Reconsidering Dualism

 Logical Atomism  was an early twentieth century philosophical movement championed by Bertrand Russell. It was based on an analogy between atoms and mathematical axioms. It  was inspired, both by the resounding success of the science of physics, and at the prospect of the  merging of logic and mathematics, also championed by Russell, that seemed imminent at the turn of the last century. Just as physical matter is ultimately  made up of combinations of atoms, concepts were envisioned to be made up of combinations of primitive atoms of meaning, like axioms in a deductive system.  The idea was that meaning has some kind of logical structure analogous to physical structure;  and the belief was that some future science could determine the laws governing this “conceptual” structure, just as physics shows us the physical laws that govern the universe.

  One hundred years after the heyday of Logical Atomism, how has that atomic analogy fared? Indeed, where is the science of meaning?  Where are the “laws” of understanding?(long pause here...)  Meaning and understanding are essentially  normative phenomena, they are always about our concerns - and science, on the other hand, has gotten as effective and comprehensive as it has, because in their relentless pursuit of objectivity, scientists have progressively eliminated human concerns from their methods. 

 

 I want to take a step back here to take a wider view,  and compare humans to animals:  as humans we can understand much more than just what we see and experience right now.  We can do this by using our own experience as a stepping stone by  extrapolating beyond what we experience directly using our imagination through metaphor. There are no guarantees in making these connections in our mind that we have a match with reality -  it is fundamentally a fallible process. All the same, this allows us to make conjectural sense of a reality that we often have no immediate access to, that is often outside of our present perception in time and space - and this is probably a uniquely human capacity.

Understanding and meaning are fundamentally metaphorical  processes in this way.  Through metaphor we can use our own ways of doing things and our own ways of perceiving things to then make sense of a greater reality. Eg.  “Can we get this project ‘up and running’?”  “How does your plan ‘work’?”  “Does this argument ‘stand up’ to criticism?” “Are you really ‘going forward’ with this?”

 

“Correspondence”, a relationship that is purported to exist between true statements and reality, is a key example of the use of metaphor.  When we see things, we rightly believe that what we see corresponds to reality. In fact we are usually correct, but not always, as can happen when we see optical illusions.  Nevertheless there is a real physical relation involved when we see things, because light photons reflect off of surfaces of objects and strike the back of our retinas, exciting sensory neurons that are connected to the brain.  In contrast, when I say my theory, or this sentence corresponds to reality, there is no physical relationship between the words of my sentences and reality the way there is when I see objects. For instance, what in reality "corresponds” to the statement: “I do not own a cat.”?  A  nonexistent cat?  Here the metaphor of seeing breaks down, and it becomes hard to imagine.

So, what is the connection between mind and matter, between our thoughts and reality?  It is our concern.   We use our minds to learn, to anticipate, to remember, and to act - in all these activities we are exercising our concerns.  Understanding, meaning, and intention  are all different names for the medium through which we exercise our concerns.  This is not some physical medium like sound or radio waves, it is a fundamentally human way of being in the world, our distinctly human way of doing things.  And this means that the Cartesian idea that mind and matter are mutually exclusive is false.  Mind is always involved in the world through our concerns, and the world is always both an influence and an object of concern for our minds.

     In our daily life we end up using concepts like the will, intention, freedom, beliefs, motives, desires, and imagination in order to understand human behaviour -  words which do not directly refer to any physical things or processes.  At the same time, when we use these intentional concepts there is, of course, some kind of processing going on in the brain that we are indirectly referring to.  But, whenever we try to reduce these concepts to physical processes  it leads to incoherence.  Knowing that my body is secreting certain hormones right now, and certain neurons are firing in certain parts of my brain, will not help me to understand what I’m about to do or why I’m about to do it.  Knowing the exact  physical and chemical nature of the paper and ink on the pages of my notebook, or the exact  movements of my hand that I take in grasping the pen and writing with it, doesn’t contribute to my understanding of what I am writing about.  It's only when something breaks down - when I fall ill,  have a stroke, or suffer from accidental brain damage - that the idea of  physical cause becomes of use, when it helps us to  understand  the basis for the dysfunction. Otherwise, when our cognition is functioning well, understanding our behavior in terms of physical causes is simply counter-productive.

