Dear All,

''This distinction gives rise to the so called mind-body problem (or dualism) and the debate is then about, for example, whether mental states can be reduced to brain states or not, whether the mental is fundamental or not, how the functional organization of the brain can give rise to consciousness and many other questions.''

Any functional descriptive models, such as some models of mecanisms in the body related to some of our mental experiences do not reduce the later to the former. Some physiologists may have a very good model of what a runner do while running but the runner own experience is a totally different realm of reality. The later IS the reality of running while the model may relate this reality to the processes in the body but it can't pretend to reduce the experience of running to this model. Science is always partial while reality is always total and the idea of a model reducing the whole of a reality is fundamentally flawed. A model ALWAYS abstracts an aspect of reality. The very idea of reduction is wrong and so lead to false problem such as the mind body problem. It vanishes as soon as the idea of reduction is eliminated. It is not particular to the study of the mental, but is general to all domains of science. Physics for example can't pretend to reduce the reality of the electron to what we know about the electrons and the more we climb the layers of complexity and the more infinite is the gap between what is known and WHAT IS. So the Mind Body problem is just an illusionary problem stemming from an hubristic conception of what a scientific model is.

Regards,

- Louis

In the referenced essay, Chomsky's described an unresolved struggle between the desire to explain reality in terms of physical principles and a reality consisting of physical and nonphysical components.

I am not a scholar of the history or philosophy of duality but the answer to your question pertains to my work. As a layperson and director of a small nonprofit involved in the study of apparent transcommunication, I try to provide useful guidance to our members. (Here, the "trans-" prefix is used to signify an "etheric-physical influence, where "etheric" would be the nonphysical aspect of your question.)

The working hypothesis I am using is that Psi Field concept sometimes discussed in parapsychology is largely correct. That is, a field of as yet unknown characteristics permeates physical space, is nonlocal and possibly nontemporal. Also, that the mind is reasonably modeled as separate from the body with the brain as transceiver. See An Emerging New Model for Consciousness: The Consciousness Field Model Chapter An Emerging New Model for Consciousness: The Consciousness Field Model

The Psi Field concept (and similar others) was developed to help explain apparent nonphysical (mind) effects such as verifiable information access via mediumship, the effect of intention on Random Event Generators, and for me, as a possible mechanism for the occurrence of Electronic Voice Phenomena and visual forms of the same.

If these phenomena are included in the discussion of reality, then it is correct to say that there is the physical and there is the nonphysical. Since characteristics can be stipulated for nonphysical to enplane the above phenomena that are not included in known physical characteristics, it is arguable that both exist and that no theory is complete without accounting for them.

I am interested in seeing your thoughts and answers from others, as they will help me better understand my work.

Dear Tom Butler and readers,

It might be helpful to consider one way in which Chomsky approaches current problems in the study of the mind: In order to solve contemporary problems, we can learn a lot from the great figures of the seventeenth and a eighteenth century. One can do this not as a scholar of the history of science, but rather driven by contemporary interests (and for the purpose of this discussions with a rather broad brush).

In case of the mind body problem, it is useful to consider the framework in which Galileo, Newton and Descartes worked, the mechanical philosophy. Basically, the view is that everything in nature works in intuitively obvious ways, i. e. three dimensional objects move through time and interact with one another only by direct contact. Contemporary psychology pretty much confirms that this is how we intuitively understand the world.

This is relevant for the mind-body problem, because in its original version Descartes explained the physical world in terms of the mechanical philosophy, or in his terminology, in terms of substance. He realized that certain phenomena, related to language and cognition, could not be explained in the terms of the mechanical philosophy. Descartes postulated a second substance, res cogitans, in order to deal with these phenomena. Thus, we have the mind-body problem.

Unfortunately, Newton showed that the mechanical philosophy is wrong. It took two centuries for physics to completely internalize this. With the advent of QM and GR, any appeal to intuition has been abandoned.

Thus, Newton showed that the first substance, the physical world, cannot be understood in intuitively intelligible terms. Therefore, we have no basis to distinguish between what is physical and what isn't. All that we can do is to try to develop ineligible theories about aspects of the world.

This would be my reply to your claim that there is a distinction: If one can show that these fields exist within the context of an explanatory theory, they would be just as real as anything in physics (the obvious problem is to show that they exist). And any intuitive distinction is meaningless.

My worry is that by proposing an intuitive understanding of the physical, the contemporary approaches are based on a false assumption and that may have consequences for the resulting research programs. It doesn't have to be, but it might.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Sven, you said " If one can show that these fields exist within the context of an explanatory theory, they would be just as real as anything in physics (the obvious problem is to show that they exist). And any intuitive distinction is meaningless."

We seem to agree in principle but not in terminology. I did not use intuitive in my comment. (Terminology check) I define objective as physically experienced; demonstrably real as part of physical space. Intuitive to me is the recognition of the nature of something that is not necessarily implied by available information. If aspects of nonphysical space can be shown to have objective characteristics, then they are not intuitively experienced. But rather, they are reasonably derived from available information.

In the context of this discussion, I argue that physical phenomena and psi phenomena are characteristics of the same reality. There may be a discontinuity between physical and nonphysical in the same sense that there is an apparent discontinuity between brain and mind. However, such a discontinuity does not necessarily require a new science. Look at the way √-1 has been imagined as the irrational number plane. In fact, I like to use the Mandelbrot Set as a tool for imagining etheric space (More generic Psi Field).

The historical reference to the mind-body question that i often go to is the Katha Upanishad:

1-III-3. Know the Self to be the master of the chariot, and the body to be the chariot. Know the intellect to be the charioteer, and the mind to be the reins.

1-III-4. The senses they speak of as the horses; the objects within their view, the way. When the Self is yoked with the mind and the senses, the wise call It the enjoyer.

The Hermetic Wisdom also describe this relationship, as it is supposed to be reasonably authentic, some of the work attributed to the Egyptian, Hermes. John 14 of the Bible also touches on this concept. My point is that the concepts are universal and not just the providence of the ancients.

Again, I think the mind-body problem is, indeed, misconceived. This, not because it is not able to be studied, but because those best qualified to do so seem reluctant to consider contemporary understanding about the nonphysical nature of mental functioning.

Dear Tom,

Sorry for the late reply, I was occupied. The problem is that in order to formulate the mind-body problem, one needs a definition of the physical. You define what you take to be “objective”: “I define objective as physically experienced; demonstrably real as part of physical space.“

Now, I experience the world as consisting of medium sized objects that move trough time and act on one another if and only if they come in direct contact. By your definition, this is objectively the case. It is demonstrably false that the world works in this way, so it is not “ demonstrably real as part of physical space”, i. e. it is not objectively the case. As far as I can make sense of your definition, it entails a contradiction.

Note that your historical references are paradigm examples for what I call 'intuition' – we experience it that way, but in all cases where we actually gain some understanding, we see that our intuition is false.

It may be useful to be clear on some methodology: In the absence of any intuitive understanding of the world, we would need a framework in which we can construct theories that; if successful, give us insight into how the world works (including your fields). My favourite definition of what a theory is comes from Einstein:

“A [theory] consists of concepts and basic laws to interrelate those concepts and of consequences to be derived by logical deduction.”

[…]

“Reason gives the structure to the system; the data of experience and their mutual relations are to correspond exactly to consequences in the theory. On the possibility alone of such a correspondence rests the value and the justification of the whole system, and especially of its fundamental concepts and basic laws. But for this, these latter would simply be free inventions of the human mind which admit of no a priori justification either through the nature of the human mind or in any other way at all.”

(pp. 164-165; Einstein; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; 1934)

Einstein is admirably clear: a theory about reality has value if and only if one can show that the consequences are true. Without this criterion, the postulated concepts and laws are a figments of our imagination - and nothing else.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Sven,

Here are some quote taken from the first half of Chomsky'essay:

''the ordinary use of language is typically innovative without bounds, appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them ''

I find this very interesting especially if we generalize it to all living behavior. Our naive interpretation of the sciences left us with a view of the world as a machine. No machine can choose appropriate behavior, it is limited to what it is already stabilized. Life could not have survive if it was so limited. LIfe had to be from the start to be creative, as having within it a capacity to augment its stabilized structure in way appropriate to circumstance. Yes natural selection can help to improve life in the long time scale, but life would not survive beyound the milisecond without a capacity to go beyond the mecanical. Here I am certainly not in line with Chomsky which would most probably excluded such creative dimension to reality.

=======

''The background is the so-called “mechanical philosophy” – mechanical science in modern terminology. This doctrine, originating with Galileo and his contemporaries, held that the world is a machine, operating by mechanical principles, much like the remarkable devices that were being constructed by skilled artisans of the day and that stimulated the scientific imagination much as computers do today; devices with gears, levers, and other mechanical components, interacting through direct contact with no mysterious forces relating them. The doctrine held that the entire world is similar: it could in principle be constructed by a skilled artisan, and was in fact created by a super-skilled artisan.''

The world is a machine is still a dominant ideology, that has a very different form today but the old idea is still there. And the hard problem of consciousness is an artefact of . this belief. If the world is a machine, all within it is machine-like and so one has to explain consciousness as a mecanism. This is a necessity of this ideology. But if the world is partly stabilized and thus partly machine-like but is intrinsically creative at its base, then consciousness is this part at the center of us that is not machine-like but is creating our body and our life. Again, this is very much against what Chomsky , as any good materialist, believe.

==================

''Today Descartes is remembered mainly for his philosophical reflections, but he was primarily a working scientist and presumably thought of himself that way, as his contemporaries did. His great achievement, he believed, was to have firmly established the mechanical philosophy, to have shown that the world is indeed a machine, that the phenomena of nature could be accounted for in mechanical terms in the sense of the science of the day.''

The word scientist only start to exist in the mid 19th century. People like Descartes were natural philosopher , geometer, physician, etc, they were polyvalent. He was a strong believer in the mecanical philosophy, the foundation of modern science. His main contribution has been in mathematics, his analytical geometry and his scientific method based on it. He provide the mathematical tools for the mathematisation of the world. He and Galileo are the creator of space time, and Newton and Leibniz will bring calculus in that space time and thus provide the machinery onto which the new science can be build. It is a mecanistic project and in itself exclude any creating, although they are great creator of this project. Descartes realized the limit that his own thoughts can be generate mecanistically and so his solution to introduce a creative aspect to the world, limited to the creation of thoughts. The assumption being that more basic behavior of humans and animals could be explain mecanistically without any creative aspects. This was wrong. Even bacteria would not survive one milisecond without something out of the stable aspect of their structure and thus are conscious. Again, Chomsky would not approve.

==================

''It is commonly believed that Newton showed that the world is a machine, following mechanical principles, and that we can therefore dismiss “the ghost in the machine,” the mind, with appropriate ridicule. The facts are the opposite: Newton exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact. The mind-body problem in its scientific form did indeed vanish as unformulable, because one of its terms, body, does not exist in any intelligible form. Newton knew this very well, and so did his great contemporaries.''

