by Louis Lopez
A Brief History of Spirit
Mind-Body Interaction
Physicalism
Brain Processes
Enter Functionalism
Different Identity Versions
"And Nothing More"
Nonreductive Materialism
Anomalous Monism
Supervenience
Reduction
Consciousness, the Mystery
What is Consciousness?
Consciousness of Consciousness (Self-Consciousness)
Consciousness and Human Life
Sensation
Noticing Mental Abilities
Dualistic thinking
Property Dualism
Extreme Physicalism
Abstract Entities
Word and Concept
Concept of Mind
Solution: Orders of Existence
Mental Experiences Affect Nothing
Mind and Computer
The Orders and Some Theories of Mind
Qualia
Chapter Conclusion
13 A Last Look at Spiritualism
The Possibilities for Spirit
What Spirit Could Be Made Of
Telekinesis
Unfathomable Spirit
Spatter
Why a Mysterious God?
Believers in a Material God
The Influence of Plato
The Actions of an Immaterial God
The Objects in Space
Pieces
Energy
Space
Special Theory of Relativity
Spacetime
Space as Infinite Vacuum
Time
Periodic Motion and Time
Chronometers
A Definition of Time
Relativity and Time
Time Machines
Timelessness
Matter in Space
The Status of Mathematics
Foundational Movements
The Simple Beginnings of Mathematics
Finitist Mathematics
The Origins of Geometry
The Mental Nature of Mathematics
Mathematics in the World
Observations
Science
The Matter of the Mind
Origin of Mind
Two Orders of Existence
A Final Look at Spiritualism
The Religious Motive Behind Spiritualism
What do philosophers have to say about the existence and nature of objects? It turns out they have said plenty over the centuries. The mind-body problem, as they have referred to it, has been amply discussed and closely analyzed by numerous philosophers and this continues to be the case. In 2004, Daniel Dennett, philosophy professor at Tufts University, was asked to consider writing a book that would survey what had been written recently on consciousness, a large subtopic of the mind-body problem. He counted 78 of only the good, new books on his bookshelf. He did not count journal articles and other published material. He decided to pass on the project.(Daniel Dennett, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005) ix.)
Since around 1970, the academic discussion of the mind-body problem has become more complex with new terms and novel lines of argument that are not easy to follow. It would take a large book to try to discuss contemporary approaches and refer to all the terms and names that have been devised. It is not necessary for the purposes here. At times writers will discuss an issue and use different terms, but it turns out that they are not really talking about anything different. This only adds to the already existing confusion in connection with a problem that is difficult by its very nature.
A Brief History of Spirit
Soul, spirit, and mind were treated together and seen as related for centuries. Thus it could be said that there was a soul-body or spirit-body problem. About 200 years ago, philosophers started to refer almost exclusively to mind. They may have wanted to avoid direct associations with religion or disembodied spirits. It may have also been the case that since they were philosophers they wanted to deal with the part most closely associated with thinking. The mind-body problem continues to hold an interest partly because it is so important to the doctrine of numerous religions.
It is conceivable that the ideas of spirit, soul, and mind go back many millennia, even before the use of writing. It appears to be a natural tendency in people to think of an abstract and separable part of the person that carries out the apparently nonphysical acts of thinking, feeling, judging, rejoicing, fearing, obsessing, doubting, and so on.
Plato was influenced by the ideas about the soul he heard from his teacher Socrates as well as the cults of Orpheus and Pythagoras. Like Socrates, Plato saw both a rational and an emotional side combined in the soul; however not surprisingly for an intellectual, he only considered the rational part to be immortal. Also not surprisingly, his pupil Aristotle agreed.(G.B. Kerferd, "Psyche," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, ed. in chief (New York: Macmillan, 1967) 512.) Plato considered the soul as separate from the body, while Aristotle thought of it in the end as the form of the living body. Christian theologians later followed these two lines of thought in their extensive discussions on the nature of the soul.
Some of Plato's dialogues offered arguments for the immortality of the soul, notably the Phaedo and the Meno. In the former, Socrates gave three arguments based on (1) reincarnation, (2) recollection, and (3) indestructibility.(Stephen Priest, Theories of the Mind (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991) 8-15.) The recollection argument involved showing that a boy without schooling could answer some questions about geometry posed by Socrates. This was supposed to show that the boy had to have known the answers even before he was born, which implied that he had learned them in his previous life.
The indestructibility argument involved the assumption that the mind and the body are drastically different. The body along with all other physical things is clearly destructible. By contrast, the mind appears to be very different from the physical, appearing to be indestructible. Physical objects are composed of parts, while the soul does not appear to be constructed from anything and thus is not vulnerable to destruction.
Descartes attempted to present a systematic exposition of the soul in Meditations on First Philosophy, first published in Latin in 1641.(Reprinted in The Rationalists (New York: Dolphin Books, 1960) 99.). As mentioned before, it was his intention in that work to prove the immortality of the soul. Descartes saw a clear separation between mind and body, but it was not enough for him to simply point that out. He referred to one as composed of mental substance and the other of material substance. This led to what is now referred to as ontological or substance dualism. Ontology is the study of being in general. Ontological dualism posits that being consists of two kinds of substance. Material substance was defined by being extended in space with examples being the objects we see in space everyday. Mental substance was not extended in space. Descartes was never clear on the composition of these substances. The idea of substance was actually first mentioned by Aristotle and then regularly discussed in the Middle Ages.
It is clear that Descartes wanted to use the idea of indestructibility of the soul used by Plato, claiming that the soul (mind) was not extended in space. If that was the case, the mind was allegedly not material and therefore supposedly not destructible. Neither man apparently considered that perhaps the mind could be concentrated in a tiny physical space and still be material.
Mind-Body Interaction
If the mind and the body are so radically different, the question arises of how the two are able to interact. The body, which includes the brain, is extended in space, while the mind does not at all exist in space. How can they then have any effect on each other? Descartes held there was psychophysical causal interaction: the physical could cause mental action, and the mental could cause physical action. That was later labeled Cartesian interactionism. Descartes was willing to take criticism of his ideas, and he received plenty. Few people were able to conceive how the interaction could take place. Descartes was not able to come up with any satisfactory answer nor to this day has anyone else. The discussion of the soul continued to be lively after Descartes.
Parallelism was an alternative explanation that was fashioned several decades after Descartes. This doctrine posited that each event in the mental realm ran precisely parallel with its corresponding event in the physical realm. Supposedly, the parallel occurrences were always coordinated to run smoothly with each other. Parallelism was proposed after philosophers saw the problems with the idea of causal interaction between the two very different substances. A brand of parallelism that was promoted by the French priest Nicolas Malebranche was called occasionalism. He claimed that God caused all events and kept the mental and the physical coordinated in parallel at all times. God was the only cause of events; no other object could cause anything. Under this scheme, God had to be constantly involved with all events on earth.
Another variant of parallelism was the idea of a preestablished harmony espoused by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. In this version, God was also involved in setting up a coordinated system of events paralleling each other in the two different realms, but he accomplished all this at the time of creation. He did not have to be continually involved in running the world.
Parallelism did not endure as an explanation for the coordinated operation of the mind and body. Philosophers were skeptical of how one could ascertain that God did the work of coordination. It was clearly a highly speculative thesis. There were a number of other objections. How can a physical object move a mental one if it cannot cause the mental one in any way, i.e. there is no causation? How can humans possess free will if the mind does not directly cause the body to act? Thinking about this, it is hard to see how a mental entity can exist at all if it does not exist in space. Abstract entities like happiness, compassion, and guilt exist but they are purely designations created by the human mind.
Epiphenomenalism is a group of philosophical doctrines that holds that physical states cause mental events but mental states cannot affect physical events. ("Epiphenomenonalism," The Oxford Companion to Philosophy) It has been described as mental states riding on top of physical ones but having no function. Epiphenomenalism is a form of dualism since it still allows for mind and body to exist as separate entities. It does avoid one of the problems of dualism: explaining how nonphysical mental states can cause physical ones. It still does not solve the problem of how physical states can affect mental ones when the two are so different. The first is an extended substance, while the mind is not. It does avoid the puzzle of whether intentions formed by the mind can cause appropriate physical action, but where does that leave free will?
Physicalism
As opposed to dualistic solutions to the mind-body problem, philosophers have tried to come up with monistic ones. Monism predicates the existence of only one substance in the universe upon which everything else is based. There is physicalism (materialism), the concept that everything is physical (made of matter) and there is ideaism (idealism), the belief that everything is made of spirit or mind. Ideaism has not been adopted. Ideaism is considered a metaphysical theory but can also be taken as an explanation of what we know, i.e. as an epistemological doctrine. This dual treatment has caused considerable confusion.
The earliest Greek philosophers showed a great inclination to explain existence in terms of physicalism rather than spirit. Leucippus and his student Democritus wrote "The Great Diakosmos" to explain that the universe consisted of atoms and the void. Epicurus was another important materialist. After the Middle Ages, Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher who was a contemporary of Descartes and was a proponent of materialism. He had to be careful in what he said since materialism has usually been associated with atheism.
In his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle ridiculed the dualist notion of a separate mind associated with each body, calling it the myth of the "ghost in the machine." He proposed that discussion of the mind was confused because of what he labeled the "category mistake" of thinking of mind and body as belonging to different categories. It was the mistaken idea that there is a ghostlike mind dwelling in the body but still being separate from it. He pointed out there is no separate entity known as a mind. It is simply the part of the body that possesses capacities and dispositions that are considered as mental.(Brian McLaughlin, "Philosophy of Mind," The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Robert Audi, ed. (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 599.)
Brain Processes
In the 1950's, a way of looking at the mind received attention and appeared to be simple and straightforward. The first one to propose the idea was U. T. Place, a psychologist. In a 1956 article, he claimed that it was a reasonable scientific hypothesis that consciousness was a brain process.(U. T. Place, "Is Consciousness a Brain Process"? XLVIII British Journal of Philosophy 44 (1956), reprinted in V. C. Chappell, ed. Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1962) 102). Place later credited the German psychologist Boring for first mentioning the idea in 1933. The explanation did not get attention at that time.
Place proposed that each sensation was a brain process. They were one and the same thing but known by different names. One name was sensation, the other brain process. This was explainable by Gottlob Frege's distinction between sense and reference. A specific example was given that held that pain was an activation of a C fiber, which is a nerve fiber in the central nervous system that transmits the feeling of dull pain from the periphery of the body.
Someone else alleged that what Place was claiming was that sensations were identical to brain processes, and Place's explanation was tagged with the name "identity theory." The philosopher J. J. C. Smart helped formulate Place's ideas and later expanded and clarified them in a series of discussions and papers.(See, e.g., J. J. C. Smart, "Sensations and Brain Processes," LXVIII Philosophical Review 1411 (1959), reprinted in Paul K. Moser and J. D. Trout, eds. Contemporary Materialism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1995) 93.) Herbert Feigl also proposed similar ideas in the1950's.(See Herbert Feigl, "The Mental and Physical," Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1958) 370.)
None of these writers referred to the name "identity theory." It was unfortunate that it was given this name because it encouraged a later copious amount of needless debate. All Boring and Place had wanted to say was that sensations as a whole depended on brain processes as a whole. I will continue to use the term "identity theory" because it is so well established and not because there could not be better labels for the basic idea.
In his essay, Place pointed to what he referred to as the "phenomenological fallacy," which was the tendency to place too great an importance on the phenomenological observations made by people about their consciousness. This can be said to occur in the phenomenal field that consists of the field of self-conscious observations made as if in an internal cinema. Examples are the observations of green trees or ominous roaring lions. Place thought that the capacity of humans to make these phenomenological observations should not override physiological explanations of what is going in a person's body when the person is making the observations.(Place 107-109) With the recent advent of brain imaging, Place's point has become more clear and acceptable.
Enter Functionalism
The theory of functionalism in philosophy maintains that a mental state should be defined by its functional role, not from the material from which it was composed. Functionalism was inspired by the processes of computers. Observation of a mental state is made in terms of its information input and output, much as in the case of a computer. In animals the input is the stimulus, and the output is the behavior caused by the stimulus.
Pat sees a lightning storm approaching fast (the input) and quickly proceeds to move inside her office building for safety (the output). Pat's reaction to the lightning need not be confined to a human or other kind of earthly animal made of the familiar flesh and blood. An exoplanet resident with a vastly different physical makeup could be put into a particular mental state by the stimulus of a bolt of lightning and react by going inside an enclosure. (An exoplanet is a planet that circles a sun (star) outside our solar system.) The composition of the mental state is of no import. What counts is the input and the output, or one could also say the cause and the effect.
One of the versions of functionalism is central state materialism, which was proposed by David Armstrong around 1970. It is a causal theory in that it considers that mental states cause a range of behavior.(Audi 603) There are additional versions of functionalism. Around 1960, it looked as if identity theory would be the predominant physicalist theory, but then functionalism gained acceptance and supposedly supplanted it.
Under functionalism, there are many distinct mental state types that can play the same causal role. This is called multiple realizability. Under this idea, pain need not only be produced in animal flesh and blood as we know it but can supposedly also occur in the flesh (or its equivalent) of someone from another planet or in the metal components of computers and robots. None of this has yet been demonstrated, nor am i aware of any one showing how, even in theory, a computer could be made to feel pain.
Hilary Putnam, who proposed machine state functionalism, was one of the original champions of functionalism along with Armstrong and Jerry Fodor. He talked about multiple realizability in one of his essays in connection with the human ideas of body and soul.(Hilary Putnam, "Philosophy and Our Mental Life," Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 291, reprinted in Moser and Trout 122.) He noted that a long standing question for lay people and philosophers alike had been "are we made of matter or soul-stuff."(Id.) He correctly pointed out the question was still being asked today but was disguised by the analytic style of writing philosophy.
Putnam went on to his main point that when it comes to ascertaining whether humans have what he called an autonomous mental life, substance or composition is irrelevant. It is clear that what Putnam called an autonomous mental life was what is usually called "free will." People have generally associated a soul with autonomy in making decisions, i.e. having free will. This ability to make free decisions is very important in moral, social, legal, and religious contexts. Conversely, if we are simply material beings, it has been supposed that we are driven automatons incapable of initiating free acts.
Putnam thought it unimportant to be concerned with what people are made of in determining whether they have free will. As he put it, "We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn't matter."(Id.) That is true but you still would have dualists claiming that there has to be an independent mental substance that provides free will to the Swiss cheese. This is the main defect in functionalism; it does not answer belief in a mental substance, whatever that might be.
Putnam was correct in making these points. Someone made of steel or exotic materials from another universe but who had the same emotional and mental characteristics as humans would have to count as having equal mental status to humans. It was understandable that functionalism became quickly accepted. Several years later, Putnam rejected functionalism as a complete explanation for the mind.
While under functionalism there are many means by which a mental state can be produced, all the means functionalists talk about are physical. Theoretically, a non-physical substance, i.e. a ghost, could exhibit mental states, but there has not been much talk of that among functionalists. Many functionalists are physicalists.(Priest 133)
While it is clear that different materials could theoretically possess the same or similar mental states, there may be good reason to want to know the details of that correspondence in our fleshy bodies. It is also possible that some materials may not be able to perform all the mind-body functions that are observed in humans. Particular materials may limit the functions that are possible. Metal robots may never be able to feel emotions precisely because metallic materials may not be able to produce mental states associated with emotions. Functionalism and its companion concept, multiple realizability, do not obviate the possibility that there could be mind-body (or mind-object) correspondences specific to different beings (or objects) in which mental states are realized.
The idea that each mental state in humans could be produced by the action of its own specific set of neurons could well be the case, while at the same time functionalism could still be correct. Functionalism could be a very general explanation with application to all thinking things, while identity theory could apply to the physical details of how mental states are produced in each particular type of thinking thing. In all earthbound animals, this would be a physiological or neurological description with which we are familiar. Pain in humans may not be caused by C fibers as Place conjectured but by some other neurological mechanism.
Identity theory could also apply to every thinking thing other than earth's animals. Take the example of a robot that could be built in the future so that it felt pain. Its pain could be produced through the activation of a specific electrical circuit or circuits in the robot. That would be the identity in its specific case. It could be said that the pain was nothing more than the activation of that particular electrical circuit(s). Perhaps a robot could be built with different types of pain. The differences could be in quality or in location. Each different type of pain could be produced by a different corresponding electrical circuit. There would be a relationship between each type of pain and the related electrical circuit(s) that had to be activated to cause the pain.
Identity theory and functionalism can stand side by side. Identity theory can delineate the relationship between mental states and their specific physical bases. Functionalism can keep track of how different materials can produce the same or similar mental states.
Different Identity Versions
Historically, the identity theory debate got sidetracked into whether there was type-type identity or token-token identity. Type-type involves a type of mental state caused by a type of physical state. As an example, a type of dull pain is caused by activation by a type of neural fiber, the C fiber. Token-token involves the particular dull pain that Mel felt when his friend poked him with a spoon.
An objection to identity theory was that it was incorrect in making any claim that each type of mental state corresponds to one type of physical state. This objection is based on multiple realizability. That means any one mental state can be realized in a variety of ways, there can be no consistent identification of one type of mental state with one single type of physical state.
As an example, pain in the jaw may be caused by a particular set of neurons for a human being, but the same pain in the jaw of a dog could be caused by a different set of neurons. This would be because the physiology of a human and a dog have some distinct differences. It could also be the case that there could be physical differences between how humans and dogs process pain neurologically. For instance, most humans could experience pain in the left jaw through a set of neurons called S. Dogs may not have the same set of neurons. They could have a similar set of neurons located in a similar position as the corresponding set S in humans that would produce a very similar pain, but they would not be the identical set S. Members of still other species could experience the same jaw pain through a different set of neurons as that of both humans and dogs.
Then there is the possibility that even within the same species some members could feel the same pain through a slightly different set of neurons. This may only be a small minority, but it would be significant in showing that mental states are not always produced in the same precise manner. The possible differences in realizability are widely accepted by philosophers as defeating type-type identity theory.
A further objection in the past to type-type identity theory was that no evidence had been produced that for every type of psychological process, there was a corresponding type of neural process.(Priest 7) As times goes by, however, brain scientists are making more and more correlations between psychological states and neural processes by the use of brain imaging. Those findings can now be considered.
Even the critics of identity theory agree that it is consistent with token physicalism, i.e. token-token identity theory. Any one mental state corresponds to at least one physical state. Putting it another way, any token mental state corresponds to at least one token physical state. Reference is made not to types but to mind-body processes in each individual occurrence.
The process would not even have to involve the very same physical one each time a dog felt pain in the left jaw. In one instance of the pain, the jaw pain could involve six neurons; call them neurons n1 thru n6. At another time, what the dog would experience as the very same pain could involve only four neurons n1 thru n4. At still another time, the same pain could be caused by neurons n1 thru n4 and a neuron not involved before, say n7. A fourth scenario could involve a still different combination. This may never happen in real earthly beings, but it is worth considering for illustration purposes. What would occur is that a mental token could be identified with different physical tokens at different times.
The upshot is that a particular mental state need not be identical with the same physical state every time. Identity need only involve a token of mental state with some token of a physical state every time, regardless of whether it is this one or that one. A variety of physical states could be identified with the same mental state, although only one physical state would be identified with that mental state at the time the mental state occurred.
The assumption by critics that each type of mental state must show a strict and unvarying correspondence with a single type of physical state was simply wrong. Identity need not mean that the exact same process has to take place every single time. All identity needs to mean is that a particular token of a mental state is always identified with some token of a physical process even if the latter is a different one at different times. Note that the pain in the jaw in each case would be related to the action of neurons; it would be an entirely physical process.
"And Nothing More"
Place, in his groundbreaking article,(Place 102) made the simple claim that consciousness is a brain process "and nothing more." He did not enter into a more detailed discussion about types or tokens or whether identity had to involve a perfect uniformity in every case. His thesis was the very general assertion that a conscious mental state was always a brain process. The thesis was put forward as a scientific hypothesis and could have involved a different physical process every time. Place talked about questions of identity in his paper in the following manner:
I am not trying to argue that when we describe our dreams, fantasies, and sensations we are talking about processes in our brains. That is, I am not claiming that statements about sensations and mental images are reducible to or analyzable into statements about brain processes.(Id.)
Place was trying to clarify how mental descriptions could legitimately refer to a physical phenomena taking place in the brain. Still, they could stand on their own as legitimate descriptions of what the person was experiencing from her/is own perspective. It was the sense and reference distinction pointed out by Frege. Place's discussion did not delve into whether identity had to span across different types.
J. J. C. Smart, in his classic paper "Sensations and Brain Processes,"(Smart) also did not delve much into different types of brain processes but like Place did not try to clarify linguistic questions. He pointed out that an "after image" or "ache" was not the same as a brain process but only a report of a process that was a brain process. All he wished to assert--in his famous statement--was "sensations are nothing over and above brain processes."(Smart 95) Smart talked of sensations rather than consciousness as Place had done. It is unfortunate that he used the term 'sensations' because use of that narrow term for mental processes may have left his position more vulnerable to attack. David Armstrong's term "mental states" gave a much more general impression of what mental processes could include. For instance, it is easier to think of robots having mental states than it is to imagine them having sensations.
In a 1995 postscript to his original article, Smart first pointed out that he had been too behavioristic in writing the original article. More importantly, he pointed out "the difference between identity theory and functionalism has been greatly exaggerated."(Smart 105) He also pointed out that he was not necessarily a type-type identity theorist; it depended on the abstractness of similarities of brain processes.
It was good that Smart confronted the idea that functionalism had eclipsed identity theory. It was unfortunate that he and Place did not defend their position more steadfastly against attack from the critics. If they had pressed their case more forthrightly, the problems with nonreductive materialism (see below) may have been evident sooner. Functionalism may serve as a good description of the general possibilities of what can take place between objects with mental characteristics and their physical bases, but identity theory is the best description of what takes place in animals on this earth. After many years, the competing ideas have simply not been able to negate that.
Nonreductive Materialism
Nonreductive materialism holds that mental states (properties) do not ultimately reduce to physical processes. It has been unable to show that is the case, at least in the ontological sense. It does not deny that everything is based on physical objects. In the final tally, the ontological sense is most important because it is the sense which declares what the universe is made of and which in turn most touches people's existential and religious concerns. It is what I want us to consider in this trilogy. The approaches that fall under nonreductive materialism involve different concerns. Those discussions really involve questions of theory reduction or linguistic reduction.
