Tag: substance dualism

Review: The Consciousness Instinct by Michael Gazzaniga

This book (Amazon review and link below) is another attempt to find a solution to both the necessity and sufficiency of brains to minds. Gazzaniga is a materialist, and so by his supposition, there must be, in the brain itself, the secret to mind’s manifestation. He has written a very cogent examination of the brain’s layering and the complementarity of a rule-law combination that animates life and (he thinks) is the secret to the otherwise mysterious properties of consciousness. This theme is reflected in “Incomplete Nature” (Deacon 2011), while his connection between life, consciousness, and quantum mechanics brings Henry Stapp (“Quantum Theory and Free Will” 2017) and others to mind. 

Gazzaniga is not a physicist but a neuroscientist, and his specialty is the connection between brain lesions, surgery, and consciousness. What he notes, profoundly enough, is that consciousness is not something that must be generated by a whole, healthy brain, nor does it arise from a specific part or even anatomical layer, but emerges from any parts of the brain that still work! When only parts of the brain are working, the affected individual reports (sometimes in very indirect ways depending on what damage there is) that they are conscious and feel mostly normal, despite considerable gaps in accounts of that experience’s content. For example, a patient may report feeling perfectly normal even though her awareness includes nothing whatsoever to her left.

In this book, we have a well-written account of the various ways in which the brain, a marvelously complex and mysterious thing, generating some “what is it like to be” inner world the individual reports as her subjectively-recognizable self, even when damaged! But even if the principles and mechanisms of this process are something like what Gazzaniga suggests to us, they are empirical evidence only of their necessity, not their sufficiency, to bring about the emergence of subjective experience. 

Nor, it has to be said, are the limits of what we know about the brain evidence that it is not sufficient to bring about mind’s emergence. The problem here is metaphysical. In all other emergent phenomena identified by science, even the case of life, the point of emergence is identifiable, as are the properties of what emerges. There is always a physical connection between prior and post-emergent physics. Both are always physical. The one can be fully traced, with mathematical rigor, through to the other. The brain-mind connection is different. No one has identified where, in the chain of neurological causes, a subject appears, nor precisely what the subject is. The brain’s physics plays its essential role, but what emerges isn’t physical in any sense that physics understands that term.

Yet there is also no evidence (evidence taken to involve physical observation) that there is anything in the universe (besides brains) that contributes some other “necessary ingredient”, that together with the brain, becomes sufficient for the emergence of the individual mind. The hypothesis that such a phenomenon exists is speculative and grounded on physics’s inability to do the job thanks to causal closure, the principle that physics produces only physics.

Gazzaniga suggests the emergence, in living matter, of translated information (in our case, DNA to RNA to proteins), what he calls a rules-based ordering, allows physics to violate the causal closure principle. Gazzaniga is saying, essentially, that the rules-based operation and interaction between layers and sub-sections of the brain can and does produce a non-physical emergent reality, mind! But there is no evidence that rules-based violation of causal closure is possible. None of the other emergent phenomena in the universe, including life (the other “rules-based” phenomenon), violate causal closure. No one has suggested how information ordering as such would or could produce a violation. Physics has nothing here. “Mind exists, therefore physics must be sufficient to produce it” is the sum and substance of the claim. 

There have been attempts to side-step this problem. Russellian Monism suggests that every object in the universe, from protons to galaxies, has “mental properties” (sometimes called “proto-mental properties”) that “add up” to mind of the sort familiar to us when brain-objects appear on the scene. None of these theories includes any suggestion as to the nature of these “mental properties”. David Chalmers (“The Conscious Mind” 1997 and others) suggests “mental laws” built into physics (a view that collapses into Russellian Monism), or a set of laws parallel to physics and present with them from the moment of the big bang (collapsing into what Philip Goff [“Galileo’s Error” 2019] calls “cosmological panpsychism”). Like mental properties, the form such laws might take, or how we might go about detecting their specific influences, is left unspecified. 

Each of these suggestions has numerous problems besides leaving key requirements unspecified. I’ve addressed these in other papers (see “Fantasy Physics and the Genesis of Mind”, and “For Every Theist there are One Hundred Materialists”). All of these ideas amount to a quasi-dualism (what Chalmers calls “property dualism”), and in every case, causal closure is violated. Materialism (if some of these ideas can be called materialistic at all) in the philosophy of mind comes down to a two-horned dilemma. Either mind is real and non-physical in which case we must account for its apparent violation of causal closure, or mind isn’t real at all, leaving us nothing for which to account.  

A few philosophers have made a go at the second horn, but it strikes most as prima facie absurd. If you accept the first horn (as does Gazzaniga, Chalmers, Goff, and many others), you are already a dualist no matter what your materialistic credentials. Substance-dualism is another alternative. There are more nuanced versions than the simple Cartesian “mind imposed on brains”.  For example, a detection, by brains, of some field with which brains, and only brains, interact. Individual minds are analogous to the sound (compression waves) issuing from radios whose antennae are sensitive to some electromagnetic radiation; the field is the radiation, the brain is the radio and antenna, mind is the music (see “From What Comes Mind”). 

The problem with substance dualism is that whatever the field is, it isn’t physical. Its source must be something other than physics. Critics argue that this demands both a plausible source (for example God. See “Metaphysical Stability in the Philosophy of Mind”) and an accounting of the field-brain interaction. But as noted in papers linked above, the unspecifiable “proto-mental properties” of Russellian Monism, panpsychism, or the “psychic laws” of Chalmers’ property dualism, demand the same dual accounting (asserting that these qualities “just belong to physics” is not an account of their origin) while violating causal closure (they are purportedly physical after all). Substance dualism preserves causal closure. Physics is not required to be both necessary and sufficient for consciousness. 

