An argument for the immateriality of the intellect

Conversation
61

I’m afraid it isn’t clear. I’m not even sure what you mean by disagreeing with Premise 1, since you elsewhere claim that meaning is “fixed by the architecture of the brain” - so do you think our thoughts can have unambiguous content, or not? And why exactly do you claim that what Feser means by “determinate” isn’t what he says he means?

Exactly - they don’t meet those criteria; they don’t have clear meanings. (That’s Premise 2.) Yet our thoughts do have clear meanings. (That’s Premise 1.) So our thoughts are not just physical processes.

It is answerable (as I’ve explained in earlier posts and as Feser elaborates on in further detail in his article) - unless you assume the conclusion of the argument is false.

I understand the analogy perfectly fine - the problem is that it requires we have a perception of intentionality. And this perception is itself an instance of intentionality which EM says doesn’t exist; it has the very same semantic content that is supposed to be merely an illusion.

In fact the optical illusion you reference illustrates this point: the illusion that the horizontal bar is shaded is only possible because different shades of grey exist (and when the different shades of grey are removed from the background, the illusion disappears). In the same way, if intentionality does not exist like EM claims, even an illusion of intentionality would be impossible.

You can claim “even though we continue to speak and act as if intentionality is real, it doesn’t mean it is”, but as far as I can see, you can give no reason to believe that such an illusion is possible even in principle. All such reasons will presuppose what they are trying to deny (while at the same time undercutting themselves by denying the existence of something which is a necessary condition for all reasoning in the first place).

At this point I might as well once again reference Ed Feser - this time pointing to an instance where he articulates this incoherence objection to eliminative materialism in the context of responding to a paper by eliminativist Alex Rosenberg. (In fact, a number of his posts responding to Rosenberg are relevant, both addressing the arguments for EM and the objections to it.)

1 Like
62

I am still not seeing the incoherence. But I will have a look at those articles (even though I often find reading Feser an excruciating experience.) Thanks!

2 Likes
63

I am certainly disagreeing with the idea that a physical basis for our thoughts must be immune to the points raised in Feser’s examples.

Well obviously if you showed me the physical components underlying thought I would not be able to understand them - any more than I can understand “gavagai” and I could certainly invent a meaning for them. And that is true whether Feser is right or wrong.

I very much doubt that. I don’t think that Feser has a solution for the interaction problem to start with.

64

I will admit he takes some getting used to, haha.

That… doesn’t answer my question about your stance on Premise 1. And I remain unclear on what you are actually asserting, though perhaps your next comment sheds some light on it.

So, here it sounds to me like you believe the following:

  • the meanings of our thoughts supervene on neural structures in our brains (“fixed by the architecture of our brains”)
  • the neural structures bear the same kind of relationship to the meanings of our thoughts as words do, and may very well be subject to the kind of indeterminacy arguments that have been referenced in support of Premise 2

From which I can only conclude that you are, in fact, a property dualist, and you believe that there are some kind of arbitrary psychophysical laws of nature connecting the emergence of mental properties (bearing the meanings of our thoughts) to the underlying physical structures.

I can make no sense of what you are saying otherwise. :confused:

If you want to press the interaction problem, you are free to make a case for it - though maybe in a new thread, since it isn’t directly relevant. (Simply mentioning it certainly does nothing to show that there is anything wrong with the argument I have been presenting here.)

65

Obviously Feser’s examples are supposed to demonstrate indeterminacy. If the physical basis of thought were not immune to them, how could it be determinate in Feser’s sense?

I don’t have a strong view on what is really going on, but the first seems to me the least bad explanation at present.

I do not agree with the second,but I hold that Feser’s examples explictly assume it,

If you read it in context, I am raising the interaction problem in response to your claim that there is an adequate explanation of how understanding arises. Not as a general refutation of Feser’s argument.

66

So here you seem to be saying that the physical base of our thoughts are subject to the indeterminacy arguments…

And here you seem to be denying that the physical base of our thoughts are subject to the indeterminacy arguments (the second point you are referring to here being “neural structures bear the same kind of relationship to meanings as words and may very well be subject to the kind of indeterminacy arguments that have been referenced in support of Premise 2”).

So which is it? And do you think our thoughts have determinate semantic content or not?

I know. But my claim that there is an adequate explanation for the existence of meaning (and the kind of explanation I’m talking about here is an ontological ground, a “how can it be this way”, not a causal “how did it get this way” kind of explanation - that’s a different question) is tied up with the success of the argument. Namely, the explanation is that it is possible for our thoughts to have determinate meaning because they have an immaterial base with intrinsic, essential semantic content, which is not subject to the indeterminacy arguments (which work on physical structures because the kind of meaning they have is extrinsic and contingent).

And it remains the case merely mentioning the interaction problem has no force; you need an argument for it.

