What’s Wrong with Dualism?

I had an email exchange with Philip Calcott recently about dualism; here’s an edited version. (Favouring my bits of the dialogue, of course!)

Philip: The main issue that puzzles me regarding consciousness is why most people in the field are so wedded to physicalism, and why substance dualism is so out of favour. It seems to me that there is indeed a huge explanatory gap – how can any physical process explain this extraordinary (and completely unexpected on physicalism) “thing” that is conscious experience?

It seems to me that there are three sorts of gaps in our knowledge:

1. I don’t know the answer to that, but others do. Just let me just google it (the exact height of Everest might be an example)
2. No one yet knows the answer to that, but we have a path towards finding the answer, and we are confident that we will discover the answer, and that this answer lies within the realm of physics (the mechanism behind high temperature superconductivity might be an example here)
3. No one can even lay out a path towards discovering the answer to this problem (consciousness)

Chalmers seems to classify consciousness as a “class 3 ignorance” problem (along the lines above). He then adopts a panpsychism approach to solve this. We have a fundamental property of nature that exhibits itself only through consciousness, and it is impossible to detect its interaction with the rest of physics in any way. How is this different from Descartes’ Soul? Basically Chalmers has produced something he claims to be still physical – but which is effectively identical to a non-physical entity.

So, why is dualism so unpopular?

I think there are two reasons. The first is not an explicit philosophical point, but more a matter of the intellectual background. In theory there are many possible versions of dualism, but what people usually want to reject when they reject it is traditional religion and traditional ideas about spirits and ghosts. A lot of people have strong feelings about this for personal or historical reasons that give an edge to their views. I suspect, for example, that this might be why Dan Dennett gives Descartes more of a beating over dualism than, in my opinion at least, he really deserves.

Second, though, dualism just doesn’t work very well. Nobody has much to offer by way of explaining how the second world or the second substance might work (certainly nothing remotely comparable to the well-developed and comprehensive account given by physics). If we could make predictions and do some maths about spirits or the second world, things would look better; as it is, it looks as if dualism just consigns the difficult issues to another world where it’s sort of presumed no explanations are required. Then again, if we could do the maths, why would we call it dualism rather than an extension of the physical, monist story?

That leads us on to the other bad problem, of how the two substances or worlds interact, one that has been a conspicuous difficulty since Descartes. We can take the view that they don’t really interact causally but perhaps run alongside each other in harmony, as Leibniz suggested; but then there seems to be little point in talking about the second world, as it explains nothing that happens and none of what we do or say. This is quite implausible to me, too, if we’re thinking particularly of subjective experience or qualia. When I am looking at a red apple, it seems to me that every bit of my subjective experience of the colour might influence my decision about whether to pick up the apple or not. Nothing in my mental world seems to be sealed off from my behaviour.

If we think there is causal interaction, then again we seem to be looking for an extension of monist physics rather than a dualism.

Yet it won’t quite do, will it, to say that the physics is all there is to it?

My view is that in fact what’s going on is that we are addressing a question which physics cannot explain, not because physics is faulty or inadequate, but because the question is outside its scope. In terms of physics, we’ve got a type 3 problem; in terms of metaphysics, I hope it’s type 2, though there are some rather discouraging arguments that suggest things are worse than that.

I think the element of mystery in conscious experience is in fact its particularity, its actual reality. All the general features can be explained at a theoretical level by physics, but not why this specific experience is real and being had by me. This is part of a more general mystery of reality, including the questions of why the world is like this in particular and not like something else, or like nothing. We try to naturalise these questions, typically by suggesting that reality is essentially historical, that things are like this because they were previously like that, so that the ultimate explanations lie in the origin of the cosmos, but I don’t think that strategy works very well.

There only seem to be two styles of explanation available here. One is the purely rational kind of reasoning you get in maths. The other is empirical observation. Neither is any good in this context; empirical explanations simply defer the issue backwards by explaining things as they are in terms of things as they once were. There’s no end to that deferral. A priori logical reasoning, on the other hand, delivers only eternal truths, whereas the whole point about reality and my experience is that it isn’t fixed and eternal; it could have been otherwise. People like Stephen Hawking try to deploy both methods, using empirical science to defer the ultimate answer back in time to a misty primordial period, a hypothetical land created by heroic backward extrapolation, where it is somehow meant to turn into a mathematical issue, but even if you could make that work I think it would be unsatisfying as an explanation of the nature of my experience here and now.

