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A New Direction in Philosophy of Mind: By Justin WhitakerFor a more readable or printable version, click here (A_New_Direction.doc)Whoever is believed
in his presuppositions, he is our master and our God…. Building on the "Cognitive Revolution" of the 1950s and 1960s, Western science and philosophy have made great strides in understanding what we call the mind1. The emphasis of those studying the mind was taken away from outward behavior and placed on the brain. Despite great strides in understanding how the brain functions, however, some essential questions about the mind have been left unanswered. These questions revolve around the exact nature of the relationship between the physical states studied in neuroscience and the mind as subjective awareness. Contemporary responses to these questions have ranged from the reductionist view, stating that the mind does not really exist, to seemingly dualist theories, holding that the mind is not only real, but has a reality not describable by the terminology of physics. Between these views are a number of theories, including Type Identity and Token Identity, which affirm the reality of the mind, but attempt to explain it in entirely physical terms. All of these theories, however, to some extent or another2, affirm and attempt to work within the principles of scientific materialism. In his books Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind and The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Theory of Consciousness, B. Alan Wallace brings these very principles to question. Drawing from the ideas of Buddhist contemplatives, the pragmatic philosophy of William James, and the discoveries and paradoxes of quantum physics, Wallace proposes that the principles of scientific materialism may be hindering, rather than assisting in gaining further insights into mind and consciousness. By examining Wallace's works along with additional elements of Buddhist philosophy and theories in quantum physics, the pieces of a new direction in Philosophy of Mind may begin to fall into place. While the principles of scientific
materialism have been extremely useful in explaining and predicting events
in the macro-world around us, they have both refused to allow any direct
study of the mind and failed to solve the puzzles of the micro-world encountered
in quantum physics. However, the astounding recent advances in the study
of the brain have led many to claim that neuroscience has within its grasp
all of the answers to consciousness. According to them it is just a matter
of time and technology before understanding of the mind is complete. This
view is well summarized by The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California's
website which states: The history of the principles of scientific materialism goes back to the earliest days of Western philosophy itself. The basis for two of the principles can be found throughout early Greek philosophy. Monism, the doctrine that there is only one ultimate substance or principle, is found in theories of archê (first-principle, origin, source, beginning) of the Presocratics. Reductionism, stating that understanding of that one ultimate substance will lead to understanding of all that it composes, can be found in theories of Being and non-Being from Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and others. The other principles: objectivism, universalism, the closure principle, and physicalism as we recognize them today have a particularly strong association with the history of Western Christianity, particularly the Protestant Reformation. A forerunner to these principles, the notion of realism, is established in the Bible. In it God is said to have created the world prior to and independent of man. Hence, any assertion that reality may be dependent in any way upon an observer was denounced a priori. The world under the Catholic Church was also seen as being inhabited by demons, angels, and the forces of both Satan and the independent, almighty God. This view, which prohibited virtually all scientific inquiry, lasted over a millennium and would have continued if it weren't for reformers within the Church. One of the first such reformers was Martin Luther. While not placing his criticism so much on the philosophy of the Church as on its practices, he did open the door for new speculation, both within and beyond the realm of the Church. A matter of theological questioning emerging from this period was whether or not the universe had been created to function in an orderly manner, with neither God nor Satan likely to intervene. A turning point in thought at this time was the growing assumption that it had, which made fruitful inquiry into the workings of nature possible. A second turning point in this period was the growing faith in the power and utility of man's examination of the world. The Protestants, relying on reason and empirical data rather than supernatural explanations of phenomena, undermined the position of the Catholic Church as the holder of all knowledge. With the Church's grip on all facets of Western society finally loosened, scientists were given freedom to apply the early principles of scientific materialism toward explaining the outside world. Soon, the principles