It is agreed that token-token identity is a sufficient basis for physicalism, but it is also claimed to be nonreductive.(Moser and Trout 8) This even though it is certainly reductive in the sense that it rejects dependence of minds on nonphysical substances. This is hard to accept from an ontological perspective. Identity theory offers a very simple proposition: any mental state is a physical process. (I am substituting "mental state" for Place's consciousness because it is more general and yet still applicable.) There is no way around that for a true materialist. Mental states always have to be reducible to processes involving physical objects in the sense that there is nothing else involved--no spirits, no entelechies, nothing. No one has presented evidence to the contrary. In token-token identity a specific mental state, such as jaw pain, does not have to involve the same neurons in all dogs or all dogs of the same breed. All that is necessary is that a specific occurrence of a mental state--a token of a mental state in each dog--be associated with a specific occurrence of a physical state--a physical token in that same dog in that single instance.
Another allegedly nonreductive version of physicalism is called compositional materialism. Token-token physicalism is based on the observation that members of a type can have differences but compositional materialism points out that even a single token can have different characteristics.(Richard Boyd, "Materialism Without Reductionism: What Physicalism Does Not Entail," Ned Block, ed., Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980) 67, 100.) For instance, a cat that contracts cancer and has to have its leg amputated is still the same cat after the operation as it was before. Removing the leg does not change the identity of the cat. In general, removing a large number of molecules from any object does not necessarily change its identity.
Token-token identity theory and compositional materialism are consistent with multiple realizability. In developmental biology, it has been discovered that animal characteristics can be produced in multiple ways in different individuals. In anthropology, social stability in different cultures is produced in multiple ways.(Moser and Trout 8) Multiple realizability maintains that, because many mental states can be physically realized in a variety of ways, there is no reducibility. What is not mentioned is that in whichever one of a variety of ways a state is realized, it is always realized in a physical state as far as anyone knows or can imagine. Travel to the other side of the galaxy and you may find a very different composition for objects and that they are realized in very different ways, but you will still find they are physical because they exist in space.
Identity theory would have fared better in academic circles if it had gone by a different name. Perhaps correspondence theory (in metaphysics as opposed to the one in epistemology) could have been the label or physical basis theory or physical basism. It could read: every mental state corresponds to one or more physical states. This would have kept the sense that all mental states are ultimately physical without giving the impression that a strict identity must always be involved.
Anomalous Monism
Another version of nonreductive materialism is called emergent materialism. It holds that everything is made of physical particles including the brain--the receptacle for mental capacities--and that token mental states are token neurophysiological states. It also includes the belief that mental capacities do not reduce to physical properties but instead emerge from physical properties. There is still work to be done by its proponents in explaining what they mean.
Another variant of nonreductive materialism is anomalous monism. It was formulated by Donald Davidson in the 1970's and received much attention. Davidson found no problem in concluding that mental events have an identity relation with physical events. He proposed that mental events are supervenient or dependent on physical events.(Donald Davidson, "Mental Events," reprinted in Moser and Trout 107.) Davidson's explanation is committed only to token identity.
Where physical and mental events differ, according to Davidson, is that while physical events follow strict causal laws, mental events do not. There are no strict psychophysical laws--hence, the label anomalous monism. Davidson clearly rejected any sort of dualism; he believed in a monism of physical objects. It was, however, a monism that had to account for what is observed as the nature of mental properties. Beings with minds have a freedom to act in a way that objects without minds do not. Mental beings seem to be able to undertake actions based upon their mental considerations. They can at times act arbitrarily or unpredictably, but even then there is a certain amount of direction by the mind. Although both anomalous monism and functionalism are purportedly nondualist positions, they have been said to inadvertently imply epiphenomenalism. ("Epiphenomenonalism," The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.)
Supervenience
The idea behind anomalous monism is the familiar one that mind has to be involved in something more than simple physical monism. Hence the explanation of anomalous monism that the mind is dependent or supervenient on physical substance, yet is not so tied to it that it cannot exercise some independence and act outside of any psychophysical laws. Hence it can be said that there is freedom of the human will. While the idea of supervenience is attractive because it allows that the mental is completely dependent on the physical for its existence, it also claims that the mind retains an amount of autonomy. Supervenience does have problems.
The best analysis of those problems can be found in a paper written in 1989 by Jaegwon Kim, "The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism."(Jaegwon Kim, "The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism," 63 Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 31 (1989), reprinted in Moser and Trout 133.) Kim undertook a meticulous analysis of programs that fall under the rubric of nonreductive materialism and found them wanting in as much as they are supposed to fall under the category of materialism. He specifically examined anomalous monism, multiple realizability, and supervenience. Kim's observations were penetrating, and careful consideration of articles and books he wrote later on the subject of physicalism are recommended.(Jaegwon Kim, Physicalism, or Something Like It (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005) is especially recommended.) The following remarks are heavily indebted to Kim's observations.
In anomalous monism, mental events are not supposed to follow psychophysical laws. They apparently do not follow physical laws or psychological laws either. This is what accounts for psychological freedom. The question arises: if mental events do not follow laws, especially psychophysical laws that would account for the interaction between the mind and body, how does any interaction take place at all? It seems that if there are no laws involved in psychophysical events, there can be no significant interaction since physical events always follow strict causal laws. The champions of anomalous monism are in a similar position as the old dualists, unable to credibly explain how mind-body interaction takes place. As much as they may deny it, these champions sound much more like dualists than materialists.
Davidson has been accused of putting forward a disguised version of epiphenomenalism in his idea of anomalous monism. Epiphenomenalism holds that physical states affect mental states but not the other way around. This scheme makes it hard to see how persons can be free agents since there seems to be an explanation lacking for how a mind can bring about the action of its associated body if it cannot act as a cause of anything. This idea, oddly enough, actually seems to be consistent with strict determinism, which proposes that all events are brought on by physical causes independently from any free mental intentions of the actor. Freedom is an illusion. Davidson argued strongly against the idea that mind plays a part in causing actions, but in the final tally, it is hard to see how he could avoid the accusation that he ultimately offered another version of epiphenomenalism, which was discredited long ago.
Supervenience is supposed to be consistent with materialism so it follows that the dependence of mental states upon the existence of physical states must be complete. This means that no mental state can exist without an accompanying physical state. Mental states and physical states have to walk together hand-in-hand in precise coordination. Yet, mental states do not have to follow any laws relating minds to bodies, the psychophysical laws.
This is hard to reconcile. Mental states do not follow any consistent patterns (laws) and yet are at all times coordinated with physical states that do have to follow laws at all times. There is no way to predict mental actions nor even a bare idea of how and when the mental influences the physical. The mind, under this scheme, rather than exhibiting supervenience appears very independent from the body, wondering instead unpredictably on its own. There is no credible account of any truly supervenient relationship and of mind-body interaction.
The same criticism applies to other claims for a materialism limited by "property dualism." Under this view, mental and physical properties are considered rather than mental and physical states. Property dualists believe in ontological physicalism: that everything in the universe is physical and nothing else, yet they also insist there is a property dualism because there are mental properties that enjoy an existence all on their own. It is hard to understand what they can mean by mental properties that have an independent existence. Supervenience and property dualism sound too much like old-fashioned dualism with all its problems. Apparently, their adherents don't intend it that way.
Reduction
Most professional philosophers claim they are not substance dualists, but one could never infer that from their frequent attacks on physicalism found in the articles they write. One example is the article by Tim Crane and D. H. Mellor, "There is No Question of Physicalism."(Tim Crane and D. H. Mellor, "There is No Question of Physicalism," 99 Mind 185 (1990), reprinted in Moser and Trout 65.) They go through their entire paper excoriating physicalism and in the end profess they are not trying to revive Cartesian dualism and see no significant difference between the mental and the nonmental.
What is it then that nonreductionists can mean when they deny the possibility of reduction to the physical? There seem to be two related approaches: scientific and linguistic. Usually the science of psychology is singled out for study on why it cannot be reduced to the science of physics. In order to reduce one science to another, it is necessary to employ "bridge laws." In the case of psychology, it would be the reduced science with physics being the reducing science, and the bridge laws would be statements, some in the form of definitions, for all terms in the reduced theory not appearing in the reducing theory. The reduced theory could then be expressed in terms of the bridge laws plus whatever terms were needed from the reducing theory. The nonreductionists argue that this cannot be accomplished, that there are unique psychological laws and properties that cannot be reduced to the language of physics. Presumably, the same problem arises in trying to reduce other sciences. Examples would be sociology or economics.
They have a point. It seems that presenting every observation made in psychology or economics in terms of physics would lose significant insights. In the article "Special Sciences," Jerry Fodor presented an interesting example using Gresham's Law in economics that involves monetary exchanges such as the dollar bill and the writing of checks.(Jerry Fodor, "Special Sciences," 28 Synthese 77, reprinted in Moser and Trout 51, 56.) He rightfully observed that statements about monetary exchanges are unlikely to turn out to be expressible as laws of physics. This makes it understandable why most contemporary materialists count themselves as nonreductive materialists.(Moser and Trout 9) Yet, it appears they are talking about theory reductionism, not ontological reductionism. Theory reduction is more appropriately a problem in the philosophy of science and not in metaphysics.
In a more general sense, the problems of theory reduction are problems in linguistic reduction or translation. Philosophy writers don't treat the problems in terms of language reduction, but that is what at least a part of the exercise involves. In philosophy of mind, the question is how do mental terms like mind, desire, and fear translate into neurological or neurochemical descriptions. This is not an ontological problem, but it sounds like one so it causes a great amount of confusion. Part of the translation problem is that most of the neurological processes have not even been delineated yet. In addition, there are reasonable doubts on whether an adequate translation can ever be accomplished. So understandably, many philosophers believe linguistic reduction cannot be successful.
Then there is the other end of the spectrum, eliminative materialism. The eliminativists agree with the nonreductionists that a reduction is not possible, but they agree for different reasons. They think that all the terminology related to the mind constitutes a false and unfounded theory that has been unfortunately promulgated for many centuries. This old body of terms has been labeled "folk psychology" and consists of commonly used statements about beliefs, desires, etc. These statements are called propositional attitudes. The eliminativists believe all this antiquated and misleading baggage of language should simply be eliminated to make room for a more accurate physiologically based body of reliable knowledge. Some eliminativists are Paul Feyerbend, Richard Rorty, and Paul Churchland.(See Paul Churchland, "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes," 78 Journal of Philosophy 67 (1981), reprinted in Moser and Trout 150.)
The eliminativists are correct in pointing out that our long-used propositional attitudes are false from a scientific perspective. The problem is that it may be next to impossible to remove them from everyday human discourse. Then there is the social science of economics. Does it contain propositional attitudes that are false? Is it a "folk economics"? Can terms like "currency" and "monetary policy" be replaced by terms from physics and should they be replaced? It seems much harder to dismiss economics as a false theory and to assert that it should be based on terms from physics. The language of economics seems necessary. The mental language should simply be tolerated--in everyday discourse--and be considered as shorthand for what is in reality happening in the brain.
In the 1930's, logical behaviorism emerged as an approach that has a similarity to eliminative materialism. It won attention by claiming that mental talk of intentions, beliefs, and the like was misguided and could instead be simply dealt with in terms of actual and potential physical behavior. Rudolf Carnap undertook the project of translating all mental language into behavioral language, but the endeavor eventually proved impossible to complete. Logical behaviorism, along with behaviorism in psychology, fell out of favor in the 1960's.
It is clear that again all this does not affect ontology. It should not. However, sometimes in reading some authors it seems that they believe that all language in the social sciences must be reduced to the language of physics before we can be sure that there is only physical substance. They have to be mistaken.
It is abundantly clear that none but the rarest of philosophers nowadays believe in two distinct realms of the mental (spiritual) and the physical in the old Cartesian sense. Those who do believe in the old dualism are most likely impelled by religious beliefs. Those lay people who would take heart from all the philosophical talk against reduction and believe that philosophers support a general belief in spirits or ghosts should think again.
Consciousness, the Mystery
It is important to say something about consciousness because it has received great attention from philosophers beginning around 1970. Before that, it seemed that consciousness was too mysterious and impenetrable to be the subject of successful study. The very reputation that had been given to consciousness inhibited discussion and research of its nature. It was supposed to be private, entirely subjective, and solely accessible to the subject having the particular conscious experience. The fashionableness of behaviorism at the time, with its idea that only the study of outward behavior could be objective and therefore scientifically respectable, reinforced the avoidance of consciousness.
Consciousness is really a part of the study of the mental; it is no more than a mental state or combination of mental states. Remember that Place set down the basic premise of identity theory as "consciousness is a process in the brain."(Chappell 102) Ultimately it is not anything that is especially mysterious. It is a process in the brain although it may be a more complex one than the one that brings a sensation, like an itch.
There was also the tendency among many lay people, mostly under the influence of religious ideas, to want to keep consciousness and other mental attitudes as something completely ineffable and above scrutiny. Probably without realizing it, these advocates wanted to believe that this ineffability made the human mind that much more special and close to the divine. The mind of God was clearly out of bounds as a subject of serious study; the study could be considered blasphemy. It should not be surprising then that humans, who are supposedly the closest to God out of all the creation, should also possess minds that cannot be completely understood. Even today one wonders whether the claim by some scientists and philosophers that the human mind will never be completely understood is influenced by those kinds of beliefs.
At the other end of the line, all animals other than humans have long been considered to lack consciousness until recently. Descartes didn't believe they were conscious. That cannot be correct because it is clear from simple observation that even insects have a limited amount of consciousness. Almost all insects and animals have the sense of sight. Others have a solid ability to sense heat and thereby avoid danger. The sense of sight of many animals as well as hearing is far superior to that of humans.
As an example, take a look at cockroaches. If they are in a dark room and a light is turned on, they may very well react in a startled manner. Move close to them and they will scurry away. They are certainly sensitive to heat, as they will not stay around something that catches fire. They are aware of other cockroaches in view of their having a sexual life. Cockroaches have a sound perception of what constitutes food for them and what does not. They have survived for millennia, much longer than have humans, so their food-gathering and other survival skills have served them well.
The objection to this talk of insect and animal consciousness is that it is only about simple consciousness or experience. Those who would object would mostly admit that this kind of fundamental consciousness exists, a consciousness of other objects and creatures. They would point out that what they really mean by consciousness is the observation that one is a unique entity in the world existing independently from other objects.
What is Consciousness?
Consciousness cannot yet be explained neurologically because there is not enough known about how the brain works to produce consciousness (including self- consciousness) from a neurological point of view. That the brain brings about consciousness physically is beyond serious doubt.(John Searle, "How To Study Consciousness Scientifically," Consciousness and Human Identity, John Cornwell, ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998) 21.) The question is how it does it? It will be sometime before there is a neurological answer, but can there already be a phenomenological answer to what is consciousness? Would it not be useful as a guide on what neurological researchers should be looking for?
Consciousness from a phenomenological view is simply awareness of objects around oneself. It is the simple act that gives the perceiver basic awareness of the surroundings. This is what the perceiver is "conscious of." Self-consciousness contains an additional element--awareness of oneself as an object separate from the surroundings. Here the person (or possibly animal) is capable of considering her/imself as an individual. This involves some introspection but that need not go very far. Self-consciousness is really that simple.
It can be more complex, as in the case of humans. A person can consider that s/he has a past and a possible future and possesses certain desires and capacities that can affect her/is feelings and actions. The course of action to take from here can be contemplated. A long and detailed self-assessment can be made by the introspector and what significance that may have.
Most humans have this capability in varying degrees. There can be the memory of knowledge gained from other persons, books, and other sources. Humans are not limited to their own personal experience. They have language to aid them in gaining helpful knowledge to use during conscious experience. Additionally reasoning power is needed. Without these three abilities, it is hard to see how other animals can go very far in introspection.
There has been much obstruction, perhaps unintentionally, by those who insist on focusing on the private, subjective nature of consciousness and thereby implying that it cannot be defined, either phenomenologically or neurologically. According to these observers, the subjective nature of consciousness is simply too overwhelming to allow for a proper understanding of consciousness. These observers are simply too pessimistic in their assessments. The subjective aspect of consciousness is simply one facet of consciousness and a small one at that. It has been blown out of proportion. What an observation in consciousness appears like to each solitary individual is a minor consideration. There are intersubjective comparisons that can be made among human individuals that indicate to them that to a great extent their perceptions are the same.
A grizzly bear could approach Harry and Mandy while on a camping trip. It is very likely that each person can form a good idea of what the conscious feelings of the other would be. There would first be the sighting of the bear. Then there would be the feeling of fear aroused by the approaching bear followed by the desire to flee. Even if their feelings were not exactly the same, each one could imagine what the feelings of the other might be. For instance, Mandy may not feel a desire to flee after seeing the bear but have more of a sense of curiosity. Later, after telling Harry, he may understand Mandy's feeling of a curiosity strong enough to overcome his desire to flee although he may not feel the same curiosity or believe that most people would react like Mandy. Perceptions, feelings, and other conscious acts may be private to the individual having them but are not totally foreign to being understood by other humans.
There may be some perceptions that turn out to be very different between individuals and that difference might not be easily detected, such as in the case of color. The perception of color could be so different between two persons that the green of one would be the red of the other and so on. It is hard to believe that this would be very common because evolution has made members of the same species very similar. The differences in private, subjective qualitative perception cannot be so different that there should be the great attention that has been paid to that aspect of consciousness.
It is interesting that nonreductionists with respect to consciousness have claimed that the subjective quality of consciousness will make it impossible to ever explain it on a brain (neurological) basis but have not made the claim with respect to some other physiological processes like heart attacks. That is, they could claim that the experience of a heart attack is a subjective one. No one can truly know what it feels like to have a heart attack except for the person having it. Why is not the claim made by nonreductionists that the subjectivity of experiencing a heart attack militates against cardiologists ever fully knowing what is a heart attack from a physiological standpoint?
The defining of consciousness and self-consciousness takes the mystery out of the topic and allows progress. Scientists can go forward and look for evidence of them in neurological processes. This provides a better map than the long-standing confusion caused by undue concern with the subjective nature of consciousness. Taking a levelheaded approach, consciousness can be studied and will probably be fully understood someday. The subjective aspect will be an interesting but minor consideration.
Consciousness of Consciousness (Self-Consciousness)
It is good that self-consciousness finally got the attention that it deserved for so long. Self-consciousness definitely adds a new dimension to how we understand ourselves, our own intelligence and that of others, our emotions, and to how we compare ourselves--for better or worse--with others.
People are rightfully impressed with the ability of humans to be clearly cognizant of their own separate individuality and of their ability to determine a direction for their life, much better than inanimate objects or other animals. Humans can also go far into introspection. At least some humans can thoroughly analyze their own individual character, motives, and failings. Humans can also speculate on the society in which they live, the species to which they belong, and the cosmos in which they find themselves. These musings can be expressed through prose or indirectly through the creation of fictional narratives, poetry, and visual art. On the other side of the ledger, one wishes that certain impulsive or mentally challenged human beings could exhibit greater self-consciousness. Perhaps that could keep them out of the problems they sometimes create.
The trait of self-consciousness-along with intelligence in general--has left it open for some to declare that humans are a special and favored creation in the universe. This is the basis for the resistance for so long to considering animals as being much more than automatons. God is often discussed as a mind, or at least mind is taken as an integral part of this most holy of beings. It has been concluded that humans themselves, having minds, must be close in status to this holy being. Therefore animals with their base impulses and desires could not possibly be in possession of minds, much less self-consciousness. The special status of being perched high above all other creatures has made it easy to ignore the possibility that some of those other creatures could have any degree of self-consciousness or intelligence.
The fact is that there have been experiments to see if other animals exhibit signs of self-consciousness. In one experiment, a piece of paper was stuck on the forehead of a gorilla without the gorilla being aware that it had been placed there. The gorilla did nothing to remove the paper until it was stood in front of a mirror. Once that happened, it noticed the paper, reached for it, and removed it. I have heard that the same experiment with an elephant yielded the same result. Some would argue that this does not prove anything, but it would seem to show at least a rudimentary sense of self.
In connection with intelligence, we are learning that animals are smarter than previously supposed. For instance, it has been discovered that a number of animals have been able to devise and use tools. I noticed that my own pets were able to discover and learn to take certain actions. One of the dogs, a Chihuahua, and later two cats learned how to push and open French doors in the house. Neither my wife nor i ever taught them how to do it. One of our two lovebirds, members of the psittacine (parrot) family, discovered how to lift the door of her cage using her beak and hold it open long enough to scoot out of the cage. The second lovebird saw that and eventually performed the same feat.
That explains why there are stories from parrot owners being at a total loss at how their parrot was magically found outside the cage. (The practice all psittacine owners would be wise to follow is to put locks or thick wire ties on the cage doors. Psittacines can chew and break thin wires.) It has become increasingly clear that animals are more intelligent than once supposed, and the same may be the case with regard to self-consciousness.
It is not surprising to find some observers who want to draw sharp lines between those who believe that reduction of the sciences to the physical can be accomplished and those who don't. It has gone so far that a reviewer in Nature magazine(John Casti, Review of Nature's Imagination, John Cornwell, ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1994) 374 Nature 840 (1995).) of papers published from a symposium on reductionism called the defenders of reductionism the "bad guys" and the reduction skeptics the "good guys in white hats."(Consciousness and Human Identity ix)
Thousands of articles and numerous books have been written disputing on one side or the other of the reduction issue, and one wonders to what avail. There is a long way to go yet in research in the biological sciences, neurology in particular, so it is clearly premature to be certain on what the outcome may be. There has been significant progress with the use of brain imaging, but it is a long way to go before there is a comprehensive understanding of the brain. Only then could any neurologist begin to assess whether neurology might be reduced to the fundamental objects and laws of physics. Only after that could antireductionists offer any informed criticism of any proposed reductionist programs.
Based on these considerations, it would seem that the best course of action would be to allow the researchers to do their work before engaging in so much discussion, especially if it aggravates some so much that they resort to drawing lines between good and evil or making accusations of "reductive megalomania."(Id.) Reductionists, on the other hand, are premature in claiming that scientific investigation will always accurately reveal all the intricacies of the physical subjects involved and that humans will always be able to understand them.
Note well that all these discussions are about philosophy of science. Antireductionists agree that everything in the universe is physical. One example is Colin McGinn who "does not doubt that consciousness is wholly dependent on the brain, with no magic or mysticism involved."(Margaret Boden, "Consciousness and Human Identity," Consciousness and Human Identity Cornwell 1, 18.) McGinn believed a complete understanding of consciousness is potentially there, but that humans may just be incapable of formulating it.(Id. 17, see Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1991).)
Consciousness and Human Life
Discussion of consciousness brings up an important side issue relevant to the controversy in recent decades over when human life begins. It can also relate to justification for ending human life.
For millennia, it appears that the prevailing idea was that the life of an individual began at birth. At that point, it was observed that the fetus came out of the womb and became physically independent from the mother. An organism in its first three months of development is called an embryo and after that a fetus. Supposedly about 500 years ago, the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church declared that human life began at conception. It is not clear why the Jesuits decided to adopt that view. It may have been that they observed what they thought as too little respect for human life among the native population. The Church itself did not adopt the position until much later.
