including those which hold for organisms, human beings, and human societies, are logical consequences of the physical laws [whether at present known or not], i.e., of those laws which are needed for the explanation of inorganic processes."
1b. See The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Paul Arthur Schilpp ed. (Open Court 1963), pp 50, 51.
1bb. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Whitehead's basic thought was that we obtain the abstract idea of a spatial point by considering the limit of a real-life series of volumes extending over each other in much the same way that we might consider a nested series of Russian dolls or a nested series of pots and pans. However, it would be a mistake to think of a spatial point as being anything more than an abstraction; instead, real positions involve the entire series of extended volumes. As Whitehead puts it, “In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world” (1925, 114).Also see Victor Lowe in Carnap, Schilpp.
2c. Please see the entry "Russell's philosophy of mind: neutral monism" found in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, second edition, Richard L. Gregory, ed. I suggest further that Russell used the word neutral to imply that a Leibnizian God was unnecessary (though it should be noted that Russell suspected that Leibniz's avowed belief in God was only for public relations purposes).
2dd. "Remarks on Russell's Theory of Knowledge" by Albert Einstein in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (Library of Living Philosophers 1946).
2ee. The Analysis of Matter by Bertrand Russell (Allen and Unwin 1927).
2e. Quoted by Morris Weitz in "The Unity of Russell's Philosophy," The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (Library of Living Philosophers 1946).
2. This point differs from the ethical problem posed by babies bonding with teddy-bots used as playmates and minders.
2a. The Mind's I, Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, an anthology of papers with comments by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (Basic Books 1981).
2x. Regarding Ludwig von Bertalanffy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Bertalanffy
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bertalanffy/
2xx. See Needham in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Paul Arthur Schilpp ed. (Library of Living Philosophers 1941, 1951).
2xy. Backers of pan-psychism would see this as an error.
2xz. Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false by Thomas Nagel (Oxford 2012).
3. Curiously, even the New Testament denies free will for those who haven't been set free by the Son. The lost don't see that by serving Self, they serve Satan, the ruler of this world. The New Testament doesn't deny souls or spirits to those in bondage to sin/sorrow, unlike Ryle and modern atheists who would deny soul and spirit as a means of denying anything beyond Missouri.
4. Hofstadter commenting in Mind's I.See FN 2a.
5. Conjecture: If I can find and shut down all speech centers of the brain, I suppose we could still detect a conscious, alert person who is unable to think in a verbal fashion. And what if the left brain is shut down? Does the person remain conscious but at a "lower" level? Perhaps he cannot read nor do math but could negotiate an obstacle course.
What kind of music would he make?
6. There is some overlap in the Freudian notion of unconscious urges that drive human behavior and the Pauline notion of the Flesh.
6a. Discussion of Carnap's views on metaphysics is based on an entry on Carnap in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Crowell Collier and Macmillan 1967).
7. We concede that Ryle has been faulted for failing to give others credit for some of his ideas, but this is not of much interest to us, though we can note that he likely absorbed some of Wittgenstein's ideas while the two were at Oxford. Certainly Ryle's book shows traces of exposure to Wittgenstein. Ryle's attitude that careful definitions suffice to reduce philosophical problems to solvable puzzles reflects Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which was completed in 1945 but not published until after Ryle's book was issued. Ryle is also accused of unconsciously plagiarizing Schopenhauer.[zw2] To be fair, however, let us bear in mind A.N. Whitehead's characterization of western philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato."