of 1) universalism, stating that God's laws are consistent in all places at all times, 2) objectivism, the idea that true knowledge exists outside the individual, and 3) physicalism, affirming that knowledge would come from inquiry into the outside world because only physical objects and processes exist, joined the growing canon of scientific materialism. The faith in man's ability to know the world was reinforced through acceptance of the closure principle, first introduced into modern Western thought by René Descartes. Descartes held that the whole of existence in the world could be explained by purely worldly causes. However, the human soul/mind as well as the miracles of the bible were held to have causes beyond the world, and were therefore excluded from his mechanistic explanation. It wasn't until Leibniz asserted that the will of the soul and mechanical movements of the body were predetermined by God to harmoniously follow alongside one another that the closure principle was completed and accepted as a principle of scientific materialism. As they have been interpreted in the West, the principles of scientific materialism assert that 1) the world is ultimately knowable as purely physical entities and processes, and 2) scientific inquiry is the best tool for gaining knowledge about the world. A third assertion often made is that only the scientific description of the world is absolutely correct, while other descriptions are weakened by vagueness and/or subjectivity. The implications of this claim in Philosophy of Mind can be found in Paul Churchland's eliminative materialism, which claims that contemporary psychological theory, along with its terminology, is outlived and will be necessarily replaced by a precise, scientific theory and vocabulary (Churchland, 1990). However, such propositions regarding psychology are rare in science and philosophy. Most people today concerned with Philosophy of Mind or Cognitive Science are content to stick with the first two claims, accepting a form of Identity Theory in which the mind does exist and can be spoken of, but only in terms of mental states, which are identical to physical/brain states. Here, psychological theories and terms are retained, but are held to describe something that is ultimately physical. In the first of these Identity theories, Type Identity Theory, the mind is composed of mental states, and each type of mental state is in every case identical to a specific type of physical/brain state. In the second, Token Identity Theory, every individual (token) mental state is identical to a physical state, but the assertion of a one-to-one matching of types such as that in Type Identity Theory is not made. Here a mental state can be the result of different physical states, and likewise, one physical state may result in differing mental states. Versions of these two theories dominate contemporary Philosophy of Mind. However, missing from either theory is an account of how physical states can have phenomenological or intentional properties. This gap in explanation is no less detrimental to physicalist theories of the mind than is the failure of substance dualist theories to explain how ontologically separate mental and physical substances could interact. Yet Identity theories satisfy the scientific materialist paradigm, so focus is generally directed toward determining in what way mental states are identical to physical states, and away from this enigma. It is imperative that a new direction in Philosophy of Mind is taken, one that takes us into the very heart of this puzzle. Interestingly, this new direction may take its cue from discoveries in the highest of the physical sciences, quantum physics. It is in the realm of quantum physics that, in just the last eighty years, the underlying principles of scientific materialism have been most strongly questioned. The inability to describe or predict the behavior of the smallest constituents of the physical world has led some physicists to speculate that the mind of the observer may play a causal role in the outcome of experiments with quantum elements. Others, however, dismiss such speculation, asserting that purely physical descriptions of the composition and behavior of the quantum world will come as technology advances. This view is that of scientific materialism, based on the principle of realism, and has been very successful in compelling fruitful study of the natural world. However, empirical data from quantum physics has led to ideas of uncertainty, even chaos, in the micro-world that have found supporters in the philosophical and scientific communities. One question that arises here is how uncertainty or chaos at the micro-level may give rise to the orderly macro-world described in the principles of scientific materialism. Acclaimed Physicist Werner Heisenberg proposes that the ontology of the macro-world may not be applicable to the micro-world. Instead, he suggests that elementary particles are potentialities, indescribable in macro-world terms of location and velocity. Mere potentia in the micro-world are thus held to constitute absolute existence in the reality of the macro-world. This problem is exemplified in Schrödinger's equation, which describes the elementary particle as a probability wave, with no