 

  Free will  does not correspond to a physical entity or process. Neurophysiologists will happily tell you that they have not been able to discover anything in the brain that corresponds to the “will” or to any process of “free will”.  Instead we can understand it better as a hypothetical ideal, our estimation of our own potential, our best way of understanding ourselves.  We always assume that at every point we could choose one way or another, and that our actions are not determined unless we suffer additional conditions that we believe would severely constrain our behaviour, such as being hypnotized, or under the influence of a powerful drug.  We act for reasons, according to beliefs, not being determined by them, but being swayed or influenced by them.  

The Ancient Greeks, up until the Stoics, didn’t have a concept of “free will”.  If they did, Aristotle might well have pointed out that the concept violates the idea that nothing can cause itself.  This whole conundrum seems to suggest that we are talking about two mutually exclusive ways of looking at reality, not two different realities.  There is seeing the world as so many physical processes, which necessarily  leaves out the normative, and there is seeing the world through the light of our concerns, which  are necessarily normative.  Normativity is conceptual and experiential, not physical.  The force of an “ought” may be physically felt, but it is more conceptual than it is physical, for it consists of the power of ideas to persuade and motivate us. 

What I am proposing here is that dualism - the idea that physical processes and the mind are two distinct realities - is not warranted in its Cartesian form, in the sense of an invisible “thinking substance” versus a mostly visible “extended (i.e. physical) substance”, but a kind of epistemic dualism is warranted by two fundamental, but mutually exclusive ways of understanding the world.   What I mean is that, contra Descartes, there aren’t two different substances: physical and mental - instead there are always and everywhere only physical processes going on.  But whenever we focus our attention on ourselves and on others - on behaviour, motives, and our expectations of others - our understanding only gets muddled if we see human behaviour as physically caused - and it is egregious what this does to our moral understanding.

Free will is always relevant to our understanding of moral questions.  People make good choices and bad choices.  To put it overly simply: morality is about encouraging good choices and preventing bad choices. But Science usually presupposes a deterministic framework which impedes moral understanding. For, how can we be held accountable for bad choices, if choices aren’t real?   

   Morality makes sense in terms of  human culture, not biological processes, for, in effect,  morality replaces animal behaviour in humans.   Culture is made up of shared ideas, beliefs, practices, institutions, and agreements.  Cultural changes are  collective changes in perspective - a collective response to previous perspectives and current conditions. Although one could argue that culture is really about the transformation of physical resources into products or artifacts, that misses out on the meaning and significance of culture for us.  Is music a physical process that takes raw sounds and combines them in a way that produces pleasure and contentment? I don’t think that this kind of physicalistic explanation will ever satisfy us.

Certainly, we can put people in MRI’s and measure patterns of brain activity, but in reality we will always understand human behaviour better by talking about our ideas, beliefs, norms, and ethical principles.

This is most obvious when we consider responsibility, a normative concept that does not fit well in a deterministic framework.  The idea of responsibility is that each of us take on obligations by our own decision.  It isn’t automatic - we can always decline - as, in fact, a certain American President admitted to doing at the beginning of a devastating pandemic, when he said: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”  Nevertheless, the vast majority of us do willingly take  on responsibilities as part of living our lives.  It’s how the adults in a society collectively  hold society together.  This is the central role of responsibility - the society as a whole provides the structure, and through various forms of responsibility each individual tries to do things right and avoid doing things wrong, and so society is made possible. In contrast, if we only try to understand human behaviour scientifically, as determined by causes, we end up losing any understanding of why people have obligations and choose to or not to fulfill them.

 Most of what animals do is shaped by natural selection, but humans take on responsibilities, which are not shaped by natural selection but by our “artificial selection” - selection by deliberate choice.  Thus we can understand the world scientifically, as determined by law-like physical relations, or understand what we are concerned about, as a world where we are free to choose good or evil, and everything in between.  

Both  Russell’s Logical Atomism and his project to derive mathematics from logic failed, and, I think, for the same reason.  Meaning does not make sense in terms of scientific analysis. When you try and analyze the parts of an idea, you destroy the coherence of the idea and are left with meaningless fragments.  Coherence doesn’t come from anything inherent in a concept, it comes from the movement of attention that is always required to grasp the meaning of the concept. In other words, meaning is always experiential, and doesn’t exist outside of our experience. The world is a physical world, existing independently of human concerns, but that relationship doesn't work the same way in reverse; human concern is our fundamental way of experiencing ourselves in the world.