''John Locke wrote that we remain in “incurable ignorance of what we desire to know” about matter and its effects, and no “science of bodies [that provides true explanations is] within our reach.” Nevertheless, he continued, he was “convinced by the judicious Mr. Newton’s incomparable book, that it is too bold a presumption to limit God’s power, in this point, by my narrow conceptions.” Though gravitation of matter to matter is “inconceivable to me,” nevertheless, as Newton demonstrated, we must recognize that it is within God’s power “to put into bodies, powers and ways of operations, above what can be derived from our idea of body, or can be explained by what we know of matter.” And thanks to Newton’s work, we know that God “has done so.” The properties of the material world are “inconceivable to us,” but real nevertheless. Newton understood the quandary. For the rest of his life, he sought some way to overcome the absurdity, suggesting various possibilities, but not committing himself to any of them because he could not show how they might work and, as he always insisted, he would not “feign hypotheses” beyond what can be experimentally established.''

The first steps towards materialist, the world is a machine, has been to posit the great designer, God. Whatever is not yet understood, is still mecanical because the great machine designer has no limit. A materialistic thesis that is hidden in the form of a theistic thesis of God as the great machine designer. It was the way that the materialist could operate into a religious world. Once the machine side is sophisticated enough to explain partially the evolution of life, when Darwin come, then the great designer will be thrown in the garbage.

================

Replacing the theological with a cognitive framework, David Hume agreed with these conclusions. In his history of England, Hume describes Newton as “the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species.” His most spectacular achievement was that while he “seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored [Nature’s] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.”

=========

I am going to stick with my definition of "objective."

The historical references transcend the paradigm concept. I referenced them because they are examples of statements about the relationship between mind and body which are consistent with current paranormalist thought. My point was to note the universality of the concept.

For the sake of discussion, I define "paranormalists" as anyone (skeptic or open-minded) with more than casual interest in Psi Field and survival-related concepts. Members of the paranormalist community are mutually dependent on acquiring understanding.

Paranormalist with whom I communicate usually think of intuition as an old term for psychic functioning, or in more antiseptic terms, anomalous mental sensing of information. In practice, "intuition" is something of an out of date term for us, as it has little contextual meaning.

With that in mind, you said "...examples for what I call 'intuition' – we experience it that way, but in all cases where we actually gain some understanding, we see that our intuition is false." If that is your understanding, then your question is loaded and it appears you intended to make a point, rather than explore alternative point of view.

Einstein's explanation of a theory has a practical error. I make the same error in my website motto: "Believe what you wish but understand the implications of what you believe." In fact, I made "Implications" my word of the year a few years back. However, leaving it up to the person to decide what an implication might be is a problem. We too easily delude ourselves.

Implications of a true statement may be true, depending on whether or not the supposed implication actually follows from the original statement. For instance, from the brain produces mind point of view, brain activity in a particular region when a person moves an arm implies that region is responsible for arm movement. However, from the perspective of the Survival Hypothesis, it only means that region may be the transceiver for the command.

I have always been uncomfortable with the distinction between theory and hypothesis. Once a theory, it seems, never an alternative.

Dear Louis,

I think that there is a slight tension between your use of “creative” and what the label “creative aspect of language use” is supposed to denote. Consider again the passage from Chomsky's essay: ''the ordinary use of language is typically innovative without bounds, appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them '' (my emphasis). As Chomsky stresses: the use of language is “appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them – a crucial distinction”.

I can say (or write) something that is appropriate to our situation (hopefully, that is what I'm doing here). So, I use language appropriate to circumstances. On the other hand, I could have chosen to say (or write) something completely different (what I had for lunch, for example). So, the circumstances (this thread) do not cause me to say what I say. The “creative aspect of language use” is simply a label for this phenomenon. Since we can observe this, we are (or should be) forced to recognize that there are principles in nature that are neither determined nor random.

A far as I'm aware, we cannot observe this phenomenon anywhere else in nature. This constitutes the tension. When we take 'machine' in the modern sense (as meaning something like “computable process”), then I don't see why we cannot describe evolution in terms of determined and random processes (as far as I'm aware, that is what evolutionary biologist's attempt to do). If you mean by “creative” that life itself must exhibit behavior that cannot be described in terms of causation and randomness, then there should be evidence for that – and as far as I can tell: there is non.

Therefore, I suspect that you have something else in mind when you use “creative” (I suspect something along the lines of “a conscious universes” in the sense of Philip Goff or others?). What Chomsky would think of such proposals, I don't know, I suspect he would ask you for evidence.

“The world is a machine is still a dominant ideology, that has a very different form today but the old idea is still there. And the hard problem of consciousness is an artefact of . this belief. If the world is a machine, all within it is machine-like and so one has to explain consciousness as a mecanism. This is a necessity of this ideology. But if the world is partly stabilized and thus partly machine-like but is intrinsically creative at its base, then consciousness is this part at the center of us that is not machine-like but is creating our body and our life. Again, this is very much against what Chomsky , as any good materialist, believe.”

I agree with you that contact mechanics is very different from todays “machines” (that's why I explicated it in terms of “computability”). At this point, my impression is that by postulating a conscious universe, one passes the buck, so to speak – what is it for the universe to be conscious in the first place? - I might misinterpret your use of “creative”, if so, please correct me!

Again, I'm not certain what Chomsky thinks, except that I'm hesitant to call him a materialist, at least in the sense of “genuine materialist” - which has suffered the same fate as the contact mechanics. Again, my best guess is that he would ask you for an explication and evidence.

With regard to your description of Descartes, I think that the main difference between you and Chomsky is the assessment of the importance of the fact that Descartes worked within the mechanical philosophy, which was shattered by Newton, everything else that I have heard from Chomsky seems much in line with what you say, except for your use of “creative”.

There is something interesting with regard to the materialistic view – both for the traditional and the contemporary view – somehow, there has to be a starting point, a “first cause” (call it God, or whatever you like). This is a topic that is much discussed in philosophy, but I think it would throw us of here.

To conclude: The main point seems to be what it is for “the world [to be] partly stabilized and thus partly machine-like but [to be] intrinsically creative at its base.” More specifically, What is the job that these concepts (“stable” and “creative”) ought to do that cannot be done by more familiar terms? And lastly - and most importantly: what is the evidence for it?

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Tom,

The purpose of the question is to scrutinize Chomsky's argument. In order to do that, I see if any alternative views hold up to scrutiny as well, in particular with regard to the question: can they overcome the difficulties that arise from Chomsky's argument?

You are certainly free to use any definition you like, but note that from a contradiction follows everything. Thus, the only way to make sense of your use of 'objective' is to revert to our ordinary use of the term, i. e. our intuitive understanding. Since this usage suffers from the same deficiency as “the physical”, there is no meaningful way to draw a distinction between “the physical” and “the non physical”. Hence, your usage of notions like “field” of “psychic function” require explication and evidence – otherwise they can be regarded as “free inventions of the human mind” with no counterpart in the mind external world.

In order to avoid quarrel over terminology, it is perhaps useful to make clear what I think intuitions are: Intuition is the result of some internal organization of an organism. Thus, when we see the world as consisting of three dimensional objects moving through time, then this is because our internal systems force us to see it that way. That this is so has been amply confirmed by contemporary psychology. Note that this is a factual claim. Thus, if true, there is no way out.

I really don't see the supposed “practical error” in Einstein's definition, perhaps you could elaborate it a bit: What exactly is wrong with the definition? After all, Einstein formulates the standard of the natural sciences ever since Newton. And the natural sciences are the most successful enterprise with regard to our understanding of nature. It is precisely the strict adherence to clear concepts, laws and logical deduction of consequences in combination with the correspondence of the consequences to evidence as the only criterion for success, that can help us to avoid deluding ourselves.

Best,

Sven Beecken

My view of "nature" seems to be a little different. Therein may lie a problem of different vocabularies.

I agree with your assessment of how an organism assigns meaning to what it senses. Since formulating that meaning appears to be a natural process of consciousness, it would never occur to me to refer to it as intuition.

As for physical-nonphysical. The subject of Chomsky's argument puts the two terms in context. "Field" has turned out to be a useful model for the nature of nonphysical. In metaphysics, I use the definition of field as a set of elements with related characteristics which are bound into a system by a common influence. This is not a space-time dependency ... just influence.

I am aware of Einstein's contribution to our understanding of the nature of physical space. "Logical deduction" is often how a theoretician works, but I would feel better if he was not so definite with: “Reason gives the structure to the system; the data of experience and their mutual relations are to correspond exactly to consequences in the theory". In my reading, I hear that the theory is correct and reality will correspond to its implications.That supposes true consequences results from true theory. Yet, selection of which are the consequences is to be made by the experiencer?

"Reason," "exactly" and "consequences" are terms assured to get a scientist in trouble. Back to your "intuition," if you are translating "reason" to mean that our mind will make reality conform to what we think is true (theory), then I agree, but that is not the definition or purpose of "theory."

Dear Tom,

I'm not entirely certain that I understand you. You wrote: “I agree with your assessment of how an organism assigns meaning to what it senses. Since formulating that meaning appears to be a natural process of consciousness, it would never occur to me to refer to it as intuition.”

“Meaning” is usually used in the context of language, what I have in mind when talking about intuitions is something broader. Take the visual system: Donald Hoffman shows that a subject, when presented with three dots in a row on a screen, inevitably perceives a rigid object moving through space. This has little to do with “meaning” in the technical sense. Or consider the work of Elizabeth Spelke on core cognition. She and her college argue that we have systems that allow us to recognize certain “patterns”. For example, we are apparently very good at Euclidean geometry, i. e. plans, but rather bad when it comes to three dimensions, say, the geometry of spheres. Systems like these must be what gives us - apparently - rather uniform core intuitions. Of course, when we come to, say, moral intuitions, things get much more complicated. So, all that I'm saying is that whatever our intuitions are, they must somehow depend on rich internal structures. What this has to do with “consciousness” - I have no idea (and insofar as I can makes sense of it, these issues are hotly debated).

As far as your reading of Chomsky's argument, I don't follow, you wrote: “As for physical-nonphysical. The subject of Chomsky's argument puts the two terms in context. "Field" has turned out to be a useful model for the nature of nonphysical. In metaphysics, I use the definition of field as a set of elements with related characteristics which are bound into a system by a common influence. This is not a space-time dependency ... just influence.”

I really don't see how the argument (which tells you that “the physical” is meaningless and hence, “the non physical” is meaningless as well) “puts the two terms in context”. Sure, one can postulate entities at will, but one needs evidence for them. In other words: one needs some sort of explanatory theory. Certainly, there are questions about entities that are by definition not part of space and time (abstract entities like numbers for example) and metaphysicians try to come to terms with these notions, but this debate belongs into a different thread (we could open one, contemporary metaphysics is interesting). With regard to the understanding of mental or cognitive processes (which is what the mind-body problem is about), I'm not sure how much this would help.

“In my reading, I hear that the theory is correct and reality will correspond to its implications.”

I would be cautions here, Einstein doesn't use the term “reality”. What he says is that the consequences correspond to “the data of experience” - which for him means measurements. The question of just how close this brings us to reality is a separate issue (which is often discussed under the label “realism” or “anti realism”). The point is that no matter how these debates are settled (if ever) – explanatory theories in Einstein's sense are undoubtedly the best we can do – whether they bring us “all the way there” or not.

With regard to your claim “That supposes true consequences results from true theory. Yet, selection of which are the consequences is to be made by the experiencer?”

There is something wrong here – theories are never true, that is why Einstein says “ On the possibility alone of such a correspondence rests the value and the justification of the whole system.”