zz1. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Together with several apparently self-evident principles (such as the principle of sufficient reason, the law of contradiction, and the identity of indiscernibles), Leibniz uses his predicate-in-subject theory of truth to develop a remarkable philosophical system that provides an intricate and thorough account of reality. Ultimately, Leibniz's universe contains only God and non-composite, immaterial, soul-like entities called "monads." Strictly speaking, space, time, causation, material objects, among other things, are all illusions (at least as normally conceived). However, these illusions are well-founded on and explained by the true nature of the universe at its fundamental level. For example, Leibniz argues that things seem to cause one another because God ordained a pre-established harmony among everything in the universe. Furthermore, as consequences of his metaphysics, Leibniz proposes solutions to several deep philosophical problems, such as the problem of free will, the problem of evil, and the nature of space and time. One thus finds Leibniz developing intriguing arguments for several philosophical positions—including theism, compatibilism, and idealism.Britannica:
The concept is intimately connected with Aristotle’s distinction between matter and form, or the potential and the actual. He analyzed each thing into the stuff or elements of which it is composed and the form which makes it what it is (see hylomorphism). The mere stuff or matter is not yet the real thing; it needs a certain form or essence or function to complete it. Matter and form, however, are never separated; they can only be distinguished. Thus, in the case of a living organism, for example, the sheer matter of the organism (viewed only as a synthesis of inorganic substances) can be distinguished from a certain form or function or inner activity, without which it would not be a living organism at all; and this “soul” or “vital function” is what Aristotle in his De anima [Latin title of the Greek work; On the Soul in English] called the entelechy (or first entelechy) of the living organism. Similarly, rational activity is what makes a man to be a man and distinguishes him from a brute animal." Leibniz...called his monads (the ultimate reality of material beings) entelechies in virtue of their inner self-determined activity. The term was revived around the turn of the 20th century by Hans Driesch, a German biologist and philosopher, in connection with his vitalistic biology to denote an internal perfecting principle which, he supposed, exists in all living organisms.
zzz1. Please see The Analysis of Matter by Bertrand Russell (Allen and Unwin 1927) for Russell's summary of Leibniz's monad system.
zu1. The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (Allen and Unwin 1921). This book does not use the term "neutral monism" but the adoption of William James's "neutral stuff" idea shows that this is what Russell had in mind. Russell specifies "neutral monism" in The Analysis of Matter.
zu1a. Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell (Longmans, Green 1918).
zu2. From Russell's 1918 paper "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, Lecture 1: 'Facts and Propositions'," that appeared in The Monist in October 1918.)
More at The Bertrand Russell Society:
http://bertrandrussellsocietylibrary.org/
zzv1. James's essay "Does 'consciousness' exist?" is found at
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Does_%27Consciousness%27_Exist%3F
For other works by James, please see the excellent and easily accessed archive Wikisource
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:William_James
zzw1. "The Psychology of Wish Fulfilment" appears in the November 1916 issue of The Scientific Monthly, according to Bertrand Russell in The Analysis of Mind.
zzz2. From A Pluralistic Universe by William James (1909):
On monism
For monism the world is no collection, but one great all−inclusive fact outside of which is nothing—nothing is its only alternative. When the monism is idealistic, this all−enveloping fact is represented as an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them, just as we make objects in a dream by dreaming them, or personages in a story by imagining them. To be, on this scheme, is, on the part of a finite thing, to be an object for the absolute; and on the part of the absolute it is to be the thinker of that assemblage of objects. If we use the word 'content' here, we see that the absolute and the world have an identical content. The absolute is nothing but the knowledge of those objects; the objects are nothing but what the absolute knows.
The world and the all−thinker thus compenetrate and soak each other up without residuum. They are but two names for the same identical material, considered now from the subjective, and now from the objective point of view—gedanke and gedachtes, as we would say if we were Germans. We philosophers naturally form part of the material, on the monistic scheme. The absolute makes us by thinking us, and if we ourselves are enlightened enough to be believers in the absolute, one may then say that our philosophizing is one of the ways in which the absolute is conscious of itself. This is the full pantheistic scheme, the identitaetsphilosophie, the immanence of God in his creation, a conception sublime from its tremendous unity.
And yet that unity is incomplete, as closer examination will show. The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materially considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct from the absolute's own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copy of it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identical with as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just is our philosophy, along with everything else that is known, in an act of knowing which (to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleague Royce) forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment.
On pluralism:
It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility. Those of you who are accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may be excused if your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt—a shrug of the shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicit refutation. But one must have lived some time with a system to appreciate its merits. Perhaps a little more familiarity may mitigate your first surprise at such a programme as I offer.
zzm1. Philosophy: History and Problems by Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser (McGraw Hill 2008, 7th ed.).
zzw3. From Reconstruction in Philosophy by John Dewey. First published in 1920 by Henry Holt; Enlarged edition published in 1948 by Beacon Press. The quotation comes from Dewey's 40-page introduction added to the 1948 edition.
zzz4. Science and the Modern World by A.N. Whitehead (Macmillan 1925). Here is the relevant passage:
The seventeenth century had finally produced a scheme of scientific thought framed by mathematicians, for the use of mathematicians. The great characteristic of the mathematical mind is its capacity for dealing with abstractions; and for eliciting from them clear-cut demonstrative trains of reasoning, entirely satisfactory so long as it is those abstractions which you want to think about. The enormous success of the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand matter with its simple location in space and time, on the other hand mind, perceiving, suffering, reasoning, but not interfering, has foisted onto philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact.
Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century.
zzz5. I have taken liberties in simplifying Whitehead in order to get at the kernel of his system. For a proper understanding, please see his Science and the Modern World, as well as Footnote zzz6 below.
zzz6. From Whitehead's Science and the Modern World:
The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of materialism only applies to very abstract entities, the products of logical discernment. The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it. In the case of an animal, the mental states enter into the plan of the total organism and thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached. Thus an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it, by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of the body, and this plan includes the mental state. But the principle of modification is perfectly general throughout nature, and represents no property peculiar to living bodies. In subsequent lectures it will be explained that this doctrine involves the abandonment of the traditional scientific materialism, and the substitution of an alternative doctrine of organism.
I shall not discuss Mill's determinism, as it lies outside the scheme of these lectures. The foregoing discussion has been directed to secure that either determinism or free will shall have some relevance, unhampered by the difficulties introduced by materialistic mechanism, or by the compromise of vitalism. I would term the doctrine of these lectures, the theory of organic mechanism.
Molecules do not differ in their intrinsic character, but when part of an organism, they are governed by processes that implement the organism's own purposes In this theory, the molecules may blindly run in accordance with the general laws, but the molecules differ in their intrinsic characters according to the general organic plans of the situations in which they find themselves.
zzz7. From "Psychology in Physical Language" (German version published in 1931) by Rudolf Carnap in Logical Positivism, ed. A.J. Ayer (Collier Macmillian 1959):
To every sentence of the system language there corresponds some sentence of the physical language such that the two sentences are inter-translatable. It is the purpose of this article to show that this is the case for the sentences of psychology. Moreover, every sentence of the protocol language of some specific person is inter-translatable with some sentence of physical language, namely, with a sentence about the physical state of the person in question. The various proto- col languages thus become sub-languages of the physical language. The physical language is universal and inter-subjective. This is the thesis of physicalism.
If the physical language, on the grounds of its universality, were adopted as the system language of science, all science would become physics. Metaphysics would be discarded as meaningless. The .vari- ous domains of science would become parts of unified science. In the material mode of speech: there would, basically, be only one kind of object — physical occurrences, in whose realm law would be all-encompassing.
Physicalism ought not to be understood as requiring psychology to concern itself only with physically describable situations. The thesis, rather, is that psychology may deal with whatever it pleases, it may formulate its sentences as it pleases — these sentences will, in every case, be translatable into physical language.
zzz8. "Editor's Introduction" in Logical Positivism, ed. A.J. Ayer (Collier Macmillian 1959).
zzz9. Cited by Gary Martin on his Phrase Finder web site.
zzz10. A monad, says Britannica, is an "elementary individual substance that reflects the order of the world and from which material properties are derived." Originally, the Pythagoreans coined the term for the name of the beginning number of a series, from which all following numbers derived. Giordano Bruno in 1591 published On the Monad, Number, and Figure in which he described three fundamental types: God, souls, and atoms. In 1714, Leibniz in his Monadologia popularized the concept of monad, with his specific characterization.
*****************************
In Leibniz’s system, monads are "basic substances that make up the universe but lack spatial extension and hence are immaterial." And "Each monad is a unique, indestructible, dynamic, soul-like entity whose properties are a function of its perceptions and appetites. Monads have no true causal relation with other monads, but all are perfectly synchronized with each other by God in a pre-established harmony. The objects of the material world are simply appearances of collections of monads."
zzz11. A System of Logic by J.S. Mill
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27942/27942-h/27942-h.html
zzz12. The Scientific Outlook by Bertrand Russell (Allen and Unwin 1931).
zzz13. Cited by Alan Wood in his appendix in My Philosophical Development by Bertrand Russell (Simon and Schuster 1959).
zzz14. My Philosophical Development by Bertrand Russell (Simon and Schuster 1959).
zzz15. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth by Bertrand Russell (W.W. Norton 1940).
zzz16. Gilbert Ryle's Debt to Bertrand Russell
http://www.linacre.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/lj3a6.pdf
by John Shosky in The Linacre Journal (No. 3, Nov. 1999).