physically describable existence, until it is measured, at which point it becomes real in the macro-world. Thus, quantum elements only become real in the macro-world, meaning that they are able to be described by classical physics, upon measurement. To compound the confusion, it has been shown that the true nature of quantum elements, either as wave phenomena or as discrete particles, varies depending on the form of measurement. From this argument Wallace concludes that "…an electron [quantum element] existing as an independent entity is in principle unknowable; therefore this independent entity does not exist as a potentiality, for it does not exist at all." (1996: p. 76) Acceptance here of the principle of physicalism as it is held today leads to confusion in understanding quantum physics. An alternative, suggested by Physicist John von Neumann, is that the reality of quantum elements shifts from mere potentia to discrete particles due to consciousness of the event. Hence the hypothesis that consciousness is a causal force independent of the physical world, or at least our current view of it, may prove useful for further study in both quantum physics and Philosophy of Mind. Such a shift in paradigm may prove to be no more drastic than that which occurred when light, as an entity which exhibits properties of both a wave and a particle, but is not perfectly described by concepts of either, was accepted as true. While this shift may be prompted by discoveries in the West, the answers it will seek, along with the methods necessary for attaining them may come from Buddhist philosophers, who have focused their attention on the mind for 2500 years. In order to lay out a new direction in Philosophy of Mind, an entirely new way of viewing reality must be brought about. Even to those who are open to the possibility of mind being indescribable by contemporary scientific materialist terminology, there is still a tendency to view the rest of reality as composed of independent, discrete elements. The view set forth by Wallace, known in Buddhism as the centrist view, is based on the underlying Buddhist principle3 which states that reality is to be seen as relationships, denying intrinsic existence from any aspect of reality. Wallace's proposition is that to exist in reality is merely a conceptual designation, in which every aspect of a phenomenon is a matter of 1) its attributes, 2) its relation to other aspects of reality, and 3) mental designation. Such a claim is based on the careful examination of several entities that are said to exist in reality. Under close examination, an entity is seen to have certain attributes. Yet is there something that has those attributes, or are the attributes in themselves the entity? According to Wallace, in Western science there is some essential thing that has the attributes: an oxygen molecule has mass, charge, size, and two atoms. Here, oxygen molecule is held to exist intrinsically and to possess certain attributes. However, if an attribute were to be changed, perhaps by adding a single carbon atom, there would not be an oxygen molecule with an altered attribute, there would exist a new molecule altogether. If it is the case that merely altering the attributes can cause an entity to come into existence or disappear, then it would follow that the entity is nothing more than the attributes. This does not deny the idea of a Form, in the Platonic sense, of oxygen molecule. However, the notion of an oxygen molecule existing in reality separate from its attributes is not possible. According to Buddhist Ontology, such a deconstruction of the physical world can be done, given the necessary tools, ad infinitum, stripping every part of reality, however minute, of intrinsic existence. By viewing elements of reality as nothing other than their attributes and examining the continuous interactions between the attributes of different elements of reality, Buddhist philosophers conclude that reality is to be viewed as a matter of relationships between objects, in which the objects4 themselves are illusory. A second analysis of reality used to destroy the tendency to reify phenomena is viewing all phenomena as in some stage of a continual process. The human inclination to view phenomena as composed of independent objects is essential to reification. In Buddhist philosophy this inclination may serve certain functions, but it must be understood to be ultimately incorrect, just as the planetary model of the atom is still useful for understanding certain aspects of quantum physics and is yet ultimately false. Thich Nhat Hahn, in his book The Heart of Understanding, gives a brief example of such analysis as applied to the paper that makes up the book itself. If we imaginatively follow the process that led to the paper being before us, by understanding the role of mill workers, logging trucks, and lumberjacks turning the tree into paper, as well as the sun, air, rain, and soil as necessary to nurturing the tree to maturity, we soon discover that this paper is not really as independent a part of reality as we may have assumed. Furthermore, the paper will, with time, fall out of existence as its attributes are unraveled. As the ever-changing reality of objects is deeply examined, the conclusion reached by Buddhist