Einstein speaks of the possibility that the consequences correspond to the measurements, which means if we measure (or observe) something different from what the theory predicts, there is something wrong with the theory, but a theory can never be true, because it is always possible that there is evidence that contradicts it, even if it confirms with everything we know.

“Yet, selection of which are the consequences is to be made by the experiencer?”

One problem for humans with logic is that consequences follow, there is no selection. Sure, we select what we focus on, but this is just science. I don't see any deeper problem here. Nor do I see how “"Reason," "exactly" and "consequences" are terms assured to get a scientist in trouble.” It seems to me that it is the other way around, they are getting us to reality, which surely is troublesome, but that's just science. Or if I misinterpret you: what is the alternative to reason, logic and observation?

“Back to your "intuition," if you are translating "reason" to mean that our mind will make reality conform to what we think is true (theory), then I agree, but that is not the definition or purpose of "theory."”

This is plainly false: our minds will not make reality confirm to what we think is true. It is the other way around. We construct theories that we can somehow understand, but our minds have a very hard time to be conform with this – usually, we have a hard time to come to terms with, say, quantum mechanics, precisely because our minds do not confirm with reality. I think the problem here arises if one does not clearly distinguishes between what we intuitively believe and what our intelligible theories tell us about the world.

Best,

Sven Beecken

• Hoffman, Donald D. Visual intelligence: How we create what we see. WW Norton & Company, 2000.
• Spelke, Elizabeth S., and Katherine D. Kinzler. "Core knowledge." Developmental science 10.1 (2007): 89-96.

Dear Sven,

Really a fascinating question you have raised, and a fascinating discussion you have given occasion for! At several points I feel tempted to intervene, but let me stick to what seems to be your main concern: Should we accept that the mind-body problem cannot be formulated because we haven no understanding of the physical ?

I think the answer depends on how we deal with the term "understanding." Reading through Chomsky's referenced text as well as your, Tom's and Louis' expositions, I met two conceptions of "understanding":

At first, there is the way of "understanding" referred to as "intuitive understanding" or "intuitive intelliginility" or "conceivability." It is the sort of "understanding" at stake in our daily experience of the world as a realm consisting of more or less familiar objects (things, animals, people...) involved as active or passive agents in situations and events.

Second, there is the way of understanding Chomsky refers to as the "intelligibility of theories about the world." He describes it as "something more limited" than "the kind of conceivability that was a criterion for true understanding in early modern science" It is the sort of understanding that may make gravitation (interaction without contact) intelligible calling upon a concept of curved space-time. That concept is unconceivable according to the above conception of experience-related understanding. However, it is intelligible if we do not reduce "intelligibility" to the familiar "intuitive intelligibility." we experience in everyday life.

My point is that if we stick to the first way of understanding the mind-body problem cannot be dealt with in a way that meets the present requirements of "science", though it may be marvellously dealt with in literary, mythical and theological discourses. Scientific dealing with the mind-body problem would require the second way of understanding, which means that we may have to renounce the familiar conceptions of "mind" and "body" of the first way and count on what you call "ineligible theories ... based on intuitively unintelligible notions...".

Your apparent aversion of theories based on intuitively unintelligible notions is a nice case in point of the human propensity for the first way of understanding revealed by psychological experiments.

However, both ways of understanding are to be credited, each with its own specific value. They constitute an epistemological dualism that should not be confounded with the widespread "new dualism" vehemently rejected by Chomsky who defines it as the "kind of epistemological and methodologicas dualism, which tacitly adopts the principle that study of mental aspects of the world should proceed in some fundamentally different way from study of what are considered physical aspects of the world..." The epistemological dualism rejected by Chomsky is just an epistemological outgrowth from the ontological Cartesian matter-mind (extensa-cogitans) dualism. However, the present dualism of conceivability and (unpredicated) intelligibility cuts right across the cartesian dualism in that it may underlie discourses about the physical as well as in discourses about the mental.

If this approach would have appeal, then some more explanation could be found on the internet in a discussion text on "scientism" in which the dualism at stake is presented as an epistemological dualism of experience and reason : https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/17595/1990REPORT_Psychologism_dualism.pdf

and a recent very brief account could be found in: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00329/full

It is perhaps worth mentioning that this epistemological dualism resulted from experimental research on formal aspects of (particularly "social") cognition that proceeded from concepts initially suggested by Chomsky (a review can be found in the theoretical and discussion sections two articles on the internet: http://doi.org/10.5334/pb-44-4-249 and http://doi.org/10.5334/pb-47-3-145

Basics and a possible application regarding the mind-body problem may be found in: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/129296/1/1989URAM_Person_NonPerson.pdf

with best regards

Guido Peeters

Dear Guido,

Thank you for your interesting comment. I read your paper Some reflections on psychologism, reductionism, and related issues leading towards an epistemological dualism of reason and experience. There are two worries with regard to your epistemic dualism that I have. The first one is that we might run into contradictions if we accept different kinds of knowledge. In your conclusion, you state that there is “no privileged epistemological status to ‘phenomenological’ reductionism as compared to ‘scientific’ reductionism. Both reflect valid models of knowledge that we may refer to as experience and reason. […] The huge qualitative difference between the ‘models of the world’ does not mean that one is right and the other is wrong.”

Now, consider the following two statements:

It seems that both statements are true. One is an intuitive judgment that reflects our experience that it is the sun that moves. Thus, we have the first kind of understanding. The other is a possible description of the physical reality in which it is the observer that moves, while the sun doesn’t change its position (or in such a small way that it really doesn’t matter). Thus, we have the second kind of understanding. So, if 1. and 2. are true, then it is simultaneously true that the sun moves and the sun does not move. A straight forward contradiction.

One can construct many more examples of this kind. In fact, Chomsky hypothesize that in all cases where we have an intuitive understanding of some aspect the world and we gain some scientific insight into the same aspect, we get a contradiction.

In order to defend your conclusion, we must somehow maintain that although both sentences are true, the contradiction does not follow. Your distinction between reason and experience does not seem to be adequate, because both statements are founded on experience (it is certainly not a matter of logic to develop a correct model of the solar system).

It seems to me that your conclusion that there is no privileged epistemological status of either one of these models of the world can be refuted in all cases of conflict, because if we want to understand how the world works, the scientific view is clearly more successful. Thus, if science disagrees with intuition (or the way we experience the world), science wins, although it may take some time. Note that I do not doubt that our intuitive knowledge is very valuable for us, I only make that statement under the condition that we want to understand.

The second worry concerns one of your premises: The success criterion is much weaker then your premise that “Only science grantees valid knowledge about reality.” All that is required is an empirical testable claim that in all cases of conflict, science wins. This does nothing with regard to the question: Does science really gives us knowledge about reality? – an interesting and far reaching question, unfortunately, I believe it would throw us too far of.

There is a possible solution to the problem, suggested by Chomsky. Instead of accepting two models of reality, we assume that we have no concept of reality at all. This might require some explanation. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, he explains it only in a talk (link below). The basic idea is that we have concepts, say, of rationality. We can, for example, clearly and reliably distinguish between irrational and rational behavior. With regard to reality, the opinions seem to differ in rather wide and unpredictable ways. My example is the conviction of a deeply religious person that God is real. And the conviction of an committed atheist such as my self that the whole story is nonsense. Now, for the religious person, God is real. She believes it, she acts on it and so on. For me, God is not real. Thus we have a contradiction, but a different one then the one above, because there is no way to settle it. The most reasonable assumption to resolve the contradiction is to assume that ‘real’ is meaningless or better, ‘real’ is what ever we happen to take serious (at the moment). This does not commit us to nonsense, because rationality, reason, evidence and so on can be applied in many cases, it is really(!) restricted to this particular concept. Also, this does not commit us to think that science brings us to reality as such - if I may use this phrase. All we have to do is to accept that science is the most successful way to come to terms with how the world works that we have. It might be that it is still a rather limited way.

Best,

Sven Beecken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHS1NraVsAc

I don't see any reason to distinguish between 'the physical' and the 'mental'. This separation assumes that the mental is not physical, that is, it does not obey psysical laws. This position is at least unsubstantiate or at worse, wrong. A better separation might be 'the outside world' and the 'mental' (i.e. perception and cognition).

Dear Christos,

The fact that there is something rather than nothing for any of us is'nt explain by all we found out about the physical so far. We can keep on searching and searching and say the problem will be solve one day. But it is naive to expect a scientific explanation which can only describe throw equations or other form of modeling, relations among things out there, to explain why there is something rather than nothing for a body like our body. Science can only look at the body and model what is going on there. But our consciousness is about our action in the world throw our body. That we are aware, conscious is natural I have no doubts on this but science is not by its method going to discover that aspect of nature although it surely help understand nature and the nature of the body. But not consciousness, subjectivity, values, basically most that is most important to our life is totally out of reach of its method mostly design for understand object relation and their manipulation.

There is not a dual world, a physical world and a mental world. No, there is only the world. The theories of science are about that world but are not that world. All these theory are in our world of human communication, but they talk about the world out there but these are only representation of it, not it. Physics has not described what an electron is, only how it intereact in probabilistic terms with other particles. Physics and the sciences are models about object-like aspects of the world, not really descriptions of the world. The world appears throw our bodily actions. We can described to each other what it is like. Most of this, we can't possibly explain scientifically. This is not a mental world, it is the world as it appears to us. The world as it appears to us is our common ground. We do science because this world of experience exist, but only taking into account only what we commonly or publicly can testify, not what is not universal, such as the fact there is a world that appear.

Dear Louis

You mentioned a lot. Values and what we perceive as important can be scientifically examined through psychology. I agree that science can not explain what an alectron is. But it can describe its properties. Same is true for energy and consciousness as well.

Dear Sven and colleagues

So many interesting arguments and ideas. I want to reply to Sven in the first place. However there are points of contact with the other discussants as well. Hence I will proceed from quotations (in italics) from the past comments.

I don't see any reason to distinguish between 'the physical' and the 'mental'. This separation assumes that the mental is not physical ... A better separation might be 'the outside world' and the 'mental' (i.e. perception and cognition) (Christos).

This statement seems another manifestation of unease with the cartesian dualism of a material res extensa versus an immaterial res cogitans; and, what's more, it seems another suggestion of an alternative duality that intersects orthogonally with that cartesian duality. How that other duality should be conceived (epistemological, ontological,...?) might be a fascinating subject of reflection and debate, and so may be the question whether it should be labelled "the outside world vs. the mental" or "perception vs. cognition" or "aristotelian vs. platonic", or, as I did: "experience vs. reason." In the context of the present discussion I will restrict to a brief explanation of what my labels "experience" and "reason" stand for.

