Day 113
4:15 A.M. I've just finished another essay; that's three out of 5 done now. Time for a few hours' sleep (literally), then off to school to complete two more, both due wednesday afternoon at 4pm sharp.
I really am on empty now. Been running on fumes these last few weeks with respect to having any motivation to write more philosophy. The semester has just been so draining... From seminars on Wittgenstein to Phil. of Mind to the Honours seminar, to Aristotle to Descartes to Leibniz to countless more thinkers... researching and writing my mini-thesis on cultural evolution, fusing philosophy and poetry, penning more essays than I care to ever remember (11 all told, this semester), and all the rest of it.
Do send me a positive vibe or two, it will be a less than pleasant task to push out 2000 words each on Aristotle and Leibniz, respectively, especially on this lack of shut eye.
I hope to write a recap of what University has been like these last four years; a brief chronicle of the most memorable times, valuable lessons learned, and compelling ideas encountered, not to mention a few thank-you's for some people without whom I'd never have retained my sanity. Expect that entry within the next week or so; I have already begun to write it on spare time!
Ah, I can hear the birds singing. They can recognize the crack of light just a little bit before the human eyes can. There is an odd way in which I can feel the light just a little bit, before it arrives.
*Day 113 addition* If you're interested in ever pursuing philosophy, here's a taste for you: an excerpted version of my Phil. of Mind essay. Enjoy!
----------------------------
The subject I wish to discuss in this essay is Donald Davidson’s theory of Anomalous Monism, which contains a multi-faceted thesis about the nature of the mind, body, and causal interactions. What AM tries to do, essentially, is retain a set of intuitive claims regarding the mind and causality without running into a paradox. I’d like to explain and analyze AM with special attention paid to the claim that mental events can cause physical events, following a criticism leveled by Ted Honderich that AM in fact leads to a form of Epiphenomenalism. I will agree with Honderich in large part, and conclude that at least one of Davidson’s intuitive three principles needs to be rejected. The essay will conclude with a few notes on Epiphenomenalism and its possible validity, in spite of its intuitive un-appeal.
We must begin by outlining Davidson’s three principles, none of which Davidson argues in favour for, but which he accepts as general principles that most people want to accept as true in any good theory of mind. The first is the Principle of Causal Interaction, which states that "there are at least some instances of mental events interacting causally with physical events." The second is Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality, which states that "events that are related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws". The third is the Principle of the Anomalism of the Mental, stating that "there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained." The apparent problem with accepting all three of these principles is that it may not be possible for them all to be simultaneously true: if the first two principles are true, then the third cannot, be, for the Anomalism of the mental runs up against the mental’s causal interaction with the physical and the Nomological nature of causation. Or stated otherwise, if the second two principles are true, then the first cannot be, for mental events cannot cause physical events whilst being both nomological and anomolous.
Davidson’s explanation for how the three principles can be reconciled lies in a particular interpretation of the second principle. He states:
But laws are linguistic; so events can instantiate laws, and can hence be explained or predicted in the light of laws, only as those events are described in one or another way… The principle of the nomological character of causality must be read carefully: it says that when events are related as cause and effect, they have descriptions that instantiate a law. It does not say that every true singular statement of causality instantiates a law.
It is a rather odd move to make, but it is a fairly clear one upon reflection. Davidson points out that only when there are cause/effect relationships there are also laws. But cause/effect relationships only hold under particular descriptions of events. So it is entirely possible, he concludes that we can have true statements about causality that simply cannot be described in such a way that they count as instances of some causal law. The tension between the nomological character of causality and the other principles has been released, and Davidson re-introduces the third principle, that (in other words) there can be no psychophysical laws, (i.e. laws governing the causal relationship between mental and physical events), and asserts that in light of the fact that the only descriptions we can give of cause/effect relationships are physical descriptions, then a token identity follows between mental and physical events. And there we have the theory of Anomalous Monism: Mental events retain their anomalous nature, to the extent that they cannot be given descriptions as such that instantiate laws, while the fact that we can give them physical descriptions that do instantiate laws, they must also be physical. The identity here is token and not type, for physical descriptions cannot be given to types of mental states because types of mental states cannot be so described the way tokens (i.e. particular instances can).