Yet even granting that such a model is correct, how the brain works to detect the field remains an open empirical issue. Gazzaniga and Deacon (see link above to “Incomplete Nature”) both have more nuanced views here than philosophers like Chalmers, Nagel, Russell, Goff, and many others; all moderns trying to make that first horn work. 

The Consciousness Instinct by Michael Gazzaniga

This is a book about consciousness and specifically, an attempt to find a solution to the qualitative difference between “minds” and brains from within physics. This is a consequence of the “materialist paradigm” (it can only be physics). Dr. Gazzaniga is a true believer. But his is the case for ninety-percent of the philosophy of mind I read and review anyway. What distinguishes this one?

Gazzaniga reviews some history for us and brings forward insights from psychology, biology, medicine (in particular observations of damaged or surgically altered brains), and physics, in particular, the notion (from quantum mechanics) of complementarity. Phenomena can have two aspects, they can exist as two sides of the same coin but at the same time, one cannot always say how each becomes the other. The two sides are not mutually reducible.

Gazzaniga, along with many others in the field, believes that quantum phenomena have some connection to consciousness (many others have speculated about this), but he also believes that this connection began way back at the origin of life. Life, like consciousness, rests in part on quantum behavior! I’ve been calling attention to this very reasonable idea for years, so it’s nice to see the idea expressed by someone with more credibility than I seem to have.

This is an important aspect of Gazzaniga’s theory because it allows him to trace the root of “the subjective” not merely to brains, but all the way back to the origin of life. Here he brings in the distinction between “rules” and “laws”. The mechanisms that characterize living things, all living things, are “rule-governed”, not “law-governed” The distinction is important because a rule (in our case how DNA sequences become specific protein sequences) adds an extra layer, an abstraction, on top of laws. Laws are fixed, rules can be changed. That is the secret of both life and consciousness. He is NOT claiming that early life was conscious. Instead, what makes life alive, its complementary double-sided nature (lawful rules), is the same principle operating in the emergence of consciousness from brains. 

From medical brain research, he notes that damaged brains are still conscious. Aspects of the former consciousness will be missing, but the person (whose damaged brain it is) doesn’t notice what’s missing. From this, he concludes that consciousness is not produced by a particular part of the brain but rather is a product of every part of it operating to produce its own small part of the whole subjective experience.

Also incorporated is the idea of modularity and layers of neural activity. Consciousness bubbles up through the layers becoming progressively richer in richer brains, but existing in some sense from the times of the earliest true nerve ganglia. The book is crafted to carry us through the development of these ideas from both medicine and philosophy. Gazzaniga’s “instinct idea” is the last aspect introduced. He notes that, like consciousness, brain research points to instincts being distributed phenomena, hence, consciousness is an instinct! Logically this is a stretch and is not as important to the theory as his rules-laws distinction and synthesis of complementarity and modularity.

In the end, like other speculations referenced in the book, he fails to nail down the “how” or the “what” of consciousness. Gazzaniga’s approach might prove to be a useful addition in the quest to answer these questions, but all of them, including this one, are perfectly consistent with a dualism holding that brains are necessary but not sufficient to explain the appearance of the subjective from the objective. Every one of his ideas can be true, while still not giving him what he needs. Every other complementarity known to our physics can be physically measured on both “sides of the coin”. Not simultaneously, but that is beside the point. It remains precisely the problem with mind that physical measurement of the “other side”, the subjective side, is impossible! That makes mind different. That makes brains insufficient, or at least leaves open that possibility.

Metaphysical Stability in the Philosophy of Mind

I have said there is, in the philosophy of mind (PoM), no stable position between eliminative materialism (EM) and substance-dualism grounded in theism (T). Stability refers to the inability of these theories to suggest answers to fundamental grounding questions. I have in mind three grounding issues.

    1. Interaction 
    2. Specification 
    3. Origin

EM (and its cousin Functionalism (F)) are stable because they deny there is anything, any “mystery of mind”, to be explained (in the case of F that there is anything besides various functional descriptions we can cogently talk about). Nothing interacts, there is no need to specify anything, and there is nothing whose origin requires any explanation.

Property Dualism (PD), Russellian Monism (RM) of many forms, and panpsychism (P), also of many variations (some built upon RM, and others not) are unstable hypotheses because they float free of any metaphysical ground. Along with T, they accept there is something about mind to be explained, but they do not address any of the three issues (PD having only the first to worry about). T addresses all three of the issues, having answers to two of them, and provides good reasons for our inability to resolve the third. T is metaphysically grounded. 

Each of these PoMs also has some relation to the principle of causal closure (CC) in the physical. CC consists of two fundamental axioms: (CCA) physics comes only from prior physics, and (CCB) physics can produce only more physics. CC is not one of the listed issues because each of these theories does address their relation to CC. Ironically, T is the only PoM, besides EM&F, that fully respects CC (see below and also “Fantasy Physics and the Genesis of Mind” for more detail). 

All of the other PoMs have two things in common (I do not include idealism in this essay because it differs from the others in this respect). First, there is a mind-independent world fully subject to CC, and second, the mind is in some way a part of this world (exists in the physical universe), and it’s unique (seemingly non-material) qualities warrant explanation.  Idealism denies a mind-independent world (a slippery slope to solipsism) and ends up having to fall back on T (or a “simulation scenario” see later)  for an explanation. 

The interaction issue plagues every PoM (including T) other than EM&F.  Every PoM apart from EM&F is offered to explain the existence of mind without resorting to T, because (among other things) T is taken to have an interaction problem! Yet to one degree or another, every PoM from PD on suffers from the same problem.