The terminology "experience and reason" goes back to an interdisciplinary symposium in which scientists were invited to discuss possible philosophical implications of their disciplines. I had done research on social cognition and had observed that people can process the same information in two alternative ways, as if they dispose of two mutually unrelated cognitive information processing programs. By way of (very simple) example: consider the information that John and Peter like each other and ask yourself the question whether the information conveyed about John is the same information as is conveyed about Peter. At a first glance one may feel that the same information is conveyed about both of them: both are said to like the other and to be liked by the other, and about both we lack information about how they feel about themselves. However, ignoring the conceptual self-other distinction, we may consider that the information conveyed about John differs from that conveyed about Peter because John and Peter are said not to like the same individual and not to be liked by the same individual. Indeed, the one is said to like (and be liked by) "him called Peter" and we lack information about his relationship with "him called John"; the other, however, is said to like (and be liked by) "him called John" and we lack information about his relationship with "him called Peter". This duality could be related to presumed linguistic and cognitive universals already touched on by Chomsky, and it boils down to the perceiver's choice to conceive of "John" and "Peter" either as "self vs. other" (to be implemented as "I" vs. "Thou") or in the way of the third person (he named John, he named Peter). It was found that the self-other way of processing generated a "personalized" animistic discourses reflecting a view on the world as in our daily experience: the world as a set of (inter)acting "beings in themselves." The third-person way, on the other hand, generated depersonalized discourses dealing with the people and objects as mere sets of features and processes (as is done in natural sciences). The third-person way turned out to be more flexible and seemed an ideal playground for thought and reasoning power. Thus, my duality of "experience" and "reason" should be interpreted as a (perhaps audacious and disputable) generalization from a hard core that is: the duality of processing information either in the "self-other" way or in the "third-person" way.

But let's turn to Sven now:

Your distinction between reason and experience does not seem to be adequate, because both statements are founded on experience (it is certainly not a matter of logic to develop a correct model of the solar system). (Sven)

I

agree with this argument, but I think it does not apply to the hard core of my distinction associating "experience" with self-other shaped cognition and "reason" with third-person shaped cognition as explained above. Of course, ultimately experience is involved in both cases. Even the most abstract rational thought has roots in experience "Nil in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu" the Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas said, but even Plato claiming the ontological primacy of the "idea" should admit that he would be unaware of the idea "horse" if he had no experience of its shadow: the concrete horse.

The point is that flexible thinking in the third-person way can stay close to the familiar self-other shaped cognition, indeed, but it enables also to go far beyond it and to create alternative views some of which may become widely accepted, even if they deviate from the original self-other shaped cognitions. This leads to the development of a variety of folkways, myths, ideologies, and so forth, among which "science" is a case in point that deserves some special attention.

Science is a case in point of third-person shaped cognition that has particular restrictive properties, which bring forth science's power but also its limitations.

First, science relies on experience and accounts for experiences. However the range of experience involved in science is very limited because the experience must meet strict criteria of exactness, verifiability and replicability. And the rest is third-person shaped conceptual construction that also must meet restrictive criteria such as logical rigor, economy (Occam's razor) and minimization of degrees of freedom (theory should tightly fit the observed data and not fit hypothetical deviant data as well). This straitjacket of constraints gives science its huge power but also its limits. Science always wins when it plays on home ground. Beyond the territory confined by the science's straitjacket of constraints, there is left a huge province of experience and creative phantasy that is not suited to qualify for science but that may have great existential value, even greater than science. For instance, the astronomer who after hours of hard work leaves for an evening walk along the seaside does not find rest and peace in the rotation of the earth but in the experience of a glorious sun setting in the sea.

But does this mean that the astronomer is going through a contradiction?

... in all cases where we have an intuitive understanding of some aspect of the world and we gain some scientific insight into the same aspect, we get a contradiction. (Sven)

Is this true? Anyway, the answer to this question may not be a simple "yes" or "no" but a multifaceted account. To lift a corner of the veil, we may look again at what my research on self-other and third-person ways of information processing has revealed. Three points seem relevant.

The first point is that a mere formal analysis of similarities and differences (as the ones between John and Peter above) implied by the self-other and third-person ways suggested that overall both ways of processing are unrelated. Sometimes they diverge (as in the above John-Peter case) but across a variety of cases, convergent and divergent cases seem to outweigh each other. Generalizing to intuitive and scientific understanding, we might advance that there may be contradiction in some cases, but not necessarily in all cases. Of course, it is possible that in the end the scientific understanding will always turn out incompatible with the intuitive understanding. But the opposite could be true as well, and science might ultimately end up with removing the contradiction. At least this seems the case with the contradiction of the orbiting sun vs. the rotating earth. For centuries it has been a contradiction, until Einstein's relativity concept stated that earth and sun move with respect to each other in a way that can be described in numerous ways ranging from "an immobile sun shining on a rotating earth" to "a sun orbiting around an immobile earth." Conclusion: the question about the contradiction remains open.

The second point, however, is that in our experiments our participants experienced the self-other and third-person ways as incompatible. They stuck to one way neglecting or even ignoring the alternative way. This means that if there would not be a logical contradiction, there may be a psychological contradiction. When our astronomer walking along the seaside suddenly realizes that the sun is not setting but the earth is rotating, his glorious feeling of rest and peace may turn into existential fear and trembling for the insignificance of human existence.

The third point is that in the experiments participants seemed biased to the self-other way. The third-person way may have enabled for scientific models that seem inconsistent with our intuitive understanding but that we cannot reject because they work. However we are inclined to reduce the inconsistency by conceiving the abstract constituents of the scientific models no longer as mere sets of features (quantified potentials accounting for quantified processes) . Instead they are projected in self-other shaped representations of familiar things. A nice example is the fate of the atom. In his reply, Louis Brassard (whose ideas seem close to mines) has clearly explained:

Physics has not described what an electron is, only how it interacts in probabilistic terms with other particles. Physics and the sciences are models about object-like aspects of the world, not really descriptions of the world (Louis)

This quotation seems to highlight the special status of scientific concepts that we have related to the third-person way. However, even Rutherford and Bohr described electrons as little things circulating out there in fixed orbits around big atomic nuclei, like rocking horses of a merry-go-round. A similar projection of an abstract third)person shaped construct into familiar self-other shaped representation can be found in the interview with Chomsky referred to by Sven. Near the end there is a discussion about Skinner's pigeon that learns to get food by pressing a bar. Chomsky notices that "pressing bars" does not belong to the pigeon's world. Pigeons have a repertory of "pecks" (pecking seed, pecking water....) and it is the use of a conglomerate of those peckings which was learned by the pigeon. The point is that the abstract concept of operant learning process is remolded into a familiar scene in the concrete human self-other shaped world: "learning to press a bar". Moreover, after that Chomsky does not return to the naked conceptual form of the operant learning process but propose an alternative self-other shaped interpretation of the same scene as it may look from the perspective of the pigeon.

Our propensity to remold unfamiliar abstract representations into more familiar concrete representations may be a main source of apparent contradiction between science and intuitive understanding. The concrete self-other shaped remolding of the abstract third-person shaped representation may not fit into the rest of our self-other shaped (intuitive) understanding, but that does not mean that the original third-person shaped representation should really be incompatible with the intuitive understanding. It may just be another valid ways of dealing with the same input information. If we further assume that input information ultimately stems from reality, then, of course, the question arises: What is reality and what do our (sometimes apparently incompatible) self-other and third-person shaped views on reality reveal about reality?

Instead of accepting two models of reality, we assume that we have no concept of reality at all.(Sven)

I think it may be clear now that (at least today) I do not advance two models of reality, but two ways of modelling representations of reality. Looking at the first "self-other" way from the (scientific) perspective of the second "third-person" way, the self-other way seems to have evolved as a tool generating a model of the world that has enabled the human species to survive and even to flourish. Basic constituents of that self-other shaped model are relatively autonomous beings in themselves that are agents of actions that can be beneficial or harmful for themselves and for other beings. This basic pattern is further modelled by individual (and socially shared) experiences and adjustments based on alternative third-person shaped modelling. Now, given this state of affairs, what's reality? Of course, we may have only models of reality, but those models are also a reality in se. The problem, however, is what's the nature of the reality that is being modelled. The least we can say is that reality is such that our models work to deal with reality, and that a model that works well in some cases may fail in other cases. Thus reality is such that our models have a certain grip on it. But for the rest, I am inclined to agree with Chomsky (and Sven) that the range of our comprehension may be too limited to achieve full understanding of reality as the ant's range of comprehension may be too limited to achieve understanding of the brexit.

I realize now that we have deviated from the original question: Is the mind-body problem misconceived? I think it may be useful to look first how the mind-body duality may appear in the self-other shaped experiential model reality. One could wonder how the original basic model may look like. Husserlian phenomenology was an attempt to uncover it and its basic concept "intentionality" suggests the presence of distinct beings in relationship with each other but no substantial distinction between matter and mind. Cultural anthropology, developmental psychology, end even certain neobehaviorists' findings (Osgood) suggest that we are primarily set for an animistic world view in which all objects are in a way animated beings with a certain action potential (or "personality": wine can be "stubborn, a mountain "proud"). The split between mind and matter seems a product of third-person shaped reflection by our ancestors, probably reflection on life and death. For instance, there is the concept of a soul that survives the material body, and in some cultures food is brought to the graves in order to enable the souls of the death to consume the souls of the food. (The morning after the living return and regale themselves with the material rests of the food – while, I assume, their own souls starve)

The cartesian dualism seems an outgrowth of that soul-body duality taking into account that the soul-like conscious mind is reserved to humans .

Chomsky argues that the cartesian duality did not work because gravity showed up as a soul-like property of matter. I agree with Chomsky that there is a problem here, but that problem can be overcome if we realize the third-person anchored nature of scientific thought. Descartes dealt with the res extensa and the res cogitans as "substances", which means: as beings in themselves, as are the thing-like constituents of our familiar self-other anchored representations of our daily world. However, third-person shaped science does not deal with substances but with concepts (features) linked on exactly observable (quantifiable) variables . Gravity and mass are features linked on quantifiable variables such as weight and acceleration. Gravity is only a problem if we try to integrate it in our self-other shaped representation of a world in which it appears as a magical attractive power exerted by (animated?) objects upon each other in the way beautiful girls can exert attractive power upon boys. Magical attractive power may not be a good scientific concept because of too many degrees of freedom. Einstein introduced a more tightly fitting concept: curved space-time. Now the problem is raised that curved space-time does not at all fit our familiar self-other shaped experience. But that's not a problem. Our experience is our experience, and science is science. Both yield models of reality, but they are not that reality. Nevertheless they must fit in one or another way certain aspects of that reality. What those aspects are and how they fit together may be an issue beyond the range of our cognitive power as (once more) the brexit is an issue beyond the range of an ant's cognitive power (cf. Chomsky). However, this restriction does not mean that we could not make further advances on the path of understanding. Perhaps we may need a paradigm shift with new concepts that meet the requirements of science. Perhaps such concepts may be found somewhere in the direction of Tom's Psi Field or Louis' creative dimensions. But I am afraid that today those concepts do not (yet) meet the stringent criteria of scientific concepts (for instance: still too many degrees of freedom).

"... it seems another suggestion of an alternative duality that intersects orthogonally with that cartesian duality" refering to the "outside world" and the "mental world".

I don't claim that these are foundamentaly different. A distinction however could be made once you take into account the observer (nothing metapsysical here). That is, for every observer observes the physical "outside world" and creates a "mental world", which is arguably also physical (I don't see any reason to suppose otherwise). Note that the "mental world" of an observer is part of the "outside world" for another.

The distinction I made among "outside world" and "mental world" is trivial.