It is hard to comprehend how that position can be espoused. At conception, there is the union of one egg cell from the female and one sperm cell from the male. After several days, the two cells grow into a clump of cells that are still too small to be visible to the naked eye. Yet, some believe ardently that such an invisible clump of cells should be considered as having equal status to a fully-grown human person.
There is the related and more recent argument that at conception all the ingredients are present in the womb for the later formation of a human being. By that, it is meant that all the necessary genes are in place and are being reproduced in the embryo. While this may be true, it is still a reality that it is a long time--nine months--until a human being will be born. To say that a clump of cells at conception is already a full-fledged human being cannot be correct and perhaps the following story can help illustrate the point.
Beth announces to Marge that she is going to give her a cake for her birthday. On that happy day, she shows up at Marge's house with a large pot that she uncovers on the kitchen table. In the pot, Marge observes a moist, heavy lump of dough. Beth proudly announces that she carefully measured all the ingredients for a two-layer chocolate cake, including flour, sugar, cocoa, canola oil, etc. She tells Marge that she hopes she will enjoy the cake and then leaves. Marge is speechless. To say that all the ingredients or materials are present for the making of something does not amount to its being the same as the finished product.
Another interesting observation in this connection is that humans and primates have a vast majority of their genes in common. Humans have about 97% of the same genes that chimpanzees possess. No one has argued that chimpanzees and perhaps other mammals should be considered the equals of humans with the accompanying consequence that their killing should be strictly punished.
A proposal for considering a human fetus as having full status is that it moves, reacts, and has distinguishable body parts like a head and limbs. Its heart is beating. The problem with that justification is that those observations are also true for other mammals. In fact, the human fetus and those of some other mammals are barely distinguishable from each other during most of their respective periods of gestation (nine months in the case of humans). It is only in the last month that you can distinguish them.
The task then is to try to discover what really sets humans apart from other animals to the extent that the killing of human fetuses can be strictly punished, while the killing of the other animal fetuses is not considered serious. It certainly cannot be that humans have generally greater abilities than the other animals. For example, birds have better eyesight and can fly. Dogs and cats have more acute hearing. Many animals like the cheetah and lumbering polar bears run much faster. Dolphins and whales can swim much faster and farther. Many animals seem to have a good capacity for predicting weather.
What does set humans apart is a greater intelligence and the ability to understand language. There is little disagreement that humans are way ahead of the other animals when it comes to intelligence. A problem arises with severely retarded people. How are they to be classified? (I will the use the term "retarded" although i am well aware that it is not considered politically correct. There is no offense intended. The use of the term "retarded" should be a perfectly acceptable way to talk about people who are slow in learning.) Some retarded people may not have more intelligence than some of the smarter animals. Should they be counted as humans? On what basis are they entitled to the status that humans enjoy if they are no more intelligent than many cats or elephants? Also the question arises of the intelligence of a newborn baby. Under an intelligence test, can a newborn baby be considered a human?
Since the use of intelligence is problematical in establishing what makes an individual human, perhaps self-consciousness could be used a criterion? I wrote a paper in 1972 for a philosophy class at Stanford i took with Professor Thomas Schwartz. As far as i know, the essay was the first to propose that self-consciousness is what distinguishes human beings from other animals. This self-consciousness is the more complex self-consciousness that other animals do not appear to have.
It would appear that retarded people have a greater degree of self-consciousness than any of the smarter animals. For one thing, even if their language is limited by comparison with other humans, it is more in evidence than it is in other animals. It appears they have some concept of themselves. Many of them know their own name and can distinguish their names from the names of others and can thus distinguish themselves from others. They seem to have a concept of possessing their own property. While intelligence is still a characteristic that can help distinguish between human beings and other animals, self-consciousness has the advantage in that it can favor retarded humans over other animals. That is, it appears that retarded humans have greater self-consciousness than other animals.
Another challenge to the claim that intelligence sets humans apart from other beings is the creation of robots especially the kinds of robots that have been constructed to exhibit great intellectual prowess. Robots have been created that have prevailed in chess games over established champions of the game. The most capable computer in this regard had the name of Big Blue. It is well known that from their early creation computers have had the ability to perform calculations much faster than humans including very complex ones.
Here again in the case of robots, self-consciousness can distinguish them from humans. At least to this date, no computer has been invented that exhibits any significant degree of even basic consciousness, the kind that shows a basic awareness of surrounding objects. With regard to self-consciousness, robots have fallen ever farther short of having that ability. Robots with emotions have not been devised. Animals are far ahead of them in this respect. It is well accepted that nonhuman animals have emotions like fear and anger. It is becoming more accepted that many of them show affection. Self-consciousness clearly distinguishes humans from both other animals and robots.
In connection with the question of when human life begins, consider the newborn baby. It certainly has a consciousness or awareness of other objects, especially food, but no self-consciousness. At birth it has no capacity for developing language, a great aid in self-consciousness. A newborn does not seem to have any concept of itself. It is highly doubtful that it could pass the test the gorilla did--remove a paper stuck on its head when stood in front of a mirror. Some time must pass before a baby can consider itself as an individual and before it can accept that other individuals exist apart from it. A child does not develop many words until around age two. Without words to signify different things, one has to wonder how much self-consciousness a two-year old can have.
Not only is a baby bereft of self-consciousness at an early age, it has little intelligence, certainly none at the time of birth. It is also clear that a baby has less intelligence than several adult animal species like cats and dogs, as well as robots. Intelligent animals like cats and dogs can solve some of their own survival problems as well as aid humans in various ways like sheep herding or rescue. There are ample stories of cats and dogs finding creative ways to rescue others in distress. Babies are completely dependent on others for their survival. They are incapable of finding any creative way to save themselves, much less anyone else.
Under either the criterion of self-consciousness or intelligence, babies ironically cannot be said to fall under the classification of a human being. Some animals are more eligible to be included in the group. It can be argued that a child gains self-consciousness around two years of age. It is not clear where the line can be drawn for the inception of self-consciousness. It appears that it would come to different children at different ages. Some children may not acquire self-consciousness until a later age, say four years old. It is clear that babies do not have the two characteristics that clearly set human beings apart from other living things: self-consciousness and advanced intelligence.
For this reason, it may not be justified to punish anyone who commits infanticide as if they had killed a fully developed human being. A baby simply has not gained the status of a full human being although it is certainly on its way. It is not even at a level of self-consciousness or intelligence that is on par with certain adult animal species.
To claim that it is murder to kill a baby may be going too far especially since that baby has also not developed any significant two-way social bonds with other people. There is affection between parents and possibly siblings and the baby, but it only proceeds from them to the baby. A society that allows infanticide may not be so easily open to condemnation, especially if there are urgent reasons for doing so. A tribe or village may be in the midst of a horrid famine and unable to feed even those who are alive. Another mouth to feed would create an oppressive hardship on those who are barely alive and starving.
All this is not to promote infanticide. In advanced modern society, it would not seem to be necessary in order to save those alive from starvation. There are certainly reasons for legally preventing the killing of a baby. It is certainly too close to being a human to take its killing lightly. By the time a baby is born, most parents have developed a strong affection for their baby, and their interests need to be protected. What is clear is that it is not possible to justify considering a baby as a full human in status. It follows that a fetus has even less status than a baby, and there are a number of additional reasons for concluding that.
There is a solution to the mind-body problem, and ultimately, it is not complicated. The solution has eluded philosophers for millennia partly because language has gotten in the way. It apparently has even deceived philosophers who have dedicated themselves to untangling problems caused by confusion in the use of words--the philosophers of language. The solution is easier today than ever before because almost all philosophers today are physicalists. It involves first showing that everything is physical, which what is involved in this book. If everything is physical, then there is no room for mind or soul or spirit.
All these years should not have been spent on the problem. This is the basic solution: eliminate all the matter and energy in the universe. What do you have left? Nothing. All that exists is physical. That is the proof of physicalism. Jeffrey Poland started out his book on physicalism(Jeffrey Poland, Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1994) and pointed out that basic fact. He could have ended the book there but instead went on for hundreds of pages more. Other philosophers also do not end it there, and so i will continue and present a second solution to the problem.
Noticing Mental Abilities
The place to start is to investigate the origin of the idea of mind. Early people must have noticed that they had the capacity to remember, to reason through problems, to make decisions, to imagine occurrences pictorially, and to conjecture about hypothetical situations. The capacity to perform these acts was incontrovertible, and yet they were puzzled about how these processes took place.
They could observe that they had numerous other abilities and could readily see how their functions were performed. Walking and running was done with the coordinated movement of the legs and feet. The lifting, pushing, and pulling of objects was done with the arms and hands. The hands by themselves could perform many varied tasks. The eyes performed the act of seeing while the ears were necessary for hearing. Talking and eating were done by the mouth and tongue. These processes were clearly visible.
The case of hearing was different. The ears did not move nor did any other body part, but upon pressing an ear shut, there was a muffling of sound. Surely, they must have concluded that there was something that was hidden inside the ears that allowed hearing. The sounds sometimes heard underneath the abdominal area of the body after eating may have led to the conclusion that a processing of food took place there even though no body part was visible that performed the work.
It was different with other activities, namely the ones mentioned before like thinking. There was no visible part of the body or even a section of it where these functions were being performed. There were no definitive experiments that would not be highly injurious to the subject. If the head had been severed, it would have affected the brain, and thinking would have stopped. Then again, every other function would have stopped without finding the location of the mind.
Giving drugs or potions to the subject could have affected thought but there would have been no indication where the unusual thinking was taking place. Of course, people must have noticed that when certain parts of the body, like arms or legs, were accidentally severed, there was no long-term effect on thinking. It was still a question where the thinking instrument could be between the head and the groin area. In spite of the puzzlement on the origin of thinking, people started to lump thinking activities together and say that they were produced by something called the mind. Most people probably didn't give much thought to assessing where the mind was located and how it produced thought. They just went ahead and developed the custom of referring to it anyway.
More inquisitive people could have given more thought to where the mind was located and may have decided that it had to refer to some organ in the body. The early Greek philosophers did not engage in much discussion of the issue. Aristotle wrote about the mind or soul, but it has been hard to reconcile different opinions he seemed to have on it. He did not spend much time discussing location, but in the Parva Naturales, the soul is often located in the heart.(G.B. Kerferd, "Aristotle," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)
Ancient people were surely more aware of the heart than of other internal organs since one can hear the beating of the heart at all times. That same beating could never be heard in a person or animal who had died. The exhalation of air from the nostrils also ceased. Breathing appeared to be related with the rising and falling of the chest. Two absolutely essential life functions took place in the chest, so the mind or soul could very well have been thought to be located there.
By 10,000 B.C.E. reference to mental activities must have taken place. People observed that they could remember things they had done the day before such as eating apples and walnuts for breakfast. Other memories were long-term ones spanning many years. Some were personal and others shared by their group.
Ancients also had to observe that they and others could engage in problem solving that took many forms such as estimating how long it would take for the rain clouds on the horizon to arrive, how many people could partake of the body of a deer that had been killed, how to keep the tribal chieftain from launching into habitual temper tantrums. It was clear that humans engaged in thinking and similar activities continually.
These activities even took place more often than many other common activities such as eating, sleeping, talking, walking, and laughing. Thinking and fantasizing could be done with the eyes closed, while climbing a hill, while eating, and in various other physical activities. It was a quiet, hidden operation that took place inside the body. Thinking and similar activities were definitely in a class of their own and appeared different from what was ordinarily considered physical. The conclusion must have eventually been reached that these activities were produced and controlled by something they started calling a mind and were labeled mental. It became convenient to think of one thing that produced all these mental acts.
After a few centuries, it must have become as natural to talk about the mind performing an act as it was to talk of a leg kicking or bending or feeling a twitch. The mind became as accepted a part of a person as their leg or arm. It also became more and more common to talk of being rational (or irrational), being stubborn, being shy, or being nervous. Traits such as these eventually became known as mental characteristics or properties as opposed to their physical characteristics such as being nearsighted or a fast runner.
It may have been several more centuries before it occurred to someone to assert that the mind was something more than the source of thought and other less overtly bodily functions. Due to the hidden and mysterious nature of the mind, this person (or persons) speculated that the mind was also associated with moral consciousness and human immortality. The mind then became known by another name--the soul. It was never clear, but in some cases it appears the soul existed in addition to the mind. There was also the spirit, but it appears to be synonymous with the soul.
The soul or spirit was associated with beliefs and emotional states connected to human awe and wonder about human destiny, nature, purpose, and powerful superhuman forces that seemed to control the world. It eventually was considered to give humans superiority above all other animals. Clearly to most people, animals could in no way experience the feelings associated with this human spirituality. It was probably unusual to find a human at the time that believed that animals even had a mind, much less a soul. Nonhuman animals truly were "dumb animals."
Gradually the mind and the soul must have grown in stature. They were mysterious and at the same time endowed with amazement and grandeur. This must have been especially true with regard to the "divine mind" and the "great spirit in the sky" as they gradually entered human Imaginary existence. The mind and soul became so impressive that they surpassed the body in status.
Some must have speculated that the mind controlled the body just as the divine mind controlled the physical universe. This was likely what brought on thinking about a dualistic status of the mental and the physical with the former being superior to the latter. This dualistic thinking continued through Plato, the Middle Ages, Descartes, and today. The development of human ideas of the mind may well have started as far back as 100,000 years.
Sensation
Before further discussion of dualistic thinking, let us consider sensations. It is open to question why they should have been assigned to the mind. They are not very similar to thoughts. It is thoughts and other cognitive processes such as reasoning, believing, and remembering that are clearly associated with the mind. Sensations are the simple events that are associated with the senses: visual observations of objects, the hearing of sounds, the feel of water on the fingers. They also include itches, tingles, and pain as well as hunger.
Contemporary philosophers seem to readily consider sensations as mental events, but that is certainly open to question. Why should something as simple as an itch or a pain be considered a mental event? If you feel an itch on your left foot, it may be bothersome and you may scratch it, but you probably won't think of it as a mental process. In fact, you may not even be aware that you are feeling an itch as you reach to scratch it. This could happen if you were engrossed in reading or in conversation.
Suppose you faced tasks like designing a spreadsheet for financial planning or making a complicated decision on whether to accept a job offer. You would no doubt believe that you were engaging in a mental act or process and would admit that it was very different from feeling an itch or a tickle or suffering hunger. The latter seem more like plain physical events and simple ones at that.
It would seem that primitive humans, when they first started to talk about minds and mental processes, would not have included sensations in the classification of mental events. They would have thought of an itch in the foot (or forearm or lower back) as simply a physical event that was taking place in that specific area that needed physical intervention by means of a physical scratch. There is no reason to think they would have believed the mind was involved in such an event, especially in view of the fact that, at best, they probably only had a vague idea of what and where the mind was.
It is not clear where the idea came from to classify sensations as mental events. It probably did not occur until much later after early people observed that reactions to sensations could be controlled. An itch was felt at the foot. An impulse was felt to scratch it. A hand would normally reach to scratch it, but at times the sensation could be ignored. There were times when it was not advisable to scratch, like when the itch was in private parts while the person was in polite company.
They concluded that the decision was made someplace in the body. This location was a control center, which later became known as the mind. Much later it was discovered that the mind was the brain. Of course, we now know from physiological studies that the brain is not involved in all reactions to sensation. Instead the nervous system usually takes care of those quick decisions. Another reason not to count sensations as mental events.
Once this assumption that there was a mind involved in sensation became accepted, only then could a sensation count as a mental event. Until then, it was likely that people believed the mind was only involved in producing acts that are more clearly mental.
Dualistic Thinking
Dualistic thinking has become so ingrained in human viewpoints that even philosophers have continued to get ensnared in it without being aware that it is happening. This is evident in all the ideas involving nonreductive materialism. A good example of this dualistic tendency is the anomalous monism devised by Donald Davidson, discussed in the previous chapter.
Davidson began by assuming that mental events are independent from the laws that control physical events and at the same time that mental events sometimes operate as causes in the physical world. Mental events must be capable of causing physical events if humans are to have free will. Davidson named the claim that "at least some mental events interact causally with physical events" the Principle of Causal Interaction.(Donald Davidson, "Mental Events," Paul Moser and J.D. Trout, eds., Contemporary Materialism (London, England: Routledge, 1995) 107.) He pointed out that his goal was to reconcile free will with causal determinism in the physical world. In setting up his problem, Davidson did not delve deeply into finding out just what are mental events or mentality in general. Instead, he seems to have inadvertently engaged in dualistic thinking in assuming that there exists a mental realm of some sort with powerful capabilities.
There was also the assumption that there could be no fully physical explanation of free will. Instead, something nonphysical had to be involved. There was the clearly well-established prejudice that physical bodies cannot conduct mental acts. Davidson did not want to be a dualist so he had to consider himself a monist with a special place for the mental. He talked about the supervenience of the mental on the physical, making the mental dependent on the physical but still having a special existence of its own. It is hard to get away from the idea of a separate existence of the mind.
Property Dualism
Some contemporary philosophers consider themselves physical substance monists but still pay enough respect to the mental realm to propose and promote property dualism. According to this idea, the body is physical, but there are still mental properties that it possesses that are too elusive to be adequately defined in physical terms.
Apparently, property dualists also seem to believe that neurological science will never reach the point where it can account for all mental properties in terms of physical properties. There will always be this "explanatory gap" as David Chalmers, one of the property dualists, labeled the problem.(David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996).) These philosophers don't even want to give the neurologists a chance to see if they can come up with physical explanations of how the mind works. They seem to think that a physical explanation will never be possible for mental states, and so it is necessary to establish a category of properties that stands all alone.
The thought occurs that perhaps neurologists and others studying the mental aspects of the body will never get to the point where they can explain mentality purely in physical terms. Suppose they would come close but still not quite get there. Let's say that the scientists were unable to understand some details but still were able to present a large picture of the mind based on physical properties.
Suppose that the failure to fully explain the mind was not due to any apparent special nature of the mind and mental properties but was due to the inability to make the minute measurements necessary. Would that mean that property dualists would still have to cling to the idea that there had to exist a separate realm for mental properties? Instead, would it not be permissible to make the inference that the mind is wholly physical and that there are no mental properties that are anything other than physical?
One of the problems with the mental approach is that so little is known about how "the mind" works. As complex and varied as mental activities are, we know so little in comparison with what we know of the functioning of the brain and other parts of the body. Little is known about how the mind remembers, at least not from the property dualist perspective. The brain and how the brain functions in the process of remembering cannot be enlisted by those who do not believe in physical explanations of what the mind does. They should only stay within the bounds of purely "mental" explanation. There seems to be little that is known purely from the perspective of mental properties.
There are a few rules that seem to be known. Say you want to commit something to memory, like a poem. First, you memorize the poem, then about five days later, you go back to review it. If you have forgotten any part of it, you rememorize it between the first and fifth day. There are studies that say that following this procedure you can remember much better than if you just memorize the first time and never review.
Another rule states that a person has a better chance of remembering an experience if under stress when it happens. In physical terms, the secretion of adrenaline in the person's body appears to help make a vivid impression on the person, which facilitates the implanting of a long-lasting memory. Note that the involvement of adrenalin is a physical process.
A third rule is that spoken passages like poems, speech, or lessons recited by a person or electronic audio device can be memorized by another who listens while sleeping. I am not sure about this technique. It may not be sufficiently proven.
These examples related to memory help to illustrate that the use of mental properties has not gone very far in explaining the mind. There are plenty of "explanatory" problems stemming from the use of strictly mental concepts. Neurology and biochemistry may not have yet gone very far in elucidating the nature of mentality, but it seems that psychology and the use of mental properties have lagged behind.
Mental properties have probably been set apart by the property dualists because of their mystery, elusiveness, and complexity. They have to be placed in a separate realm of their own. If the mystery of the mind entitles it to such special status, can't the mystery of some of the other organs also give them claim to special treatment? The liver and the appendix come to mind.
The liver is not so much a mystery as it is complex, performing a variety of important functions. It is the most complex of the organs found in vertebrates. The liver secretes bile to aid in digestion; works with the blood by synthesizing blood clotting factors, destroys old red blood cells, wastes, and toxins; metabolizes proteins, fats, and carbohydrates; stores glycogen, vitamins, and other substances; and synthesizes various enzymes. To perform its functions, especially with regard to metabolism, the liver is endowed with specialized cells transversed with bile ducts and blood vessels. There is a second group of cells called Kupffer cells.
The appendix is a small, hollow, narrow tube located at the entrance to the large intestine that has no function in humans. For many years people have wondered what purpose this mysterious body part could have. It sometimes has to be removed if it becomes painfully infected. It could be surmised that the appendix has some hidden function that is important. Those who have an appendectomy don't notice that any changes take place, but perhaps the changes do not make their presence felt until years after the appendectomy. For all we know, the appendix may have something to do with consciousness. Given the complexity of the liver and the mysteriousness of the appendix, perhaps they should have been awarded some special status. Their properties should be set apart.
That brings into question why mental properties should be awarded the special status they have enjoyed. Why should they have any special place? That preference has been based on custom, their inscrutability, and their exclusive association with the human soul. Mental properties should be seen as just the physical properties that particular persons have that fall under the classification of "mental." They are ultimately physical properties.
Many physical properties of a person manifest through their behavior. A person has a twitch in the left cheek or has a stutter or can run very fast. Likewise, mental properties can be observed through a person's behavior. Observations of a person can reveal that s/he is forgetful or argumentative or quick-tempered or kind-hearted. We can also accept a person's reports of being forgetful or quick-tempered.
Some characteristics can remain hidden. An abnormally enlarged heart or a missing uvula in the throat would not be noticed by others. How kind-hearted a person is may not become apparent for a long time. So upon closer examination, the mental properties of people are often seen through their visible behavior. In this respect, they are not that much different from physical properties.
Property dualists need to realize that if they are going to set out a category known as property dualism, they are in effect saying that mental properties have a separate but equal status with physical properties. They are not simply stating that mental properties have their own separate category like liver properties and appendix properties. If they give mental properties this equal status, then they may be slipping into substance dualism without realizing it. If property dualists are going to talk about mental properties, they may want to think of them as special and full of mystery without going so far as to talk about any kind of dualism.
There may be some mysterious aspects of mental properties like why certain colors are experienced at certain times. Overall, however, mental properties do not deserve the special status they have been given. Even less, should they be placed on an equal status with physical properties. Davidson implied that there are two substances that stand on equal footing with respect to each other. Property dualism, intentionally or not, assumes the same. There is no support for that assumption. Mental properties may be unusual, but they are still based on characteristics of the body or manifested by behavior of individuals, which means they are ultimately physical. Even when discussed in terms of properties, the mental is totally dependent on the physical.