I conclude that to deal with this properly we really need a different way of thinking. I fear it might be that all we can do is contemplate the matter and hope pre- or post-theoretical enlightenment dawns, in a sort of Taoist way; but I continue to hope that eventually that one weird trick of metaphysical argument that cracks the issue will occur to someone, because like anyone brought up in the western tradition I really want to get it all back to territory where we can write out the rules and even do some maths!

As I’ve said, this all raises another question, namely why we bother about monism versus dualism at all. Most people realise that there is no single account of the world that covers everything. Besides concrete physical objects we have to consider the abstract entities; those dealt with in maths, for example, and many other fields. Any system of metaphysics which isn’t intolerably flat and limited is going to have some features that would entitle us to call it at least loosely dualist. On the other hand, everything is part of the cosmos, broadly understood, and everything is in some way related to the other contents of those cosmos. So we can equally say that any sufficiently comprehensive system can, at least loosely, be described as monist too; in the end there is only one world. Any reasonable theory will be a bit dualist and a bit monist in some respects.

That being so, the pure metaphysical question of monism versus dualism begins to look rather academic, more about nomenclature than substance. The real interest is in whether your dualism or your monism is any good as an elegant and effective explanation. In that competition materialism, which we tend to call monist, just looks to be an awfully long way ahead.

The Hard Problem Problem

neuron questionBy now the materialist, reductionist, monist, functionalist approaches to consciousness are quite well developed. That is not to say that they have the final answer, but there is quite a range of ideas and theories, complete with objections and rebuttals of the objections. By comparison the dualist case may look a bit underdeveloped, or as Paul Churchland once put it:

Compared to the rich resources and explanatory successes of current materialism, dualism is less a theory of mind than it is an empty space waiting for a genuine theory of mind to be put in it.

In a paper in the latest JCS William S Robinson quotes this scathing observation and takes up the challenge.

Robinson, who could never be accused of denying airtime to his opponents, also quotes O’Hara and Scott’s dismissal of the Hard Problem. For something to be regarded as a legitimate problem, they said, there has to be some viable idea of what an answer would actually look like, or how the supposed problem could actually be solved; since this is absent in the case of the Hard Problem, it doesn’t deserve to be given serious consideration.

Robinson, accordingly, seeks to point out, not a full-blown dualist theory, but a path by which future generations might come to be dualists. This is, in his eyes, the Hard Problem problem; how can we show that the Hard Problem is potentially solvable, without pretending it’s any less Hard than it is? His vision of what our dualist descendants might come to believe relies on two possible future developments, one more or less scientific, the other conceptual.

He starts from the essential question; how can neuronal activity give rise to phenomenal experience? It’s uncontroversial that these two things seem very different, but Robinson sees a basic difference which causes me some difficulty. He thinks neuronal activity is complex while phenomenal experience is simple. Simple? What he seems to have in mind is that when we see, say, a particular patch of yellow paint, a vast array of neurons comes into play, but the experience is just ‘some yellow’.  It’s true that neuronal activity is very complex in the basic sense of there being many parts to it, but it consists of many essentially similar elements in a basically binary state (firing or not firing); whereas the sight of a banana seems to me a multi-level experience whose complexity is actually very hard to assess in any kind of objective terms. It’s not clear to me that even monolithic phenomenal experiences are inherently less complex than the neuronal activity that putatively underpins or constitutes them. I must say, though, that I owe Robinson some thanks for disturbing my dogmatic slumbers, because I’d never really been forced to think so particularly about the complexity of phenomenal experience (and I’m still not sure I can get my mind properly around it).

Anyway, for Robinson this means that the bridge between neurons and qualia is one between complexity and simplicity. He notes that not all kinds of neural activity seem to give rise to consciousness; the first part of his bridge is the reasonable hope that science (or mathematics?) will eventually succeed in characterising and analysing the special kind of complexity which is causally associated with conscious experience; we have no idea yet, but it’s plausible that this will all become clear in due course.