It is part of our Mind, i.e. our experience to be a Body interacting in the world. Even when we think, we do so from the location of our body. I never personally experience an ''out of body'' experience. My experience, i.e. my Mind is a bodily experience. Because other humans and animals have body similar to mine and thus have similar bodily experience and that they express their feeling, thoughts and emotions throw their body expression, I can empathise with them, partially experience their experience and so Minds do enter into each other and so partially belong to other bodies. My MInd is my bodily interacting experience and so it is mostly about this interaction, about the actions. Human Minds are different to other's non human mammalian Minds by being able to think, i.e. enact a dream-like experience under conscious control in the waked state. This allow us throw languages and other form of arts and culture to create and enter dream-like worlds but it is perillious because we get hypnotize by them and can loose site of our primary experience reality and start living into state of hypnotic collective states. It is fine in the rise of a civilisation but it is fatal in times of decline such as this one. We then have to wake-up, partially de-hypnotise in order to re-orient the collective dream.

Dear Guido,

I apologize for the late reply, I’m rather occupied at the moment. Still, I find your proposal rather interesting. First of all, could you refer me to a more detailed publication?

Much of what you say seems rather plausible to me, still there are two major points where I would like to object. The first is my claim, cited by you, that “ in all cases where we have an intuitive understanding of some aspect of the world and we gain some scientific insight into the same aspect, we get a contradiction”.

I would like to point out that I did not mean to suggest that this is a logical necessity. It is an empirical claim that can be falsified by evidence. I’m not aware of any such evidence. I would argue that your claim that advances in the sciences have resolved the contradiction is not very convincing. You wrote:

“At least this seems the case with the contradiction of the orbiting sun vs. the rotating earth. For centuries it has been a contradiction, until Einstein's relativity concept stated that earth and sun move with respect to each other in a way that can be described in numerous ways ranging from "an immobile sun shining on a rotating earth" to "a sun orbiting around an immobile earth." Conclusion: the question about the contradiction remains open.”

I would say that Einstein’s concept of relativity is even more removed from intuition. There is no concept of absolute rest, the speed of light is the same in all frameworks of reference and whatever else is required. It is true that there is the possibility that we can give a description of the sun example that resembles our intuitions, but at the cost of even more unintelligible concepts. Hence even more contradictions. Thus, my claim stands unrefuted.

Therefore, although I find your thesis that there are two distinct ways to process information rather intriguing, I do think that the contradiction stands. Hence, one of the ways we represent reality, although rather useful for us, yields false representations. This isn’t (or shouldn’t be) much of a bother – we haven’t evolved to discover the truth about reality – and it has been recognized centuries ago by David Hume:

“I shall add, for a further confirmation of the foregoing theory, that, as this operation of the mind, by which we infer like effects from like causes, and vice versa, is so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures, it is not probable, that it could be trusted to the fallacious deductions of our reason, which is slow in its operations; appears not, in any degree, during the first years of infancy; and at best is, in every age and period of human life, extremely liable to error and mistake. It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency, which may be infallible in its operations, may discover itself at the first appearance of life and thought, and may be independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding. As nature has taught us the use of our limbs, without giving us the knowledge of the muscles and nerves, by which they are actuated; so has she implanted in us an instinct, which carries forward the thought in a correspondent course to that which she has established among external objects; though we are ignorant of those powers and forces, on which this regular course and succession of objects totally depends.” David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Uunderstanding, Section V, [22]

Hume, recognizing that we construct causal connections independent from what happens in the actual world, also observes that this is extremely useful for us. Although we remain in total ignorance of what is actually going on.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear All,

Finally some time found to reply. Incredible how busy holidays are, particularly when one is retired and unable to hide in one's office while everybody assumes you have plenty of time available.

Both, Christos and Louis, point to a duality that is qualified by Christos as "trivial." It opposes an "outside world" to an "mental world" inside my body. I agree that this view reminds one of Descartes'. It is an ontological duality, while my duality is an epistemological duality: two relatively valid but different ways of forming representations or models of reality.

But let us forget for a while about epistemology and focus on the "trivial" duality of "outside world" and "mental world". It is not because something is trivial that it would not be valuable. A trivial view may be an excellent starting point for a critical analysis. For instance, proceeding from a trivial duality of outside and mental worlds, a first critical question may be the question where the outside world ends and my inside mental world begins. At a first glance, it seems evident to me that my body is part of the outside world. In that outside world I recognize other bodies like mine in which I assume the presence of similar mental worlds. However, because they belong to bodies in the outside world, also those mental worlds belong to my outside world. And considering that my body with its mental world is one body among others in that outside world, I may end up with the conclusion that also my inner mental world belongs to that outside world. So we may end up with one single world: a world of bodies, the mental being a product of the body. And it is by the (physical, chemical, biological, neurological....) study of the bodies that we may achieve understanding of the true nature of what we call provisorily "the mental world" or "the mind."

So far, so good. But are things that simple? One could object that what's trivial to us may not be trivial to people grown up in a different cultural setting. Our prehistoric ancestors may find it trivial that reality has a persistent spiritual core making, for instance, that people who died years ago can still visit me alive in my dreams. But even if we stick to our familiar materialist view, things may not yet be that simple. About two centuries ago a decent young man caused a little scandal when, to the horror of the present, he attended a church service wearing flaming red stockings. It led him to his first scientific achievement being the discovery of an eye condition that would carry his name: daltonism. Apparently, the dark grey hue perceived by John Dalton differed from the hue perceived by the rest of the congregation. Hence the color of John's garment should belong to the peoples mental world. And so we could go on. Imagine that the outside world consists only of mass and energetic fields to be conceived ultimately as quantum waves (whatever that may be), then the familiar appearance of our presumed outside world would be an illusion construed by our neural-mental activity as a tool to maintain our existence. And what about the quantum phenomena themselves? Are they another illusion created by the neural system because also quantum physics is a set of mental contents established by the brains of Max Planck and colleagues. And so my trivial theory that the mental is a product of physical (neurological) processes ends up as a possibly illusory mental product itself. Moreover, why not pursue our argument and conclude that the mental world is a possible illusion created by mental activity, and so may be the theory that there is something like mental activity that creates a mental world.

It looks like the mind-body problem takes us to a deadlock of circular reasoning and perhaps we should conclude that the problem is misconceived, indeed.

On the other hand, circular reasoning can turn out to be very productive. A case in point is evolution theory proceeding from the idea of the survival of the fittest. But who's the fittest? The one who survives, of course! Proceeding from that circular truism, one could start with highly productive research focusing on how particular features and conditions may contribute to (or detract from) the "fitness" that enables organisms to survive. In the same vein, we may go on searching for connections between neurological and mental processes. It may lead us to an increased understanding, although not to full understanding. The twilight may brighten up alittle, but it will never turn into full daylight

Let's now turn to Sven.

"First of all, could you refer me to a more detailed publication?"

As to the duality of self-other anchored and third-person anchored discourses about reality, I think of four papers. They are available by internet, but it's easier to have them added immediately. Notice that I do not recommend to read them all but to focus on some passages. In this way a good introduction may be provided by the initial pages (p.145-149) of the 2007 article on "Dual Self", and so may be the initial pages of the 2004 article on "expertness" (p. 249-261 – you can skip the formal puzzles and stick to the headlines).

The two other articles are invited philosophical papers. In the 1986 article on "good and evil" the section 5 (p.223-229) can be helpful as an exemplary illustration. And so is the whole 1989 article on "Person and non-person".

“ in all cases where we have an intuitive understanding of some aspect of the world and we gain some scientific insight into the same aspect, we get a contradiction”.

I only disagree with the word "all" in "all cases". I would replace it with "many, perhaps all". The contradictions you refer to show up when we try to conceive of the third-person anchored scientific models of reality in the familiar self-other anchored way (e.g., turning abstract mathematical representations into concrete representations of tangible things -- for instance: electrons represented as minuscule globes orbiting around a larger sun-like globe). In many cases, this remoulding of abstract unfamiliar representations in familiar concrete representations may often result in apparent contradictions. In this way the representation of photons as rifle bullets clashes with their representation as ripples expanding across the water. However, in other cases there may be no problem. For instance, it may be no problem to relinquish the idea of an absolute space defined by a quasi-divine fixed coordinate system. I still remember well my first train journey when at the end of the war my parents could go shopping again in Antwerp. I remember how I was fascinated by the moving landscape outside the window while I thought the train stood still all the time. Even the theologians in Galilei's time anticipated Einstein in their efforts to reconcile the bible with Copernicus. They accepted that one could take the sun as a fixed point of reference as an aid for a concise description of astronomic observations. Only one had to keep in mind that in God's eyes only the earth was standing still and that the resulting complex description of the same astronomic observations reflected the real state of the universe as it was created by God.

Hence, one of the ways we represent reality, although rather useful for us, yields false representations. This isn’t (or shouldn’t be) much of a bother – we haven’t evolved to discover the truth about reality

Here you touch on a central theme of my own experimental psychological career: looking for an evolutionary basis of observations regarding social cognition and affect. We haven't evolved to discover the truth about reality, but to survive in that reality as part of that reality, whatever that reality may be. So we form representations of reality that are not necessarily veridical, but that guide our actions in a way making for good adaptation and survival.

Nevertheless, I see that you use the term "false representations". What means "false"? Taking a mere evolutionary perspective, I would say: "false representations" are representations that guide my actions in a way detracting from survival. For instance, I see a fungus, think it's a mushroom, but it turns out to be a poisonous toadstool. However, my bad experience with the toadstool has also an epistemological side. If I survive my experience, it shows me that the differentiation between mushrooms and toadstools in my model of the world was not correctly in line with reality.

We touch here on a subject matter that has been a main theme of research in cognitive social psychology (cf. unrealistic optimism, positive-negative asymmetry, negativity effect, positivity bias, polyanna phenomenon, leniency effect, etc.). In a nutshell, research outcomes suggest that evolution may have set us to discover truth about reality if reality threatens to be damaging. If the situation is safe, unrealistically optimistic illusions may turn out highly adaptive in that they may lead to achievements that one would never have realized if one would have been realistically aware of the difficulties to be overcome. Mistaking a toadstool for a mushroom may often result in death, while mistaking a mushroom for a toadstool may require some search for other food but not result in starving to death.

Similar epistemological implications have been dealt with by Lewicka of whom I include a paper that may interest philosophers. Ultimately, we may end up again with a twilight view. Reality is neither fully tangible nor fully intangible. And we can shed some light on it, but not achieve full daylight – think of Chomsky about the bees and the ants.

With wishes for a happy and productive 1919

Guido

Dear Guido ,

G:‘’a first critical question may be the question where the outside world ends and my inside mental world begins. ‘’

Descartes made this distinction, he put all the feelings and perceptions with the body in the outside world and put thinking into the inside world and this was conveniently the main distinction between humans and non-human animals. He treated the later bodies and non-human animals as biological machines and humans as having on top of this outside world an inside thinking world.

I much prefer the Von Uexkull’s view of animals as Umwelt. The whole outside world is a product of the organism interaction and he called this individual totality of interactive bodily experience: the Umwelt. There is no inside versus outside world . But all organisms , including plants, have to be able to to distinctinguished within the umwelt what is only under the organism control (the organism body) and what is not (only very partially) , the outside world . But the later with all the Umwelt is not indepent of the organism interaction but part of it.

Take the example you took, the colour of objects. Our primate ancestors were fruit eaters and for them it is very important to be able to visually determined the maturity of fruits that is signaled by the plants as specific reflectance of the fruit surfaces. Their visual systems do make gross estimate of these fruit surfaces that are the colours of these fruits. These estimates are like all aspects of these primate visual umwelt product of the bodily interaction but this part of their umwelt is not under their exclusive bodily control and thus belong to the external world part of the umwelt. But for some individual, their reflectance estimator are defectives because of some genetic defects. Their umwelt do not include some of the distinctions that other member of this species included. Does this make colours part of the interior or under exclusive bodily control? NO. So your conclusion that

G:‘’ Hence the color of John's garment should belong to the peoples mental world.’’

is wrong from within this Von Uexkull Umwelt conception of the mental world.