Extreme Physicalism
Assume there are physicalists who are not only reductionists but go so far as to claim that everything is truly physical, without exception. I have never heard or read of any such reductionists and have my doubts on whether anyone truly holds such an opinion. These extreme physicalists make no concession for unicorns, Bugs Bunny, Hercules, the golden mountain, Valhalla, words, or any other imaginary entity. None of these items have any existence of any kind according to these reductionists; only physical objects can be said to exist.
More than likely they would not take such a strong stance and make some concession to the existence of abstract entities. Any misunderstanding may be due to their opponents' misunderstanding of the reductionist position. In turn, this extreme reductionist position may lead the nonreductionists (or property dualists) to become more rigid in maintaining that there exist independent mental properties. With that in mind, let us consider the status of abstract entities.
Abstract Entities
Regardless of what the reductionists may think, it seems that room has to be made for abstract entities in some manner. It will be helpful to study them because mind and mental properties appear to be abstract entities. It just does not seem possible to say that things like Hercules and Santa Claus do not exist in any sense. Thousands of people have talked and written about Hercules for centuries.
Billions of people around the world talk about Santa Claus. They can readily describe him. At the same time, almost as many people would readily agree that Santa Claus does not exist and has never existed. By that, they would mean that there has never been a person physically present in the world by the name of Santa Claus who has performed the feats attributed to him like flying on a sled pulled by a team of reindeer. In spite of this, they would still go on comfortably talking and even celebrating Santa Claus. They certainly would not understand, and much less agree, that there was no sense in which Santa Claus did not exist.
The same is true of countless other entities. They simply cannot be denied. They count as imaginary or abstract entities. Concepts also fall in this category. Words and numbers are indispensable abstract, nonphysical entities. People argue whether particular words exist, but when this happens, they are not disputing whether the words exist physically. There could be a doubt about the existence of specific words like sequent, usufructuary, matutinal, effector, calve, cenatory. People in disagreement would not go look around for them in a field or a forest or a store. They would consult a dictionary.
You know that the printing of a particular word in your dictionary is just one example or token of that word. There is a token of that word in every dictionary. There would also be tokens in various other sources: newspapers, books, newsletters, internet web pages, advertisements. The more popular the word, the more tokens would be found.
Where then does that word that you looked up in your dictionary reside? Is it in the mind? Is it in some special place in the world or the universe? Is there a heaven for abstractions that Plato was trying to understand? Are there official representations or models of each word or other abstraction somewhere? If these entities are in the mind, then whose mind? Are words in the mind of the world's top lexicographer who publishes the most authoritative dictionary? Would each word for each different language have the model for it in the brain of the topmost lexicographer of that language? How is one to know who the top lexicographer is for each language?
A committee of top lexicographers could designate the model of each word. There could be genuine disagreement on the meaning of words. This would put the model in doubt. What would the model be for words that have more than one meaning like "bear," "club," and "matter." One can try to think of other possible ways to come up with a representative of each word, but it will be a dead end. The fact is that there is no defining model anywhere.
The philosophers who want to find a definite representation or object for each abstraction have recently come to be called "realists." Those opposed to them hold that abstractions are wholly dependent on the mind and have no existence of their own. They are predictably called "antirealists." In this respect, they sound very much like the old ideaists, but there is a big difference.
An antirealist can be a physicalist, believing that all objects in space exist in reality as solid objects. At the same time, the antirealist may not believe that abstractions exist in space or anywhere else except in the minds that invent or imagine them. An ideaist agrees with the antirealist that abstractions do not exist in space but are simply creations of the human mind. However, the ideaist additionally believes that objects that appear to us in space are also just a product of the mind.
The following is a likely description of how language came about. I will use English words but the development must have been similar in other languages. At some point a long time ago, a person used the word "water" for the flowing stuff that plants and animals need in order to survive. The person's acquaintances heard it and decided to adopt it. Some other person may have thought of the word "moon" for the white sphere that sometimes appeared in the sky. Another person may have coined the word "rock" and still another the word "tree." A vocabulary was built gradually among people in this manner. Additional words may have originated when one person, say the tribal chieftain or some intellectual appointed by him, dictated what names were to be given to other objects along with some verbs to describe action. This all would have been oral as writing was not invented for a long time yet to come.
Whichever way vocabulary came to be, it was clearly a human invention. There is no evidence that languages were handed down from the sky or that they were found on a tall rock wall without any sign of human authorship. As evidence of human invention, a number of shortcomings can be found in language: ambiguities, odd spelling, etc. Then there is the proliferation of hundreds of languages around the world with some words from different languages that are supposed to have the same meaning but in fact differ in subtle ways. Also there are words in one language that have no exact equivalent meaning in another. Looking in a good dictionary of a modern language at the etymologies of words shows how the words may have developed historically, at times from other languages.
Etymology makes it abundantly clear that languages are a product of development through human minds. Then there are new words frequently appearing on the scene. Examples are email, glitch, boombox, fractal, knockoff, spreadsheet, bitcoin, transgender, hacker, grunge, scumbag, prion. What has to be said about words and other abstractions is that they exist in minds. Since no model of the word "mountain" exists there is a different version of the word in each person's mind. This would seem to create a pool of confusion, but for the most part discourse goes smoothly. People's individual definitions of words are close enough to each other for things to usually work out.
This does not mean that the general working definition exists in any particular place. You should simply think of a word as an imaginary abstraction that everyone tacitly agrees on while using the word in communicating with others. There may be a slight difference between the common working definition and what each individual would write down as what s/he believes is correct. The general working definition seems to work most of the time.
In spite of all the foregoing considerations, there is still the stubborn idea that a word has to have a reality beyond the mere tokens found in brains, dictionaries, books, and other places. The realists also have a point. While words certainly have their beginning in individual human minds, they eventually seem to take on a life of their own. This may seem especially true of old, established words and those that in turn refer to abstractions like "real," "love," "truth," and "beauty." The realist would say these words point to important and far-ranging concepts that have long pervaded culture. They therefore should be considered real in some sense.
Word and Concept
The question then arises: What is the difference between a word and a concept. Does the word "territory" point to a concept? Is it a label for the concept? Or are the word and the concept one and the same thing? I will opt for the idea that the word is a label for a concept or general idea that can be associated with subordinate ideas, actions, customs, and other behavior. A concept can stand on its own without a word.
An example of the grasping of a concept without having a word for it may be found in vertebrates in connection with their concept of territory. Anyone who has observed dogs, cats, or a number of vertebrate species is well aware that an individual animal will set out a certain area for itself and those close to it. It will try to mark that territory with its urine and body scents. It will act aggressively if an intruder ventures into its territory but will usually be more reserved if it goes into the territory of another. In the wild it seems that an animal knows that it is advisable to try to maintain an area for itself that can provide a reliable source of food. It may also realize that other animals have to possess territory of their own in order to survive. Based on their behavior, it seems that these animals have a sound understanding of the concept of territory, at least as far as it fits their needs. Yet they have no word for it.
It is similar to the situation of the person who is not familiar with the word "love." Consider a person who feels and shows strong affection for others and is fully aware of those feelings and yet does not have any word for that set of feelings. The person could also be aware that other people have those feelings and how important those feelings of affection are to them and how strong they are in social interaction. This could have happened to persons 100,000 years ago when humans were just starting to grapple with what words to apply to abstractions. It is credible that they would nevertheless have been able to understand that there was a concept of love evident in some living things through their behavior and expressions without having a word for it.
All this serves to show that there is a difference between a concept and the word that signifies it. There are additional examples that bolster the case. Both words and concepts are abstractions, and the question at hand is whether abstractions are real on a level equal with physical objects.
Concept of Mind
We have seen from the nature and history of words that they are abstractions that are human-made. Territory, love, and beauty are likewise abstractions created by humans and are used by humans to facilitate their understanding of the world. People made words that identify those concepts, but those words are different in different languages. This is because different people made up the words at different times. There was no universal word for any concept.
One of those concepts is mind, to bring us back to the subject that is our original interest. Mind was probably a word and concept invented by humans more than 50,000 years ago. However, as with so many other words and concepts, there was no clear target to which it referred. Each person could have a different version. The same is true today, but there is probably more agreement based on how much more is known about human physiology.
Generally, mind is meant as whatever does the thinking, remembering, calculating, and similar activities. There could have been disagreements on whether some functions were performed in some other parts of the body. Someone could have claimed to know that arithmetical calculations were performed in the hands and fingers given that was the way many people performed the task. They could have thought there was a small organ in each hand that performed the calculations. Others could have thought that emotional responses were centered in the chest since that is where feelings seem to emanate. Early humans may have thought that some mental functions were performed by different parts of the body, while other people could have thought it was a unified something that spread and performed its functions throughout the body or at least a large part of the body.
Just alleging that there is something and calling it a mind does not show what in fact it is. All you have done is make a vague assignment of the performance of a group of functions to a human-created concept. There is no reason to consider that this concept called mind has any special ontological status. Like other concepts, it calls attention to a family of acts observed in humans and some other animals, and those acts are the only thing that can be said to reliably exist.
Mind is only a verbally expressed concept referring to certain behavior and feeling. It is not clear enough what behavior should form the basis of mind. As mentioned before, it is questionable that sensations should be considered mental. Why are emotions mental? Don't they involve the central nervous system which is spread throughout the body? Doesn't that make emotions bodily (physically) based?
It would appear that the mind is simply the brain. Physicalists make this claim. Surely, now that the brain is so well known after decades of close investigation, many people equate the two, especially those more scientifically in tune. Everyone need not use the word mind in a way that equates it in every way with the brain especially those who associate the mind with a soul. Nor would those people be required to accept the brain as the mind. After all, the concept of mind was begun thousands of years ago by people groping for a word to describe certain human abilities. They knew nothing about the brain.
The concept of mind may have changed in meaning through the ages. There was no one who dictated the direction. It just changed as circumstances occurred and is now close in meaning to that of the brain. That the concept of mind has been a changing one through the ages further testifies to its creation by humans just like other concepts such as territory, weather, and fear. There is nothing special about it or about the mental properties like thinking or remembering. Mental properties are also abstractions that refer simply to a category of characteristics.
Gilbert Ryle was apparently trying to say something like this in The Concept of Mind but was misunderstood and dismissed as a behaviorist. The identity theorists claimed that mind was identical with the brain, but it is not. This is because mind is an abstract concept, and the brain is a physical organ. They are closely related but different. The mind and its properties are conceptual tools that help understand and communicate about particular classes of physical actions, the mental ones.
Physical objects in space and abstract concepts are very different. Abstract concepts often refer to physical objects but not the other way around. As in the case of numbers, abstract concepts are dependent for their existence on the physical domain. That is because the physical objects called humans invented them. Without human minds, there would be no concepts on this earth, including the one of mind. The position of ontological physicalism is the correct one here: everything including mental concepts is based on the physical.
Solution: Orders of Existence
All this leads us to the solution of the mind-body problem. It may have already been offered. Stephen Priest seems the closest to having it. The solution is certainly the type that fits in the area of linguistic philosophy, especially in connection with pronouncements of people like Wittgenstein that philosophical problems are at root only problems involving confusions in language. The mind-body problem is certainly such a problem. It is really a mind problem since it is replete with confusion regarding the word "mind".
The problem is that mind is an abstract concept itself created by the mind and body is a physical object in space and as such the two belong in very different categories. They should not be conflated. It is the old apples and oranges problem. To carelessly mix talk about mind and body is to commit a category mistake. The error was first labeled by Ryle in the The Concept of Mind in wrestling with the mind-body problem. Perhaps his explanation was not clear enough or his detractors diverted attention from his argument. Hopefully, my presentation here with regard to the nature of mind as an abstract object will be closer to the mark.
Reference will be made to orders of existence with "categories" sometimes being used synonymously with "orders." Orders will be preferred because of the use in logic of the concept of orders of logic. First, body (matter) will comprise the first order of existence. This level of existence will include all physical phenomena starting from the smallest, i.e. quarks and leptons, as well as additionally energy, to the largest, i.e. the largest stars.
The second order of existence will constitute everything else. This will include all the abstractions such as those discussed above. It will include mind. Ontological dualists will object that this scheme leaves no room for mind and soul--as they see it, a totally separate category from the two mentioned. They would be correct. There is no room for mind and soul other than as abstractions created by humans. They are very important and useful abstractions but nothing more.
Property dualism also seems afflicted by confusion regarding orders of existence. It does not go as far as full-fledged dualism in treating mental events on the same level as physical objects, but it does seem to count them as more than abstractions. It is as if it counted them as lying in an additional order of existence. On this level, mental properties are not physical in nature, but neither are they just abstract concepts. At least, the property dualists don't seem to talk that way. There seems to be a special place for mental properties. The other nonmentally related concepts such as territory and money do not seem to rate the same status. The property dualists commit a category mistake in believing in a special category for mental properties.
It would seem that most if not all property dualists are nonreductive physicalists. Looking at existence from the perspective of nonreductive physicalism, the claim appears to again be that mental abstractions are not reducible to physical objects. We have seen that such is not the case. All abstractions reduce to the physical because physical humans create them all. For this reason, the second order--abstract entities--can probably be considered as actually a suborder of the first one-physical entities. Nonreductive physicalists, like their subclass of property dualists, may also be making the category mistake of unwittingly assigning a special substance status to mental phenomena. If on the other hand, they are merely saying that abstractions do not reduce to physical objects because the two are in different orders of existence, that is a different story. I will try to clarify.
First, i want to make sure that it is clear that talk of orders of existence is not talk about substances. Remember that ontological or substance dualism posits mind and body (matter) as the two different materials out of which everything in the universe is constructed. I am rejecting that and proposing physical monism as the foundation. Everything that exists in the universe is physical and belongs in order 1 of existence. Order here is not synonymous with substance. There is only one substance--the physical--but there are two orders.
The problem is that we humans talk of the existence of abstractions using the same words that we use when we discuss the existence of physical objects. We use words like "exist," "to be," or "real" just as readily when talking about abstractions as when talking of physical objects. For instance, you will hear references like the "the grass is real" as well as "his devotion is real." There is "those decrepit bridges " and also " those decrepit values." It would be better if there could be different words to designate the existence of physical objects from those used to refer to abstractions. It seems that this interchangeability is common among languages. Unfortunately, it has been the source of great confusion, with philosophers spending thousands of hours and tons of paper and ink to try to solve the problem.
So one reason for positing order 2 of existence is to remind people that while the language is the same, what is being pointed out is very different. Order 2 contains those things that exist or are real in some sense but not in any physical sense. Constructing an order 2 keeps people aware that it contains members like numbers and morals that must be said to exist in some unclear sense but which are not physical objects. Neither are they a part of any second substance with equal status with the only substance, the physical.
The solution that some physicalists came up with before was that only physical objects were real, even in the widest sense, and nothing else. That was too simple. Abstractions have to be given their due regard. They exist in some sense, so the solution is to admit their existence but make a separate category for them-really a subcategory. That way, people will be reminded that to be an abstraction does not imply being or being capable of being a physical object. Nor do abstractions have any equal status with physical objects. Every time someone claims that something exists, they can be asked what they mean--physical existence or abstract existence. They are two separate orders and should never be mixed together. Mind, soul, and their properties are clearly order 2.
Mental Experiences Affect Nothing
When Jay says, "I would like a chocolate drink" or if Judy says, "I feel a desire to play my violin," the only thing they are doing is making observations about their inner feelings using old, traditional language containing words like mind and desire. They are speaking the language of "folk psychology." They are saying nothing about what the neurons in their brain are doing or what neurochemicals are being activated. They are merely expressing themselves in the way people have for millennia, using labels invented long ago. They are not intending to describe anything about what physiological processes are taking place inside themselves. They are merely communicating what from their own conscious perspective they are feeling in a way that people listening can understand. It does not matter much that "mind" and "desire" are not precisely defined. A vague idea of what the words mean is enough to get the point across.
In this vein, Jaegwon Kim once posed the question: How does a desire manage to get the appropriate neurons to fire and thereby cause the right muscles to contract?("Mind-Body Problem," The Oxford Companion to Philosophy) The answer is that no such thing happens. A desire can do nothing. A desire is our everyday description of how persons feel when they develop a definite want for some thing or situation to take place. A desire cannot cause neurons to fire. Only other neurons or physiological bodily components can activate neurons. A desire is simply an abstract concept used something that is being felt in the body. Of course, it is possible to speak of a desire (or a fear or other mental event) firing neurons and thus get a basic point across, but that is not even close as a description of what actually takes place.
What actually happens is more like the following scenario. This will be a poor attempt at an oversimplified physiological description. Max sees another boy pass by eating a large chocolate ice cream cone on a hot summer day. Max's eyes first register the scene of the boy with the ice cream cone through cells in their pupils that focus the image onto the cells of the retina at the back of each eye. From there, the image or information about it is transported by the optic nerve at the back of the eyes to the appropriate nerve cells in the brain that process the information.
The information is transmitted to what may be called memory neurons to see if Max has ever observed this kind of scene before. The information is then sent to a group of desire neurons where the impulse may arise to crave the ice cream cone or not or even to be repelled by it. (I don't know that neuroscientists have ever identified any neurons specifically as memory or desire neurons, but for our purposes i think we can assume there are neurons like them.) If a desire were produced in the desire neurons, then they would get the appropriate neurons to fire and thereby cause the right muscles to contract.
What muscles would become involved would depend on what other neurons were activated in the entire process. Probably the muscles that would be stimulated in Max would be the ones that would make him walk to the ice cream store that the other boy was coming from in order to buy an ice cream cone of his own. However, other neurons for whatever reason could be activated making Max simply walk to the boy and take the cone away from him.
So what takes place is a complex physiological process involving neurons performing different functions in different areas of the brain. There is no abstract desire that somehow sets it all off. Instead, it is started by an outside stimulus that involves a number of parts of the body to interpret and to make a decision on how to respond. To say that desire causes a person to undertake certain action is inaccurate. The statement can be made, but it amounts to using the abstract concept of desire in a shorthand manner to very roughly describe what someone feels that motivates her/im to physically obtain the target of their desire or to feel frustrated if they don't get it.
It is a category mistake to mix (1) physical events with (2) abstract mental states or properties. It has been the cause of great confusion resulting in the mind problem. The two categories have to be kept apart except for casual conversation.
Mind and Computer
Two imperfect analogies come to mind that may help clarify the point that two processes can take place simultaneously that appear to be intertwined but are not. The first involves the computer and the languages that it uses. Take the word processing that is done on computers to write letters, reports, and books. Examples of word-processing programs are Wordpad, Word, and Open Office Writer. These programs are written in what is called high-level computer language that is closer to ordinary English than lower-level languages and therefore easier for the programmer to write and revise.(Ron White, How Computers Work (Indianapolis, Indiana: Que, 1999) 57.) Say you want to write the word "metaphysics." You first strike the key with the letter "m," then the one with the letter "e," the one with the letter "t," and so on. You also need to know some other keystroke combinations in order to make the program perform certain functions like deleting characters, setting margins, and closing the program. Those keystrokes and commands are simple for you to understand, and you may think that the computer understands the words you are using in order to know what characters to type. That is not the way computers work at all. The computer's processor can only understand 0's and 1's. It does this very fast but that is all it knows to do. This computer language is called machine language. There are two important processes going on here. You are typing in a language (English) that you understand, but the computer processor is understanding your keystrokes as 0's and 1's based on the program written by the computer programmer. Each keystroke you type has a different set of 0's and 1's for the processor to understand.
The analogy is this. The English keystrokes made by you the typist are like mental language. Typists and writers can talk freely in English about what they are typing in English. They don't need to talk about the machine language. For every English character there is a corresponding set of 0's and 1's, but other than that, there is no relation between the two languages. The typists do not have to know what the computer is doing. They do not need to be concerned that the words they finally see on the computer screen are produced by an arcane computer language and electrical impulses.
This is similar to the relation of mental language to neurological actions. People talk about their thinking, remembering, fears, and hopes, but that is only language used for ready and easy description of what the person observes is going on in their bodies. It does not describe what is occurring in a neurological sense, including the transmission of electrical impulses and the action of neurotransmitters in the body. It is this neurological action that is in fact taking place, and the mental talk is only a linguistic description. Any feeling of fear is simply that--what the person experiences and possibly discusses with others. It is not what is actually going on inside the brain and the rest of the body.
Another imperfect analogy stems from the television screen. A person from a primitive background with no familiarity with television could think that he is observing actual people and places inside the television (especially a big screen one). It seems unlikely that someone would think this for very long, but assume that it happens.
Say that what is being shown on television is actually a live event, let's say it is the Rose Bowl Parade. The naive viewer thinks that the parade is somehow taking place inside the television, but in fact there are two events taking place. The first is the actual parade taking place in California, and the second is an electronic reproduction in the television of what is taking place in the parade. It won't be necessary to go into the details of how the reproduction takes place. Suffice it to say that a complicated electronic process takes place in the television after receiving an electromagnetic transmission through airwaves from California. Talk about events taking place in the mind is like the observation of images on the television screen. They are what people observe, but it is not what is actually happening in the brain and nervous system to actually produce the experiences of people.
The Orders and Some Theories of Mind
Does the solution to the mind-body problem provided here explain something of what philosophers have brought up as theories of the mind? First, take the idea of epiphenomenalism and the related ideas of anomalous monism. Under the epiphenomenal group of doctrines, physical events take place that are described as mental events but mental events have no effect on physical events. This is consistent with the two orders of existence proposed here. The physical order determines the abstract order but not the other way around.
Physical events occurring in Jack's brain cause an old memory to pop into his brain, and he talks about it while using mental terms. Neurons in Sara's brain come up with a solution to an arithmetic problem. She realizes that and cheers about it. All the events that occur in the brain have physical causes that originate in the brain. If a person has a mental experience like remembering a date or learning a song, that experience does not cause anything in the brain. Mental events are only names and descriptions of what the person experiences. They cause nothing.
Under the double aspect theory, the mental and the physical are simply different aspects of the same underlying substance. Spinoza was the first to propose the double aspect view. The doctrine is open to many questions, mostly depending on the meaning of definitions such as the one of aspect. It has also been said that the two aspects are not different properties but full descriptions of humans under different categories. If the categories are the same ones i have proposed here, then double aspect theory appears similar to the idea of the two orders of existence. There is, however, a big difference between the two theories, which is that--according to Spinoza at least--there is a substance that underlies the orders and to which they refer. What exactly is this substance is not clear. The idea is incoherent and not followed much anymore.
It is interesting to see how identity theory fares under the idea of two orders of existence. The pronouncement from identity theorists that mental events are "nothing over and above" physical events is consistent with the two orders of existence in which the mental is only an abstraction and not in any way to be considered above the physical.
Where identity theory runs into a problem with orders of existence is on any claim that there is an identity between the two orders of existence. Under the orders idea, mental terms are only abstractions concocted by humans and cannot be identical to the actual physical events that produce what people perceive as mental acts. One category is physical and the other is very different in that it is linguistic, descriptive, and derivative on the physical. There is no way the two can be considered identical. It is correct to say that mental events are not something over and above physical events, but that does not imply an exact identity, although it seems that has been the assumption up to now.