The second, conceptual part of the bridge is a realignment of our ideas to fit the new schema; Robinson suggests we may need to think of complexity and simplicity, not as irreconcilable opposites, but as part of a grander conception, Complexity-And-Simplicity (CAS).

The real challenge for Robinson’s framework is to show how our descendants might on the one hand, find it obvious, almost self-evident, that complex neuronal activity gives rise to simple phenomenal experience, and yet at the same time completely understand how it must have seemed to us that there was a Hard Problem about it; so the Hard Problem is seen to be solvable but still (for us) Hard.

Robinson rejects what he calls the the Short Route of causal essentialism, namely that future generations might come to see it as just metaphysically necessary that the relevant kind of neuronal activity (they understand what kind it is, we don’t) causes our experience. That won’t wash because, briefly,  while in other worlds bricks might not be bricks, depending on the causal properties of the item under consideration, blue will always be blue irrespective of causal relations.

Robinson prefers to draw on an observation of Austen Clark, that there is structure in experience.  The experience of orange is closer to the experience of red and yellow than to the experience of green, and moreover colour space is not symmetrical, with yellow being more like white than blue is. We might legitimately hope that in due course isomorphisms between colour space and neuronal activity will give us good reasons to identify the two. To buttress this line of thinking, Robinson proposes a Minimum Arbitrariness Principle, that in essence, causes and effects tend to be similar, or we might say, isomorphic.

For me the problem here is that I think Clark is completely wrong. Briefly, the resemblances and asymmetries of colour space arise from the properties of light and the limitations of our eyes; they are entirely a matter of non-phenomenal, materialist factors which are available to objective science. Set aside the visual science and our familiarity with the spectrum, and there is no reason to think the phenomenal experience of orange resembles the phenomenal experience of red any more than it resembles the phenomenal experience of Turkish Delight. If that seems bonkers, I submit that it seems so in the light of the strangeness of qualia theory if taken seriously – but I expect I am in a minority.

If we step back, I think that if the descendants whose views Robinson is keen to foresee were to think along the lines he suggests, they probably wouldn’t consider themselves dualists any more; instead they would think that with their new concept of CAS and their discovery of the true nature of neuronal complexity, that they had achieved the grand union of objective and subjective  – and vindicated monism.

Interesting stuff

Picture: correspondent. I mentioned that Mike Spenard has written a book about dualism: Duelling with Dualism. He gives a nice account of the history and arguments: if you’re wondering how things turn out for dualism, the subtitle – “the forlorn quest for the immaterial mind” – offers a hint.

One point in Mike’s account that struck me was a comparison he makes in passing between the discussion of dualism and ancient discussions of what the fundamental substance of the world might be – water, fire, earth or what. We don’t talk about that any more, and if there is an equivalent discussion it’s going on in physics, not philosophy. So why do we still seem concerned about dualism versus monism?

I think in many cases it is really a particular dualism we are concerned with rejecting: ‘dualism’ is often just a more neutral way of referring to religious belief in souls and spirits. So long as that is clearly ruled out, we perhaps don’t feel so worried about the apparent dualism of mental and physical or abstract and concrete. We all accept that the world can profitably be addressed on not just two, but several levels of interpretation (though why that is the case, and whether it’s a feature of the world or of the way we see the world are questions to which I personally have no clear answer).

The best reason for doing without traditional souls may actually not be the dualism involved, but the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any soul theory. If there was an account of the spiritual world which explained how our conscious life works, it would certainly be worth a look, but the traditional view seems to take it that once we’ve attributed the self or volition or moral responsibility to the spiritual realm, the need for explanation somehow lapses.

The book is a solid, convincing account of the issue, well worth a look.

Qualia: The Movie

Picture: ghost. I suppose the zombies couldn’t have the film industry all to themselves for ever, and here it is: Qualia, the movie (via). I wondered at first whether this was something to do with Sony and their Qualia man Ken Mogi, but in fact it seems it is a small independent venture. I said ‘here it is’, but actually all we have for the moment is a trailer: it seems that the funds required (amounts which I expect wouldn’t cover one day’s catering budget on a Hollywood blockbuster) have been difficult to get together.