G:‘’ And so we could go on. Imagine that the outside world consists only of mass and energetic fields to be conceived ultimately as quantum waves (whatever that may be), then the familiar appearance of our presumed outside world would be an illusion construed by our neural-mental activity as a tool to maintain our existence. ‘’

Yes ,Von Uexkull would agree but he woud also considered the world of physical abstractions as part of the Physicist’s umwelt. It is not outside there by itself. It is too easy to FORGET that these physical concepts are not out there by itself but the product of the interaction with nature of a cultural tradition called physics. Calling this the world as it is ‘’ is forgetting something, i.e., the context of its own production. Organisms can’t forget this, they never mixed the part of the umwelt outside of their control and the part under their control. Even plants do that and humans seems to fail often at making this distinction, especially scientists.

G:‘’ It looks like the mind-body problem takes us to a deadlock of circular reasoning and perhaps we should conclude that the problem is misconceived, indeed.’’

It is a mis-understanding of under exclusive body control versus not under exclusive body control living distinction.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Guido Peeters

I don't accept that a real metaphysical duality exists in the first place. Concsiousness one more example of a quantity of the universe. We would call matter vs space a duality, so why call duality the body (matter) vs concsiousness a duality? They are both manifestations of what exists in the universe.

In the large, I think it is a very useful early provisional distinction to draw, and leads to solving the real problem by trying to solve the original alleged problem.

Dear All,

''This distinction gives rise to the so called mind-body problem (or dualism) and the debate is then about, for example, whether mental states can be reduced to brain states or not, whether the mental is fundamental or not, how the functional organization of the brain can give rise to consciousness and many other questions.''

Any functional descriptive models, such as some models of mecanisms in the body related to some of our mental experiences do not reduce the later to the former. Some physiologists may have a very good model of what a runner do while running but the runner own experience is a totally different realm of reality. The later IS the reality of running while the model may relate this reality to the processes in the body but it can't pretend to reduce the experience of running to this model. Science is always partial while reality is always total and the idea of a model reducing the whole of a reality is fundamentally flawed. A model ALWAYS abstracts an aspect of reality. The very idea of reduction is wrong and so lead to false problem such as the mind body problem. It vanishes as soon as the idea of reduction is eliminated. It is not particular to the study of the mental, but is general to all domains of science. Physics for example can't pretend to reduce the reality of the electron to what we know about the electrons and the more we climb the layers of complexity and the more infinite is the gap between what is known and WHAT IS. So the Mind Body problem is just an illusionary problem stemming from an hubristic conception of what a scientific model is.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

Thank you for your interesting comment. There is a lot going on in what you say and since I find some of it quite interesting, let me try to get this right. What you cite is a central step in an argument that tries to come to terms with one instance of - what I call - Chomskyien problems. They are around for decades, are basically ignored or if not (I’m sorry to say) often poorly understood. The point of the argument is that any attempt to coherently formulate the mind-body problem presupposes an understanding of `body’ and this is the problem: We have no conception of what the material is. Since this seems to tie into some of what you say, let me try to explain.

We do have an intuitive conception of causation, or how the physical world is supposed to behave. Basically, rigid three dimensional objects move through time and interact if and only if they are in contact with one another. This is essentially the so-called mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century (firmly believed in by Galileo, Leibniz, Descartes, Newton, to name a few). On this model for a scientific explanation, to give an explanation of a natural phenomenon just is to understand the world. Sadly, this nice picture was destroyed by Isaac Newton. To his great displeasur, Newton showed that this is simply not how nature works. It took scientists about two centuries to come to terms with this fact. Finally, with the advent of GR and QM, (as historians of science such as I. B. Cohen have pointed out), scientists simply abandoned intuitions and settled for explanatory theories.

Thus, as Chomsky argues, the natural sciences have lowered their standards for scientific explanations: They no longer search for an intelligible world, but rather for intelligible theories.

If this is correct, as it seems to me it is, then it might help to clarify a couple of points. Let’s start with the problem of `body’ (or ‘material’, ‘causal’, ‘physical’ and so on). In order to formulate the mind-body problem in any non-intutive way, one has to have some non-intuitive understanding of what the body is. If this cannot be done, the debate about the whole distinction becomes meaningless.

All we can do is try to construct explanatory theories for various aspects of nature. This seems relevant to what you say about `reduction’. It seems to me that for your argument to hold, you have to presuppose that the mind-body problem can be formulated. Despite this, as far as I understand you, the emerging picture here is not so different from what I think you are saying. It’s basically Chomsky’s view on ‘reduction’. (I quote from memory, so don’t hold me to it) “The working scientist can do no better then to construct various doctrines about aspects of nature and try to unify them.” (my emphasis)

On this view, questions about ‘reduction’ or ‘reality’ kinda fall out of the picture. What remains is the question: What is the right explanatory theory?

I hope this comes close to what you have in mind.

Best,

Sven

Doesn't this sort of entail that contemporary physics is wrong?

Dear Richard,

I don not know enough about physics or your proposal to go any further, but I thank you for your comment!

Best,

Sven

Dear all

Many interesting views have been said here about the philsophy of science, what is real and how (and if) we can know something about it.

Concsiousness is a hot debated issue and still a kind of a mystery, even we do know much more than 200 years ago.

All that said, and given the success of science and epistimological materialism, I think we all should agree on discussing concsiousness in these term, and create theories of reality that reduce to descriptions of cause and effect. Any other road has historically failed.

Consequetly, I think we should only discuss on whether concsiousness is causally linked to body (i.e. thel brain),the direction of causality, and its characteristics.

Best regards

Dear all,

Sometimes things go wrong unnoticed. So it took me months to realize that I did no longer receive mails from Researchgate. I found out soon that Researchgate still used an outdated variant of my academic email address that was definitely inactivated on January 1. So it was in the middle of the hot summer that I came upon the middle of winter replies to my intervention by Louis and Christos. Both of them argue against a cartesian-like metaphysical dualism. The question is: What's the alternative? Perhaps we should stick to it and hope that it will turn out to be a useful leg up to a more valid understanding, as Karl Sipfle (June 3) seems to suggest.

However there may be alternatives.

A possible alternative has been suggested by Christos (January 21, my birthday). He wonders why we should handle body and consciousness as a privileged duality. One can formulate as many dualities as one wants. What matters, Christos says, is that we are dealing with "what exists." Apparently Christos brings the problem back to its most fundamental level: the metaphysics of the being. I do not exclude that a reflection on what it means "to be" may form a valuable starting point, but I think the concept of "being" or "reality" may soon require some specification and differentiation. Actually, that's what Descartes did when differentiating between the two substantial ways of being that are bothering us today. But there may be other ways – other dualities or even multiplicities -- than Descartes' way.

Another alternative is Louis' (January 18à view stressing interaction as a basic unit involving an organism and an umwelt as complementary facets of the same substantial being. This view has been a prolific starting point of good science, particularly in behavioral biology. In addition, it ties in with well-established philosophical developments such as husserlian phenomenology stressing concepts such as: intentionality and consciousness to be conceived as "consciousness of." Hence, in search for an alternative for Descartes' dualism, I see the interactional approach as a main candidate.

At this point I wonder what are the implications regarding my epistemological dualism. I think that it reflects neither the cartesian dualism nor the duality of organism and umwelt. Rather it may relate to dualities such as nature and culture, and, mutatis mutandis, to Louis' (July 7) distinction between "reality" and "model of reality." Only, I would use the term "reality" in a different way. In agreement with Chomsky (cf. the ants and the bees) I assume that ultimate reality is beyond the scope of our cognitive powers. So I would define also Louis' "reality" as " a model of reality." However it is a model that has been shaped by millennia of biological evolution. We can refer to it as our natural intuitive experience of reality. It constitutes our natural umwelt. And it is to be distinguished from the alternative third-person shaped models that vary across (and within) cultures and that usually deal with only some (useful) aspects of reality. So the same person can have different umwelts. As Louis puts it: the world of physical abstractions belong to the physicist's umwelt. I assume that if the physicist is the father of a family, he leaves the physicist's umwelt when he comes home and enters his living room.

Notice that third-person shaped models can stay very close to intuitive experience. For instance, third-person shaped thinking has enabled for an explanatory model of thunder as Thor's hammer-blows. Thor being conceived as a super-human-like god, this model still fits well intuitive experiences, at least if people are familiar with smiths. However, an alternative third-person shaped model relating thunder to electric discharges and aerial vibration, is further off intuitive experience.

The latter brings us to Sven's (July 9) concern that scientific representations (explanations) drift away from our intuitive experiential representations. And it seems paradoxical that just most unfamiliar contra-intuitive QM concepts enable for most amazing technical realizations. The explanation is that rigorous scientific models are still tied on intuitive experiences. But these experiences are very limited by strict conditions of precision and replicability in space and time. The most awkward, but valid, theory is still hooked on the experienced world by some tiny but strong cords such as the experience of, for instance, a minuscule but exactly predicted trace on a screen connected with a sophisticated detector. Thus only few experiences meet the requirements of experiences that can underpin scientific theories. Most of our experiences, even most precious ones such as love and beauty, are not qualified. So I agree with Louis that science just covers some aspects of reality.

Finally a brief remark about Richard's reply. I have to join Sven telling that also my competence falls short to appreciate correctly Richard's proposal. Nevertheless, there's one sentence that made a bell ringing: "...physics does not focus too much on potentiality as opposed to dynamics." If we would try to construe a metaphysical world view based exclusively on science, we may meet "potentiality" and "chance" as basic ultimates. The big bang is conceived of as a chance quantum fluctuation breaking into a potential of which we, our minds and our world are realizations. In biological evolution, mutations select randomly some realizations from a huge potential of realizations, whereupon the best fitting one is preserved. Does Richard see a way to explore and map (parts of) that tremendous hidden potential?

And after all, still a brief post scriptum given cause by Christos' last reply (August 7). I am an experimental psychologist and in the early 20th century experimental psychologists noticed that consciousness is an individual phenomenon and, for that reason, cannot be investigated in a way that would meet the standards of science. Specifically, I can observe my own consciousness, but others cannot check the correctness of my observation (no replicability in space). So I have been surprised that just hard-core neurological science has reintroduced consciousness as a topic of experimental research. How is it possible? I found the answer in Dennett's "Consciousness explained." Dennett distinguishes between autophenomenal and allophenomenal consciousness. The latter is consciousness conceived as what people communicate about it. For instance, when in an experiment a particular part of my brain is stimulated, I may communicate that I see red flashes. The experiment can be repeated with other participants and one can check whether they too report red flashes. However, one cannot check whether what I call "red flashes" is the same subjective experience as what another participant calls "red flashes." The experimenter has no access to the "qualia" making that what I call red might be called "green" by another person if he would see what I see. The experimenter can only conclude that participants make the same differentiations. Both of us we assign to the flashes the same color as we assign to cherries, and we call that experienced color "red." But the exactly experienced content is a matter of autophenomenal consciousness and stays out of range. And just that autophenomenal aspect is essential. Without it we may be just robots.