It is interesting to find that nonreductive materialism turns out to be correct under the two orders of existence scheme. Mental events and properties do not reduce to physical ones because they are too different. They belong to different orders, and there is no way that you can reduce a mental event to a physical one. The two events occur simultaneously, but one--the mental--is a conceptual or linguistic description that makes the event comprehensible to humans while the other is what is actually taking place in the physical body. It does not make sense to talk about reducing descriptions to actual physical processes. The mental description is wholly dependent on the occurrence of the physical event.
If Alex gets hit on the head hard with a baseball, he might exclaim, "That hurt." His exclamation of pain and the physical process that made him feel pain are closely related in time and place. The pain is in the same place as the blow. Nevertheless under the two orders of existence idea, you have two very different types of occurrences. The mental part is just a description of what Alex feels. It is not, by its very nature, reducible to the physical process.
Eliminativism is the doctrine that mental concepts fall under the rubric of folk psychology. The "folk" have invented mental terms throughout history. To this point, eliminativism is hardly distinguishable from the two orders of existence doctrine. Both approaches are in agreement: mental concepts have no independent existence of their own but are fully the creation of humans. They are not adequate in explaining what goes on in the body in a physiological sense, and they were not intended to function in such a precise manner.
The difference is that eliminativism goes beyond the two-order theory and claims that folk psychology is false and should be completely eliminated. The eliminativist objection is that folk psychology is in reality an empirical theory and as such it is false because upon close examination it is not very accurate in its predictions.(Paul Churchland, "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes," Moser and Trout 150.) As more knowledge is gained through neuroscience, folk psychology is shown to be less and less valid. So it is best not to even keep folk psychology around. Discard it completely and concentrate on the facts as presented by neuroscience.
The eliminativists have made some very good points and should not be as quickly dismissed as they have been by some philosophers. If they are talking about eliminating folk psychology as a theory, they seem to be standing on solid ground. If on the other hand, they are talking of eliminating folk psychological conversation altogether such as talking about an observation like "my mind is playing tricks on me" or "I saw stars when my head hit the pole," then their position is extreme. It seems that a number of their critics have taken the eliminativist critique to require total elimination and thus have not left eliminativism much credence.
There should be no problem in keeping folk psychological terms around for use in everyday conversation. It would be very hard to eradicate the statements related to feelings. They have been around for thousands of years and serve some purpose. It is hard to imagine psychological counseling without being able to talk about thought, self-esteem, fear, anger, sadness, worry, and other emotions. It may be off-base as a neurological theory, but it seems useful when people try to understand their emotions and thoughts. Besides the controversy over the complete elimination of folk psychology, eliminativism comes closest to the ideas related to the two orders of existence.
Functionalism is consistent with two orders of existence theory. The difference between functionalism and the other approaches involves order 1--physical objects. What functionalism holds is that there can be different physical substrates supporting the mental processes that take place. Traditionally, it was considered that what counts as physical in the relationship of the mind and the body was biological material, the stuff that humans and other thinking animals are made of. The functionalists have good reason to say that it is not necessary that the material be of biological origin. It could just as well be all metal and plastic as in the case of the material that makes up robots. According to the functionalists, the material that enables the mental processes is not important. The mental processes can be carried out in a variety of media and work in exactly the same manner regardless.
While the functionalist arguments seem to make sense, there is not much empirical data to show to what extent they are true. Still, functionalists agree that abstractions do not enjoy status as a separate substance. Functionalism is a physicalist theory. However, it does not answer the dualist claim that there is a different mental substance that affects whatever the physical substrate might be.
Qualia
I would like to make some peripheral remarks on qualia--the subjective aspects of conscious experience like the reflection of the sun on water, the sound of wind in trees, the taste of chocolate fudge, the feel of hair running through the fingers. These experiences are supposed to be completely subjective to the individual having them and supposedly not explainable in physiological terms. This belief in the uniqueness and impenetrability of subjective experience forms some of the basis for nonreductive materialism. Supposedly, qualia cannot be reduced to physical processes. On the other hand, the nonreductionists do not offer any alternate nonphysical explanation for qualia. It is a mystery and apparently will always remain one.
Two possible answers to this approach come to mind. The first has been presented by philosophers, among them Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland. It begins by pointing out that with respect to qualia nonreductive materialists ultimately maintain that they cannot imagine any physical explanation to the nature of qualia and so there must not be one. The fallacy in that thinking is that to say that one cannot imagine how a certain outcome would be produced does not guarantee that the outcome could never be fully explainable. Not being able to imagine the outcome may just show a lack of imagination and nothing else. A physical explanation of the outcome may still be found in the future. This may be the case with regard to the puzzle involving qualia.
The second answer is that indeed there may be no explanation of why qualia appear in the manner they do. That is, things like the particular look of the color green or the particular sound of raindrops hitting the ground are brute facts that arbitrarily came out the way they did in the development of the earth. At some point, the leaves had to be red or green or some other color, and they turned out to look like the latter. There is no explanation for it except that in the final appearance and outcome things just turned out a certain way. It may just be a random occurrence.
Similar questions could be asked about other natural appearances. For instance, why are the shapes of the stomach or the liver exactly the way they are? It may be that there is a long and exact explanation for the operation of the physical processes behind the growth of grass or the fermenting of wine, but that some facts relating to that growth especially those related to the end of the process like color simply have no explanation. That is just the way they manifest themselves in the end.
To ask why grass is green is like asking why in traffic signal lights the light on the bottom indicates you can go, why the light on top means you have to stop, and why the light in the middle means stop if you can. This common arrangement of lights could have been different. It could still be redone if traffic engineers chose to do so. There is the claim that someone pointed out that red was the most visible of the three, so it was better that it be on top. That may be so but it is open to question. A different choice could have been easily made. The choices could just as well have been made arbitrarily. You can think of a variety of other combinations but the present scheme is just the way it came out.
At the final point, things have to be configured a certain way, and it need not be tied to the constitution of the item. A traffic signal light contains materials like different metals, glass, paint, and electrical current. These do not dictate the colors and positions of the lights. The two factors can be arbitrarily chosen and then learned by motorists without any connection to the materials in the signal light itself.
Likewise with objects occurring in nature, the particular qualia they present to the human senses (color, sound, fragrance) may not always be explainable by physical laws or the composition of the material object. Probably qualia sometimes turn out the way they are for no sound reason. Perhaps this explanation could be called manifestation theory. Qualia sometimes manifest themselves to sentient beings in a certain way without any explanation. There is no mystery involved or any dualistic explanation. Dualism--ontological or otherwise--is no answer. It just adds to the confusion. Why did pain have to be used as a notification? Why couldn't one hear sweet little chimes instead?
Chapter Conclusion
After examination from several perspectives, the idea of two orders of existence stands up well as the solution to the mind-body problem. Mind and body belong to two distinct orders that should never be confused. The confusion of the two is what has produced much of the endless wrangling over whether abstractions (including minds) exist. The fact is abstractions do exist but not in any physical sense. They exist only in an imaginary and derivative sense. Without the existence of physical objects, they would have no existence whatsoever.
So, if anyone ever asks whether something exists or whether something is real, the test is to see whether it falls in order 1, physical existence, or in order 2, abstract existence. Once that determination is reached, a more meaningful judgment can be made on the nature of the item. Based on what neurologists and biochemists have found about the brain, it has become clear that the mind is merely a folk-created abstraction.
An alternative way of answering the question is to the say that everything exists. The important issue that follows after that is to determine the exact nature of the existence of the item under scrutiny. It can be (1) physical or (2) abstract and derivative on the physical. Even Caspar the Ghost exists--in an abstractly imaginary manner.
One could be ready to conclude at this point that, in addition to great certainty in the existence of a multitude of physical objects throughout the universe, it is clear that matter, both familiar and unusual, constitutes everything that exists in the universe. In other words, everything in the universe is made of matter, regardless of how complex, or derivative it is. We have reviewed much evidence for this proposition including that the mind is always dependent upon a physical object, the brain. Even ghosts must be physical since they are allegedly experienced by the eye and ear.
One idea that can certainly be eliminated based on the previous analysis is the converse of materialism, which is that spirit constitutes everything in the universe. This is the most extreme form of spiritualism--ideaism. However, it seems that many ideaists do not seem to go to the extreme of completely denying the existence of matter but only insist that spirit is a more fundamental substance. Most spiritualists think the same way and are therefore dualists. Christian Scientists are true ideaists.
The Possibilities for Spirit
In spite of all the evidence, i now want to bend over backward and discuss some possibilities for spirit. It may be that spirit in animals is always completely dependent on their brains, but another kind of spirit could possibly stand alone in other configurations like that of the Holy Spirit of Christianity. Even in connection with the human brain, spirit could still be ultimately independent, just intricately intertwined with it.
In the following discussion, soul and spirit will be treated as synonymous with mind. Mind has had more of a connection with rationality; spirit and soul have been more closely associated with emotionality. I will revert back to talking of mind as some sort of independent entity as opposed to the way i treated it in the last chapter--as a mere concept. This does not mean i am in any way abandoning the two orders of existence doctrine. The reason for treating it traditionally is that it is how discussions related to spirit have been lodged. I will talk more of spirit in Book 3 in discussing God and religious belief.
Many people to this day--including well educated ones--maintain that there is something called spirit or soul, that it can be completely separated from the body, and that this separation occurs when a person dies. Philosophers and scientists have not made any official pronouncement on whether physicalism (materialism) is the correct doctrine to believe. Scientists do not believe that the scientific endeavor involves making judgments on doctrines like physicalism because that involves metaphysics, which is properly outside of science. Those judgments are apart from some philosophical problems that have to be confronted in order to engage in the practice of science.
It can also be pointed out that in spite of all the physical objects in the universe, there could still be mental or spiritual substance somewhere out there, even if only a very small amount. Somewhere out there, a planet could exist made at least partly of spiritual substance. It could be just an unusual planet, or it could be the home of God and his angels. It could be the place called heaven. It could be named planet H1. Planet H2 would be hell.
Another speculation could be that, although the universe is populated with physical objects, there is still some supernatural or spiritual substance working behind the scenes to keep everything in motion. The concept of force, which causes motion, is not completely understood by physicists. Gravity is still a great mystery. The related concept of energy leaves unanswered questions. Aristotle invented the twin ideas of kinetic energy and potential energy. A boulder as it falls from a cliff exhibits kinetic energy, but if it only sits on the edge of the cliff with the potential of falling off, it possesses potential energy. The latter idea is not very enlightening. Astronomers have observed something in space that they called dark matter and dark energy. They don't know what they are, have never isolated either one, and do not know their characteristics. Scientists decided they might exist because that could help explain things.
It should be no surprise if some spiritualists take these vague assertions about a strange matter and energy, especially the latter, to support that they are the long sought spiritual substance.(One example of this may be found in Gerald Schroeder, The Hidden Face of God (New York, New York: Touchstone, 2001), although he is never clear enough about what he thinks God could be. Apparently, the idea is related to digitalized information.) Regardless of the status of dark matter and dark energy, there are still enough mysterious aspects about the cosmos like energy that leave the door open for claims about spiritual substance.
Another possibility for spiritual substance would be inside the individual's brain. That could be the brain of individual humans or the brain of a physical God. It could be located in a small spot in the brain--next to the pineal gland perhaps. Descartes speculated that the soul was located in the pineal gland. Or it could be interlaced throughout the brain to help with its various functions. It could constitute numerous special cells located throughout the brain that would help with spiritual functions. They could be called spiritons. John Eccles, Nobel Prize winning neurophysiologist, posited special brain cells to be contrasted with neurons, the regular brain cells. He called them psychons but did not say where they could be located or give much detail on how they worked.(See his book Understanding the Brain (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973).) In all these cases, the brain along with the body and all objects outside the body would be physical in the sense that we know them to be.
A nonphysical mind can more plausibly move objects if it dwells inside the body it affects. Even then there is no idea how it can initiate a physical process. Spiritualists have still not given an account of how a mind can actually control different parts of the body if it cannot physically come into contact with them.
These speculations about spiritual substance all accept a physical universe but present at least a speculative case for an additional substance that actually controls the universe or humans or both. Many, if not most, people find this case convincing.(Videotape, Soul of the Universe, BBC TV, Anthony Clare, moderator. Clare interviewed a number of people who said they felt there has to be a soul or mind of the universe. It can't just all be starkly physical.)
What Spirit Could Be Made Of
Spiritualists have not tried very hard to define spiritual substance, and indeed it is hard to do. Materialists have tried harder but have also had difficulty providing a simple definition of material substance; one will be attempted in Chapter 14.
What is spirit made of? There is the assertion that it is simply made of nothing. You are supposed to believe that on faith. To say that it is made of nothing, that it is just there, is very unsatisfying. Why should anyone making a serious inquiry believe that? How can that help them accept the existence of spirit? This presents an especially difficult burden for the proponent of belief in disembodied spirits. How can a disembodied spirit made of nothing be distinguished from ordinary run-of-the-mill nothing? Furthermore, if spirits are made of nothing, how does the spiritualist know they are there? If the answer is that ghosts are spirits that can be seen and heard, then as discussed before, it is not credible that they can be made of anything but matter. Humans are not known to be able to see or hear in any way other than by physical means that are only known to involve physical objects. Perhaps it would be better for the spiritualist not to consider ghosts as spirits but rather to consign them to the superstition of a limited number of people.
The main objection to nonphysical spirit is still that it cannot interact with physical objects. It seems an unavoidable requirement that only a physical object be able to interact with physical objects. Only a physical object can exert the force to move or stop another physical object. Physical objects do not move spontaneously without a physical explanation. Objects that are not visibly moved by another object are moved by air, as in the case of pollen, or by gravity if they are put in a position to fall or roll downwards.
Telekinesis
There is no credible evidence that a human mind can move objects beyond its own body. Such a phenomenon is called telekinesis. Some have claimed to be able to do it, but it is suspected that they have merely used magic tricks. Uri Geller claimed to be able to perform extraordinary mental feats such as bending spoons in the 1970's. Critics of people like Geller say that they are simply good magicians and have no special powers.
He was exposed on the Tonight Show on the NBC television network by host Johnny Carson, who was himself an accomplished magician. The night Geller appeared on the show, he was supposed to hold a spoon in his hand and bend it with his mind. Geller brought a spoon with him, but Carson took it from him, gave him a different spoon, and asked him to bend that spoon with his mind. Geller said he couldn't perform the feat at that time. Carson gave him the opportunity to perform the feat later in the show but Geller was never able to regain his wondrous telekinetic power.
Even if some humans can engage in telekinesis, it is still possible that it is entirely explainable by physical interaction. It could be, for example, that the gifted telekinetic brain is able to physically produce a strong enough electromagnetic field to direct it accurately at an object and move it. The field would be invisible but still physical. It is doubtful that an invisible field with such power is even theoretically possible; i only injected it as a possible explanation.
Unfathomable Spirit
The spiritualist can claim that spirit is made of something but that it cannot be analyzed or broken down in any way. It is meant to be that way--a mystery to be revered and not disturbed. It is a position not much different from the assertion that spirit is made of nothing. It is one step removed from being made of nothing. Again it must be asked, how does the spiritualist witness that such is the case? How can s/he tell the nature of spirit if it is so mysterious and unfathomable?
Ultimately, the spiritualist can claim to have the power of mystical knowledge about spirit without having to know any details. A mystic's answer on having a special route to knowledge avoids the questions that come up and is not satisfying to someone who wants to examine the issue thoroughly. In one sense, the mystical answer can seem arrogant, implying that the mystic who provides the requested information has the special privilege of gaining cosmic knowledge that the rest of us are too unfortunate to possess. The more likely explanation of the mystic's feeling about having special knowledge is that s/he has no interest in delving deeply into the questions and is simply intent on stubbornly clinging to preconceived opinion.
Spatter
The best approach for spiritualists to take with regard to the composition of the soul is to maintain that it is made of matter but that it is a different matter. This would involve the concession that everything is matter, the physicalist position. There would then be two choices for the composition of matter. The idea that spiritual matter (call it spatter for short) is actually physical, i.e. extended in space, avoids the objections that have been lodged in the past against the idea that spirit was not extended in space. It would avoid some of the difficulties found in the mind problem. Drawing a sharp divide like Descartes did where body was extended in space while the mind was not may have unnecessarily created the problem in the first place.
The first possibility is for spirit or mind to be constructed from ordinary physical matter such as what is found in the world. This kind of spirit could be made from an element or elements from the periodic table of elements. To this date, there has been no element or combination of elements that has been found that supports spirit or spiritual properties. No element or material has been observed that controls other elements or objects and directs their movement and action other than through ordinary, well-observed physical or chemical means. Nor has any special material been found in the brain that controls the movements of the body or at least the spiritual functions.
It is often unclear what people mean by the word "spiritual," but it would seem to include emotional functions such as expressing love, gratitude, appreciation, respect, wonder, and love toward the deity. Unfortunately, it probably also has to include some negative emotions like anger and hatred toward those who blaspheme, disobey, or even just ignore the deity.
Spiritualists could argue that physiologists and chemists have simply not looked hard enough for any material that could produce spiritual effects. Physical scientists simply are not interested in looking for those kinds of properties in matter and are blind to such effects. The answer to that is that it should have beeen obvious if there were any specific material that always clearly produced spiritual effects. A discovery of such a phenomenon should not be hard to reach. It would be clear that one material was causing spiritual actions and reactions. In any case, it is advisable that reputable scientists mount a vigorous search for spatter. A thorough search should involve a number of successful experiments or demonstrations, and not just one.
It could be claimed that the effect is not obvious because the element or spatter is a special one that cannot be detected. The spiritual acts are clearly seen, but it cannot be observed that this secret spiritual substance is causing them. It could be asserted that this special material is causing the movement of the planets. Maybe it is a form of gravity. This would explain why gravity has been so difficult for physicists to understand.
If this spatter is an element, it could be an element that has yet to be discovered. Or it could be one that is not found in nature, and thus there has not been the opportunity to study it. It could alternatively be one of the natural elements, or it could be an isotope. For instance, it could be an isotope of krypton. An isotope is an alternate form of an element that has a different number of neutrons in its nucleus from the number found in the nucleus of the main form of the atom. For example, the regular form of helium has two protons and two neutrons in its nucleus while the isotope helium-3 has two protons and one neutron.(David Darling, The Universal Book of Astronomy (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004) 262). It could be that the creator of the universe decided to make that isotope of krypton undetectable to humans for some reason, and so it will never be discovered.
People at times say that the creator wanted to keep some things hidden and mysterious. This could be one of those hidden facts. How a physical element constructed of protons, neutrons, and electrons like other physical elements and moving freely in space could remain hidden to human methods of detection such as the powerful scanning tunneling microscope would be an amazing puzzle. Spiritualists claim that the deity can perform what to humans is impossible, so they should have no problem in believing in a hidden, physical, three-dimensional spatter that makes up spirit.
The second possibility for the composition of spatter would be a material that while existing in space would be totally alien to what is normally found in the universe. It would still react with regular matter and fully control all the functions normally associated with spirit. It would not necessarily be made of the protons, neutrons, and electrons of regular, worldly matter or at least not with the same structure with which we have become familiar. It could be truly elemental and not divisible into anything further, or it could merely appear so because it would simply be impenetrable to human investigation. That could be because, as in the prior hypothetical case of a krypton isotope, the creator would want it to remain a mystery.
There may be other possibilities for a spatter that could constitute spirit or mind, but the foregoing two possibilities should at least make the idea plausible of a monistic composition of the universe consisting completely of matter, with some of that matter being a spiritual matter (spatter). These two propositions are highly speculative with no evidence to support them, but they demonstrate that it is not an absolute theoretical requirement that spirit be nonphysical.
If there were to be such a spatter, or physical spirit, everything in the universe would be physical and the metaphysical problem of the composition of the universe would clearly be solved. The question of whether there truly was a spatter would be a problem in both physics and theology. The task for physicists would be to understand the composition of spatter. The question in theology would be why God would want to construct a secret matter to support spirit. Why would he not want to reveal the existence and nature of spatter?
An important question arises in case spirit is made of some kind of matter. It is usually considered that spirits consist of a very thin, diaphanous material, thinner than smoke. Spirit has to apparently be this way in order to move at blazing speeds and to pass through thick walls. How then can a spirit have the full capacity to think?
All thinking with which we are familiar involves complex brains composed of matter of considerable density and complexity. The human brain occupies almost a cubic foot. It contains billions of neurons that are activated in complicated ways with the aid of a variety of chemical compounds. It is very hard to comprehend how all the complex mental activities that spirits can supposedly undertake can be accomplished with any physical structure much less complex than that of the human brain. The thin cloud that is often imagined as a spirit would not seem substantial enough to be able to carry out the processes of thought.
I chose to explore the idea of a physically based spirit in order to make sure all the possibilities were covered, no matter how remote. The truth is that there is next to no chance that there is anything like spatter. Surely the physicists and biologists would have detected something like it but they have not. Then there is the vagueness and inconsistency of the actions of spirit in our everyday world. Remember there are also supposedly evil spirits. Why should they exist?
Why a Mysterious God?
Why haven't the theists who insist on believing in an immaterial God asked themselves why God should be so secretive? It is clear that God is very secretive, witnessed simply by the fact that he does not clearly appear to humans and converse with them. Answers to prayers cannot count in this regard because those can simply be based on the imagination of the person supposedly receiving the answers.
Beyond this basic secretiveness, the immaterialist believer thinks that God has an additional means of operating by stealth--invisibility. From every indication, invisibility is a feature of immateriality. So God for some reason wants to remain a secret to humans who cannot apparently perceive immaterial beings or are not very adept at it. Occasionally, someone happens upon an apparition of a dead person, an angel, or the Virgin Mary. Why should God to go to such lengths to make himself invisible to his favorite creatures, humans?
Believers in a Material God
Then there is the question of how God got to be a nonphysical spirit. Why must God be a spiritual being? Is there a physical or logical necessity that requires it? What is the origin of the idea that God must be a spirit? Many Christians today assume that their God is spirit, but a closer look at their Bible, especially the Tanakh (Jewish or Old Testament), will show that there are ample passages showing that he is a material God.
Starting with Genesis 1:26, there is the assertion that God made humans in his own image. While it is claimed that the passage does not refer to physical likeness,(The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) footnote) it would seem that it could just as well be interpreted as assuming a physical likeness, especially in light of the later passages that talk of a physical likeness.
In Exodus 24:10, Moses and the elders of Israel "saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement of sapphire stone . . . ." This was not only a material God but he had a very humanlike form. In Exodus 33:22, the Lord told Moses, "I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by, then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen."
