Follow-up on "Does the PI Literature Beg the Question?"

I was pleased to get the large number of interesting comments to the last post. Here is the latest, from "Noldorin":

"You've raised some very interesting points here. Indeed, too many of the arguments relating to the relationship between the mind and body tend to take a circular form. Monism/physicalism is the easy resolution to this, which is the core of your stance (correct me if I'm wrong). To me however, this denies the emergent nature of the mind, and treats it as a mere automaton. Consciousness, almost be definition, is an emergent entity - it cannot be understood from anything but a holistic viewpoint, which is very much what modern neurology and psychology seem to suggest.

Of course, the dualistic view has own problems too, which you highlighted at the start of your article. I however prefer to resolve the issue in another way. To me, the mind is inextricably tied to the "hardware" of the brain, yet this does not mean the mind is nothing more than the brain. If we consider the simple thought-experiment of transposing the mind (or to be clear, the physical brain even) to another body, to me, the identity clearly follows the mind. More problems however arise when you consider the concept of a cloned body. (Ignoring the science, I think this is perfectly acceptable philosophically.) Hypothetically two identical bodies and brains may then exist at some point, from which they would consequently evolve and diverge. What then if the "original" mind has already ceased to exist by the time the cloned one comes into existence? Does that transfer the identity of the original person to the clone? While this can be resolve (superficially) by the physicalist's view, I am most inclined to accept that both identity and the mind cannot in general be distinctly labelled, but rather they exist in some level of hierarchy, which can branch and fork. In this sense, the mind is not independent from the body, yet nonetheless exists as some higher level."

Here is one of my basic schticks that I posted in the earlier comments but that Noldorin may have missed: Stomachs don't eat lunch. Persons eat lunch. This is not to deny that the stomach performs a necessary function (for a mammal at least, as it happens in the human case, although perhaps not necessarily for a person, which is a member of a much larger set than the set of all humans). The semantics of the phrase "eating lunch" is external, or wide: we understand "eating lunch" as something that a whole, embodied person is doing out in the world. Part of the sense of "eating lunch" is a denoting of a relation that the person has to his/her environment.

Of course where I'm going with this is to the "wide content" account of intentional predicates ("He believes that...", "She desires that...") developed notably by the Wittgenstein-influenced Hilary Putnam ("Brains in a vat," Twin Earth etc.) and recently elaborated with great lucidity by Tim Crane (Mechanical Mind, 2003)and by Andy Clark (Supersizing the Mind, 2008) among others (don't miss Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 2003). This is a style of physicalism that accommodates the "emergent" intuition of Noldorin. In fact my view is that it is a mistake to identify mental processes with brain processes, or indeed with any processes located entirely inside one's skin (that would be internalism, or narrow content, tightly related to representational theories of mind, viz Jerry Fodor).

Brains don't think. They don't imagine, they don't solve problems, they don't remember, believe, desire, hope, fear, "picture," "hear," they don't dream or hallucinate or perceive. They do not "construct worlds." There are no images, words, or symbolic content of any kind "in" brains (there is no "inside" to a brain, except as there is an inside to a bone, or a stomach). Like eating lunch, thinking is something that a person does (I think that there cannot be disembodied persons, of course that follows from holding a physical-continuity theory of personal identity as I do).

I'm not someone to write over-long blog posts, let me end this one with the following consideration that I think is under-appreciated and illustrates the practical importance of this seemingly abstruse discussion (and this is the bottom line, I think, of Bennett and Hacker's excellent book): if it is a mistake, as I think it is, to hold to a representational theory of mind, or even an information-processing model of nervous system function, then so long as we do we will be sabotaging ourselves from understanding what the brain really does. We understand (I take it) what the stomach does, that is, the role that the stomach plays in the overall process of the human eating lunch. But so long as we commit the homuncular fallacy - the fallacy of thinking that the brain helps the human to think by thinking itself - we cannot come to understand the real role that the brain plays in the overall process of the human thinking. In fact it appears that under the current theoretical regime (representationalism) we have absolutely no idea.

Does the "Personal Identity" Literature Beg the Question?

A standard line in "personal identity" goes like this: Suppose your mind were put into another person's body, and vice-versa? Which person would now be "you"? It's pretty reliable to assume that if one puts the issue that way to a philosophy class, most people will have the intuition that they follow their mind: that "they" will now be "in" the other person's body, and thus the person embodied by that body will now be "them." Thus theories of psychological continuity have been more popular than theories of physical continuity since the time of John Locke.

I suspect that this is all wrong or, like the man said, "not even wrong." That is, in order for supporters of a psychological continuity of personal identity to be wrong it would have to be possible (conceivable) for them to be right. But it's not. The whole discussion is question-begging. An argument is question-begging when there is a premise in the argument that could be questioned, but isn't. In this case, that premise is, "There is something that is 'mind' that can be distinguished from 'body.'"

If there was something that was "my mind" that could be distinguished from my body, then it would be possible to imagine my mind existing independently of my body. That is what I'm doing when I imagine my mind in another body (or in heaven, or just out of my body, or whatever). Now, it seems as if we can imagine such a circumstance: we have a rich tradition of fiction, for example, that imagines minds switched between bodies, or the souls of dead people haunting the present world, etc. So the tricky part of my claim is the argument that, while you may think that you can (obviously, unequivocally) imagine your mind existing without your body, that is an illusion: in fact you cannot do that. For that is my position.

Today I'm thinking that maybe some arguments about skepticism can be deployed here. Someone says that there is a real issue as to the existence of the external world, say. It might exist, or it might not. I don't think that this is a coherent question. My view is that I neither "know" nor do "not know" that the external world exists: it is a spurious application of the verb "to know" in either case. The "external world" is not something separable from my experience.

The argument that persuades me here is one common to Zen Buddhism and to Wittgenstein, although I think that it is also the view that emerges from a correct interpretation of David Hume. The key is to see that "the world" does not collapse into "the self" any more or less than the self collapses into the world (the common German, Kantian interpretation of this material - Buddhism, Wittgenstein - tends to miss this crucial point). My world is the world as it is constituted by my body. In the absence of my body, this world also is absent. To say that my mind might be in another body is equivalent to saying that my world might be experienced by another.

Well that's vaguer than I'd like, but on the right track. Notice that there's another route to go here: one might make arguments to the effect that there is no such thing as "mind" at all. I think that that is also a valid way to go, and brings the question-begging nature of the traditional personal identity literature into clear focus. If there is no such thing as mind then there is no question of an alternative between psychological and physical continuity. Physical continuity, in that case, is the only coherent option.