Dear Guido

You mention Dennett's auto and allophenomenal conciousness but one should assume these are not the same thing. When some say "I see red" and given he is not lying we can know within his brain exists the neural activity pattern of red. Most people would agree also that he/she experiences the "red" qualia. Hence, when hearing him saying this, you actually observe arguably consciousness. You don't experience it but you neither experience electron charge. Still we say that we observe it.

Just simplify the probabilities, inevitably we co-exist , life is sinful, yes but without the human form lies something else, it's atheism but it's easy to defer to an external hand. Where do you stand? Or do some suggest a pre- existent state of consciousness?

Either the entire human form is self sufficient/unique or compelled to act as reason suggests, the mind entirely dependant on cognitive function, reacting to instinctive rationalisation but from external sources- this so called 'physical consciousness'.

I doubt 'humanity' has been threatened since the ideological clashes threatened to reveal that sciences held the keys to human emancipation from Catholicism.

It's probably been troubling to some from the moment a mind first gazed into a reflective pool of water. Our decline will go hand in hand with environmental extinction but our curiosities may well be our safeguarding.

Dear Guido,

Inquiring about a problem such as the mind-body problem should start about the historical context of when the problem became recognized as a problem and to search in the difference between the framework of idea previous to the period and the frameworkd of ideas of the period where the mind-boby emerged. We know that the previous framework of ideas was scholastic philosophy and that the new framework of ideas which the main philosophers established with Descartes is that beings and purpose became obsolete to the new scientific mind set. What most characterise the new scientific mind set is the centrality of the myth of the machine. This myth makes Mind problematic, it makes of mind a mystery and it is called the mind-body problem. The problem of Mind did not exist into the scholastic mind set, it was central to being. So the mind-body problem is only a problem if one accept to work within the myth of the machine and will necessarily evaporate once we move out of this mind set. Withing the myth of the machine, the mind is an unexplicable ghost in the machine. The very idea of a machine exclude any Mind and so no wonder a solution can't another layer of machinery since the very idea of a machine excluded mind. Science itself, especially in the natural science is essentially mecanistic, and operate along the same principle that were put in place during the beginning of modernity; It is never going to change, science has and will always be what it is in spite of all its progress. ITs project and method are mecanistic, the incarnation of the spirit of the myth of the machine. Nothing to criticize there. The only thing to notice is that Mind is not going to enter this mind set. It is totally excluded from the beginning and will always be. It is not a question of progress of science, it is a question of what science is in principle. Science is one of our best source of information about the world, of the living world in particular where mind is the central reality. What could be a new metaphysical mind set, one that naturally welcome mind and science. It will be one that is both scientific and phenomenological. The two will not mixed but will be complementory in an natural way. To promote such a mind set, I sudgest the following narrative about the world: (I cut and paste what I said recently on another thread ):

=========

The content of experience is about our bodily interaction. To perform these bodily interactions, different parts of the body are necessary. It is well known that some people after an heart attack will loose a part of their brain and temporarily loose some bodily abilities, for example will speak with difficulties , but will after a certain period totally regain this abilities. The brain can do help the body performing a function such as speaking using more than one manner, this is called neuroplasticity. So we should not expect to have a one to one relation between brain processes and experience since there are different brain processes that can help us doing exactly the same thing and thus having the same experience. So the very idea of finding the neural correlate of consciousness is flawed. Consciousness is about bodily interaction, what we INTER-ACT and not about we actually internally proceeds to interact. All living organism INTER-ACT, they are self-creating growing INTERACTION. Consciousness is the self-creating edge of this INTERACTION. According to this definition of life and consciousness then all living being, all self-creating growing interaction are conscious. According to the above philosophical view, the hard problem of consciousness is the hard problem of explain what life is in the above sense. It is not about what is but about the self-creating of the interaction and by definition it can't be a mecanism. The interaction is performed by the mecanisms of interaction but consciousness is about the INTER-ACTION an its creation. The INTER-ACTION part is our phenomenal experience, the subject matter of phenomenology but the creative part can't be studied since it can't be about something existing, since it is coming into existence.

=======

Dear Sven,

The question ''What is Life?'' is a very ancient philosophical question which in my mind is associate with our current question ''What is Consciousness?''. I provide short answers to both. In order to answer your question , I will elaborate a bit further and so provides some pointers to related ideas in philosophy and science that influenced me. Consciousness is non controversially intimatly related to Life. Some consider that it is only a property of higher form of life with complex central nervous system but other (like me) consider it intrinsic to what life is and so for those the hard problem of consciousness is the hard problem of life. Saying what is life is also saying what is consciousness. Those thinking that consciousness is only a property of some form of life have to explain when and why the consciousness switch was put on during the biological evolution. Kant defines life as entities that produce themself, that are both the cause and the effect of themself. Von Uexkull conceptualized living organisms as interaction loop. Their bodily structure of interaction conditioning the structure of their interaction and this interaction being their conscious world or Umwelt. Thus each organism self-construct its interaction world and they enter each other interaction world. Each interaction/conscious world mirror the world in its own way and so the world is a interacting network of interacting mirrors more orless complex. We have here an echo of the Leibnizian organismic network view of the world. In 1972, Maturana and Varela described living organism as autopoietic systems, systems that produce,maintain, reproduce itself. Autopoesis means self-creation. Such systems are self-creating interacting loops. Their are interractingly coupled with different aspects (living or non living) of their environment. In this picture, the (conscious) world of interaction (Umwelt) is not uniquely defined by its material implementing tools within the boundary of the organism. The physical boundary of the organism is not deliminating the . interaction loop but part of the material realization of it and a given conscious reality is not defined by its material realization and can't be said to be into a unique relationship with it.

Erwin Schrodinger, in “Mind and matter” (1958) wrote:

''The ensuing organic development begins to be accompanied by consciousness only inasmuch as there are organs that gradually take up interaction with the environment, adapt their functions to the changes in the situation, are influenced, undergo practice, are in special ways modified by the surroundings. We higher vertebrates possess such an organ mainly in our nervous system. Therefore consciousness is associated with those of its functions that adapt themselves by what we call experience to a changing environment. The nervous system is the place where our species is still engaged in phylogenetic transformation; metaphorically speaking it is the “vegetation top” (Vegetationsspitze) of our stem. I would summarize my general hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how (Konnen ¨ ) is unconscious.''

So consciousness is the growing or creating or learning or Konnen of the interaction. It is not what has been learned but the learning itself,, it is not what is created but the creating itself. It does not exist but the coming in existence itself. It is why life is alife and not dead. This is why there is something rather than nothing.

So we can scientifically study what has been created and exist in a stable way, what is order but nothing else, not the creating of what we can study. It does not mean that the structure of consciousness and of the evolution of life can't be studied. It is studied successfully but the core phenomena of the permanent creating at work can't for the above reasons.

I don't expect to convince you although I hope it will help make you understand what I am saying.

=========

What is important is not the details of this view of the world but about the kind of mind set I hope it may help to foster. It is a new kind of practical reason in the scholastic sense of the expression. A lot of the scholastic philosophy can be included and not at odd with science although science can't enter the creative and has to be limited to the machine-like. The new mind set or more exactly the new attidude can embrace the machine-like without being enclosed by it.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Poznanski

Please provide an adequate definitions and descriptions of the terms: 'cause-affect' and 'microfeels'. I search and got nothing but music bands. Also, please provide an outline of how to experimentally investigate conscious or the mind-body problem under your model.

Dear Sven Beecken

here’s my belated reply to your comment from Sept. 6th in the “Is Chalmers’ so-called “hard problem” in consciousness real”-thread. Consequently, the first two points in what follows are not strictly concerned with the overarching question of this thread, but I thought that splitting up my answer over several threads would cause more confusion than simply just posting everything in one answer here. I am including quotes from your reply, so you (and the discussion's other participants) don’t have to always go back to the other thread.

1.) Regarding mechanic philosophy and intelligibility: You wrote “what I have in mind when referring to intuitions is something much narrower. Perhaps it would be better follow Elizabeth S. Spelke and Katherine D. Kinzler and call the relevant intuitions ‘core knowledge’. What seems to be that case is that we have sort of hard wired ways to see the world. For instance, we have a rigid core system for object representation (basically causation): ‘The core system of object representation has been studied most extensively. It centers on the spatio-temporal principles of cohesion (objects move as connected and bounded wholes), continuity (objects move on connected, unobstructed paths), and contact (objects do not interact at a distance) (Aguiar & Baillargeon, 1999; Leslie & Keeble, 1987; Spelke, 1990)’ (p. 99, Spelke and Kinzler). (…) If this system is responsible for the intelligibility criterion, then it would explain the difference, it is not that that we are most familiar with it, it is because we are hardwired to see the world in a specific way. That we can accustom ourselves to educated intuitions is probably the much weaker notion. We can get accustomed to all sorts of things, which is why intuitions of this kind are rather dubious”.

I assume what is meant here is something like the fact that assumptions of “object permanence” (etc.) are already present in human infants. Still, I doubt is that this alone suffices to say that scientific theories which depend on (nothing but) object permanence (etc.) are more intelligible than those which do not. But perhaps that is just a technical notion of intelligibility then, and as such need not be disputed any further. I simply think that there are also different notion of intelligibility which are relevant for evaluating scientific theories, and which do not prefer scientific theories which depend on (nothing but) object permanence (etc.) over those which do not. If I were to judge today whether one theory in quantum physics is more intelligible than another, I would not even start with considerations about object permanence, but something like formal simplicity, symmetry, familiarity of theorems etc.. In any case, I agree that the kind of intelligibility you refer to is certainly that which explains Newton’s writing that “one body [which] may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else [...] is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”.

2.) You wrote: “The abstract notions are part of the theory, the observations are part of the natural world.”

My view is that you never really have pretheoretic observations, at least not if these observations amount to observations about things or properties (i.e. anything having to do with ontology and/or truth-values). Things or properties are always theoretically constructed entities. So, I would reject the notion that there is such a thing as a “raw observation” in the first place. Observation and theories always interact and depend on each other. Hence, abstraction seems to me to be a relation between more or less general theoretical entities, not between “observed things” and “things as they appear in theories” (and consequently, I do not think of theories as “reducing” observations, even though they admittedly subsume instances under universals/kinds. But things are always only observable as instances of kinds in the first place). But perhaps this even chimes with your Chomsky quote – that “[explanation by reduction] is one continuous effort from the beginning”?

3.) On to the Chomsky-vs-the-mind-body-problem part. You wrote: “what Chomsky asks for isn’t all that unreasonable: He simply asks for a definition of the physical, material or whatever. If this cannot be done without recurs to physics, the view is in trouble (…). if there is no definition and if there is no such thing as a “general understanding of physics”, then there is also no basis for conjectures what may or may not be necessary to solve, say, the Hard Problem. And that’s basically Chomsky’s point”.

Again, I strongly contest this. While I would agree in principle that a definition of physics is desirable for Physicalism, I can only reiterate that what sets Physicalism apart from its counterparts – mainly dualism and idealism – does not so much depend on a definition of physics, but simply consists in a special form of monistic ontology, enriched by some (open set of) additional criteria (with causal closedness chiefly among them). It may even turn out that “ultimate physics” does not adhere to this ontology, so said definition might in an even stronger sense be independent of what we today call “Physicalism”.

