Intellectual Catastrophe

gameScott has a nice discussion of our post-intentional future (or really our non-intentional present, if you like) here on Scientia Salon. He quotes Fodor saying that the loss of ‘common-sense intentional psychology’ would be the greatest intellectual catastrophe ever: hard to disagree, yet that seems to be just what faces us if we fully embrace materialism about the brain and its consequences. Scott, of course, has been exploring this territory for some time, both with his Blind Brain Theory  and his unforgettable novel Neuropath; a tough read, not because the writing is bad but  because it’s all too vividly good.

Why do we suppose that human beings uniquely stand outside the basic account of physics, with real agency, free will, intentions and all the rest of it? Surely we just know that we do have intentions? We can be wrong about what’s in the world; that table may be an illusion; but our intentions are directly present to our minds in a way that means we can’t be wrong about them – aren’t they?

That kind of privileged access is what Scott questions. Cast your mind back, he says, to the days before philosophy of mind clouded your horizons, when we all lived the unexamined life. Back to Square One, as it were: did your ignorance of your own mental processes trouble you then? No: there was no obvious gaping hole in our mental lives;  we’re not bothered by things we’re not aware of. Alas,  we may think we’ve got a more sophisticated grasp of our cognitive life these days, but in fact the same problem remains. There’s still no good reason to think we enjoy an epistemic privilege in respect of our own version of our minds.

Of course, our understanding of intentions works in practice. All that really gets us, though, is that it seems to be a viable heuristic. We don’t actually have the underlying causal account we need to justify it; all we do is apply our intentional cognition to intentional cognition…

it can never tell us what cognition is simply because solving that problem requires the very information intentional cognition has evolved to do without.

Maybe then, we should turn aside from philosophy and hope that cognitive science will restore to us what physical science seems to take away? Alas, it turns out that according to cognitive science our idea of ourselves is badly out of kilter, the product of a mixed-up bunch of confabulation, misremembering, and chronically limited awareness. We don’t make decisions, we observe them, our reasons are not the ones we recognise, and our awareness of our own mental processes is narrow and error-filled.

That last part about the testimony of science is hard to disagree with; my experience has been that the more one reads about recent research the worse our self-knowledge seems to get.

If it’s really that bad, what would a post-intentional world look like? Well, probably like nothing really, because without our intentional thought we’d presumably have an outlook like that of dogs, and dogs don’t have any view of the mind. Thinking like dogs, of course, has a long and respectable philosophical pedigree going back to the original Cynics, whose name implies a d0g-level outlook. Diogenes himself did his best to lead a doggish, pre-intentional life,  living rough, splendidly telling Alexander the Great to fuck off and less splendidly, masturbating in public (‘Hey,  I wish I could cure hunger too just by rubbing my stomach’). Let’s hope that’s not where we’re heading.

However, that does sort of indicate the first point we might offer. Even Diogenes couldn’t really live like a dog: he couldn’t resist the chance to make Plato look a fool, or hold back when a good zinger came to mind. We don’t really cling to our intentional thoughts because we believe ourselves to have privileged access (though we may well believe that); we cling to them because believing we own those thoughts in some sense is just the precondition of addressing the issue at all, or perhaps even of having any articulate thoughts about anything. How could we stop? Some kind of spontaneous self-induced dissociative syndrome? Intensive meditation? There isn’t really any option but to go on thinking of our selves and our thoughts in more or less the way we do, even if we conclude that we have no real warrant for doing so.

Secondly, we might suggest that although our thoughts about our own cognition are not veridical, that doesn’t mean our thoughts or our cognition don’t exist. What they say about the contents of our mind is wrong perhaps, but what they imply about there being contents (inscrutable as they may be) can still be right. We don’t have to be able to think correctly about what we’re thinking in order to think. False ideas about our thoughts are still embodied in thoughts of some kind.

Is ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ the best we can do?