How do you make a film about qualia? (Ken Mogi would probably ask how you could make one without them.) I can’t quite decide whether getting ineffable qualities into a film is an amusingly quixotic endeavour or an admirable ambition. It seems all too likely that you would end up with either the talkiest, chin-strokingest film ever made; or an exciting dramatisation of the life of Mary the Colour Scientist. (Susan Blackmore suggested that students should act out this famous gedankenexperiment, after all, though how that would help still rather eludes me.) Actually there’s no reason why a film can’t at least raise genuine philosophical issues. I’ll always remember the Captain’s advice on how to deal with the malfunctioning bomb in Dark Star (“Teach it phenomenology”), and The Matrix is often credited with asking interesting questions – though sadly the red and blue pills were soon put aside so that the film could become a kung fu movie performed by people dressed as a Eurythmics tribute band (The Revenge Tourists?).

I haven’t found much information about the actual plot of Qualia, but it seems it has something to do with research which triggers or examines ghostly occurrences and disturbs someone’s complacent monist materialism. Nothing wrong with disturbing our dogmatic slumbers, of course. I like to think that at some stage a grave scientist will say “Sir! We’re detecting… phenomena.”

But the association with ghosts is not particularly welcome. I wonder whether this is another sign, like the use of qualia to buttress the theist case, that the hard problem potentially appeals to those who would like the world to be less scientific and more magical.  I hope not: I’d hate to see New Age shops selling qualia-enhancing crystals. Perhaps that’s just snobbery?  After all It’s legitimate to claim qualia as evidence for some kind of dualism, and some kind of dualism is what you might well be looking for if you wanted to provide ghosts with some respectable ontological underpinnings. Still, I can only look forward to the film with qualified enthusiasm .

Nearly a virgin

Picture: Jaegwon Kim. David Chalmers recently commented that Jaegwon Kim’s new book ‘Physicalism, or something near enough’ showed how old-fashioned materialism was slipping in the popularity stakes: not suffering wholesale rejection exactly, but no longer enjoying the status of a near-unchallenged orthodoxy.

Kim himself says that the book offers no startlingly new views, only a clearer and better argued case. But the interest of some readers has at least been distinctly quickened by the main conclusion; that physicalism is nearly, but not quite, the whole truth. How can that be? At first sight, claiming that one is nearly a physicalist is about as plausible as claiming that one is nearly a virgin: in such cases even the most progressive logicians would generally exclude the middle. How can you have more than one fundamental substance without having two?

On reflection, however, I can see some attractions in that way of thinking. After all, physicists and mathematicians sometimes talk about spatial dimensions in fractional terms. If one can coherently have a space which is not 3- or 4-, but 4½- dimensional, why not fractional substances? What about a graduated ontological scale? We might say that anything over 1.5 counts as dualist, while anything less passes as monism; substance dualists would be up in the 1.8 to 1.9 range, while property dualists generally scored around 1.6 to 1.7. Only the most obdurate materialists would manage a 1.0, while some bold souls – Penrose, Popper? – would score values in excess of 2.0. Scores below 1.0 would surely be unattainable, unless perhaps reserved for the softer kinds of idealism (‘life is but a dream’).

In fact, joking aside, I really think that the scope for vagueness provided by such a scale might depict the discussion in realistic terms. It seems to me that if the fundamental argument over dualism is interpreted too strictly, there is a straight choice between monism and epiphenomenalism. If your second fundamental stuff is really detached from the first, it must be an irrelevant epiphenomenon which you might as well forget about; if, instead, it has at least some causal connections with the first, you might as well exercise ontological economy and regard both stuffs as part of a single comprehensive world (after all, believing in energy as well as matter doesn’t make you a dualist; so why should believing in suitably causal spirits?). A general application of the latter approach would, of course, have the strange effect of reclassifying nearly everyone, including Descartes, as monists – whether they knew it or not.