zzz17. "What is Mind?" by Bertrand Russell in The Journal of Philosophy (01/02/1958).
zzz18. Words and Things by Ernest Gellner (Victor Gollancz 1959).
zzz19. Russell's comment appears in My Philosophical Development (Simon and Schuster 1959), page 217. Wittgenstein's posthumous Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953 by Basil Blackwell Ltd.
zzz20. Russell continues:
There is here, however, an important distinction to be made. There is, on the one hand, the question as to the sort of stuff the world is made of, and on the other hand, the question as to its causal skeleton. Science has been from its inception, though at first not exclusively, a form of what may be called power- thought : that is to say, it has been concerned to understand what causes the processes we observe rather than to analyse the ingredients of which they are composed. The highly abstract scheme of physics gives, it would seem, the causal skeleton of the world, while leaving out all the colour and variety and individuality of the things that compose the world. In suggesting that the causal skeleton supplied by physics is, in theory, adequate to give the causal laws governing the behaviour of human bodies, we are not suggesting that this bare abstrac tion tells us anything about the contents of human minds, or for that matter about the actual constitu tion of what we regard as matter. The billiard-balls of old-fashioned materialism were far too concrete and sensible to be admitted into the framework of
zzz21. Human Knowledge -- Its Scope and Limits by Bertrand Russell (Simon and Schuster 1948).
xx30. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory by Warren Breckman Cambridge 1999.
zw1. Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper by Bryan Magee (Weidenfield & Nicolson 1997).
zw2. The journalist of philosophy Bryan Magee (see footnote zw1 above) charges that Ryle's book unconsciously recycles Schopenhauer. "As a student" Ryle "read Schopenhauer, and a long time later, in his fiftieth year -- having, as he thought forgotten Schopenhauer almost entirely -- published the book that made his name, The Concept of Mnd, in which not only the central thesis but also what came to be the best known of the subsidiary theses come straight out of Schopenhauer. Of all long-dead philosophers the one who most influenced Wittgenstein was also Schopenhauer, but it is unlikely that Ryle knew that either." Even after their long friendship had cooled, Ryle remained under Wittgenstein's spell, Magee reports.
No corroboration of Magee's belief is to be found in a quick scan of the internet.
zw3. The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, translated by E.F.J. Payne and cited in Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee (Weidenfield and Nicolson 1997).
zw4. In the Spirit of Hegel by Robert C. Solomon (Oxford 1983).
zw5. Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume.
zw6. The Self and Its Brain by Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles (Routledge and Kegan Paul (1977).
zw7. See the essay "Conversation with Gilbert Ryle" in Modern British Philosophy, which consists of a series of interviews by Bryan Magee (Secker and Warburg 1971).
zw8. See "Conversation with Anthony Quinton" in Modern British Philosophy, which consists of a series of interviews by Bryan Magee (Secker and Warburg 1971).
zw9. One of Russell's teachers was J.M.E. McTaggart, a Hegelian who argues, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, that scientific claims do not aim to express the fundamental nature of reality.
For example, science tells us about the laws governing the part of the universe known as ‘matter’ are mechanical. Science does not go on to tell us whether these laws are manifestations of deeper laws, or the will of God (McTaggart, 1906, 13-4). In fact, McTaggart argues that the consistency of science would be unaffected if its object of study ─ matter ─ turned out to be immaterial. To learn about the ultimate nature of the world, we must look to metaphysics, not science.Metaphysics is defined as "the systematic study of the ultimate nature of reality."
zw10. See George di Giovanni's introduction [FN 110, Page lvii] to his translation of The Science of Logic by G.W.F. Hegel (Cambridge 2010).
zw11. George di Giovanni's translation of The Science of Logic by G.W.F. Hegel (Cambridge 2010).
zt1. Some Dogmas of Religion by J.M.E. McTaggart (Edward Arnold 1906).
zt2. Wisdom of the West by Bertrand Russell (Rathbone Books 1959).
zt3. In 1918, Russell said on the subject of the "self-subsistence of particulars" that "each particular has its being independently of any other and does not depend upon anything else for the logical possibility of its existence," adding: "I compared particulars with the old conception of substance, that is to say, they have the quality of self-subsistence that used to belong to substance, but not the quality of persistence through time. A particular, as a rule, is apt to last for a very short time indeed, not an instant but a very short time. In that respect particulars differ from the old substances but in their logical position they do not."