Honderich, in his critique, pushes at Davidson’s "descriptions." What, precisely, does it mean to say that something is law-like under a particular description? Take some particular physical event (which Davidson notes is purely unique in space and time, and is therefore not repeatable), and we find that it can carry an infinite number of properties, depending on just how greatly detailed our explanation is. Wittgenstein notes that the entire world can be constructed (understood) around any one instance of an object. That said, it becomes clear that when we are describing an event for the purposes of having it fall under a law, we are describing whatever properties of that event are relevant to its causal efficacy. Said another way, we describe the properties that are relevant to the relationship between cause X and effect Y.
Honderich uses the example of a pear, and some of its properties. If we weigh a pear, we can give a certain description of the object which will explain how it produced the effect of tipping the scale to such-and-such a degree; the explanation will have to do mainly with the mass of the pear and the gravitational effect it’s mass will produce on the scale. But then, there are other properties to the pear that do not play into the causal story, such as its being green, or its being French, in spite of the fact that these properties might be necessary conditions to our calling the object a pear. So a clear distinction is made by Honderich: "The greenness and Frenchness were necessary to the event’s being the event that it was, but not necessary to the event’s being the cause that it was."
The logic of the matter is this: Way can say that X is the cause of effect Y when X has property f that was the cause of Y’s property g. There may be multiple contributing causal properties, but the fact remains that some properties of X will be causally relevant and some not.
The question, relating back to Davidson is this: if we are to say that under some description, there are cause/effect relationships between mental and physical events, which properties of mental events are the relevant properties, and which are not? We must keep in mind that according to Davidson, token identity is true (meaning that every mental event is identical with a physical event), so that every mental event can be described in physical terms. Davidson refers to mental events as propositional attitudes "like believing, intending, desiring, hoping, knowing, perceiving, noticing, remembering, and so on." And in an effort to save his theory from collapsing into Epiphenomenalism, he implicitly contends that mental events can be said to be causes described as mental events, of physical events. That is, if we take an intentional state as the cause of an action, we are viewing the cause/effect as one between a mental event described as such (as opposed to a mental event described as a physical event) and a physical event.
But this poses a massive problem for Anomalous Monism, argues Honderich. If we take into account the notion that cause/effect relationships are in fact relationships between particular relevant properties, the original contradiction in the three principles springs up once again. The reason is this: the introduction of the notion of causally relevant properties also reintroduces a strict nomological connection between mental cause and physical effect; that is, if we understand a cause to be mental and its effect to be physical, and we take into account that there must be causally relevant properties to the relationship, and what Honderich calls "the nomological character of causally relevant properties" We have a renewed denial of Davidson’s third principle, that there can be no strict psychophysical laws. The argument can be mirrored as well: if instead we wish to keep the third principle, we are forced to abandon the first principle, because if there are no psychophysical laws, (and causality is understood in terms of causally relevant properties, which are nomological), then it cannot be the case that mental events cause physical events. Either way, Anomalous Monism is false.
The most obvious line to take from here on first thought is also the least intuitively appealing line upon second thought: when treating mental events as causes, they ought to be understood as physical events. That is, the intentional states that Davidson outlines simply do not have causal power when understood as such; the only things which have causal power are physical brain states, because they are the only ones that line up with the nomologicality of causal relationships with respect to relevant properties. This is the way in which Davidson’s first principle may be abandoned, and we are left with a picture of causality only between things that have physical descriptions. This tidies things up quite nicely; we retain the nomologicality of cause/effect relationships, (which is important) and we also retain the principle that there are no strict psychophysical laws. It makes solid sense, at least to the extent that when an action is produced by a person, there is at least something between that person’s ears that is most definitely the cause of the action. As well, there is a law-governed causal relationship between all the relevant properties of the cause and the effect. But in return we are forced to abandon the claim that mental events (described as such) have causal power.
From here I’d like to take some time to examine Epiphenomenalism, and what I believe to be a way in which it might be taken as a little bit more intuitively appealing.
First, to define specifically: Epiphenomenalism is the view that the causal road between the physical and the mental is strictly one way. While we can say there is a kind of substance dualism (distinct mental and physical substances), or a weaker form of property dualism, the mental has absolutely no causal power. Mental events are incidental effects of physical causes that do nothing in return, but keep up with the physical such that there is a certain appearance that the mental can cause the physical to a certain degree. We live (pragmatically) certainly as though mental (intentional) states cause physical states; in fact, it is difficult to make any movement whatsoever without in some sense recognizing one’s apparent decision-making power.
