SR wrote:

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

What do you mean by known? Do you mean proven? 

I mean experienced.

That seems a somewhat different issue to the interaction problem.

Yes, but related, since the question of what kinds of causation there are depends on what kinds of things there are.

Immaterial-immaterial causation is questioned by the materialist (who denies the immaterial) and the property dualist (who denied immaterial, or at least mental, causation).

They can deny the claim that mental activity is irreducible to material causation, but not mental activity itself, since denying is a mental activity. There is then the question of whether mental activity is reducible to non-mental causation, and it is there that the materialist is stopped, since he cannot explain how it is reduced.

The substance dualist would presumably say that his account show the existence of immaterial-immaterial causation.

Yes, but his problem is showing that there is also immaterial-material causation, and that cannot be shown, since no material effect existing outside of experience can be shown.

 

Hm. I still don't really understand the difficulty. You seem to be saying we have experience of immaterial-immaterial and material-material causation, but not immaterial-material causation. But isn't it the case the categorisation of things - whether our thoughts or objects in the external world - follows from our analysis of them? We come to reflect on them and their properties, and call them immaterial or material. Such analysis can also lead us to conclusions about the causal properties of immaterial or material objects. But it seems to me we can conclude that experience does in fact include immaterial-material causation, for instance when our thought and volition causes our bodies to move. One might reject that there are truly material, or immaterial, objects, or immaterial-material causation. But I am not sure why the latter is more mysterious or prima facie questionable.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Hm. I still don't really understand the difficulty. You seem to be saying we have experience of immaterial-immaterial and material-material causation, but not immaterial-material causation.

No. I would also deny that we have experience of material-material causation (in the sense of 'material' given in my previous post).

 

But isn't it the case the categorisation of things - whether our thoughts or objects in the external world - follows from our analysis of them? We come to reflect on them and their properties, and call them immaterial or material. Such analysis can also lead us to conclusions about the causal properties of immaterial or material objects. But it seems to me we can conclude that experience does in fact include immaterial-material causation, for instance when our thought and volition causes our bodies to move.

You are describing common sense, which is, indeed, dualist, and which assumes immaterial-material causation (and of course, material-material causation). The idealist questions common sense on the grounds that no evidence of mind-independent matter can be found.

One might reject that there are truly material, or immaterial, objects, or immaterial-material causation. But I am not sure why the latter is more mysterious or prima facie questionable.

I wouldn't say it is more questionable. What I would say is that when questioned, there is no means to answer the question, which is what I mean by saying it is intractable. Once one questions common sense, and comes up with (to simplify) three possible answers -- idealism, materialism, and dualism -- then to say that an immaterial will moves a material body is simply to say that dualism is true, just as to say that will is reducible to a material process is simply to say that materialism is true.

Now of course it is also the case that to say there is only immaterial-immaterial causation is simply to say that idealism is true. There is a difference, however, and that is that the idealist claim can in principle become known, while the dualist and materialist claims cannot become known, where again by 'known' I mean 'experienced'. And there are reports of people who have come to know it, namely mystics. Another opening that the idealist claim provides is that of exploring evidence that the substance dualism of common sense is something that came to be, and only relatively recently -- that the modern age can be described as the era in which substance dualism became common sense, while much earlier common sense could be described as naive idealism. (This evidence can be found in Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry if anyone is interested.) 
 

Greg wrote:

That's fair, this is another option. As an explanation of human consciousness, I think it faces the same orthogonality problem that naturalistic panpsychism faces. We are not much helped in explaining the forms of consciousness with which we are familiar (that is, our own) by supposing that we are part of a universe which itself is a conscious whole, anymore than by supposing that we are composed of bits which are conscious. The problem is exacerbated if one holds that some but not all beings in the conscious universe are conscious; for then one is admitting that the consciousness of the universe does not suffice for their consciousness, and the question arises What does?​. (It's been a while since I've read Nagel and Chalmers, and I don't recall that the consciousness of the whole universe played a significant role in their views. They both seem to hope that there are non-physical laws of consciousness or pre-consciousness, and that aspiration is decidedly naturalistic. I should be careful about pontificating here, though, since it really has been a while, and I am only thinking of Mind and Cosmos and The Conscious Mind​--they have perhaps written on the topic elsewhere.)

​That--that is, the inaptness of panpsychism of either form for explaining human consciousness--is less of a problem for you if you don't consider it to be an explanation of specifically human consciousness. On the other hand, there's still the obscurity as to what explanatory work panpsychism, whether universal or naturalistic, does if some things are conscious (say, humans and bee hives) but not others.

I've read Nagel's View From Nowhere (or most of it), and there were a couple of points where he started to make at least figurative references to the concept of a world-soul, even if he didn't actually advocate such a position. I haven't read Mind and Cosmos, but I came across a quote from it where he at least admitted to Platonic leanings. Nothing conclusive, but there are enough hints there for me at least to wonder just how far away from standard naturalism he really has wandered.

As for Chalmers, two observations: firstly, I've seen him describe consciousness as another natural force at work in the universe instead of necessarily being attributed to matter itself, which would probably make it an altogether different approach to panpsychism. I did recently come across a quote by him in some article somewhere where he said that you start as a materialist, then go to dualism, and then panpsychism, before finally ending up at idealism, which would be a strange comment if he isn't actually sympathetic to idealism. He does strike me as emphatically naturalistic too, though, so I agree that it's a bit odd, but I think the hints are there. (Honestly, I sometimes think whether or not something counts as naturalism depends on how scientific you can make it sound. That is probably not very nice of me, though.)