-- from The Philosophy of Logical Atomism by Bertrand Russell (1918).
ztt1. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism by Bertrand Russell. The Open Court paperback edition of 1985 includes Russell's lectures and essay from the years 1918 and 1924. David Pears does a creditable critique in his introduction.
ztt2. In a 1924 article, "Logical Atomism," Russell expounds on neutral monism:
I will take another illustration, a kind of problem that our method is useful in helping to deal with. You all know the American theory of neutral monism, which derives really from William James and is also suggested in the work of Mach, but in a rather less developed form. The theory of neutral monism maintains that the distinction between the mental and the physical is entirely an affair of arrangement, that the actual material arranged is exactly the same in the case of the mental as it is in the case of the physical, but they differ merely in the fact that when you take a thing as belonging in the same context with certain other things, it will belong to psychology, while when you take it in a certain other context with other things, it will belong to physics, and the difference is as to what you consider to be its context, just the same sort of difference as there is between arranging the people in London alphabetically or geographically. So, according to William James, the actual material of the world can be arranged in two different ways, one of which gives you physics and the other psychology. It is just like rows or columns: in an arrangement of rows and columns, you can take an item as either a member of a certain row or a member of a certain column; the item is the same in the two cases, but its context is different.
If you will allow me a little undue simplicity I can go on to say rather more about neutral monism, but you must understand that I am talking more simply than I ought to do because there is not time to put in all the shadings and qualifications. I was talking a moment ago about the appearances that a chair presents. If we take any one of these chairs, we can all look at it, and it presents a different appearance to each of us. Taken all together, taking all the different appearances that that chair is presenting to all of us at this moment, you get something that belongs to physics. So that, if one takes sense-data and arranges together all those sense-data that appear to different people at a given moment and are such as we should ordinarily say are appearances of the same physical object, then that class of sense-data will give you something that belongs to physics, namely, the chair at this moment. On the other hand, if instead of taking all the appearances that that chair presents to all of us at this moment, I take all the appearances that the different chairs in this room present to me at this moment, I get quite another group of particulars. All the different appearances that different chairs present to me now will give you something belonging to psychology, because that will give you my experiences at the present moment. Broadly speaking, according to what one may take as an expansion of William James, that should be the definition of the difference between physics and psychology.
We commonly assume that there is a phenomenon which we call seeing the chair, but what I call my seeing the chair according to neutral monism is merely the existence of a certain particular, namely the particular which is the sense-datum of that chair at that moment. And I and the chair are both logical fictions, both being in fact a series of classes of particulars, of which one will be that particular which we call my seeing the chair. That actual appearance that the chair is presenting to me now is a member of me and a member of the chair, I and the chair being logical fictions. That will be at any rate a view that you can consider if you are engaged in vindicating neutral monism.
There is no simple entity that you can point to and say: this entity is physical and not mental. According to William James and neutral monists, that will not be the case with any simple entity that you may take. Any such entity will be a member of physical series and a member of mental series. Now I want to say that if you wish to test such a theory as that of neutral monism, if you wish to discover whether it is true or false, you cannot hope to get any distance with your problem unless you have at your fingers’ end the theory of logic that I have been talking of. You never can tell otherwise what can be done with a given material, whether you can concoct out of a given material the sort of logical fictions that will have the properties you want in psychology and in physics. That sort of thing is by no means easy to decide. You can only decide it if you really have a very considerable technical facility in these matters. Having said that, I ought to proceed to tell you that I have discovered whether neutral monism is true or not, because otherwise you may not believe that logic is any use in the matter. But I do not profess to know whether it is true or not. I feel more and more inclined to think that it may be true. I feel more and more that the difficulties that occur in regard to it are all of the sort that may be solved by ingenuity. But nevertheless there are a number of difficulties; there are a number of problems, some of which I have spoken about in the course of these lectures. One is the question of belief and the other sorts of facts involving two verbs. If there are such facts as this, that, I think, may make neutral monism rather difficult, but as I was pointing out, there is the theory that one calls behaviorism, which belongs logically with neutral monism, and that theory would altogether dispense with those facts containing two verbs, and would therefore dispose of that argument against neutral monism. There is, on the other hand, the argument from emphatic particulars, such as “this” and “now” and “here” and such words as that, which are not very easy to reconcile, to my mind, with the view which does not distinguish between a particular and experiencing that particular. But the argument about emphatic particulars is so delicate and so subtle that I cannot feel quite sure whether it is a valid one or not, and I think the longer one pursues philosophy, the more conscious one becomes how extremely often one has been taken in by fallacies, and the less willing one is to be quite sure that an argument is valid if there is anything about it that is at all subtle or elusive, at all difficult to grasp. That makes me a little cautious and doubtful about all these arguments, and therefore although I am quite sure that the question of the truth or falsehood of neutral monism is not to be solved except by these means, yet I do not profess to know whether neutral monism is true or is not. I am not without hopes of finding out in the course of time, but I do not profess to know yet.