Probably the least popular kind of Epiphenomenalism today is that proposed by Malbranche, who believed that while there is no causal power held by the mind, mental events always line up to perfection with brain states thanks to the constantly intervening hand of God. A veritable deus ex machina for those who trouble over philosophy of mind. And I am highly unsympathetic to such a view on the very simple ground that it is completely impossible to be supported or falsified by any piece of evidence. And in agreement with both Davidson and Honderich (and many others), I find there is a certain inclination to believe without serious examination that any good theory of mind will leave at least some causal power in the hands of intentional states.
But the clearness and distinctness (as Descartes might say) of a perception is not sufficient grounds to believe in its truth. People hallucinate all the time; brain-in-vat speculations are theoretically plausible in spite of our distaste for such notions. The real question has to do with how we ought to proceed when compelling pragmatic and experiential considerations are run up against when we follow our lines of philosophical work. A critic like Wittgenstein might offer nothing but contempt toward a notion like Epiphenomenalism, arguing that in talking about a theory that supposes to disconnect the mind from the world in such a way we’ve descended into nonsense-talk; even more broadly, it might be said that words like "mind" and "intentional state" have such weakly or fuzzily understood referents that they simply ought not to be used in any kind of analytical context.
On what I think to be the opposite end of the spectrum are philosophers who have absolutely no trouble abandoning intuitive claims about the mind. Take Memeticist Susan Blackmore who argues in the final chapters of The Meme Machine that the self is a complete illusion. Similarly to the way the body is no more than the sum of its interacting parts, the mind is nothing more than the sum of learned cultural information that inhabits it. Any ‘decision’ we make is simply one bit of cultural information appropriating the physical apparatus for its own needs, and the idea of the self as having causal power is an illusion. Now of course this is not Epiphenomenalism, for what it refers to has to do with the lack of causal power on the part of the conscious mind, while it may well retain the deeper philosophical position that the mind interacts causally with the physical world. But, if one is to take the theory seriously, one has also jumped an intuitive hurdle toward accepting Epiphenomenalism as a viable theory.
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I really am on empty now. Been running on fumes these last few weeks with respect to having any motivation to write more philosophy. The semester has just been so draining... From seminars on Wittgenstein to Phil. of Mind to the Honours seminar, to Aristotle to Descartes to Leibniz to countless more thinkers... researching and writing my mini-thesis on cultural evolution, fusing philosophy and poetry, penning more essays than I care to ever remember (11 all told, this semester), and all the rest of it.
Do send me a positive vibe or two, it will be a less than pleasant task to push out 2000 words each on Aristotle and Leibniz, respectively, especially on this lack of shut eye.
I hope to write a recap of what University has been like these last four years; a brief chronicle of the most memorable times, valuable lessons learned, and compelling ideas encountered, not to mention a few thank-you's for some people without whom I'd never have retained my sanity. Expect that entry within the next week or so; I have already begun to write it on spare time!
Ah, I can hear the birds singing. They can recognize the crack of light just a little bit before the human eyes can. There is an odd way in which I can feel the light just a little bit, before it arrives.
*Day 113 addition* If you're interested in ever pursuing philosophy, here's a taste for you: an excerpted version of my Phil. of Mind essay. Enjoy!
----------------------------
The subject I wish to discuss in this essay is Donald Davidson’s theory of Anomalous Monism, which contains a multi-faceted thesis about the nature of the mind, body, and causal interactions. What AM tries to do, essentially, is retain a set of intuitive claims regarding the mind and causality without running into a paradox. I’d like to explain and analyze AM with special attention paid to the claim that mental events can cause physical events, following a criticism leveled by Ted Honderich that AM in fact leads to a form of Epiphenomenalism. I will agree with Honderich in large part, and conclude that at least one of Davidson’s intuitive three principles needs to be rejected. The essay will conclude with a few notes on Epiphenomenalism and its possible validity, in spite of its intuitive un-appeal.