67

I am suggesting that if the examples demonstrate indeterminacy, then they would seem to demonstrate that the physical base of our thoughts is indeterminate - whether that is a problem or not.

I am disagreeing with the idea that the relationship is the same. If that invalidates Feser’s support for Premise 2, that really doesn’t affect my point much.

I do think that they have semantic content.

I think you need rather more than proposing hypothetical entities with the necessary qualities to have an adequate explanation. The interaction problem is a serious issue since it calls any such explanation into question.

68

Okay, but I wasn’t trying to pin you with the claim that the relationship was exactly identical - by the same kind of relationship I only intended that they were analogous enough that the indeterminacy arguments applied equally. Which you seem to agree with - you think if they work in one case then they work in the other.

(Granted, I don’t think you’ve conceded that the indeterminacy arguments do work, either for language or for physical patterns or structures generally. I haven’t seen any reason that undercuts them either, though, and it seems to me that they do work.)

That still doesn’t answer my question, though it’s a start. (I don’t think physicalism has the resources to account even for that, but that would be a digression.)

It isn’t a hypothesis - it’s a conclusion, following the logic of the argument. (Again - explained in more detail in Feser’s article.)

I do not think it is a serious issue. Perhaps if you were to present it, I would have a better understanding of why you think it is.

69

I can see that I am going to have to repeat myself. I do not assume that is true, I argue that Feser’s examples implicitly assume that is true.

Well, I am still not sure what you mean by determinate, if you mean that it obviously has a single meaning that can be told from examination of the physical underpinnings - if physicalism is true - then obviously not.

Unless you can establish that such entities actually exist, they are hypothetical.

I understood it to be a widely-known issue in the philosophy of mind. Essentially the question is how do non-material entities interact with the physical? Obviously they must do to work as part of the mind, but equally obviously we have no reliable detections of such interactions or any solid ideas on how they would work.

70

I apologize, that was not clear to me.

Nevertheless, you seem to be missing something. Yes, the indeterminacy arguments that Feser references are about the indeterminacy of language. But he does not assume that these arguments apply to physical structures - he argues that they do, reasoning that the features of language which enable the indeterminacy arguments (e.g., not having intrinsic semantic content) are also features of physical structures.

I’ve stated the intended meaning of determinate several times now. “Having a single meaning” would be an adequate summary, if you like.

If a thought has a unique meaning, and if physicalism is true so that thought is entirely constituted by some physical structure or pattern, then yes, it would have to be the case that the unique meaning was determined by the underlying physical facts - by hypothesis of physicalism, there isn’t anything else there to determine it! But that question doesn’t have to be settled before we can answer whether any of our thoughts have unambiguous meaning, since the way we know the meanings of our thoughts is by introspection.

If you’ll allow me to look back at your original response to my presentation of the argument…

To me this means you do, in fact, agree with Premise 1 - having a clear idea of what we mean (if accurate!) means that our thought has a clear meaning. Yet you seem to disagree with the idea that this clear meaning can be determined by the underlying physical facts. So I think that you actually agree with Premise 2 as well.

So you should also accept the conclusion of the argument.

(Since you still want to say that the meanings of our thoughts supervene on the physical facts, you’ll probably want to go with property dualism, though I don’t think that is the best option.)

Establishing that fact is precisely what the argument accomplishes. And more broadly, the argument shows that there is an answer to the question you say is unanswerable, which kicked off this particular thread of our conversation in the first place.

If there is an immaterial aspect to our thoughts, then we reliably detect such interactions whenever our thoughts impact our physical actions. And the argument here shows that there is an immaterial aspect to our thoughts, so we can in fact know that we are detecting such an interaction. So “we have no reliable detections of such interactions” begs the question.

As for “or any solid ideas on how they would work”, I claim (i) this is false - I think dualists do have viable explanations of mind-body interaction - but more relevantly for this discussion, (ii) we don’t need to know how such interactions occur before we can know that they occur (which the main argument in question in this topic shows).

There’s plenty more that can be said for and against the interaction problem, but as I’ve been saying, if you want to continue on that subject, I think it would be better to start another thread.

71

I don’t think it’s possible to coherently disagree with Premise 1. Sure, you can say that you disagree with Premise 1, but if Premise 1 is false, then your belief that “I disagree with Premise 1” has no determined meaning. You might actually agree with Premise 1 even though you believe “I disagree with Premise 1.”

Obviously, that’s ridiculous, since you do know what you mean when you say “I disagree with Premise 1.” But that’s the whole point; by knowing what you believe, you’re proving Premise 1 to be true, whether you recognize it or not. It’s like cogito ergo sum; it’s impossible to coherently doubt that you yourself exist, because by doubting, you prove that you exist.