wu1. According to Whitehead in Process and Reality -- Corrected Edition (The Free Press 1978, based on the Gifford Lectures, 1927-28),
The doctrine of the philosophy of organism is that, however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence [the coalescence or growing together of parts originally separate] -- its data, its emotions, its appreciations, its purposes, its phases of subjective aim -- beyond the determination of these components there always remains the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe. This final reaction completes the self-creative act by putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis upon the determinations of efficient cause. Each occasion exhibits its measure of creative emphasis in proportion to its measure of subjective intensity. The absolute standard of such intensity is that of the primordial nature of God, which is neither great nor small because it arises out of no actual world. It has within it no components which are standards of comparison. But in the temporal world for occasions of relatively slight experient intensity, their decisions of creative emphasis are individually negligible compared to the determined components which they receive and transmit. But the final accumulation of all such decisions--the decision of God's nature and the decisions of all occasions--constitutes that special element in the flux of forms in history, which is 'given' and incapable of rationalization beyond the fact that within it every component which is determinable is internally determined.
zxv1. Walter Kaufmann notes the similarity of Ryle's notion of category error to a point made by Hegel on the value of studying specific philosophies when studying the history of philosophy. "Whoever studied and mastered any philosophy at all, if it really is a philosophy, would master some philosophy." Those who argue otherwise, Hegel compares "with a pedantical invalid whom his doctor advises to eat fruit and who is offered cherries or plums or grapes, but who will not take any" because "none of these are fruit but merely cherries or plums or grapes." From Hegel's lectures. See Kaufmann's Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Anchor Books edition 1966), page 281.
Ryle has been quoted as saying that Hegel made no sense to him, "even as error." Kaufmann, along with John Findlay, helped restore Hegel's reputation among 20th century philosophers.
zxd0. The Philosophy of Hegel -- A Systematic Exposition by W.T. Stace (Macmillan 1924).
JD1. "Dewey's Theory of Science" by Hans Reichenbach in The Philosophy of John Dewey (Library of Living Philosophers, Paul Arthur Schilp, ed., 1939).
zn1. Hegel, a Re-Examination by J.N. Findlay (Oxford 1958).
q1. In a letter to a fellow physicist, Henry P. Stapp, Werner Heisenberg tells of his differences with Russell.
I think that you [Stapp] I have too much confidence in the possibilities of language. I think that the attitude which is behind the Copenhagen interpretation [of quantum physics] is not compatible with the philosophy of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. It may be compatible with the philosophy contained in the later papers of Wittgenstein. As you probably know, Bertrand Russell liked the Tractatus of Wittgenstein, but disapproved of the later papers, and therefore I could never come to an agreement with Russell on these philosophical questions.From Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics, 3rd Edition, by Henry P. Stapp (Springer 2009).
q2. The Self and Its Brain by Karl Popper and John C. Eccles (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1977).
zq0. The philosopher Thomas Nagel remarks,
Philosophy is also infected by a broader tendency of contemporary intellectual life: scientism. Scientism is actually a special form of idealism, for it puts one type of human understanding in charge of the universe and what can be said about it. At its most myopic it assumes that everything there is must be understandable by scientific theories of the kind we have developed to date – physics and evolutionary biology being the current paradigms – as if the current age were not just another in the series.-- The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel (Oxford 1986).
Precisely because of their dominance, these attitudes are ripe for attack. Of course some of the opposition is foolish; it can degenerate into the rejection of science – whereas anti-scientism is essential to the defense of science against misappropriation... Too much time is wasted because of the assumptions that methods already in existence will solve problems for which they were not designed.
QW1. The View from Nowhere, Nagel,(page 81).
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