We must begin by outlining Davidson’s three principles, none of which Davidson argues in favour for, but which he accepts as general principles that most people want to accept as true in any good theory of mind. The first is the Principle of Causal Interaction, which states that "there are at least some instances of mental events interacting causally with physical events." The second is Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality, which states that "events that are related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws". The third is the Principle of the Anomalism of the Mental, stating that "there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained." The apparent problem with accepting all three of these principles is that it may not be possible for them all to be simultaneously true: if the first two principles are true, then the third cannot, be, for the Anomalism of the mental runs up against the mental’s causal interaction with the physical and the Nomological nature of causation. Or stated otherwise, if the second two principles are true, then the first cannot be, for mental events cannot cause physical events whilst being both nomological and anomolous.
Davidson’s explanation for how the three principles can be reconciled lies in a particular interpretation of the second principle. He states:
But laws are linguistic; so events can instantiate laws, and can hence be explained or predicted in the light of laws, only as those events are described in one or another way… The principle of the nomological character of causality must be read carefully: it says that when events are related as cause and effect, they have descriptions that instantiate a law. It does not say that every true singular statement of causality instantiates a law.
It is a rather odd move to make, but it is a fairly clear one upon reflection. Davidson points out that only when there are cause/effect relationships there are also laws. But cause/effect relationships only hold under particular descriptions of events. So it is entirely possible, he concludes that we can have true statements about causality that simply cannot be described in such a way that they count as instances of some causal law. The tension between the nomological character of causality and the other principles has been released, and Davidson re-introduces the third principle, that (in other words) there can be no psychophysical laws, (i.e. laws governing the causal relationship between mental and physical events), and asserts that in light of the fact that the only descriptions we can give of cause/effect relationships are physical descriptions, then a token identity follows between mental and physical events. And there we have the theory of Anomalous Monism: Mental events retain their anomalous nature, to the extent that they cannot be given descriptions as such that instantiate laws, while the fact that we can give them physical descriptions that do instantiate laws, they must also be physical. The identity here is token and not type, for physical descriptions cannot be given to types of mental states because types of mental states cannot be so described the way tokens (i.e. particular instances can).
Honderich, in his critique, pushes at Davidson’s "descriptions." What, precisely, does it mean to say that something is law-like under a particular description? Take some particular physical event (which Davidson notes is purely unique in space and time, and is therefore not repeatable), and we find that it can carry an infinite number of properties, depending on just how greatly detailed our explanation is. Wittgenstein notes that the entire world can be constructed (understood) around any one instance of an object. That said, it becomes clear that when we are describing an event for the purposes of having it fall under a law, we are describing whatever properties of that event are relevant to its causal efficacy. Said another way, we describe the properties that are relevant to the relationship between cause X and effect Y.
Honderich uses the example of a pear, and some of its properties. If we weigh a pear, we can give a certain description of the object which will explain how it produced the effect of tipping the scale to such-and-such a degree; the explanation will have to do mainly with the mass of the pear and the gravitational effect it’s mass will produce on the scale. But then, there are other properties to the pear that do not play into the causal story, such as its being green, or its being French, in spite of the fact that these properties might be necessary conditions to our calling the object a pear. So a clear distinction is made by Honderich: "The greenness and Frenchness were necessary to the event’s being the event that it was, but not necessary to the event’s being the cause that it was."
The logic of the matter is this: Way can say that X is the cause of effect Y when X has property f that was the cause of Y’s property g. There may be multiple contributing causal properties, but the fact remains that some properties of X will be causally relevant and some not.
The question, relating back to Davidson is this: if we are to say that under some description, there are cause/effect relationships between mental and physical events, which properties of mental events are the relevant properties, and which are not? We must keep in mind that according to Davidson, token identity is true (meaning that every mental event is identical with a physical event), so that every mental event can be described in physical terms. Davidson refers to mental events as propositional attitudes "like believing, intending, desiring, hoping, knowing, perceiving, noticing, remembering, and so on." And in an effort to save his theory from collapsing into Epiphenomenalism, he implicitly contends that mental events can be said to be causes described as mental events, of physical events. That is, if we take an intentional state as the cause of an action, we are viewing the cause/effect as one between a mental event described as such (as opposed to a mental event described as a physical event) and a physical event.