As for the explanatory power of panpsychism, I do think it needs to be combined with other theories like Information Integration to explain how consciousness can arise in any specific system, but it does provide a backdrop of what it is about reality that makes such things possible at all. 

Greg wrote:

I think it's possible to say that a beehive or a star is not conscious (that it does not feel pain etc.), for the usual Wittgensteinian reasons. That couldn't be true of beehives unless it were true of humans, but I don't think it's true that we cannot say whether or not some human is in pain. (I am taking "cannot say" here to mean "can only provisionally suppose or conjecture".) For our notion of pain is inherently tied to observable criteria. How this is so is a complicated matter, though it's necessary if we are ever to learn how to attribute pain to ourselves or others. It's brought out in the fact that if you try to imagine that ordinary people walking around are in a great deal of pain, then you must imagine that they are artfully concealing it or stoicly bearing it; and in the fact that if you try to imagine a stone in pain, you have to imagine its being different in other ways too (being able to cry, or talk, or move).

I should specify that I'm not necessarily thinking of physical sensations when I talk about consciousness (at least in a panpsychist context). Better to ask in Nagelese whether there's something it's like to be a beehive than to ask if a beehive itself can see or feel pain. I would limit consciousness as we experience it to humans and other animals.

Do I think rocks can feel pain without a nervous system? No. Do I think there might be something it's like to be a rock? Possibly. We panpsychists have got a couple screws loose, for sure, but I don't think it's as bad as people make it out to be.

Greg wrote:

​The word "material" is​ very ambiguous, and that's what I was getting at. I was denying that the human soul is "entirely" immaterial and that the animal soul is "entirely" material, because there are several senses of "material" (and correspondingly, "immaterial"), and in various respects human and animal souls are alike in respect of their materiality.

​It's true that the human intellect is considered "uniquely" immaterial, in that it is considered to be immaterial in some (interesting) senses in which animal souls are not. At least two ways are worth highlighting.

​First, the intellect is analogous to the senses, but is in some way less material than them. Aristotle thinks that each sense has a corresponding proper object, by which things can be sensed. Sight has the proper object of color; things are visible (come under the power of sight) insofar as they are colored. Aristotle thinks that it is necessary that the organs of each sense (their seats in the body) lack​ the corresponding proper object, or else nothing could be sensed as it is. The pupil cannot have a color; if it did, then everything would appear that color.

That is one way of attributing a kind of immateriality to animals, as compared with plants. Plants do not have sensation. When they are affected, they simply change "materially" as it were. Animals and humans, it is proposed, have these sense organs which lack the forms of any corresponding proper object of the sense, which enables those forms to be received.

​Aristotle and Aquinas think that intellect is like the senses in that respect: it has a proper object, which it must lack if it is to think of things. But the sense organs only need to lack the forms of their corresponding proper objects. The intellect needs to lack all "corporeal and bodily forms", because it can think of all that is corporeal and bodily (cf. DA II.12, III.4). That is the argument to which Miguel was alluding above. I was there casting doubt as to whether it establishes that the intellect has no bodily organ and that it is subsistent, but whatever one thinks about that argument, this sort of view does provide a​ sense in which the human soul is "more immaterial" than the animal soul.

That brings us to the second relevant sense in which the human soul is said to be uniquely immaterial: it is said to have a power (the intellect) which lacks a bodily organ, and it is said to subsist (to remain in existence even if the substance of which it is [or was] a metaphysical part loses its material cause).

It'd be fair for Miguel to latch onto what I've said here and propose that it provides a way out of the objection I raised. For that argument says that the intellect needs to lack the form of corporeal things in order to be able to think about all of them; I was saying that even when it does think of them, the presence of their forms does not literally make​ the human into what it thinks about; so it cannot be in that sense, before it thinks, that the intellect lacks all corporeal form (that is, that it is not seated in a bodily organ). But Aristotle's treatment of the senses perhaps is supposed to show that the modes of presence and absence do not have to be correlated in the way I am supposing they do. When the eye sees something red, its redness is in some sense present. But is it present in a way that makes​ the eye red? If this could be answered "no", and if it could still be maintained that its receiving the form in whatever way it does​ receive it requires that, before seeing, it was not red, then it could be maintained that the intellect before it thinks, by analogy, needs to lack corporeal form in what I called the primary mode, even if, when it thinks, the corresponding form is not present in the primary mode. There are, perhaps, prospects for rehabilitating the argument.

Alright, that makes some sense. I suppose my next question would be what precisely we mean by intellect. With the exception of Kant, I'm a bit leery of Western theories of mind in general, both modern and ancient, since the traditional ones seem to ignore how cognitive abilities evolve and develop and have neurological underpinings. If the intellect is cognition itself, then it seems to me that it must be material. On the other hand, if the intellect is whatever it is that makes us aware of cognitive processes (unlike computers that presumably are not), then it seems like something shared at the very least between us and other animals. The only alternative I see is to pull the rug out from beneath computationalists and insist that information processing is always strictly speaking immaterial rather than material.

(And I recognize that it's probably strange that I'm speculating about conscious rocks one moment and then worrying about neuroscience the next.)