PROPERTY DUALISM 

The interaction problem is particularly acute for PD, which also makes the most overt break with CC. In PD, plain-old-physics is the causal root of mind in violation of CCB. Most, but not all, PD advocates also accept the reality of “mental cause”, which violates CCA. Thanks to PD’s stipulation that CC is false, it manages to address the “origin issue”; brains cause (it must be a causal relation) mind, which is the end of the matter. Thanks to this emphasis, PD manages to avoid any need to specify anything mental before the brain’s appearance, but PD cannot escape its interaction problem. How exactly does plain-ordinary-physics produce and then subsequently interact with a subjective-anything at all? 

The interaction issue is about mechanism. What exactly are the mechanics of the physical production of mind or mind’s capacity to cause physics? PD advocates assert that minds and brains do interact, and they admit that these are violations of what CC fundamentally says. Still, they are as unable as theists to say anything about how exactly this works. PD does not have any specification issue because there is nothing mental about the universe either in part or whole except when brains are present. 

RUSSELLIAN MONISM AND PANPSYCHISM

RM and P both developed to avoid PD’s problem with CC and interaction. In the end, they fail to avoid either. The foundation of RM and P is the idea that there isn’t any “interaction problem” because the mental is in some way built into the physical. “Some way” hides a lot of skeletons. What we take to be CC already includes the effects of “the mental” as these are taken to be either constitutive (often the un-observable essence) of the physical, or having a causal relation to it. There are many variations, but in every case, the idea is that when brains come along whatever-it-is that constitutes the mental embedded in the physical, results in consciousness as we experience it. 

RM rests the mental on the micro-physical, quarks, leptons, bosons, and all their assemblies. While we’re being speculative, if we ascribe the mental to any one particle, the force bosons would be the logical candidates because they mediate the relation between the quarks that give matter (protons, neutrons, atoms) its dispositional qualities. But I digress.

Some advocates of RM ground the mental in quantum phenomena. Somehow, these “essences of the mental” add up in assemblies until reaching brains, consciousness as we know it emerges. How and what goes on in this assembling (the infamous “combination problem”) is anyone’s guess. Some variations of RM assign a special status to the total assembly, the whole universe. RM adds-up to P.

Without RM adding up to it, P holds that there is no mental in the micro, but instead, it appears only as a quality of the total, the universe.  Indeed one might look at the present universe at vast scales (billions of light-years) and note its resemblance to a giant brain. In a recent paper, Phil Goff suggests that the cosmological settings, fixed in the opening second of the big bang, are the result not merely of cosmological mentality, but also intentionality, operating in and on a universe filled with undifferentiated radiation (see link to his article below)! In effect, the claim is that in this state, the universe is mind in its purest form!

While this is not idealism, the idea of “mind independence” is shifted. There is a physical world independent of mind as we (and presumably the higher animals) experience it, but it is no longer shorn of mind altogether. The universe (or particle) mind is not our mind, but it is the case that a “mental essence” lies at the heart of the material world. Yet, (we are assured) this mind is not consciousness as we (or even fish) experience it. 

This brings us to the heart of the “specification problem”. In what, even partly, does this “mental essence” consist? No RM or P advocate that I know has the slightest positive suggestion regarding any of it! They say “it isn’t consciousness as we understand it”, but that is saying what it is not. I would not presume to demand philosophers give us rich detail (as we can do about our mental properties), but they seem unable to specify even one of these qualities. This failure applies equally to RM and P. In the case of P, the quality in question is a mental property (at least one) of the universe. Again, no positive suggestion is forthcoming.

Every one of these philosophers pays homage to this problem. They all admit they cannot provide any positive quality specifications. Goff goes so far as to suggest that such qualities may remain forever unknowable. What philosophers ignore are the consequences of this failure to the theory itself. To say that X, having properties we can never in principle discriminate, is responsible (causally or constitutively) for Y is to say that X cannot be confirmed or dis-confirmed! This admission empties the theory (a hypothesis about the physical world) of any possible physical content! Proposed solutions to the “combination problem” rest on nothing because no one can say (even speculatively) what is being combined!

This brings us again to interaction. The whole point of RM or P is to make mind, of our sort, un-mysterious. Biological mind, the interaction between mind and brains, is not [supposedly] a mystery because atoms (or the universe) encompass mind’s potentials before its appearance, not merely its possibility, but also the mechanics of the process that produces it. How do they do this? The same mystery is transferred to the micro-physical or the universe.

No one disputes that brains are physical. How does the micro (or universal) embedded-mental interact with the physical? What does it do to physics, not merely to produce the mental that we know (that it does so is by stipulation of the hypothesis), but to drive physics (cosmology) towards its emergence? How would physics (cosmological evolution) be different if the proposed mental-in-it was withdrawn? Philosophers have only pushed the interaction problem to another part of the rug, and even that not completely. 

The origin issue is something else again. Physics has the quantum vacuum. Our physical theories show no sign of needing a mental component to operate as they do. We can trace the evolution of the entire physical universe to the big bang, and the physical equations describe all of the effects we observe without a “mental term”. From what ground does the mental essence of atoms or the cosmos arise? To say it just happens in the same big bang as everything else is merely to stipulate an answer and beg the question. 

Of the three issues, interaction, specification, and origin, the last is the least acknowledged by the RM or P community. The properties whose specification we do not know, interacting we know not how, are merely stipulated to have been present since the big bang. Surely there is something about this that warrants inquiry? I suspect the problem is that any such investigation quickly backs up into something like God. CC is purportedly teleology-free (at least this is how physicists understand it). The moment one suggests there is a mental essence associated with physical causal relations, one throws this corollary of the principle into question. If the proto-mental has the effect of guiding physics towards brains and consciousness CC, as understood by physicists, is broken. 