In practice a dualist is not generally someone who believes in the utter, unbridgeable bifurcation of the universe, but someone who believes that a twofold division of some kind is especially salient: more important than the distinction between energy and matter, but not so important that the world falls apart down the middle. The precise degree of salience might indeed be a matter for a graduated scale. Perhaps there’s actually less ontology involved than meets the eye: perhaps we should be better off, in most cases, if we saw the choice of monism or dualism as more a matter of expositional strategy than fundamental principle. One reason we don’t, I suspect, is that people have a strong desire to exclude ghosts and Christian spirits from their theories, and dualism (which need not actually involve souls or spirits at all) gets used as a proxy. Perhaps that’s also why Descartes keeps on getting such a bad press: not really for dualism per se, but for a dualism which explicitly made room for Jehovah.

So then, maybe in principle it’s alright to be nearly a physicalist – so long as the theory itself is OK. What is the nature of Kim’s dualism, or small lapse from perfect physicalism?

The bulk of the discussion is taken up with establishing Kim’s basic physicalism, with the ‘lapse’ discussed mainly at the end of the book. If we want mental events to have real causal power (and we surely do), Kim argues that they must be reducible in principle to the physical level. He carefully distinguishes this view from eliminative reductionism: phlogiston, he says, was eliminated, and thereby banished from science, while heat and temperature were reduced, and remain useful concepts. Moreover, after a careful survey of the options it turns out that the only kind of reduction available is a functional one.

This is all fairly persuasive, though not so seductive that it is likely to make many converts, and it leads us to a pretty familiar position: it turns out that many mental events are susceptible to functionalist reduction, and can therefore be brought within the pale of physicalism. We may not be able to spell out the account in full, but we have a pretty good idea of its broad outline. The problem, as ever, is qualia. Qualia are not susceptible to functional reduction (the possibility of inverted qualia is sufficient to establish this: Kim rather loftily remarks that we don’t need any of that zombie stuff). The distinctive feature of Kim’s analysis is that he nevertheless wants to take another slice off the unsolved problem; claim the border regions of the qualia country for physicalism. This he does by asserting that while qualia in themselves cannot be characterised in functional terms, differences between qualia can. So, it would not matter in practical terms if the real experience of red and green were switched: we should still be able to interpret traffic lights correctly. But if there were no difference between the real experiences, we should be in trouble. Thus qualia do have a real causal role, though in their essence they remain ineffable.

It’s this move which allows Kim to claim he’s still really a physicalist; even qualia have been naturalised and given a role; the fact that they still have an inscrutable phenomenal aspect isn’t a cause for concern. The tone of Kim’s conclusion makes it clear that he regards this as an acceptable final position; he isn’t in despair over qualia and he isn’t looking for more to say about them, either.

This seems a little strange, even on Kim’s own terms. An inexplicable feature of the world just demands philosophical attention: you expect a philosopher to respond to a hint of the unexplained in the way a mother responds to a faint sound of crying. In Kim’s eyes, the problem has been substantially reduced; but half a problem is still a problem. I do have some sympathy with idea that people worry too much about qualia, but that’s because I think there’s an element of confusion about the whole thing: a kind of clerkish surprise that accounts or explanations of experience don’t bring with them the experience itself. On Kim’s account, a significant portion of the old problem is still there: he just somehow manages not to worry about it.

I’m not convinced that the argument about differences really works, anyway. In the first place, is it really true that qualia play a causal role in our response to traffic lights? It’s certainly possible to detect the difference between red and green, and respond accordingly, without any trace of qualia: quite simple machines could do so, and it rather looks as if the brain uses some broadly similar mechanisms. I suppose we could argue that qualia over-determine or somehow help out with the response, but it seems easier to conclude that these functionalizable qualities which Kim is talking about are not really qualia at all.

Secondly, doesn’t our ability to spot differences between qualia depend causally on our ability to perceive them in the first place? It seems to me that we see the difference between red and green qualia only because we actually see green and red. But if that is so, and if our perception of qualia differences has a causal role in determining our behaviour, then qualia themselves also have a causal role, albeit one step removed.

I suspect there is something in what David Chalmers says about a noticeable swing away from monist materialism; but I also suspect that the reasons are more to do with despair over the current impasse than any new and stronger case for dualism. You could see Kim’s theory as another desperate effort to find a novel yet plausible way forward – an effort which nearly succeeds. Unfortunately, in this case, nearly really is the same as not at all.