In Numbers 12:8, God stated that he spoke with Moses "face to face." In Isaiah 6:1, the prophet claimed to see the Lord sitting on a throne and that "the hem of his robe filled the temple." Ezekiel 1:26, Jeremiah 1:9, and Amos 7:7 and 9:1 also referred to a humanlike form of God.
In the Christian Testament, there is talk of God as a spirit (John 4:24) and as invisible (Colossians 1:15), but even in this testament, there is language showing a belief that he takes a material form. In Luke 24:39 the divine Jesus appeared to his disciples after his crucifixion to assure them that he was alive. He wanted to make sure that they understood that he was not a mere ghost since a ghost is the form taken by a dead person. With this in mind, he entreated them, "Look at my hands and feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." To further show that he was human flesh, he ate broiled fish in their presence. The divine Jesus--consistent with the Jewish testament-was in the form of flesh and blood. According to Hebrews 1:3, Jesus sat down in heaven at the right hand of God. Only physical beings sit.
There is an interesting account in Acts 17:16-34 of Paul having a discussion with some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers at the Aeropagus in Athens. He ends it by proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus by God, at which some of the philosophers scoff. Once again the belief is asserted that a divine being would have to be resurrected in flesh and blood as opposed to simply returning as a spirit.
The more important point is that the Athenian philosophers scoff at the mention of resurrection. This is to be expected since Greeks would be more inclined to believe that people's nonphysical souls extracted themselves from their corpses and departed for a new life, perhaps as part of a process of reincarnation. Ancient Greeks were no doubt aware that after any living thing died the flesh disappeared from the body until only a skeleton was left. Therefore, it was hard for them to imagine how resurrection of the body to its prior living form could be accomplished. By contrast, it appears that Paul and contemporary Jews continued to believe in the possibility of bodily resurrection. This was consistent with Jewish thinking that shunned reference to disembodied spirits, divine or otherwise.
The Influence of Plato
This belief in resurrection would have probably continued without interruption in Christianity were it not for the influence of Plato on the Roman world. His writings had a number of references to a soul that was separate from the body. A sidenote: Plato's ideas on the immortality and nature of the soul were not always the same in his different dialogues. ("Plato," The Oxford Companion to Philosophy 1995.)
The Platonic view of the soul received a strong boost from Plotinus around 250 C.E. in his teachings. He was the founder of a school that was labeled Neoplatonism in the 1800's.("Neoplatonism," Id.) Plotinus immigrated to Rome from Alexandria. He and his pupil Porphyry significantly modified Plato's original ideas. Other versions of Neoplatonism emerged in later centuries. Among Plotinus' ideas, which were presented in articles and letters, was that of physical souls that were subject to reincarnation.
While neither Plotinus nor Porphyry was sympathetic to Christianity, later Christian thinkers adopted large portions of Neoplatonism to their philosophies. Some of these were the Greek Church fathers, Basil, and the two Gregories. In the Latin Church, there were Augustine, Boethius Eriugena, and Thomas Aquinas. In the Middle Ages, certain Jewish and Islamic philosophers were influenced by Neoplatonism. In the 1600's, some English Christian theorists formed a group that later received the label of Cambridge Platonists.
Ideas of an immaterial God or immaterial soul did not come from the Jews or Jesus or Paul or their contemporaries. There is thus no reason to believe that God cannot be material, even from the standpoint of religion. For centuries, there have been two avenues of opinion on whether God is physical or nonphysical. Christianity presents a difficult problem in its doctrine of the Trinity: that God consists of three parts, Father, Son and Holy Spirit or Ghost. Apparently, the Father and Son must be physical, based on the preceding Bible verses. The Holy Ghost is nonphysical--perhaps another influence of Platonic thought. So the Christian Trinity is both material and immaterial.
The Actions of an Immaterial God
Belief in an immaterial God presents all the difficulties mentioned before involved in the idea of a nonphysical entity. How does an immaterial being affect and interact with material objects? How can a material being like a human observe an immaterial being or God, as has been claimed by some people? The early Christian leaders came up with the idea of a dualistic God through the Trinity that can act as a material being when necessary but at other times go forward nonphysically when that is convenient.
The nonphysical part comes in handy when it becomes desirable to imagine that God can be at many places at once or when it is nice to imagine that God can come to your aid in an instant, perhaps coming hundreds of light-years away from another part of the universe. As a nonphysical being, the laws of physics do not bind him.
Immaterial beings like angels and human ghosts can supposedly also perform physical impossibilities like easily moving through walls and standing in fire or flying through the sky. It is also comforting to believe that our human souls can be wisked away as a spirit after we have finished living here on earth and taken immediately to heaven. Those who believe in such fantastic immaterial beings probably have not wanted to explore the problems involved with even conceiving of a being that is truly not made of any kind of material. Better not to ask questions when it is so comforting to continue to believe in the magic of an immaterial God.
One motivation for not believing in a physical God is the association of all material objects with decay. All material things with which we are familiar have a limited existence before they succumb to decay or deterioration. This applies to inanimate objects as well as all living things. A big reason theists believe in God is because they think he will help them get around the problem of their body's decay upon death. The most obvious way to get around that bodily death is to believe in the existence of an immaterial soul that survives afterward.
The reluctance to believe in a physical God comes from the fear that God himself would then be subject to decay and death. Surely that would be an untenable and lamentable situation. It has to be, in the minds of believers in the soul, that God is either partially or totally immaterial in order for him to avoid death.
This shows a surprising lack of faith in the abilities of God. After all, basic theist doctrine is that God is omnipotent. Why could it not be then that God, even if material, would be able to arrange things such that he could avoid death? Perhaps, he could rejuvenate himself periodically to ensure that he would never be old. After all, we upgrade computers and smartphones. Or he could let himself grow old and then at a certain point physically transfer all the information in his brain to a new body.
It could be a completely different body from the original one. God could certainly choose what body he desired to inhabit next. He could also inhabit a new planet, if he so chose! A material God would not be able to get to a distant location instantaneously because of the physical limit on speed, but he could post angels at relay stations all over the universe to carry out his actions. There are those who espoused a doctrine of theistic materialism.
With respect to mortals, shouldn't God be able to resurrect persons from their skeletons or ashes? If that were not possible, wouldn't he and his angels keep meticulous records of each person's DNA and experiences so that their bodies could later be precisely reproduced along with the exact configuration of their brain with all its records of the person's experiences?
For many theists God has to be spiritual (immaterial) in order to live forever. This also allows him to be more powerful. This requires the more general belief that immaterial entities are possible. The problem is that the idea of immaterial entities is incoherent. Secondly, it is not necessary for God to be immaterial or purely spiritual in order to exist. A material God could do great things.
Ultimately, the important points about God are his concern and actions in favor of his creation. These and other favorable qualities do not depend on what material he is made of. It depends on the actions he takes to further the welfare of creatures. This is similar to the functionalist position with respect to the nature of mind: it is not important what material makes up minds but their function.
What is it that is physical (material)? In Chapter 4, i simply used the traditional idea that matter could be considered to be bodies that exist in space. It may be better to have a more precise definition. Differences in ideas of space and the advance of particle physics make it advisable to further explore the definition of physical and material. I will start with the more traditional definition of matter and then consider some alternatives.
The Objects in Space
A widely used definition of matter is (1) what makes up the objects in space. It was once thought that only a few things made up all objects. Remember that Thales thought everything was made of water while other Greek philosophers had similar ideas. It could be objected that definition (1) is too indefinite. The "what" it mentions should be more precisely described and articulated. This may be desirable, but we simply are not sure how many particles exist in the universe. It should not be necessary to enumerate all the ingredients that go into making up the objects.
Take something like the definitions of "mountain" or "building." No definition can get a good sense of all mountains or buildings. Can a definition of mountain give a good sense of what makes the difference between a mountain and a hill or a mound? There is simply no fine line between these. This brings up the sorites or heap paradox. It asks at what point do grains of sugar piled on top of each other become a heap. It may just be that pointing to or showing pictures of examples may be the best way to convey meaning in these cases--an ostensive definition.
Likewise in the case of matter, it may be that simply pointing out examples of matter is the best that can be done to get a definition. Furthermore, the composition of the thing to be defined, the definiens, need not be specified. This is the case even though the ingredients of the object may be important. In the case of a building, an architect or builder needs to know what are appropriate materials for the construction of the particular building, but they are not necessary in defining "building." The type of rock found in a mountain tells much about its age as well as the natural processes that went into its formation but does not define "mountain." There are numerous other examples in which pointing out the ingredients of the definiens is not considered necessary in providing its definition. With matter, it seems that this has traditionally been expected, but perhaps that is the reason it has been so difficult to define. Simply telling what the definiens is generally or pointing out examples of it should be sufficient.
Definition (1) is adequate. Nevertheless, it could be possible to be more precise. Today physicists tell us there are 88 natural elements each with respective atoms that are divisible into a number of smaller particles. Regardless of the number of elements or particles that might exist in the universe (and more may well be discovered later), it should be acceptable to say that matter is made of whatever subatomic particles are found in the universe, today or in the future, without having to enumerate what those components are. It would be wonderful if such precision were available, but that lack should not invalidate a less exact definition. The better definition would then be that matter is (2) the particles that make up the objects in space.
Definition (2) could be said to leave out the matter that does not exist in objects. There are many atoms and particles in the air around us as well as in space beyond the earth that stand alone and not as parts of objects. Of course, we know oxygen is in the air at all times but cannot be seen. The most elusive are certain particles that are extremely hard to detect because they barely interact with any matter around them. The prime example of these is the neutrino, which took about 25 years to detect after it had been predicted to exist. There may be billions of neutrinos coming from the sun everyday, and yet they are so light in mass that they pass right through the earth and through our bodies without notice. Other elusive particles that have not been detected but only estimated to exist are the axion, photino, and gravitino.
Of course, one solution could be to count these tiny particles as objects. After all they do have some mass, however little that might be. They have three dimensions, if you can believe that. In addition to the puzzlement about these particles, the question arises: where do energy and gravity fit in?
Pieces
Let us include as particles those that make up the atoms like the quarks and leptons as well as the loner particles floating around. What about any smaller pieces that may later be discovered to make up the particles. Numerous subatomic particles may be discovered in the future, or the ones that now seem to be the smallest constituents may be further divisible into smaller components.
For this reason, some critics have expressed doubt about finding an adequate definition of matter or of physical.(See e.g., Barbara Montero, "The Body Problem," 33 Nous 3 p. 183 (1999).) They point out that without knowing what is ultimately out there as far as all the constituents involved, there is no way to come up with a satisfactory definition. I don't think that is a significant objection. It is too much like the other quibbles into which philosophers get involved.
As i previously pointed out, there is no requirement that a definition enumerate all the ingredients or components of the definiens. An example was the definition of a mountain or a building. Another example could be that of a cake. A definition of a cake could be made that only said it was a solid food made of baked batter. It would not have to mention anything about the ingredients. It might be more enlightening to list ingredients, but it would not by any means be indispensable. Likewise in the case of matter, an adequate definition can be given by just saying "particles."
In spite of dismissing the objection that all the particles may not have been discovered, i will offer a definition that is a little more specific and tries to take into account future discoveries of entities in space. To do that, i will simply come up with a name for all particles that are now known plus those that may later be discovered. There would even be the possibility that one or more of today's known particles could be split into two or more smaller particles and that those newer particles could in turn be split into even smaller particles and so on. Let all those known particles and possible particles be collectively called "pieces."
The newest definition would then be matter is (3) the pieces that make up the objects in space. Or it could be the pieces that make up all objects. The definitions offered before (3) were adequate, but definition (3) is more specific and tries to meet the objections to the other definitions. No doubt there are some who would find fault with it. I believe that it is a good definition of matter, but we know that there is much more in space than just matter. What is missing is the mention of "energy."
Energy
It is now well established that energy is in abundance both inside the atom as well as outside in space. The strong nuclear force binds quarks while the weak nuclear force operates between leptons like the electron. Whenever you turn on a light bulb, millions of photons are dispersed into the room. They are considered particles but are said to give off electromagnetic radiation, a form of energy. Then there is the most famous formula in physics, which was part of the general theory of relativity: E=mc2. It states that energy and matter are the same thing in different forms. They are interchangeable. It is now considered that the universe is filled with dark energy, which could be neutrinos. With all this, it is hard to ignore energy when talking about what exists in space.
There seems to be a need to talk about both matter and energy in some contexts including the philosophical. This is the reason that philosophers now often talk about physicalism rather than materialism. There is the tendency to refer to the physical rather than to matter or the material. "Physical" tends to be used as a noun in this context, being used in reference not only to material things but also to energy.
The hyphenated word "matter-energy" has sometimes been used. I propose the use of the word "menergy." With this in mind, it may be better to make the point of talking about the physical rather than matter and to define the physical: the menergy in space.
Now there may be someone who would claim that while holy spirits exist beyond space and time, they are still capable of living in space if they so desire. After all, they have special powers. It would then seem that, at least while appearing in space, a spirit would have to convert itself into some form of energy or matter or "menergy." Nothing else seems to exist in space. If a spirit could exist as some form of menergy in space, it would then be an object. This could be said to contradict, or at least detract from, its "spirituality." It could also cast doubt on its ability to perform some of the magical feats while in space attributed to spirits.
Space
There are problems with assuming that there is a simple definition of space that can be readily accepted in defining what is physical. There are two approaches that can be used at this point due to the complications in defining space. The first involves coming up with a definition of matter that avoids the mention of space and thus avoids those complications. I offered that alternative in using pieces. Secondly, find an acceptable definition of space so that reference to space can be made. It would be desirable to find an acceptable alternative definition involving space.
There is no complete agreement on what is space, especially after the theory of relativity introduced the concept of spacetime. Agreement is much less common than nonscientists would think. To most people it is simple--the emptiness that extends indefinitely in all directions around us. It is an infinite receptacle for everything. It is nothing, yet in some sense it has to be a thing. After all we refer to it all the time. Then there is the idea that space has to have some solidity, maybe be a jelly or an ether or air. Historically, there have been a number of variations on these two themes.
The Pythagoreans who had opinions on a variety of subjects thought space was a very thin air. Parmenides got caught up in believing that it was impossible to say that nothing could exist; just mentioning the thing that could not exist meant that it existed. So with respect to space it was incomprehensible to consider it to be a vacuum or nothing. It had to be something. He did not give any further details. To Plato, space was a container but objects themselves were also empty space. What distinguished the empty space that made up the objects from the rest of unoccupied space was the fluctuations of geometrical surfaces. It is not clear where the geometrical surfaces were located, perhaps in Platonic heaven.
The early atomists (Leucippus and Democritus) believed in the void, the total emptiness of an infinite space. Lucretius referred to space as a container and seems to have believed in its infinite expanse.(J. J. C. Smart, "Space," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy 506.) This infinite space was filled with objects that were made of atoms that were indivisible, the smallest thing in existence. In contrast to Parmenides, the atomists were not afraid to talk of empty space as simply being nothing.
Like Parmenides, Descartes did not believe in a vacuum. To him, the defining characteristic of matter was that it was extended. A volume of space between two objects could be measured and thus was also extended. It could be measured. Space was then a material substance, but he did not elaborate on that. Isaac Newton insisted that space was absolute although the belief was not necessary to establish the laws of motion he formulated. He still seemed to have a need to think that there had to be one set of three-dimensional axes that was the absolute reference for all space. Philosophers today still write articles debating the status of absolute space.
Special Theory of Relativity
The idea of an absolute space was definitely brought into question by the theory of special relativity proposed by Einstein in 1905. The theory was devised as a result of Einstein's attempt to understand the motion of the earth with respect to light. An important consequence of the theory is the following: a flash of light observed by travelers in one frame of reference (set of three-dimensional axes) can be observed as happening at a different time by a second group of travelers moving on a different frame of reference. This is where relativity comes in. The occurrence of the flash is relative to the frame of reference of the observer; the flash need not occur at the absolute same time for observers in all different frames of reference.
The connection of the special theory of relativity (STR) with space is that it brought forward the use of four-dimensional spacetime made up of the three dimensions of space conjoined with time as a fourth dimension. Time is not something that is also in space. Spacetime is a mathematical convention, but STR has been confirmed by experiment many times so it is not just fanciful mathematical calculations. Some odd results of STR like the slowing of clocks on a spaceship traveling at very high speed are barely noticeable here on earth. High speeds, especially close to the speed of light, have to be involved for predicted results to become apparent. Very fast airplanes have measured the effect. Spacetime was very useful in the construction of the general theory of relativity.
Spacetime
Hermann Minkowski, a mathematics professor of Einstein, came up with the idea of applying spacetime to STR. He and others like Alfred North Whitehead thought that from then on only spacetime would be important in physical calculations. In a lecture Minkowski gave in 1908, he stated: "Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."("Minkowski, Hermann," John Gribbin, ed. Companion to the Cosmos (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown & Company, 1996) 274.)
Space by itself and time by itself have not been abandoned in our everyday life. Measurements on earth are still made in the same way as before Minkowski came up with spacetime, and clocks run at the same pace throughout the world. The use of time as the fourth dimension attached to the space with which we are familiar is understandable, but the two do not always have to be associated. Mathematicians talk about four-dimensional space, but they do not mean to refer to a literal space, as we know it in everyday living here on earth. It has been named a space because it is a mathematical extension of common three-dimensional space and was designed by analogy with it.
In the general theory of relativity, there is talk of the curvature of spacetime and about the degree of curvature in any given region being dependent upon the amount of matter present. At times the discussion seems to claim that curvature of spacetime implies curvature of space, but it is not clear how that happens since they are separate concepts. Based partly on these considerations, some cosmologists try to assess what happened at the Big Bang when it is estimated that not only was all matter created but also space itself. The assessment probably depends on how they define space. There are still questions about some of the assertions of general relativity and related theories. There is still not a complete understanding.
Space as Infinite Vacuum
Given the questions about the true nature of spacetime, there is no reason to refrain from considering space by itself, even in coming up with a definition for matter. It doesn't seem that we should be precluded from thinking of space just as it is ordinarily observed in a stationary position on earth. Until there is further evidence why it should not be so considered, treating space as it ordinarily appears should be valid and acceptable without having to take account of relativity theory.
With that in mind, the best definition for space would appear to be the one offered by the atomists: an infinite vacuum in all directions. It is the void, that is to say, nothing at all. It should also be acceptable to define it ostensively by pointing to it. It is hard to understand how it can be claimed that space is some sort of matter, a thin air or something similar. It seems that whatever is claimed to be there, e.g., a thin air, should be able to be eliminated.
At least in theory, one could imagine the removal, however difficult, of the thin air or whatever would be there. Whatever components the thin air were made of, one could imagine the removal of the atoms or particles constituting it. What would be left after that? Nothing, but wouldn't that be empty space, as we know it? Or would there be some sort of collapse of everything? If there were a collapse, it would seem that after the collapse, nothing would be left. That would leave us with empty space or a complete vacuum. The final result would be the same. It seems inevitable. What else could there be?
The same conclusion would seem to come from considering what there was before the Big Bang. Cosmologists talk of "quantum foam" existing at the first moment of existence of the universe in which particles could hardly be distinguished. There was an expansion immediately after that, but can one imagine an expansion without emptiness into which the expansion could take place? Again, what else could there be but nothing, which is exactly what is meant by empty space. Until the physicists and cosmologists come up with a clearer explanation of what they are talking about when they say that space was created with the Big Bang, it seems that it would be valid to think that there was and will always be empty space.
One could imagine another scenario in which the universe was not empty space and that would be, for instance, an endless slab of iron or gold, if you prefer. This slab would extend indefinitely in all directions. But wouldn't the infinite slab have to be placed in empty space, and if it were removed, would that not leave empty space? It seems that whatever we do, we are always left with nothing but empty space. We could go on to define matter with what we know of space at this point, but exploring the idea of time may be helpful.
Time
Time seems simple--the period between two events. The two events can be everyday events or historical events. Yet there is much mystery surrounding the phenomenon of time. For centuries poets have certainly liked to reflect upon its elusive qualities and reminisce about lost times. The theologians have claimed that God is timeless. That is not as difficult to comprehend if by that they mean that God had no beginning and will have no end but is more difficult to understand when the claim is that God is "outside of time." For one thing, the question arises, similar to the case of spirits, how can any being be outside of time and still be able to interact with things within the realm of time, as everything in the universe to do.
Philosophers have also been confused by time. J. M. E. McTaggart gave a well-known account of the nonexistence of time in the early 1900's. He devised an A series that consisted of the ordering of events into past, present, and future and a B series that was an ordering by earlier and later. The reasoning behind his claim has been refuted. McTaggart was a Hegelian ideaist and as such believed in only a spiritual reality. To him, physical objects as well as space and time did not exist.(J. Schneewind, "McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy 229.) As far as i know, he was not a Christian Scientist.
Much of the problem with understanding time stems from the way it manifests itself to humans psychologically. Depending upon our state of mind at the moment, one hour can "drag by" or "rush past." It depends on what we are doing during that hour. If we are waiting in line at an office to pay a charge, time goes by very slowly. If we are doing something enthralling like hiking in the Colorado Rockies or reading philosophy(?), we feel that time rushes past. Another point at which we can be confused over how much time has passed is upon awaking. At times, we can feel as if we have slept an hour, but upon looking at a clock see that only fifteen minutes passed. Sometimes it is just the opposite.
Then there is the question that has been asked many times: what is the nature of past, present, and future--the A series of McTaggart? It has been said that the past and future are not real because the past happened prior to the present and has now disappeared. It is no longer real. The future hasn't even occurred yet, so how can it be real? Only the present is real, but how do we measure it? Is it the ten-minute interval in which everything is now present? Someone may object that that is too long a period for the present. After all, even five minutes ago could be considered as the past. Should the time period of the present then be counted as one minute? Again, it could be objected that even five seconds ago can be considered the past. The argument could be kept up infinitesimally. Therefore, it could be claimed that the present also is not real. Any choice of a time period for the present would have to be arbitrary, but it could be made. It could then be said that the present at least is real.
Much of the mystery stems from the feeling that time is something that flows by. Poets say that it streams by in the "river of time." This may provide an attractive metaphor in poems, but close examination will show that it does not have any sound foundation in any nonfigurative sense. It forms what has been called the "myth of passage."(D. C. Williams, "The Myth of Passage," 48 Journal of Philosophy 457 (1951).) Time flows by like the water in a river, but what is that flow? How do we measure it? In minutes or hours per second? In seconds per second? We sit in the ship of the present and look out the window at time passing by from the future to the past. There is simply no river or train of time. Henri Bergson, a philosopher who was a contemporary of McTaggart, is a good example of someone who confused time with duration and stream-of-consciousness.