If the proto-mental does not affect physical unfolding until and unless brains happen along, if it is teleology-free, its existence is more mysterious still! There would be then, an essential (if unspecifiable) quality of the physical that has no effect what-so-ever over billions of years but happens to generate consciousness when brains happen along, which by sheer luck, occurs. This is exactly how PD comes out! “The mental” emerges from brains and only from brains! RM and P are teleological hypotheses, or they are explanatorily redundant!

THEISM

If there is a teleological direction, who or what sets it? Dr. Goff goes so far as to assert that the cosmos is not merely minded in some vague sense, but intentional, as far back as the big bang (“Did the Universe Design Itself” Nov. 2018). Intentionality would leave no doubt about teleology. I pointed out to Dr. Goff that once he goes this far, he is nine-tenths of the way to God. He has never commented. 

T addresses the origin question, and along with it, the teleological direction. Whatever it is that brings mind about when brains are on the scene (see “From what comes Mind”), God is responsible for it. What then is responsible for God? God is responsible for God, theism’s grand stipulation. There is a single entity at the top of the chain of being who is responsible (eternally) for its own existence. If this weren’t so, there would be yet something antecedent to God. 

In this context, it is worth mentioning simulation scenarios (SS) tangential to PD, RM, and P. These break down into three broad varieties. Mind might be simulated directly (a brain-in-a-vat) in which case SS collapses into idealism (ultimately solipsism), with the simulators (whomever they are) being proxies for God. Next, the mind-independent world is simulated directly and our physical selves simulated within it (many computer games serve as the present metaphor for this). However, the appearance of a first-person subjectivity in the simulated world is as mysterious as it is without hypothesizing the simulation. Finally, what is simulated is not the world as we find it but the big bang, the settings, and the standard model (what David Chalmers’ calls a “metaphysical simulation”). The world is left to evolve with the simulation providing whatever is required to evoke minds from brains. Except for the interaction mechanism, this scenario does remove the mystery from mind’s appearance, but at the cost of making the simulators not merely proxies for God but to all intents and purposes, actually God!

God is God if and only if he is his own eternal source, meaning there never was a time when God was not (see “Prolegomena to a Future Theology”). Of course, this “too pat” answer is among the reasons atheist philosophers (the majority these days) reject T. But in response, as an alternative, they offer nothing to ground their speculations!

God sets the settings producing a physical universe where mind is possible. There is nothing else for God to do until somewhere conditions become life-compatible. From that point, God, or some proxy acting for him, might have something to do with life’s origin and the evolution of mind-supporting brains. There is no mystery in a teleological direction if God is the source of it. 

T also addresses the specification issue.  Mind emerges from the functioning of brains as PD advocates imagine it, except that something God adds to the physical universe (see again “From what comes Mind”) supports mind’s emergence. There are no mental qualities or essences of atoms, stars, or even the whole physical universe. Interestingly, Dr. Goff suggests a field idea for whatever it is that embodies the intentionality of the cosmos (as do I in the aforementioned essay), but he says nothing about what might ground it metaphysically. If there is a fire in a fireplace, we say “the fire is intentional”, but this is a metaphor. The fire has no intention. The intention belongs to she who lit it. T grounds intentionality because it belongs to God, who is minded — conscious!  

That leaves the “interaction issue”, identical to that faced by PD, RM, and P.  Under T, even brains have no “mental qualities” of their own. The mental is a response, an outcome of the interaction between brains and whatever supports its emergence. Consciousness is analogous to the movement of a pointer on a dial, a  response to the interaction between some phenomenon and an experimental apparatus. 

T can say no more about how this works or what “the something” does to brains to evoke mind than any other hypothesis. But T does have two arrows in its quiver the others lack. First, it has God who knows the trick! Second, it gives a good reason why we cannot fathom the interaction mechanism. Whatever it is that interacts with brains to produce mind, it is metaphysically antecedent to the mind, the subjective individual consciousness, it invokes. 

Whatever God (directly or indirectly, e.g., via a field in spacetime) does to produce consciousness is transparent to us. We have only the result, the output of the interaction that constitutes our experiential arena. That arena has phenomenal access to the structure of the material (mind-independent) world through qualia, the mediation of physical senses. It has no access to the phenomenon that invokes consciousness from brains beyond that which is invoked. Individual mind is our brain’s measurement or detection of the supporting phenomenon, whatever it is. Like the motion of the needle, that’s all we get!

T has one other advantage. It leaves CC alone! PD accepts that CC is false. RM and P try to save CC but do so only by stipulation — “the physical is fundamentally also mental”. In T, CC genuinely holds. The purely physical produces, and emerges from, only the physical! As Dawkins puts it (The Blind Watchmaker), “God is redundant” (he should add “in or for the physical as such”). Mind’s source is outside the physical, from God, directly or indirectly. God also happens to be the source of the material, including the properties of CC. This fact explains the ability of mind to both represent the physical and manipulate it. Mind is designed and intended, by God, to do that!

CONCLUSION

If atheist philosophers want to be taken seriously by theists who are, at this time, the only philosophers who grasp the fact that God alone grounds all the metaphysical questions, they must suggest reasonable answers to the questions posed at the beginning of this essay. PD, RM, and P all suffer by breaking with CC one way or another. Only T (besides EM&F) fully preserves CC, and only T explains why the interaction mechanism is, in principle, out of our reach.

Both RM and P (especially P) could claim (along with T) that we cannot specify the proto-mental or how it interacts with brains because it is antecedent to the consciousness invoked. But unlike T, these qualities supposedly originate in a physical event, the big bang, which is historically, but not metaphysically, antecedent to mind. It may well be that we cannot fathom the interaction between mind and proto-mental assemblies (or the cosmological totality) in brains. But hydrogen atoms and planets, not to mention the universe, are of the mind-independent world, the world to which we have phenomenal (sensory) access. If we cannot even hypothesize about the effect of the proto-mental on the physical, if the proto-mental has no measurable effect on cosmological evolution (at least up until brains come along) then it is explanatorily redundant. 