philosophers is that within every object a portion of every other aspect of reality can be found. The result of such analysis is that of two realities, the illusory reality of independent objects and the true reality of constant change and absolute interrelatedness. In such an ontological system, the centrist view in Buddhism, one can mistakenly understand any object, including the mind, as confined to the first, or one can see its nature as existing in the second. According to the centrist view in Buddhism, the reality of entities as we know them are dependent upon mental conception. One must not take this as going so far as to say that there is no world beyond mental conception. However, the centrist view does hold that the world independent of the mind cannot be logically spoken of or explored. It simply makes no sense to address "reality independent of the mind" considering that postulation of such a reality as well as exploration of it requires the mind, insofar as it requires a subject to do the postulating and exploring. The problem with Western science according to this view is the attempt to explain reality in terms "independent of the mind." In order to do this, Western science reifies the phenomena it encounters. Such reification places phenomena firmly into the illusory realm of reality. While this has been successful in a great deal of research in the West, it has ignored the reality of greatest importance to Buddhist contemplatives, a reality that may shed light on the still mysterious quest for understanding of the mind. In order to teach monks the nature of mind and reality, several ontological theories are taught sequentially, in order to put forward and then deconstruct any notions that would lead to reification of either the mind or the physical world. Monks are first taught a form of dualism in which both the mind and physical realm are given ontological independence. Next, the idea of any intrinsic external reality is challenged by idealist philosophy. Finally, monks are taught to search for the intrinsic qualities of the mind through meditation. With a great deal of practice, hours upon hours of sustained one-pointedness may be maintained in meditation. It is when this one-pointedness, during which only one finite point of mind is attended to, falls away that the entirely empty nature of the mind is revealed. No perfect analogy can be made to show exactly how this works, but one can imagine the mind as a concert hall: the everyday conditioned mind is like hall during an orchestra's warm up, filled with discordant instruments as they tune and a talkative audience. Through meditation one seeks to calm the mind, through focusing attention on just one mental object. Here one can imagine sitting in the noisy concert hall, but focusing upon just one instrument on stage to such an extent that all other sounds fall away. One can imagine the rest of the orchestra and audience not just growing silent but falling out of existence entirely. With practice, eventually this sound (object of mind) is said to fade into perfect quiescence, known as conceptually unstructured awareness. Here one's connection to reality is said to be direct, unobstructed by the preconceptions and filters through which the conditioned mind experiences reality. While such a state of awareness is seemingly impossible given the principles of scientific materialism, it has been attained by innumerable skilled contemplatives throughout the history of Buddhism. To compare the Buddhist concept with the contemporary physicalist theories mentioned previously, let us use the term chair as analogous to the mind (similarly, the individual chair is analogous to the individual mental state). A chair, like a mental state, has no definite physical attributes or limitations. By applying eliminative materialism to the chair, one would say that it does not in fact exist. Rather, "chair" is an imprecise term applied to what can be described more accurately through examination of its underlying structure. What really exists, according to this theory, is the physical makeup of the chair, and if we could only learn to use terms based on this physical makeup a great deal of confusion may be eliminated. Identity Theories would hold that the chair does exist, but merely as a product of its physical makeup. In Type Identity Theory, every chair is necessarily made up of some physical structure, and each type of chair is identical to a specific type of physical structure. Token Identity Theory would hold that each instance of chair is identical to some physical structure, yet any given type of physical structure may constitute different chairs and the same chair may be the result of different types of physical structures. In the Buddhist theory, chair is a conceptual designation dependent upon its attributes, its relationship with other things in the world, and mental recognition of it as a chair. Where eliminative materialism breaks down, according to the centrist Buddhist view, is in holding that there is a reality underlying chair which is more real than the chair itself. Yet, as discovered in quantum physics, no such reality existing apart from observation or interaction with other entities exists. So we are left holding that Truth in physics exists, yet while