Periodic Motion and Time
Time is simply a method for keeping track of motion. We often need to keep track of motion. We may need to know how many motions can take place before or after another motion or set of motions take place. An example of this could involve what Jane can do during her lunch hour. Suppose she wants to walk to the Stoma Restaurant that is one mile away. If she has been granted two hours for lunch, she can probably go through all the motions necessary, i.e. walking, finding a table, moving her mouth and hands to eat, and so on, to go there and get back to her desk at the end of the lunch period. If she has only been allotted a half-hour for lunch, she simply would not be able to perform all those motions.
Or we may need to know the rate at which a certain set of motions took place. This could involve a race. Five track athletes could run a quarter-mile race. That is one complete revolution around a standard track. We can say the motion involved is that of completing the revolution and not be concerned with any individual motions of the runners. If we are only concerned with how fast the athletes run in comparison with each other in the particular race, all we have to do is observe the order in which they complete the revolution, i.e. the race. The runner who made the motion around the track first would do so in the shortest time.
We may want to compare today's race performances with performances by other runners in the quarter-mile on other days. We would want some method for measuring the performance of the motions and compare them. We may also want to assess whether any records were broken. We would want to devise a method for recording the motions. Wait, this has already been done with the invention of the clock. It performs its own motions that are compared with the motions of the runners. If we use different clocks for different quarter-mile races, we would want to make sure to keep them synchronized. A timed race then always involves a "race against the clock."
At other times, the motion we may want to keep track of is the motion of the hands of a clock itself. This happens when you tell a friend, "I'll meet you at the Stoma Restaurant at 1:00 o'clock." In this case, both you and the person you are meeting keep track of the motion of the hands of a clock or watch in order to know when to be at the restaurant. A clock has at least two and possibly three recurring motions going on at once-those of the hours, minutes, and seconds hands. When someone makes an appointment to meet someone else at a designated place at a particular time, both parties are agreeing to keep track of the motion of the hands of supposedly synchronized clocks and to be at the designated place when the motion of the hands reaches a certain position. Of course, the same motion does not apply in the case of digital clocks that display only numbers.
You can also estimate what motions you can undertake before the time you have designated for doing something. Suppose you told your friend at 9:00 A.M. that you would meet at 1:00 P.M. You could estimate that in the intervening four hours you could go to the store, clean your desk, check your email, and wash some clothes. This estimate is possible because your experience has taught you what motions you can undertake in comparison to the motions of a clock.
Chronometers
There are all kinds of other examples of keeping track of motions with an instrument for measurement. All cases involve motion of some kind, even if it is only the motion of the hands of a clock. The measurement of time need not always be with a clock. People were measuring time long before the invention of the clock. Primitive people were keeping time in different ways with the aid of the sun or other lights in the sky. The sun seems like the most obvious chronometer. It must have become apparent that the sun reached its highest point in the sky on a regular basis. These equal periods between the reaching of the highest point became known as days.
Our early ancestors also noticed that the sun shifted its position in the sky slightly every few days. It would slowly move southward and eventually shift northward to its starting position. The amount of sunlight and dark in each day varied but the sun eventually returned to the same position in the sky after 365 days. These periods became known as years. Months were based on the cycle of the moon from one new moon to the next one, which is almost 30 days.
What all these measurements of time have in common is that they are periodic motions. They are reliable in marking the same period over and over again with high accuracy. They do not synchronize with each other with great accuracy. That is why in order to fit the months into a year, there are months with 30 days, while others have 31 days, and February has 28. That is why there has to be an adjustment to the yearly calendar with an extra day every four years (leap year).
Now all this is different on other planets. The complete rotation of each planet around its own axis takes less or more time than the 24 hours it takes our planet. A day on those planets is correspondingly shorter or longer. The rotation of each planet around the sun also takes a different amount of time depending on the planet's distance from the sun and makes years shorter or longer than on earth.
The basis for hours and minutes does not have to be tied to astronomical phenomena. It is not necessary that a day be divided into twenty four hours or an hour into 60 minutes or a minute into 60 seconds. There are 1,440 minutes in a day. A full day could be divided into 10 hours with each hour having 144 minutes or into 12 hours with each hour having 120 minutes. It could be any combination that multiplied out to the 1,440 minutes in a day.
In order to keep track of the order of different events, people found that cataloguing years, months, and days was helpful. In order to keep track of events during a day, the sundial and the hourglass were invented. Eventually the clock was invented, was gradually improved in accuracy, and even kept track of seconds. Today we have atomic clocks that are extremely accurate. Stopwatches keep track of hundredths of seconds in events like races.
All this is to show that time is not some mysterious or magical phenomenon but simply a way of keeping track of events by the use of a periodic moving gauge. Different gauges have been used. Of course, the most accurate is preferable. Atomic clocks could probably be used as a basis for keeping track of all time from now on without ever having to consult the motion of the sun or any other heavenly objects. Time keeps tabs on events, and events are nothing more than a motion or set of motions in space.
Time in a year allows us to group the events that took place in that year and keep them separate from the events that took place in other years. Within any one year, time can differentiate between events in the first month and those that took place in some other month. The same can be done within a month to distinguish one day from another.
A Definition of Time
It is now time to give a definition of time: a periodic motion that allows for keeping track of the order of events. Time acts as a gauge of the order of motions based on its being a periodic motion. A test for this definition of time is to assume that the universe ceases to have any uniform motion including the motion of the world itself. Assume that this means that even a metronome cannot keep count of regular seconds. Any ticking of a metronome or clock is haphazard. The movement of the world around its axis would be random; it wouldn't even consistently have to spin around any one axis but could keep changing its axis in a frantic manner. In its orbit around the sun, it would change its speed and even completely stop and start without reason. Clocks simply could not run regularly and certainly would not be in synchronization with each other. The result is that nothing could keep track of time as is done now.
Modify this scenario a bit and say that the earth still spun around consistently on a single axis as it does now. Assume, however, that the spin around the axis was irregular and that the speed varied wildly in the journey around the sun. This would mean that the days would vary widely in length as well the years. Some days and years would be much shorter than others and every other length in between. On some days the morning might go by very fast, but the earth might then slow down, and the afternoon would drag on. Variations like these could happen in numerous ways. It would be exasperating.
You would be able to keep track of some events but not nearly as neatly as done now. You would not be able to keep reliable records of speeds or completion times in races since clocks would never run at uniformly reliable speeds. Calendars would still be of some use. You could keep track of the events that took place on a particular day or year even though the length of days and years would vary widely. The reason you could keep count of days and years is that days could still be differentiated by the rising of the sun and years by the sun reaching the same position in the sky it had occupied before.
You could not expect a process or project to take a specified amount of time. For instance, if you entered into a contract for a builder to construct a home for you, you could not expect the builder to complete the job in a specific number of days. It could turn out that the specified days would be too short, and it would be impossible to expect completion of the project in the previously specified time in days.
In races you could declare the winner and keep track of what place the other runners came in but there would not be much use to keep their times. They could not be compared to other races. It could be even worse. People could not control their motions. Like all other motions, their movements would be erratic. A runner could run very fast but then uncontrollably slow down for a few moments. Then the runner would be able to speed up again. This would happen erratically. It would be the plight of every runner. A race could not be a contest of ability then. It would be a random match of luck in who had the least involuntary muscular slow downs.
Another test of time would occur if all the matter in the universe were completely frozen. Nothing would move, not even the smallest particles, and there would be no evidence of energy anywhere. Remember that it is estimated that this may be the fate of the universe if it indeed is expanding in the way the latest astrophysical thinking indicates. In a universe in which nothing whatsoever moves, how would you keep time? There would be no method for doing it.
You might say that there could be an imaginary clock that would keep time. How could it function? If it were in the imagination of a brain, there would have to be motion in the brain for it to work. That could not be possible because the universe is supposed to be motionless.
Now assume that somehow there were only one thing left moving in the universe and that was an accurate clock. Nothing else would be moving except that clock. The question is whether time would then exist. You might say that there would be time since that one clock would keep it. Can one say there is time if there is no one there to observe it take place? Can there be time if no one keeps any record of it? There could be a million clocks all in perfect synchronization and performing with perfect accuracy. Could it then be said they were keeping time if there were no mind there to observe it? Would they not simply be just a million objects performing a synchronized mechanical action but nothing more? How could it be said to be anything more than periodic movement if there were no one there to appreciate what they were doing?
Relativity and Time
Before going further, it may be desirable to address some of the odd results with respect to time that come out of the special theory of relativity. The important point in connection with time is that under STR clocks will slow down if they travel at very high speeds. It will be especially noticeable if they travel at speeds close to that of light (186,282 miles or 300,000 meters per second). Does this happen only to clocks? If it did, there would be some reason to suspect that time was something truly special, like a special substance or element.
Alas, it happens to everything. All motions are slower on a frame of reference traveling at very high speed, for example, a spaceship. This is the reason behind the twin paradox. One of two twins leaves on a spaceship traveling at close to the speed of light for a long trip in outer space, while the other twin stays on earth. STR says that when the traveling twin returns to earth, she will be noticeably younger. She could be several years younger depending on the circumstances. So it is not just clocks that slow down. All processes slow down when traveling at ultrafast speeds. Also objects shrink in the direction of their motion and their masses increase. This has been shown various times through experiment.("Special Theory of Relativity," Gribbin 374.)
One such experiment involved the placing of a very accurate clock in the seat of an airplane that went on a long trip at high speeds. After the airplane returned, the time on the clock was measured and showed the clock had slowed down. It was only a fraction of a second slower, but it had slowed.
On earth, or on any planet for that matter, when an object or person is at a standstill or traveling at slow speeds as in an automobile, there is no perceptible slowing or time dilation, as scientists have named it. Time can be considered separately from space, and in fact, people consult time regularly without even thinking of space. Nevertheless, time is intimately related to space since it involves motion in space.
Spacetime has not eclipsed the notions of space and time as was previously predicted. Carlo Rovelli and Julian Barbour, pointed that out.(See Julian Barbour, The End of Time (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000).) In their studies of relativity, they questioned the importance of spacetime. They also expressed doubts about the existence of time. They pointed out that general relativity used field equations but those do have to depend on time.
They also went further and even expressed doubts about space. Instead of space, they saw objects as simply being differentiated by relative position. One wonders how this can be. What about what so obviously appears between objects? It would seem that we have been well justified all these centuries in thinking of that as space.
The scientists seem to have greater justification in doubting time rather than space, and McTaggart may have been right after all. Certainly if he was trying to cast doubt on the idea of time as something concrete like a substance or a material or an element, he was on the right track. Time is not concrete, but is a concept that was discovered for measuring and recording motion. Without motion, there can be no time, and you also need an observer to witness it all. McTaggart was probably more inclined to doubt the existence of time due to his ideaistic orientation. He may have been right but for the wrong reasons.
Regardless of whether it is McTaggart or modern scientists questioning space and time and spacetime, we are justified in considering space and time to exist in the way they appear to us on earth. At high speeds, there are relativistic effects but that does not mean that they cannot be reconciled with the manifestations that are seen everyday on earth and on any other planet in a stationary position. We can continue to see things this way until scientists give us strong reasons why we should reject the ordinary appearances of space and time. Furthermore, no one should be misled by the speculation that scientists sometimes fall into, especially when trying to write popular books that will appeal to the public.
Time Machines
Science fiction enthusiasts have talked about time machines for a long time, and more recently some hope has been given to such projects by some speculations by reputable scientists.(See "Time Travel," Gribbin 405.) I don't want go into the details of what has been proposed but would like to simply point out a possible problem for time travel.
There is an incredibly copious amount of matter in the universe, but still it is a finite amount. Under the law of conservation of matter, no new matter can be created. Assume there is only one universe, but even if there are other "parallel" universes, there is good reason to believe that the law of conservation of matter would also hold there. All objects in the universe are made of atoms including you.
Say that one day you have finally run all the necessary tests on your newly built time machine and are ready to go back in time. You choose to go back to January 1, 1,000 C.E. based on the Gregorian calendar. Every atom at any one instant is always performing a certain function, whether it is in the waters in the ocean, being part of somebody's gallbladder, being part of one of the white cliffs of Dover, being part of the eye of a grasshopper, and numerous other roles. (For the purpose of this demonstration, I think i can safely ignore the lone subatomic particles like the neutrinos that are floating around at any one time.)
On 1/1/1000 C.E., all atoms in the universe were occupied performing some function. Where are the atoms going to come from that will be needed to constitute your body and your time machine when you arrive there? You might answer that you will simply be taking the atoms with you from the earth today as you and your time machine travel back to your target date, but that can't be an acceptable answer.
The atoms that comprise your body today were present in the universe on 1/1/1000 but were performing various other tasks on that day. The atoms that are your body and your machine will also have to be in the places they were on January 1, 1000. How do you propose those atoms will be able to perform double duty? They will have to be in two places at once. As far as i have ever known, there is no warehouse of necessary atoms waiting for the use of time travelers to construct a new body when they land in the old time.
Another way of stating it is that the atoms that today constitute your body have performed numerous other roles for millennia before you were born. As time went by, they were conscripted to perform one of a number of different roles on and around the earth. On 1/1/1000 the atoms in your body and in your machine were engaged in numerous other assignments in various parts of the globe. There is no reason for those atoms to rush to congregate into making up your body and your time machine on your machine's command on 1/1/1000. The atoms can't both continue on their assigned tasks for 1/1/1000 as well as run to constitute you and your time machine. They couldn't be two performing two different tasks at two different places at one time.
If that could be done, it would not only disrupt the constitution of objects existing in 1/1/1000, it would also change the sequence of events from then until now. The atoms would not be able to follow the cause-and-effect sequence of events that took place after 1/1/1000 until now because they would be changed by their change of assignment to constitute you and your machine on 1/1/1000.
I mentioned the subject of time travel because i just wanted to express my reservations about it. I had no intention of having it add to the considerations of the nature of space and time.
Timelessness
With what we have considered about space and time, what can we now say about the ideas of something being "timeless" or "outside of time"? These terms are usually applied to God by theologians. I suspect there is much interest in the ideas because they are associated with immortality. Time is associated with the relentless approach of death, and so some people feel compelled to speculate on what the "timeless" realm might be like.
We found that time is a uniformly recurring motion that allows for keeping track of all other motions. There were two ways in which time would cease to function as we know it. The first would be for there to be no regular motion to be found to use as a reference to keep track of motion. Everything would act erratically. For things to be timeless, motions would have to be so topsy-turvy that it wouldn't even be possible to distinguish one day from the other or one year from the other. You truly could not keep track of events in any way.
The second way for time to stop functioning would be a total cessation of movement, the "end of time." The price of being in this timeless realm, however, would be to exist in a motionless state. There could not be a heartbeat because that would be in contradiction to a motionless state. Even God could could not move. Either scenario would accurately be called "timeless." There would simply not be anything resembling time. It would not be a pleasant existence. The same predicament would be found in the state called being "outside of time."
The same conundrums arise when considering the implications of statements such as "existing beyond space and time." There would be the same problems with respect to time, but they would be compounded by considerations of what it means to be "beyond space." Under what appears to be the implication of general relativity, space is a closed sphere, or at least analogous to one. In that case, nothing can be beyond space. Under the idea that space is an infinite void or goes on endlessly, what is beyond space is simply more space. Even if it is found that the space containing our universe is partitioned from other spaces, what is beyond space is simply more space. There is no avoiding that the labels like "timeless" and "outside of time" are meaningless.
Matter in Space
It should be safe to assume that the conclusions previously set out on the nature of space and time are on solid ground. The implications of general relativity may pose some threat to the familiar concepts of space and time, but it is well accepted that relativity applies to objects traveling at high speeds. In addition, the full implications of relativity with respect to the nature of space and time are still up in the air. Scientists are not in agreement on what that nature is. Basic facts of relativity have become well established through experiment, but any claims about what it indicates about space, time, and the borders of the universe are open to discussion. There is every reason to proceed with space and time as separate concepts. With that in mind, the definition of matter that refers to space should be acceptable.
The Status of Mathematics
Mathematics has long been studied to determine in what sense it is real. Certainly it cannot be said to consist of physical objects. It has always held a great fascination for philosophers. The attention goes back at least to the mystical reverence paid to it by the Pythagoreans. I spent much time in college wondering about the status of mathematics and the implications of its nature for the metaphysical status of other items. I found out that looking into the philosophy of mathematics helps in deciding on the reality of mathematics.
Mathematics is partly a language--a specialized one. It has commanded particular attention because of some unique features. It is always consistent, exhibits necessity in that its truths always follow from its axioms, is a priori (independent from empirical facts), and appears to be permanent. Those features help explain why the Pythagoreans and other early religious philosophers stood in such awe of it. Questions naturally arose as to the nature and source of mathematics. Was it divinely inspired? Was it a conduit to the divine?
Questions on the nature of mathematics persisted for centuries and continue to intrigue to this day. In the late 1800's, inquiry into the philosophy of mathematics or, as mathematicians more often refer to it, the foundations of mathematics, accelerated in pace with the research of men like J.W.R. Dedekind, Georg Cantor, Giuseppe Peano, and Gottlob Frege. Dedekind and Peano produced axioms for the natural numbers,("Dedekind, J.W.R.," The Oxford Companion to Philosophy) while Frege derived the natural numbers from sets.
Frege is considered a realist with respect to numbers. In mathematics, it has been customary to call realism, Platonism. Frege believed that mathematics could be derived purely from logical definitions--the view known as logicism.
Foundational Movements
In the early 1900's, two rival foundational movements arose that took on antiPlatonist stands. Intuitionism was based on intuitonist ideas of Kant and was a type of constructivism that holds that there are no mathematical objects independent of the mind but instead that a valid claim for the existence of a mathematical entity must be accomplished by a showing of how to find or construct it. The other foundational approach was formalism, which tried to avoid an ontology of mathematical objects by proposing that mathematics is established by proofs that are no more than marks made on pieces of paper following mechanical rules. The marks and formulas derived could be meaningless and yet the results would always be the same.
Although Frege was a realist, his logical ontology consisted of concepts and their extensions.("Logicism," The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.) This was obviously not a very concrete ontology. Many philosophers today think that logic should have no ontology.(Id.) If that is the case, any logic-derived mathematics would appear to also not have any ontology. None of the three foundational movements survived for a long time, but they inspired investigations and ideas up to this day.
Mathematicians and philosophers have varying ideas on what is to be included in their mathematical ontology, but there are not many who believe that there are distinct mathematical objects independent of the human mind. Thinking about ontology seems to take formalist lines: mathematics is represented by marks on paper following rules and need not represent anything at all. On the other hand, it can represent something and does when it is employed in the sciences. Whenever there is a professed belief in an ontology, it seems to revolve around abstract entities. Disagreements seem to be centered on what is to be properly included in mathematical ontology from the choices available like sets, points, numbers, and planes.
The Simple Beginnings of Mathematics
Numbers did not fall to earth mystically from the sky. Numbers were nowhere to be seen, either in nature or in the heavens. Humans invented numbers. The fact that numbers were created by the mind should not be taken to mean they possess a mystical quality, making them superior to physical objects found in the world. Neither is there any evidence that numbers were created in the mind of God and then bequeathed to humans. God surely would have thought of numbers long ago, but we have no evidence of any number delivery to earth.
As in the case of words, one can only imagine how numbers came to be invented. It is almost certain that no earthly animals other than humans came up with the idea of numbers, even if it has been reported that gorillas and parrots can recognize single digit numbers. Humans taught them that. Nor does it seem the case that humans found numbers on cave walls mysteriously without any evidence of human authorship.
It is most likely that many centuries passed before humans devised a number system. Note also that when they did the figures for numbers were not uniform across all cultures. There were the Roman numerals, the Arabic, and so on. There was probably not a great need for numbers for a long time. At first there was no reason trade could not be carried out using rough estimates of quantities to be bartered. For instance, two housewives might trade several stalks of broccoli for a big batch of strawberries. It wouldn't be important to count the exact amount of items involved or to weigh them. All that was necessary was that each saw the size and quality of the food items and decided that the amount she was receiving was sufficient for what she was giving. Trades were made in person, and people could see and inspect first hand what they were getting.
Two warriors could trade three spears for a bow and arrows. They could inspect and test them. If the one receiving the bow and arrows thought he should have more arrows to make the transaction even, he had several options to indicate that. He could say, "Another one," if that is all he wanted. He could say, "More," and the other warrior could set down more arrows, one at a time, until the first one was satisfied. If the first warrior was more mathematically inclined and wanted to indicate that he desired three more, he could have held up three digits of his hand. He would not need to have a name for "three." It would suffice that his fingers would represent symbols in a one-to-one representation of the additional arrows he wanted. (Note the noncoincidental double meaning of "digit." Digit is one of the numbers 1 thru 10 that comes from their first being counted on the fingers of the hands.)
Years later, it was seen necessary to keep records of trades for later reference. Simply making charcoal marks on the side of a large boulder could have first done this or arranging small sticks or pebbles on the ground. Later when papyrus came into use for writing, record keeping became easier. Record keeping probably arose after the profession of merchant came into being. Business people devoting themselves to full-time selling to large numbers of customers needed to keep good inventory of their goods. Some of their customers also probably desired to buy on credit, and accurate records definitely had to be kept for that purpose. It may have been that sticks on the ground or a series of vertical lines like |||| for "four" were used for some time. It may have been cumbersome but still possible to do for a small business.
After running into problems of not having enough ground space for all those sticks, accountants of the day had to get more creative. After all, representation of a quantity of 100 took 100 sticks or dashes. It was time-consuming just to make sure there were exactly 100 sticks in the representation. Someone had the idea to represent quantities by a single symbol to simplify matters rather than by a long string of dashes every time. After that, symbols could be combined to represent other quantities.
An interesting case study along those lines is found in the Roman numerals. If you will notice, the first three numbers are represented by vertical dashes: I, II, III, reminiscent of vertically-place sticks. After that, four is IV, which could still easily be represented by sticks, along with the other basic Roman numerals like V, X, and L. C for 100 can be formed with three sticks in block form.
The decimal or base-10 system is generally associated with Arabs living from the 8th century through the 11th century but actually had its beginning in several cultures including the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese. The Cretans, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans had systems similar to the Egyptian one.("Number System," The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Micropedia 1987.)
Numerical systems do not necessarily have to be based on 10. The Babylonians had one based on 60 and the Mayans one on 20. Computers use the binary system based on 2. There are differences in the old decimal systems and the one we use today. For one thing, the old systems did not always have place notation or include 0 as a number. (It is understandable that they would not count 0 as a number. After all, it is nothing, and numbers have always been thought as standing for quantities.)
The decimal system continued to be developed and eventually became very useful in making complex calculations and intricate measurements. The number system started out with the counting of whole numbers. Then one day when someone was cutting a pie, fractions were discovered. The Greeks called these rational numbers because a fraction constitutes a ratio between two numbers. They thought that was all the numbers until other numbers were discovered existing between the rational numbers that did not form a ratio. All these numbers plus their negative mirror images, the negative numbers, form what were named the real numbers. Negative numbers were not readily accepted.