T is not an empty hypothesis. It posits no unspecifiable proto-mental qualities embedded in physics or cosmology. What evokes the mental comes from outside physics altogether, from God who is not explanatorily redundant because he is the source and ground of both whatever-it-is that evokes the mental from brains, and the physical, ultimately the brains, from which consciousness emerges. For this reason, because it is metaphysically antecedent to physics, its interaction with brains cannot be fathomed by the consciousness invoked by it. 

None of this impels us to say that God exists, let alone that he must exist. In this PoM context, T is a hypothesis like all the others. It happens to be the only hypothesis that answers most of the questions left unanswered by PD, RM, and P. Not only is it logical, it is the best hypothesis we presently have and should therefore be taken seriously.

Comments on “Mind” by John Searle

In a wonderfully written book, “Mind” (2004 — see my Amazon review here) John Searle introduces us to issues in the philosophy of mind and promotes his own version of a theory of mind. While carefully rejecting present views of dualism (substance and property versions), and a larger set of variations grounded in materialism. He proposes his own view grounded, in the end, in materialism, but claims to avoid all the problems with other versions. What makes his version materialistic is that he assumes both the necessity and sufficiency of brains to be causally responsible for consciousness, that is agent subjectivity and intentionality. In large part, it is because of the causal relationship that presentation to consciousness via sensory experience, and causal action by an agent who can “make things happen” that the “interaction problem” (the “mind-body problem”) largely disappears in Searle’s philosophy of mind.

But it never completely disappears. Searle runs into problems with free will and personal identity that the theory fails to accommodate. Free will does fit into his view of mind as it relates both to the individual and the collective. It has “conditions of satisfaction” that can be easily specified in Searle’s terms. Personal identity is far more problematic. I discuss both below.

While the necessity of brains to consciousness is these days not controversial, Searle’s assumption of their sufficiency begs the question in the debate between dualists (particularly substance dualists) and materialists, including Searle. It is precisely the point of the debate here that no one has established sufficiency of brains to minds, and it turns out the whole debate turns on what evidence there might be that brains are insufficient. It turns out the evidence, not proof, comes from physics itself; the causal closure principle!

Searle implicitly recognizes this “begging of the question”. At the end of chapter 4, having said that he belives his arguments fully refute the various materialist variations he explores, he says this about dualism.

“Notice that these arguments still leave dualism as a logical possibility, though I think extremely unlikely, that when our bodies are destroyed, our souls will go marching on. I have not tried to show that this is an impossibility (indeed I wish it were true), but rather that it is inconsistent with just about everything else we know about how the universe works and therefore it is irrational to believe in it.”

I do not believe he really “wishes it were true”. If he did, he might have found a more sophisticated version of the argument (see  also “From What Comes Mind?”). He also says, in the same conclusion to chapter 4 that as goes the two ontological realms (the mental and the physical), “No one has ever succeeded in giving an intelligible account of the relationships between these two realms”. Part of the purpose of this essay is to give such an account consistent with his structural analysis of mind. In the end, the precise mechanism of the connection remains a mystery, but in my view, it is no longer a connection between realms. One problem is that by “how the universe works” Searle is speaking of the discoveries of science, starting with physics. In physics, there simply is no evidence of any positive reality added from elsewhere (besides brains) that could constitute consciousness some separate thing added to physics. Physics finds no other realm and that is certainly true! There is no other realm that physics can possibly detect. But for physics to declare, blithely, that “nothing other than physics exists” obviously begs the question, something even physicists (those not pushing some vested interest) admit. This blatant assumption impacts both substance and property dualism.

Property dualism is a materialism where brains are necessary and sufficient causally, but what they cause comes, inexplicably, to take on a being of its own. Property dualism says that a new ontological realm emerges from physics, and once emerged has independent properties that are ontologically objective and yet remain interactive with physics. Property dualism springs from materialism and either proposes a new, fundamentally different ontology springing (who knows how) from the material, or it falls into epiphenomenalism. The core of this view falls into the same trap as many nondualistic (materialist) explanations, the naked assumption that “nothing but physics” is manifesting any such ontologically novel realm.

As for substance dualism, Searle refers explicitly to a strictly Cartesian version. In this variation, God in some direct way imposes mind on bodies. Brains are not even directly involved, although even Descartes recognized that some connection must exist between them. This view leads to all sorts of distractions (souls, disembodied minds) that are not, in fact, entailed even by a “mind realm”. Searle believes the whole idea of an ontologically objective “mental realm” (substance or property) is the root of dualist problems and he is right, but for some of the wrong reasons. His reasons stem, mostly, from belief expressions that come down to us through the history of religious institutions. These beliefs are vague and confused and may not properly distinguish between mind, soul, person, or spirit. All this vagueness was present in Descartes, and everyone (dualist or anti-dualist) since Descartes has simply imported it into their idea of what dualism must entail. Property dualism of course looses the disembodied soul notion but still comes out to an ontologically objective “realm” that brains produce. I agree with Searle, this is the wrong way to look at it.

There are more sophisticated versions of a proper substance dualism argument, but it remains the case that some of what is substantial about substance dualism has to come from something that is itself nonmaterial. This typically ends in God because that is what humans have thought must ground anything nonphysical. Once you have God, the physical too becomes grounded, and the fact of interaction between whatever it is that constitutes the mental and the physical is no longer a surprise. Nevertheless, the mystery of the interaction mechanism remains. But we need not go as far as God to paint a more sophisticated substance dualism; we can start with physics. The principle of causal closure stated briefly is that physics comes from and produces only physics. Subjective experience, being in its essential nature nonphysical, cannot emerge from physics, at least not physics alone!.