1 Like
72

Believers in pansychism would deny the latter, and the difference in the relationship would be very relevant to that, Also, I am not convinced that intrinsic semantic content is necessary. I’ve already argued as much with regard to colours.

Well, no because Premise 1 seems to go beyond that - and that was the point of the extract you quoted.

I would argue that supervenience is sufficient for your version of Premise 1, especially as you have to take the whole brain into consideration. Since there can only be one mental state assocIated with any physical state there is no ambiguity at that level.

And according to that discussion it was not necessary to accept the argument, only not to reject it.

Obviously it does not. Equally obviously it is a fact.

But you need to know how they occur to have a full explanation - indeed you cannot even be certain that they do occur without some testable explanation.

73

So far as I can tell Premise 1 demands that the meaning is completely obvious to an observer and can be told by simple inspection, and no alternative interpretation is possible. I can certainly disagree with both those points without descending into incoherence.

74

This is one philosophical school of thought that does disagree with the premise. Whether it does so coherently is a matter of debate, as you can see from the preceding discussion here.

75

I found it somewhat amusing that when Patricia Churchland lays out the motivation for eliminative materialism in that video, the reasoning basically boils down to:

Mental phenomena X, Y, Z can’t be explained in materialist terms.
(Unstated premise: whatever cannot be explained in materialist terms does not exist.)
Therefore, mental phenomena X, Y, Z do not exist.

Which is really just the modus tollens to Feser’s and my modus ponens.

76

No, no, that isn’t what Premise 1 requires. What Premise 1 requires is that some of our thoughts have unique, unambiguous meanings. If you have any thought with some meaning X, and you know that it means X and not some other meaning, then you can know that Premise 1 is true.

You seem to be reading the examples given to support Premise 2 as if they are supposed to be telling you the meaning of determinate and indeterminate, but that isn’t what they are doing. Rather, the intent of those examples is to argue that our ability to impose alternative interpretations on words, or physical patterns, or what have you, shows that the physical facts do not determine a unique meaning. But then the unique meanings that (at least some of) our thoughts have, must be grounded in something non-physical.

Again, if physicalism is true then the meanings of our thoughts have to be determined by the physical facts (because there’s nothing else there), and in principle an observer should be able to determine those meanings by inspection of those physical facts. The argument for Premise 2 is that it does not seem possible in principle for thoughts to have a unique meaning in this way, because some reinterpretation is always going to be available. But that has no bearing on Premise 1.

Panpsychism is a form of property dualism, so it doesn’t look to me like it escapes the argument. (Also, by my lights, its “composition problem” is orders of magnitude worse than the “interaction problem”, but that would be another digression.)

I think your argument about colours falters on the distinction Feser makes between concepts and mental images, which I’ve also pointed out. (And even if it didn’t, I don’t see how it would generalize.)

Well, no, that’s not what I was saying. If you don’t reject the conclusion of the argument out of hand, the question of what grounds meaning is answerable (by following the logic of the argument to its conclusion).

Not much to do here beyond saying that I simply disagree with these assertions.

1 Like
77

Then you misunderstand what Premise 1 is saying. It’s not saying that meaning is definite to an observer, but that the meaning of your thoughts is definite to you.

Do the Churchlands say that we can never know the meaning of our thoughts, because our thoughts don’t have a defined meaning at all (even to ourselves)? If so, then yeah, I’d say that’s self-defeating. I’m not sure that’s what they’re saying, though.

78

That seems about right.

What I find attractive about EM, or at least more attractive than any form of immaterial account of the mind, is that the former at least holds out the prospect that we will understand the mind. If immaterial accounts are correct, then we will never understand the mind unless and until someone comes up with an immaterialist version of the scientific method.

79

Well, that is your interpretation but Feser says a lot of things that make me doubt that is what it means.
For a start it is not at all clear that he means that the thought must be taken in the context of the entire system - which seems rather like knowing what “gaviago” means in advance.

This seems to be a distinction without a difference. If these arguments illustrate indeterminate and are meant to show indeterminism in physicalist views of the mind then they must apply to physicalist views of the mind.

According to my reading the composition problem only applies to some forms of pansychism. And I do not see hoe Feser’s arguments can touch the presumed mental properties of matter. The examples certainly do not.

I don’t think that there is a hard line there, and I am not convinced that concepts are anything like the problem Feser claims they are. Generalising it is an issue, but it does not seem impossible to me that there are some low-level referents built into the brain (or something that could give rise to them)

I don’t see how you can call something a reliable detection when you don’t even know if it is a detection. That really would beg the question.

80

I’ve been trying to understand what the problem is and I have to concede I just don’t see it. This whole thing about intentionality, or thoughts being “about” something, I don’t see how that isn’t possible on materialism, or how that can’t be explained on materialism.

Is it possible to get a really succinct version of what the problem is?

3 Likes