But this poses a massive problem for Anomalous Monism, argues Honderich. If we take into account the notion that cause/effect relationships are in fact relationships between particular relevant properties, the original contradiction in the three principles springs up once again. The reason is this: the introduction of the notion of causally relevant properties also reintroduces a strict nomological connection between mental cause and physical effect; that is, if we understand a cause to be mental and its effect to be physical, and we take into account that there must be causally relevant properties to the relationship, and what Honderich calls "the nomological character of causally relevant properties" We have a renewed denial of Davidson’s third principle, that there can be no strict psychophysical laws. The argument can be mirrored as well: if instead we wish to keep the third principle, we are forced to abandon the first principle, because if there are no psychophysical laws, (and causality is understood in terms of causally relevant properties, which are nomological), then it cannot be the case that mental events cause physical events. Either way, Anomalous Monism is false.
The most obvious line to take from here on first thought is also the least intuitively appealing line upon second thought: when treating mental events as causes, they ought to be understood as physical events. That is, the intentional states that Davidson outlines simply do not have causal power when understood as such; the only things which have causal power are physical brain states, because they are the only ones that line up with the nomologicality of causal relationships with respect to relevant properties. This is the way in which Davidson’s first principle may be abandoned, and we are left with a picture of causality only between things that have physical descriptions. This tidies things up quite nicely; we retain the nomologicality of cause/effect relationships, (which is important) and we also retain the principle that there are no strict psychophysical laws. It makes solid sense, at least to the extent that when an action is produced by a person, there is at least something between that person’s ears that is most definitely the cause of the action. As well, there is a law-governed causal relationship between all the relevant properties of the cause and the effect. But in return we are forced to abandon the claim that mental events (described as such) have causal power.
From here I’d like to take some time to examine Epiphenomenalism, and what I believe to be a way in which it might be taken as a little bit more intuitively appealing.
First, to define specifically: Epiphenomenalism is the view that the causal road between the physical and the mental is strictly one way. While we can say there is a kind of substance dualism (distinct mental and physical substances), or a weaker form of property dualism, the mental has absolutely no causal power. Mental events are incidental effects of physical causes that do nothing in return, but keep up with the physical such that there is a certain appearance that the mental can cause the physical to a certain degree. We live (pragmatically) certainly as though mental (intentional) states cause physical states; in fact, it is difficult to make any movement whatsoever without in some sense recognizing one’s apparent decision-making power.
Probably the least popular kind of Epiphenomenalism today is that proposed by Malbranche, who believed that while there is no causal power held by the mind, mental events always line up to perfection with brain states thanks to the constantly intervening hand of God. A veritable deus ex machina for those who trouble over philosophy of mind. And I am highly unsympathetic to such a view on the very simple ground that it is completely impossible to be supported or falsified by any piece of evidence. And in agreement with both Davidson and Honderich (and many others), I find there is a certain inclination to believe without serious examination that any good theory of mind will leave at least some causal power in the hands of intentional states.
But the clearness and distinctness (as Descartes might say) of a perception is not sufficient grounds to believe in its truth. People hallucinate all the time; brain-in-vat speculations are theoretically plausible in spite of our distaste for such notions. The real question has to do with how we ought to proceed when compelling pragmatic and experiential considerations are run up against when we follow our lines of philosophical work. A critic like Wittgenstein might offer nothing but contempt toward a notion like Epiphenomenalism, arguing that in talking about a theory that supposes to disconnect the mind from the world in such a way we’ve descended into nonsense-talk; even more broadly, it might be said that words like "mind" and "intentional state" have such weakly or fuzzily understood referents that they simply ought not to be used in any kind of analytical context.
On what I think to be the opposite end of the spectrum are philosophers who have absolutely no trouble abandoning intuitive claims about the mind. Take Memeticist Susan Blackmore who argues in the final chapters of The Meme Machine that the self is a complete illusion. Similarly to the way the body is no more than the sum of its interacting parts, the mind is nothing more than the sum of learned cultural information that inhabits it. Any ‘decision’ we make is simply one bit of cultural information appropriating the physical apparatus for its own needs, and the idea of the self as having causal power is an illusion. Now of course this is not Epiphenomenalism, for what it refers to has to do with the lack of causal power on the part of the conscious mind, while it may well retain the deeper philosophical position that the mind interacts causally with the physical world. But, if one is to take the theory seriously, one has also jumped an intuitive hurdle toward accepting Epiphenomenalism as a viable theory.
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