Consider a radio, powered up, properly functioning, playing some music. The music issues from the proper functioning of the radio in a way analogous to subjective mind’s issuing from our brains. Clearly the music (technically pressure waves of a certain type) is not the radio itself. But there is no music realm, only music which stops (or becomes distorted) the moment the radio stops functioning properly. Note now the properly functioning circuitry of the radio is 99% responsible for the music, but not 100%. There is something else, in this case a physical electromagnetic wave, that carries information to which the circuitry of the radio is (through a complex convolution of electron perturbation) sensitive. The important point here is the music is not merely added to the radio the way Descartes added mind to body. That is why, in the case of the music, there is no realm. The radio is responsible, the cause, of the music, and brains are similarly the cause of consciousness.

Consciousness is not added to brains, but stems from them. However, the radio while necessary is not sufficient to produce any music at all without the information bearing (and electron perturbing) radio wave to which its functioning circuits are sensitive. The music (strictly speaking the configured pressure wave) is the expression of that sensitivity transformed through the radio’s circuitry. Something to which the brain is sensitive results in a metaphorical interpretation we experience literally as experience. There is no realm because mind as such is not added from the outside to brains. Mind, subjectivity, springs from brains in response to or as a result of (transformed by brain circuitry) sensitivity to something nonphysical that must, nevertheless, exist inside the physical universe.

We must posit something, we need not go all the way to God, existing inside (is a part of) the physical universe that has three qualities. 1) It cannot itself be physical. 2) it must be able to affect brains, or put another way, brains must be sensitive to or detect this something. 3) it must be everywhere in the physical universe such that where ever the right circuitry comes to be in the universe, a subjective experience, attached to that circuitry, appears in or rather as some subject. This “hybrid-substance dualism” says this: Consciousness emerges from brains. Consciousness is not added to brains from the outside but emerges in functioning brains themselves in conjunction with or as a result of (causal) interaction with some entity that is not itself material.

Why not material? Because the material alone, the brains, cannot invoke the nonmaterial which is the essential characteristic of a subjective awareness! This is my core assumption, and I justify it not by religion but physics! No physics has demonstrated the emergence of a nonphysical phenomenon from nothing but physical forerunners (causes). It is also a fact that the only seemingly nonphysical phenomenon we know is consciousness, subjectivity, itself. Given what it is physics is competent to explore, the physical, and that we have a manifestly nonphysical subjective experience that is clearly reliant on brains, the only legitimate assertion physics can make about mind is that we cannot possibly know if physics is sufficient to produce it. This does not prove “physics doesn’t produce it”, but it also gives us no justification to say that it does.

In both of my books and a few essays here on the blog I call this entity “Cosmic Mind”, but that has the unfortunate connotation that it is itself a thinking entity or that it amounts to panpsychism. Neither is the case. Perhaps a better name might be “Cosmic Mind Field” (CMF). Existing in time and pervading all space. It is nevertheless not a panpsychism because it evokes consciousness only in brains, not rocks, individual living cells, or thermostats. But it must function as a field (albeit not electromagnetic) because it performs where ever functioning brains are present and evokes a continuum of consciousness from brains of varying levels of complexity.

Perhaps there is “something it is like to be a fish or a lizard, but we have good reason to believe that whatever that is, the consciousness of lions, apes, and parrots is richer, and that of humans richer still. Like two radios of different quality, the more primitive brains invoke a more primitive and limited consciousness in the same way the lower quality radio reproduces less of the information present in the electromagnetic wave.

This picture allows Searle’s view of consciousness to go through. Brains being causal entities evoke consciousness. There is no mystery of “causal mind” because brains do all the causing. Searle’s analysis of “aspectual intentionality”, qualia (aspectual perception), belief, desire, the subconscious, and so on all can go through as he supposes they do. My proposal avoids the Cartesian “realm business”. Mind is not some realm imposed on bodies, but stems from them. At the same time it resolves the causal closure dilemma. Mind is nonphysical because its invocation from brains isn’t entirely physical but depends on the brain’s sensitivity to the CMF.

But what is that exactly? It is precisely because the only handle we have on objective (mind-independent) ontology is perceptual and therefore physical that we cannot say. We cannot detect the CMF with physical instruments, nor conceive of any experiment that would isolate it from other phenomena because we can only so isolate physical phenomena! CMF sensitivity is common to all consciousness. There is nothing that we have from within consciousness that isolates the effect of the CMF because consciousness is that effect. But human consciousness at least effects a partial escape from this. I will come to that a bit below.

The Free Will Problem

In Mind Searle runs into two problems he cannot fit into his analysis, free will and personal identity. As concerns free will Searle admits he cannot reconcile even a causally efficacious consciousness with free will on the brain side. On the psychological side, from within subjectivity, he cannot shake the conviction that free will must somehow be genuine. We presuppose it in everything we do and every utterance we make. Does my model help us here? I could always say that free will is just a power (more in man than in fish) that consciousness has. Searle would rightly object that this doesn’t explain anything new. It doesn’t explain the ontological ground of the freedom. How in a universe of random (quantum) and deterministic phenomena does anything (even the nonmaterial) become free in the volitional sense?

This is both a physical and a metaphysical problem. It’s hard enough to accept that physics alone is sufficient to cause consciousness. Now it also happens that this consciousness is volitional, its choices neither determined nor random (both purposeless) but now directed and purposeful? The CMF is becoming extraordinary indeed.