Then there are the imaginary numbers. The basic imaginary number is the square root of -1, which was given the notation "i." If you think about it a little, you can see why it would have been thought that these numbers were meaningless, or at least imaginary. They were first identified around 100 C.E. but were ignored until the 1800's.
Then there are the complex numbers that are a combination of real and imaginary numbers. It is in contrast to the imaginary numbers that mathematicians think of the other numbers as real, but this is purely mathematical classification. It has nothing to do with the issue of whether numbers or mathematics are real in the metaphysical sense. The apparent reason why imaginary numbers were given that name is that they do not seem to reflect any measurements or quantities found in nature, as was the case with the "real" numbers.
The field of mathematics that studies the real numbers is known as real analysis, while that which covers the complex numbers is complex analysis. Neither one places a limit on the magnitude of the numbers. There is no known largest real number or smallest one in the negative direction. Numbers go to infinity in both directions. Nobody knows what happens at infinity. How can you ever reach it?
Many individual real numbers go on endlessly without being infinitely large. The integers and some fractions (rational numbers) like 1/2 and 1/5 are finite. Other fractions and those numbers that cannot be expressed as fractions go on indefinitely without end. The fractions like 1/3, 1/9 and 1/11 go on indefinitely when written in decimal notation. These are repeating decimals and are respectively, .3333 . . . . , .1111. . . . , and .0909. . . . . Then there are the many numbers with nonrepeating decimals that go on indefinitely. Two of the most famous ones are the square root of 2 = 1.4142135623 . . . . and pi = 3.1415926535 . . . . .
Infinity in mathematics can create puzzlement for lay people and mathematicians alike. The fraction one divided by infinity comes up from time to time in mathematical calculations, and it is perplexing what to think of it. It is clearly a minuscule quantity, next to nothing. In mathematics, it is called an infinitesimal and has to be considered an actual quantity of some sort. Some have criticized it for being too vague a concept.
Finitist Mathematics
While studying math in college, i tried to think of a solution to the problem posed by infinity. I asked what would happen if infinity were simply thrown out the window. Declaring that the system of real numbers would end at a chosen high number would do this. That high number would not have to be permanently set. It could be flexibly set depending on the need of those setting it.
For most purposes, one quadrillion would probably be large enough. (In the United States and France, one quadrillion is 1 followed by 15 zeros. In Great Britain and Germany, the 1 is followed by 24 zeros.) The smallest fraction would be 1 divided by one quadrillion. Unending fractions like .3333 . . could simply be truncated, or rounded off, after a prescribed number of places. You would choose the number of places you desired depending on how precise you wanted measurements to be. For ordinary measurements like in carpentry and clothes making, the numbers would not have to go very far since rounding is ordinarily done at three places or less. In general the number of places to the right of the decimal point could be the same as the number of zeros in the largest number. In the case of the quadrillion system in the United States, that would be 15 places to the right of the decimal point. That would seem to be more than enough for most worldly purposes and even celestial ones to a great extent.
If quadrillion were to prove not to be large enough, a higher number could be picked. You could pick the nice round number of decillion. In the U.S. that's 1 followed by 33 zeros. There could be an almost infinite number of such finitist systems each one based on each different number that could be used as the largest number.
The axioms and definitions that would support such systems and the consistency within any one system would be the same. They should not be different for each system. If one system proved adequate, so would all the rest. Perhaps, a better characterization is that it would be just one system but with different numbers chosen as the largest number.
An important objection that mathematicians would lodge against a finite system is that it would not have continuity. Take two numbers in a quadrillion based system with 15 decimal places to the right of the decimal point. Say that these two numbers have all their decimal places full and one follows the other in sequence. Say that one ends . . . 2493 and the following one ends . . . 2494. The objection would be that there is a discontinuity between the two numbers because they were arbitrarily truncated. If the numbers were allowed to go on indefinitely as they are in standard analysis, other numbers would exist between the two numbers. In fact, there is an infinity of numbers between the two numbers, and this is supposed to provide continuity from number to number.
In a finitist system, there is nothing like this, but the continuity could be defined to be there between two numbers that are contiguous like the two above. After all, the difference in the two numbers from a practical standpoint is extremely small. It seems a quibble to claim there is any significant gap there. It could be called a practical continuity.
Another way to demonstrate the difference between the infinite and the finite system is through use of the real number line with each point on the line representing a number. Take the line segment between 0 and 1.
Standard analysis assumes there is an infinity of numbers all less than 1 between 0 and 1. In fact, there is an infinity of numbers between any two numbers. Here is an example. Take any two numbers that appear in sequence with each other, such as 2 and 3. Add any fraction less than 1 to the smaller of the two numbers--say .3 in this example--and you come up with a third number, 2.3, between the first two. You can continue adding an infinity of numbers less than 1 to the smaller number.
Likewise in geometry, it is assumed that there is an infinity of points on any line segment. This is because it is assumed that between any two points--no matter how close to each other--there is always another point. This is supposed to be analogous to the real number system. The line segment above is composed of points, and the points can represent real numbers.
Under the finite approach, the segment would contain a large but limited amount of numbers. The maximum count would depend on how many places were allowed to the right of the decimal point. It seems that, for all practical purposes, not that many places would be necessary. You could specify 33 places to the right of the decimal point if you wanted to be sure you had enough numbers, and if that still was not enough, you could go higher.
Analogously in geometry, one could limit the number of points on a line. This could be done in several ways. One way would be to take a 10-centimeter long line segment and decide how many points would make it up. The next step would be to decide how wide a point would be. Presumably, a point would be a circle so its width would be the same as the diameter of the circle. The width of a point could be set at 1 micron which is 0.001 millimeter. That would mean there would be 100,000 microns in a 10-centimeter line segment. If you wanted smaller points, you could make one the width of an angstrom which is 0.0001 micron.
This could be called finitist geometry. It is closer to what is found in the physical world than is standard geometry with its alleged infinity of points on finite lengths and areas. It is clear that the amount of ink on any line drawn on a sheet of paper is always finite, so how can the line contain an infinity of points? This is remindful of Zeno's paradoxes: the racecourse and Achilles. The root of the problem in Zeno's paradoxes of motion is assuming that infinity exists in a finite physical world. Even the universe is finite according to the cosmologists. If you took the width of a point on a line segment to be the width of a quark, you would still have a finite amount of points.
I have not had the time or knowledge to develop the finitist system. I have only been discussing it but feel confident it can be done, if it hasn't already. I have heard of mathematicians developing valid systems of nonstandard analysis that are based on minute quantities similar to infinitesimals.
The Origins of Geometry
The impression is often given that geometry originated with Pythagoras since one of the most fundamental theorems of geometry was labeled with his name. Actually, it is doubtful that Pythagoras himself discovered the Pythagorean theorem. It was most likely his followers that came up with the mathematical findings thought to stem from Pythagoras. He was most likely just the founder of a religious brotherhood in the late 400's B.C.E. that thrived in southern Italy.
It was the Babylonians who should be given credit for achieving the first significant results in number theory and geometry.("The History of Mathematics," The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropedia 2008.) It appears that from at least the dynasty of Hammurabi around 1700 B.C.E., the Babylonians developed math in the service of commerce and land measurement.
Geometry was developed slowly for surveying. There is evidence of surveying among the early Egyptians, as well as the Babylonians. Like the rest of mathematics, geometry has followed a long, tortuous route, taking short, slow, and confused steps with no clear destination ahead and thus many surprises along the way. It was well after the efforts of the Babylonians that Pythagoras and later Greeks began to have an idealized vision of geometric figures like the triangle, circle, and cone. It culminated around 300 B.C.E. when Euclid took the truths of geometry as written by others before him and carefully organized them into his work, The Elements.
The Mental Nature of Mathematics
Mathematics has developed into a number of branches. To name some besides number theory, analysis, and geometry, there are algebra, combinatorics, game theory, matrix theory, numerical analysis, optimization, probability theory, set theory, statistics, and topology. The various branches exhibit such differences that it is hard to see how they can all fall under the rubric of mathematics. Topology is an interesting example of how different a branch can be. It does not deal with measurement or number. It has some similarity to geometry in that it deals with figures but not with the ones found in geometry like the circle and the plane.
Some attempt has been made at coming up with a definition of mathematics. It is something like this: the order of the relations between numbers or figures or both. Other elementary descriptions can be made, like that it involves logical reasoning, abstraction, and quantitative calculation. It has been a great aid in quantitative understanding in the sciences. It was first suggested by the measurement of quantities but was eventually developed into a purely abstract subject.
Mathematics in the World
This brings up the question of how mathematics has been capable of reflecting so many processes in nature so that reliable predictions and calculations can be carried out. There has been much puzzlement about this connection, and it seems that it has been seen as such a mystery for some that it has appeared magical or even mystical. How can such an accurate and consistent relation appear every time? Simple calculations like M = wRT x pV as well as more complex ones involving calculus or differential equations or some other branch of mathematics always provide the same result.
First, a mathematician comes up with a formula for calculating the product of one number by the square of another number which is a = bc2. The product always comes up the same every time you insert a particular pair of numbers for b and c. For instance if b = 3 and c=2, the product a will always compute to be 12. If b is a measurement of the mass of a physical object and c is the speed of light, then the product a is the energy released by an atomic reaction. Einstein first predicted that result based on algebraic calculations except that he wrote the equation e = mc2. Later, the results were confirmed with actual real world measurements. This means that the results actually fit the algebraic formula; they corresponded.
That is all that happens when a mathematical calculation gives a physical result in one of the sciences. Mathematical systems contain the means of producing a tremendous variety of equations. An equation like y = 4 + 2n was produced in algebra, but the figures by themselves have no meaning. They only tell what numerical value y will have if n has a certain value. It is all a matter of numerical values and nothing else. They do not signify anything beyond that. Perhaps Wittgenstein was trying to understand this feature when he told Russell that mathematics was a tautology.
If a scientist finds through experiment that there is a relationship between two quantities and that the relationship is given by the equation y = 4 + 2t, then it can be said that the equation represents something concrete, something in the physical world. Say that the t represents time in seconds and that y represents the number of bacteria in a petri dish. That is an example from the biological world, but the equation could also be used in physics, chemistry or other scientific branches.
There is no special attachment of the equation to science. It can be used wherever it fits the data. It may be of use in economics. There is no magic or special quality in the relation of the data to the equation other than that they fit together to provide the calculation of a second unknown quantity, called the dependent variable, based on a first quantity, called the independent variable. The equation itself expresses a relation among numbers and variables that can yield results based on rules of algebra. Calculations can be made without the figures standing for anything. The figures can stand on their own.
Another example could be what shows up as a curve on a graph in analytic geometry. Take any equation like y = x2 that defines a particular curve. The algebraic equation, and the curve it traces on the graph, is a mathematical abstraction and nothing more. Or it can represent something like velocity or acceleration that coincide with the equation. Other than that there is no special tie between mathematics and the measurable universe.
Mathematics was invented by the human mind and is manipulated and stored in the human mind and books manufactured by humans. A long history reveals this as a slow process. There is no other possible explanation for its existence. It is considered real by some not because of any physical reality but because of its necessity, consistency and universality. Necessity means the manner in which results follow forcefully and inevitably from initial configurations. Take two numbers, add them, and you always obtain the same sum. You derive the same sum today as well as 10,000 years ago and 10,000 years from now. Given the same calculation, mathematical results are always the same.
The universality is related to necessity and means that the same truths apply anywhere in the world and in the universe, as far as we can tell. Even if the figures are in a different notation, such as Roman numerals as opposed to Arabic ones, the results are the same. There seems to be something pervasive and eternal in all this, so it therefore would seem that mathematics and its notation is real, but it is not a physical reality. The sense in which mathematics is real is only in an abstract sense, like the way we saw words exist.
The closest that mathematics comes to a reality outside the mind is that numbers can represent individual physical objects. Each number can represent a stick that is lined up with others to represent quantities, for instance apples to be counted. Lines can represent the boundary lines between land properties. The foundation of mathematics is not sets although it can be derived from sets. The foundation is the whole numbers. In turn, the whole numbers were invented by humans to represent objects like apples in the world. From there curious humans have extended it to unimaginable lengths.
This is all consistent with ontological physicalism that says that everything is physical or derived from the physical. Mathematics and its notations were invented and are used by human beings who are physical objects including their brains where mathematics was created and is stored. Mathematics is an abstraction derived from the physical.
Ample evidence has been presented in this book to show that the universe is physical. The evidence is most telling against those who deny that anything physical exists, the monistic ideaists. The dualists insist that there are minds or spirits that exist as a substance separate and independent from the physical. The evidence is just as strong against them. The world is widely comprehensible from a physical standpoint based on common, consistent, everyday observation and on the knowledge that has been established by the sciences. Science has provided an understanding of the world based on theories that take into account various physical phenomena. This has rendered old explanations based on spirit erroneous and unnecessary.
Observations
In Chapter 3, entitled Initial Observations, i took the same path that Descartes took in using methodical doubt in order to discover what was reliable knowledge. Descartes claimed that he could not be confident in the objects around him because it could after all be that they were only part of a dream he was having. Incidentally, he never questioned that his thinking process itself could be part of a dream and thus be erroneous. He never asked what significance that might have. After all in regular dreams, we often make absurd judgments.
Following Descartes' approach, i had no problem establishing that objects existed beyond my body based on my present observation. I could also confirm various objects existed based on my memory of past observations. Then there are other people who say they perceive the same objects and refer to them in the same way. This would tend to show objects exist, unless the persons are also imaginary. It is not credible that everything is imaginary.
I readily established that i was an object and that therefore i exist. It was not necessary to predicate my existence on my being able to think. All this was ascertainable under Descartes' own standard that propositions be clear and distinct. It may not be proven to an absolute certainty, but it is beyond much doubt.
Possibly, images of false objects could be produced totally inside the mind. In this instance the mind would have to go through a physical process to observe the images. The images would have to be physical inside my mind. It would only seem possible for an image to be created if it were constructed of something physical even if it were only one or two-dimensional and even if made of some completely different material from what is familiar on earth. My mind would also have to be physical.
Claiming spirits to be composed of something nonphysical or of nothing is simply incoherent. Spirits made of nothing or that are truly immaterial would have difficulty interacting with each other or being distinguishable from one another. The arguments presented against nonmaterial objects count against the idea of disembodied spirits, which include purely spiritual gods or angels.
It remains the slightest possibility that i could always be in a dream. That there were objects all around me and appeared to be outside me in space did not prove they had to be physical as we know that term. They could have been there but still not be solid and in space. That required further consideration, like finding out something about their history and composition. With that in mind, I engaged in a close examination of the evidence of science.
Science
The sciences completely support physicalism. They have provided copious details about the objects in the physical world. They tell us much about the composition of the world and also provide extensive descriptions of the physical processes that take place to bring the various events that are periodically seen, like the falling of rain and the blooming of roses.
It was seen that physics provides information about the invisible objects that provide the ingredients of everything physical. Chemistry tells the details of the nature of the elements and how they combine to form the more complicated compounds. The earth sciences give us various details about the formation of the earth, the composition of its surface, and what processes are continuing to take place on and under the surface. Geology discovered that the earth began about 4.6 billion years ago and that it has developed gradually ever since. It is vastly different from what it was in the beginning.
Meteorology, the science that explains atmospheric conditions and the weather, has shown that lightning and storms are not sent at the whim of the gods. Instead, they are formed by evaporation of water from the earth, differences in atmospheric air pressure in the atmosphere, and heat from the sun.
Cosmology has come up with information on how the universe was formed based on calculations on how it has been expanding since its beginning. Cosmologists have estimated the universe is almost 14 billion years old. Cosmology also contradicts what the Tanakh alleges about the creation of the universe. Only the simplest elements were formed in the early age of the universe. It was not until much later that stars were formed and later still that they started to die. Most of the elements were created in the stars. It is clear that we humans are composed of many of these elements. All this refutes religious allegations that the world was only created in a short period of time--seven days according to the Yahwehists.
There is complete evidence that the living things on earth are just as physical as all the other objects. They are made from the same elements. They stay alive through physical processes such as eating foods that are made from the elements. Humans evolved on the earth gradually rather than being created all at once. How they and other living things appeared and survived depended on the conditions on earth at the respective time. Animals in the past often found vegetation very scarce and had to resort to eating other animals in order to survive.
The science of neurology has made the functioning of the brain much less mysterious. The brain is composed of the same materials as the rest of the body. There has been continuing progress in understanding the brain through the discovery of the chemical neurotransmitters and the use of brain tomography. The more that is revealed about the physical functioning of the brain, the less the need to believe in a mysterious soul that regulates mental functions. Overall, as science uncovers more about the processes of the universe, the earth, and living things, the more certain it becomes that the world is physical, including all its living inhabitants, and that it functions in a physical manner.
The Matter of the Mind
Philosophical debate has revolved around whether spirit or mind is a substance in addition to matter. The dualists have never been able to furnish a satisfactory description of how the nonphysical mind and the body can interact. Mind does not exist in space, while matter does. Given this state of affairs, it is hard to see how the two can have any effect on each other. There are not many philosophers who are dualists, but many nonphilosophers are. It is easy to continue to believe in some form of spirit if one does not want to give much thought to the possibility that spirit is just a creation of wishful imaginations.
Identity theory has made much sense among philosophical theories, especially in its simple form. It stands for the proposition: a mental state is always produced by a physical state. There is no way a mental state or event can take place without there being a physical state that brings it about. This would not appear to be controversial.
Much of the debate after that has been involved more with theory reduction. It is confusing to follow the discussion until it becomes clear that it is in actuality about theory reduction or language. It is much simpler if the problem is approached in terms of ontological reduction. In that case, the question is whether something mental always reduces to a physical event, and the answer is yes. If there is no physical material to carry out the necessary processes, there can be no mental activity. Any mental state is always the product of a physical state. Eliminativism holds that mental or psychological terms make up a false theory so it is useless to talk of reducing false theories to physical terms. There is simply nothing to reduce.
Consciousness is really a special way of talking about mind, especially as seen from a phenomenological perspective. Consciousness is not as mysterious a concept as has been thought. It is awareness of objects. In human self-consciousness, it additionally involves awareness of oneself as separate from other objects. It can involve introspection which requires some reasoning power.
In asserting that there is nothing but what is physical, it was necessary to define it. Before being able to do that, it was helpful to understand space. It was found that time was not a real phenomenon. It was rather a method for keeping track of the occurrence of motions in relation to each other. Space was definitely found to be real in that it is present to us at all times, yet it is nothing, i.e. it is not physically real. It is the only exception to the rule that everything is physical. It does provide a container for the physical. The definition of the physical is all the menergy (energy and pieces of matter) that appears in space.
Origin of Mind
Mind is clearly a human-created concept. It is not hard to imagine how it might have come about. People recognized they had abilities that were not clearly based in any part of their body. Words were invented for mental properties and activities. The word "mind" was thought up for whatever part of the person carried out mental activities. Eventually, the related idea of soul or spirit was devised to set out the part of the person that produced the higher emotions like love, kindness, and charity. The mind became so important that it was eventually thought to have a separate and equal status with the body. This marked the start of dualistic thinking.
Unfortunately, this dualistic thinking has continued to this day to some extent, even with philosophers who believe in the idea of property dualism. It is questionable why mental properties have continued to enjoy a special status. It seems that their proper place is as physical properties that apply to a set of characteristics known as behavioral. It is true that it has been difficult to describe these particular properties in physical terms up to now, but that is probably because enough is not known about neurology rather than any special status.
An examination of abstract entities like words, concepts, and numbers shows no indication that they are part of any special substance simply because they are not physical. They are derived from the physical in that humans who are themselves physical beings invented them. This is consistent with physical monism according to which everything in the universe is physical. Mind and mental properties are also abstract entities. They have no independent existence. Physical objects have been in the world for billions of years longer than abstract entities.
Two Orders of Existence
To consider the physical and the mental (or abstract) as both substances and thus on an equal status is to make a category mistake. The two are not comparable. To make matters more clear, i have proposed a method of classifying physical objects and abstractions in order to keep them separate. Simply considering that there are two orders of existence does this. Order 1 is the physical, while order 2 includes abstract entities. Whenever the question comes up whether something exists, it helps to decide whether the thing falls in order 1 or 2. If it falls in order 1, it has an existence in space. It could be said to have a more objective existence. If it is any kind of abstraction, it is in order 2. That means it is a human invention and thus has a derivative existence. They are not substances and do not merit any kind of status other than as abstractions invented by humans.
The two orders of existence idea is consistent with most of the theories of mind that have been fashioned by philosophers, but there are some differences. It disagrees with identity theory in that it clearly does not find an identity between physical and mental states or events. Eliminativism comes the closest to agreeing in that it also proposes that the mental deserves no special consideration and that mental terms have no sound scientific basis. The difference may be that eliminativism wants to completely eliminate all mention of mental activity, even in everyday discourse.
A Final Look at Spiritualism
In spite of all the evidence that has been presented that everything in the universe is physical, there could still be some immaterialists who insist on claiming the existence of some form of spirit among all that menergy. They could say that spirit is secreted somewhere in physical brains. Or they could claim that there was one special planet somewhere that controlled the entire universe and that it was completely made of spirit. There is no evidence of these or similar claims, but that doesn't seem to deter those who insist on believing in spirit. It is hard to conclusively disprove such claims. How is one to travel throughout the entire universe to show that there is no such thing as a spiritual planet?
In spite of the supposition of the immaterialists that spirit could be tucked away somewhere that is undetectable to humans, the first obstacle to them is the problem of how spirit that is so vastly different from physical substance can interact with physical objects. This spiritual matter (spatter) could be different from regular matter, exist in space, but be undetectable. This is incoherent and so very difficult to comprehend. Immaterialists have a very tough case to make for believing in spirit. It is also hard to believe that a very thin and vaporous spiritual material could be capable of carrying out the complex mental activities attributed to spirit. There has been no evidence of spatter and believing on faith is not satisfactory.
The Religious Motive Behind Spiritualism
It is without a doubt that those who insist on continuing to believe in spirit as an independent entity, whether it be substance or spatter, have a religious motive. But is it that important for theistic belief that God be spirit or part spirit? Is it important for religious doctrine that humans have a soul, especially one that can leave the body? After all, shouldn't God be able to resurrect or restore persons to their original state or even in an improved physical condition?
Belief in a material God would seem acceptable to believers. This would make sense since a powerful God, even more an omnipotent one, should be capable of carrying out much of what he desires even if he is a physical being. He may not be able to carry out all the fantasies humans imagine, like being in multiple places at one time, but can surely accomplish much of what he intends. From a theological standpoint, what is important is how God treats his creatures. The composition of his being is not significant. From a metaphysical standpoint every indication is that everything is physical. Our universe is in the final count a physical universe, and people need to learn to accept that.