we are growing nearer that Truth, nothing we know today fully constitutes it. Until we discover that entity which is real in itself we are left with a kind of nihilism. Type Identity Theory proves inconsistent in this analogy when we think of something as unchairlike as a fallen tree. According to this theory a fallen tree is such because of its underlying physical structure. However, without any alteration to that structure it would seem that the fallen tree could be turned into a chair simply by a person sitting on it. Likewise, the type of chair constituted by the fallen tree may change simply by the position a person places themselves on it, whether upright, reclined, with or without a backrest, etc. This seems impossible in Type Identity Theory, as each type of chair is identical to its underlying structure, and the underlying structure of the fallen tree has remained consistent while first becoming a chair and then changing to different types of chairs. In the centrist Buddhist view, such changes are due simply to the changing relationship of the fallen tree with the person. When the person leaves, the fallen tree reassumes its nature as a mere fallen tree, and may take on the realities of fuel source, hiding spot, or home, dependent on changes in its relationship with other entities. Here, even the label of fallen tree is temporal and dependent on being designated as such. Token Identity Theory does not fall prey to such changes in the way Type Identity Theory does. It does, however, fail to acknowledge the necessitating factor for the changes, that being the relationship of the entity with others. The centrist Buddhist view, in acknowledging the necessity of relationships along with mental designation and physical features in the definitions of objects, is the only one consistent here. This analysis can likewise be directed toward the mind and mental states. Just as the chair certainly has a physical structure in every instance, so too does each mental state. However, that physical structure cannot present an exhaustive explanation of a mental state any better than it can for a chair. Despite the deficiency of current physicalist theories, even in describing physical things, as well as the growing evidence in quantum physics supporting the claim that current concepts of reality need to be questioned, many philosophers and scientists still wish to simply extend Descartes' model of the mechanical world into the uncertain world of the mind. By granting the mind the same ontological status, one dependent upon conception, to the mind as to the physical world, one sees the emptiness of intrinsic existence in all phenomena. By reifying the external world Western science has created its own problems in determining the nature of the mind. A new direction in Philosophy of Mind ought not to seek to refute the advances made by physicalist theories concerning the physical structures of our world. However, these theories should be seen as pertaining to a reality of their own making, a reality that will always be limited by the principles of scientific materialism. As the title of his earlier work, Choosing Reality, and his turn in his second book to the pragmatic philosophy of William James suggests, the answers to the questions of the mind may depend on what metaphysical principles are chosen by the questioner. By choosing the reality of scientific materialism, one is choosing which data to examine, which to ignore, and even which conclusions are possible before study has begun. Even a brief glance at the history of science shows us that such choices are only valuable insofar as they continue to provide explanation to mysterious phenomena. Conceptually, it seems that physicalism has hit a brick wall in furthering our knowledge, in both Philosophy of Mind and quantum physics. Wallace quotes philosopher Güven Güzeldere as stating that "[i]f anything, the survey of the contemporary issues and current debates surrounding consciousness points to a need for a careful re-examination of our pre-theoretical intuitions and conceptual foundations on which to build better accounts of consciousness." (2000: p.132) Others questioning the physicalist principles make similar assertions, such as that of Thomas Nagel holding that, "[a]t present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination-without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method…" (1974) While the purely physicalist theories are useful toward understanding one important aspect of the mind, any assertion that mind can be fully understood by these theories is based only on adherence to principles that are clearly in need of reexamination.
Chalmers, David J (1995) "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience." In Scientific American, December 1995 pp. 62-68. Churchland, Paul M. (1990) "Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes." In Mind and Cognition, edited by William G. Lycan. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 206-23. Gomez, Luis O. (1975) "Some
aspects of the free-will question in the Nikaayas." In Philosophy
East and West, The University of Hawaii p. 81-90 Wallace, B. Alan (2000) The
Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. New York,
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