The metaphysical issue is not merely the possibility of volition in the universe, though that is one issue. Like consciousness, free will must be possible as its exercise supports our entire intentional state. As with consciousness, free will’s possibility is something physical law makes room for. What physical law demands is that physical causal chains have some physical starting point. Physics allows its macro-deterministic behavior to arise from randomness, the quantum vacuum. If physicists were being honest, they could not rule out that something else, something not visible to scientific method, can also start causal chains.

Volitionally initiated causal chains, the causal part, all begin with some macro-physical starting point; for example the motion of a hand or a speech act. They are not causal chains until that point. But physics cannot preclude that, perhaps simultaneous with neural activity, a volitional act neither determined nor random, initiates that chain. It is, in other words, logically possible that physics alone is not enough to explain the appearance of a third source of causal chains; volition. Not only is this logically possible, physics itself recommends the conclusion. In centuries of sophisticated experiments and observation physics has found only determinism and randomness. Why should physicists concede the possibility of a type of cause they cannot, even in principle, detect? Because unlike other hypothetical entities (ghosts) and powers (remote viewing), free will is presupposed in virtually every decision we make as human beings. Volitional capacity is the closest thing to “obvious in our experience” besides experience itself. Not only must we presuppose it, our entire culture, language, art, institutions, cleverly designed experiments, and engineering feats, all imply free will.

In “Making the Social World” (2011) Searle devotes a chapter to language and the commonalities and differences between pre-linguistic and linguistic mind. He lists five possible types of “linguistic utterances”: Assertives, Directives, Commissives (e.g. promises), Expressives (e.g. apologies), and Declarations (e.g. “I pronounce you husband and wife”). The first four of these all have pre-linguistic forms (beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions respectively) but Searle says that Declarations, making something real (e.g. a married couple) merely by declaring it, has only a linguistic form. Searle does not recognize that free exercise of will is precisely a pre-linguistic declarative. It “makes something real” by willing it, and has the same “two directions of fit with the world” as declarations.

One freely chooses (Searle’s “prior intention”, “will-to-world fit”, “world-to-will” cause) and then freely acts (“intention-in-action”, “world-to-will fit”, “will-to-world” cause). The “conditions of satisfaction” for free will are the same, indeed a combination of, those of perception and action, homologous to linguistic declarations. If I think I am free, that belief can only be true if I really am free. If I act freely and introduce into the world a new [physical] causal chain that action is satisfied only by a genuinely new causal chain initiated by a free choice. If this analysis is correct, then free will is a property of consciousness in the same sense as intentionality and the CMF must, in some sense be its metaphysical ground.

The Identity Problem

Searle demurs on free will’s “ontologically objective” reality, but he cannot bring himself to do the same for agent-identity. To be conscious, to have purposes, to choose, are, in human experience, the consciousness, intentionality, and volitional elections of an agent. All of our experience presupposes agency, some singular identity that recognizes the change all around it by reference to its constitutive changelessness. Searle doesn’t use the word ‘changeless’, but his examples are telling.

He shows that memories do not explain the phenomenon. There is an image in my mind from when I was two. I believe it is real because my parents explained to me once what it was when I was a little older. But then there is a gap and the next memories (few) I have are of events taking place when I was four. Gradually, the gaps become smaller and the number of memories grows, but gaps persist here and there even to recent times. And yet, I have the unshakable conviction, as much as the conviction that a persistent “I”, the same person, have existed since that earliest memory.

I had that memory and I have all the other memories, the same I despite gaps in the memory record spanning years! What about the future? I can plan for a future, say going to graduate and postgraduate school to become a philosopher. I can act today so eight or ten years from now I, the same I who today applies to graduate schools, becomes a philosopher. Looking backwards from that time, I will be the same person who filled out those first applications. I will recognize this. If my brain has functioned normally throughout that time, its truth (reality-representation) is immediately apparent. The “conditions of satisfaction” for changelessness are met.

Searle believes it necessary to posit some functional entity that stands for this “I”. He does not hesitate to declare that it cannot be a substance, but something must stand antecedent, logically anterior, to consciousness itself. As we experience it, agency is inseparable from our (that is human-subjective) exercise of will. Both the freedom and the will in “free will” seem, in our phenomenal arena, to come from, to be the will of, my agent-self, my “I”.

Is Searle’s “functional entity” helpful here? What does it mean for a functional entity to be changeless? How does this property emerge in a universe where everything else from physics to thought is constantly in flux? How does a functional entity dependent in some necessary sense on both a changeable brain and changeable consciousness gain this quality? Searle’s suggestion is merely a stand-in, but the qualities it must have suggest more.

Functions are processes. A changeless process is logically impossible. The agent can only be a substance whose persistence, at least, is logically possible. If that is the case agency cannot take origin in mind. The always-changing cannot produce changeless substance any more than physics alone can produce nonmaterial mind. Agency is always experienced and expressed in mind, but its metaphysical source must be external to it.

It is this substantial agency that makes possible the capacity to partially escape otherwise transparent subjectivity, something it appears only humans can do. By this I refer to our capacity to analyse mind itself. Lions have some sense of individuation from the world, but do not exhibit any ability to think about their consciousness as such. Only humans do this, and while language seems to be necessary in the exercise of this capacity it isn’t sufficient for its appearance. Even though what we experience of our own identity is experienced only in and through mind, only the existence of something in someway distinct from mind can provide a sort of “binocular perspective” that enables us to say something about mind itself, to describe our subjectivity (to ourselves or others) as if, as it were, from a third person perspective. I have much more to say about this in my essay “Why Personality”.

 

Putting it All Together

Both free will and identity raise extraordinary ontological issues. For mind, it seems an extraordinary coincidence that this CMF happened to be around to evoke consciousness from a certain organization of matter, especially as both the consciousness and the life on which it rests were contingent. Not only is the CMF implicated in consciousness (which at least we can suppose is generated by brains as music is generated by the radio), but also volition, something for which physics and philosophy cannot even account for logically let alone physically!

Identity is even more remarkable. It is one thing to suppose that some nonmaterial reality can arise out of the purely physical. It is even more of a stretch to demand that an entity that never changes in time arises in a time-drenched universe in which everything else changes! The absurdity of these impossibilities ends in two extreme positions, denial that nonmaterial phenomena exist, including consciousness, or that its existence must be purposeful. This is to say the antecedent presence of the CMF, is not an accident, but produced for the purpose of causing consciousness with free will when the right material organization comes along. Of course this has further teleological implications.

Searle insists that all explanations find their ground in physics, material reality, but he is left with three problems resulting from this demand; the mind-body problem, free will, and timeless agency. Starting with consciousness as such we have Searle’s assertion that it is just “what brains do” but he knows his explanation does not cross the gap. Dual-aspect (Russellian) monisms (Davidson, Nagel) or panpsychism (Chalmers, Goff) also fail to bridge the gap. If, as these philosophers insist, mind is nothing more than an expression of undiscovered physics then we should find evidence in physics for the emergence of something (besides mind which begs the question) even minimally nonphysical.

My own solution, the CMF, doesn’t get to the details either, but it explains why what we seek is not found in physics. It isn’t there. If the CMF and brains interact (which they seem obviously to do) then either we are back to impossible physics, or there is a third entity responsible for both. When we discover interaction between two otherwise discontinuous phenomena in the physical world we take this discovery to be evidence of some third phenomenon that mediates the interaction. In proposing such an entity, a common source of physics and mind, we are doing nothing new philosophically speaking.

The CMF makes consciousness possible, evoking subjectivity from brains, but by itself doesn’t give us free will. If free will, obviously exercised in and by mind, has a ground it must come also from our third entity. That entity must itself be willful, purposeful. It is reasonable to locate free will in mind, a power of consciousness, because its operation fits perfectly into Searle’s structural analysis of intentionality in language and both exhibit constraint by time. We choose only in the present and both the choices made and the conscious arena in which they take place are constantly changing.

But the same cannot be said of human subjective agency. This also exists in time and expresses in mind; I am here in the universe after all. But unlike everything else agency does not change. Our consciousness is always changing and our will (free or not) can act only in the present, but all this change takes place within a phenomenology of changeless self. This is such an extreme problem for Searle that he proposes a functional entity in some sense independent of both mind and physics. But just as we never see physics resulting in the nonphysical, it cannot yield up a changeless entity antecedent even to mind. Moreover, it is this agency that enables us to reflexively examine mind itself, something it could not do if it was not in ontologically distinct from mind.

Function resting on a constantly changing consciousness cannot be changeless. Unlike volition, changeless agency cannot be a product of the time-constrained CMF. Our antecedent and ontologically objective source must also be a timeless agency, able to add this agency to time-constrained mind. With this step we are all the way to a personal God outside time.

Granted this is a truncated argument. Searle is honest enough to admit that substance dualism remains logically possible but rejects it on the grounds that it adds nothing useful to the philosophy of mind. But Searle does not get any closer to the secret of subjectivity emerging out of physics alone other than to insist that it does. The dualism I propose takes nothing away from his analysis of the structure of consciousness as we experience it. My analysis of free will (above) shows that Searle’s basic insights about mind remain sound. Free will fits into his ideas about the relation of mind to language, better in fact than in his own analysis!

While not popular with physicists or philosophers, God, like dualism, always remains logically possible. Moreover, while theism does not explain the details, it does account for free willed nonmaterial agency outside physics. It tells us why physics cannot find these in physics itself but yet experiences (presumably in the minds of physicists and philosophers) them in a physical universe otherwise governed by deterministic process resting on the randomness of quantum mechanics.

That we have agency and do exercise free will is so obvious to me that I will make the extraordinary claim that what motivates most free will and agent denial is not physics as such which says only “physics cannot account for it”, but precisely that accepting the ontological objectivity of free will agency too easily opens the door to theism. Of course physicists and philosophers will greet this claim with derision but the fact remains that, in the end, only God can provide the ontological ground for both free will and agency.

 

Searle’s Quantum Mistake

In a chapter on free will (of the libertarian sort) Searle runs into something of a wall. He concedes that psychological freedom must be real, but he cannot reconcile this with what is ultimately physical biology (brains) both necessary and sufficient to produce consciousness, the arena in which psychological free will operates. He speculates on a popular suggestion, that quantum behavior, some quantum randomness essential to the brain’s function, is in some part responsible for a genuine (ontologically objective) volitional will. Searle knows that randomness is not volitional freedom, but he says that it is possible that something about the brain transforms the randomness into volitional freedom in agent consciousness.

But he doesn’t like this solution because it makes the brain different from all other organs in that only the brain requires quantum processes in its role. I believe he is mistaken here. There is good reason to suppose that life itself rests to some degree on quantum phenomena. Every bacterium, amoeba, or living cell in an organ of the body lives because quantum phenomena are an intimate part of the mechanics of living processes. The brain then would be no different from any other life in this respect though it may (I suspect does) further constrain (in Terrence Deacon’s sense, see “Incomplete Nature”) the quantum processes necessary for life. That is the brain utilizes quantum processes in some quantitatively or qualitatively “enhanced way” as compared to life in general, but it is no longer unique in its dependency on quantum process generally.

Suppose I am right here. Does it help us answer the free will question as concerns biology? No. There always remains the gap between physics and the subjective experience. How do “enhanced quantum constraints” become volitional, or for that matter subjective? The interaction problem always remains. But my suggestion does clear one of Searle’s objections to the involvement of quantum phenomena with the phenomenal experience of consciousness and free will; quantum processes are essential to life generally.