You wrote: “In fact, for a non-physicist such as myself, there is a clear yes-or-no condition for the minimum that is required for understanding physics: Can you do the math? (Note that I’m using the general ‘you’ here.) If the answer is yes, then great, you have mastered a necessary condition. If the answer is no, then too bad, you have no clue what you are talking about”. Could you perhaps comment on this criterion a bit more? What role does it play in our discussion?

You wrote: “Unfortunately, we are often presented with sort of a white washed version of the actual history [of physics]. For instance, people often think of Newton as the arch scientist and then they are surprised to find out that he spent a lot of time and effort on subjects such as theology and alchemy. This doesn’t really fit our picture, but for him, it was a rational thing to do. Not to mention his own condemnation of his greatest discovery! Or consider Quine’s famous arguments for indeterminacy of translation (basically a series of arguments intended to show that what linguists within Generative Grammar do is folly and ought not to be done). His arguments are impeccable and based on – what he considered to be – hard science. But he argued against the progress of empirical inquiry. Linguists didn’t care and proceeded anyway. Well, whatever you think about linguistics, as far as I can tell, the scientific basis for Quine’s views – Skinnerian psychology – is out of the window.”

I readily grant the part about white-washing physicalist history. Here, my answer would be that what we today think about physicalist history is crucial, not what history actually was like. Why? Because we only mean to define a kind of current ideology – we’re not actually doing history of science. There would be nothing wrong with Newton turning out not to be a Physicalist (in the current sense).

As for Quine, I am not sure whether he was in direct opposition to the kind of linguistic progress associated with Chomsky. Chomsky’s progress, as far as I am familiar with it, e.g. in the realm of combinatorial syntax, seem to validate Quine rather than prove him wrong; and where Chomsky deviates from Quine (mainly Chomsky’s internalism about semantics as opposed to Quine’s externalism), it seems to me that Chomsky is wrong, not Quine (or at least I don’t see how the available evidence prefers Chomsky over Quine). Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation were chiefly arguments about semantics as related to pragmatic theories of interpretation, and, as far as I can see, these are still alive and well. Further, they do not depend on Skinnerian psychology in a strict sense (there are different interpretations of Skinner’s behaviourism, and his views are only “out of the window” if narrowly interpreted [i.e. as abolishing all “internal” cognition from science in favour of externally observable behaviour]; the standard framework in modern cognitive science is still broadly Skinnerian [insofar as behaviour is the ultimate anchor for cognitive-content-attribution and validation of cognitive theories]). So, perhaps you might want to state in which sense empirical linguists proved Quine wrong, so we can take a look at this matter in more detail?

You wrote: “I would be very interested in your views on the res extensa, res cogitans issue”. It might take me a bit more time to formulate these accurately, but the way Chomsky presented the Cartesian views in his paper “Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding”, he completely left out the things which were actually empirically proven wrong about the Cartesian mind-body-interaction, e.g. via the Pineal Gland. No part of Descartes’s theory which assumes that there is a separate mental substance has survived simply because there is no way you could today explain how a separate substance could interact with brain tissue (see my point about “causal closedness” above). Additionally, we do not have any workable theory about the “res cogitans” today. There is no science of the “res cogitans”, and for this reason alone, it is daring, to say the least, that the “res cogitans” has survived in science but the “res extensa” has not. The standard theory in cognitive science today is that the brain is sufficient for mental phenomena, and that the brain itself belongs to the “res extensa”. This means that, given what we can justifiably expect today, all mental phenomena, insofar as they are scientifically explainable at all, will be explainable via theories of the brain (and associated neural or organismic functions), and hence via the "res extensa". Or perhaps I am overlooking something about Chomsky's claims here?

Thanks in advance and best regards,

Joachim

I should add that what I wrote in my point (2) directly above ties into what Louis Brassard wrote back on July 7th: "Science is always partial while reality is always total and the idea of a model reducing the whole of a reality is fundamentally flawed. A model ALWAYS abstracts an aspect of reality. The very idea of reduction is wrong and so lead to false problem such as the mind body problem. It vanishes as soon as the idea of reduction is eliminated".

Accordingly, in my opinion, reduction is a relation between theories, not between observation and explanatory theory, and much less between reality and theory. If you are lucky, then you can reduce a more complex (or high-level) theory to a less complex (or lower-level) theory, but you can never "reduce" reality to a theory.

However, this also means that, in opposition to what Louis wrote, the problem does in fact NOT vanish, since both mind and body are theoretical entities. The mind-body-problem is a problem of reconciling theories about the mind with theories about the body, not a problem of reconciling some mental reality with some physical theory. That is, both "mind" and "body" are simply different ways to describe (aspects of) reality.

Compare Bertrand Russell: “modern science gives no indication whatever of the existence of the soul or mind as an entity; indeed the reasons for disbelieving in it are very much of the same kind as the reasons for disbelieving in matter. Mind and matter were something like the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown; the end of the battle is not the victory of one or the other, but the discovery that both are only heraldic inventions. The world consists of events, not of things that endure for a long time and have changing properties. Events can be collected into groups by their causal relations. If the causal relations are of one sort, the resulting group of events may be called a physical object, and if the causal relations are of another sort, the resulting group may be called a mind. Any event that occurs inside a man’s head will belong to groups of both kinds; considered as belonging to a group of one kind, it is a constituent of his brain, and considered as belonging to a group of the other kind, it is a constituent of his mind. Thus both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of organizing events.” (Russell 1973[1935]: In Praise of Idleness and other essays. London: Unwin Books, p. 142 f.)

Science is always partial while reality is always total and the idea of a model reducing the whole of a reality is fundamentally flawed. A model ALWAYS abstracts an aspect of reality. The very idea of reduction is wrong and so lead to false problem such as the mind body problem. It vanishes as soon as the idea of reduction is eliminated"

This is a knowledge claim that cannot be substanciated. The possibility that a theory of everything exists and maybe obtainable through science cannot be ruled out. Alternatively, if such a theory exists we could learn it through a better future method. We simply don't know.

Christos Sidiras

I think a "theory of everything" still doesn't amount to a theory reducing reality. The term "theory of everything" is typically used to assert that it covers all phenomena that every other theory explains (or that every other theory is in a qualifiable sense derivable from it).

I imagine the farthest we could take the term would be to have it mean that every observed phenomenon would be covered by that "theory of everything". But would that amount to a "reduction" of reality? I was under the impression that Louis Brassard had meant something beyond "(scientifically) explaining everything" here.

Dear Joachim

You raize an intesting point, but I think this is just a matter of convinience. I mean that one could define theory of everything as whatever he pleases. Personally, I tend to define it as the theory that exlains everything (known and unknown phenomena), but not how the theory itself came about, or any other metaphysical matter.

Dear Christos Sidiras

I should probably just defer to Louis Brassard given that he raised this point, and I am not entirely sure I understood him correctly. But the simple point to me seems that you simply cannot define reality arbitrarily to meet your theoretical standards. There seems to be an obvious difference between reality and a theory about reality, and if that difference is what Louis meant, then there is no bridging it.

Dear Joachim Lipski

I accept that real is what we can perceive and test to be real. In this sense, an apple you sense is really out there (i.e. it's not only a qualia, but the qualia corresponds to something real), an illusion is not out there, but it is still real (i.e. it exists) as a qualia. Any other thing we can not sense, may or may not be real, i.e. may or may not exist (e.g. a parallel universe), but we cannot decide either way.

I find it extreemely hard to come up with any other satisfying theory of reality.

Dear Joachim and readers,

Thank you for your interesting and challenging comment! I too apologize for my late reply - and, in addition, for a very lengthy comment! I can only say: Please don’t feel obliged to hasten on my account, or even to read it, it is quite long. In what follows, I shall try to lay out a reply along the different subthreads we have started. The replies along the subthreads should tie into one another in a way that – hopefully – illuminates some of the core issues, as far as I can see them. One point about methodology. I had either the choice of adding a long list of references or simply to omit them all in the first place. Since for now, what I’m trying to do is to establish common ground, rather then discussing actual arguments, I decided to omit them. But I can provide references for all cases, if you wish for me to do so.

1) You wrote: “I assume what is meant here is something like the fact that assumptions of “object permanence” (etc.) are already present in human infants.”

Not exactly, there is the fact that one can show that “object permanence (essentially a concept with the following features: 0bjects move as connected and bounded wholes; objects move on connected, unobstructed paths; objects do not interact at a distance), can already be observed in infants. What is meant here is that humans are endowed with internal systems that, in this case, allow us to identify causal relations in the world. This mechanism is the reason for why explanations spelled out in terms that correspond to the way the system “presents the world to us”, are intuitively intelligible. In this sense, we have a working hypothesis for why explanations that are fully in accord with our intuitions work.

The question about intelligibility of theories in the modern sense is a difficult matter. I’m not aware of any proposal that tells us anything about a system that corresponds to, what basically amounts to, doing mathematics. i. e. our capacity to develop and use abstract concepts in conjunction with symbols and rules of inference.

Even the question “Why can we do mathematics to begin with?” is somewhat problematic. After all, being a mathematician doesn’t seem to have many evolutionary advantages (not to mention that mathematics was never used until quite recently in evolutionary terms).

Now, if we set all the complications aside, then we can simply restrict ‘intelligibility’ to the rigid and clear standard of mathematical or logical models. Even then - as far as I can tell - there is no explanation for the intelligibility of mathematical models in terms of internal systems. Other than the fact that we must have, as Chomsky put’s it, “some sort of science forming faculty”. What exactly this amounts to is - to the best of my knowledge - unknown. What seems to be clear is that whatever this faculty is, it is probably very different from the system responsible for causation in the first sense. After all, one form of intelligibility is based on a system we have from birth, which in Hume’s words “works effortlessly and without error”. Where the other form is based on the most hated subjects in school – mathematics. And for most people (myself included), learning and doing math is the very opposite of “effortless” and “without failure”.

I think the most important point here for now is that we seem to agree on the following two claims: a) the mechanical philosophy, which includes Descartes, is based on the first kind of intelligibility; and b) that there are other kinds of intelligibility. I would further add that, in an idealized sense, the modern version of `intelligibility’ is based on mathematics. In other words, we have - at least - two notions of intelligibility here. Note further, that the first kind is abandoned by the natural sciences, while the later seems to be very much obscure (at least as far as understanding the underlying mechanisms goes). Albeit proven by its success.

2) I tend to agree with you that there is no sense in which I, as an organism, are ever exposed to “raw data”. In some sense, the stimuli from the environment will always be mediated by internal systems that somehow present the results in a way that, according to standard analysis, are best spelled out in terms of propositions and their properties. In this sense, I would agree. However, what I had in mind is ‘observation’ as it is used with regard to theories.

Since what follows ties into the debate about reality, let me spell out Einstein’s distinction between ‘consequences’ and ‘data of experience’ in different terms. (I’m referring here to a definition of a theory and its evaluation given by Einstein in On the Method of Theoretical Physics).

Consider the consequences to be propositions and consider the data of experience to be facts, then we can use a standard view in metaphysics and philosophy of language to define the following biconditional:

A proposition P is true iff the fact that P obtains.

The well-known Correspondence Theory of Truth is at the hart of some of the things that are going on in contemporary metaphysics, and a good starting point to think about the relation between language (or theory) and the world - or reality, if you prefer.

So, the observations are about the facts and the facts are related to theories by the biconditional in a way clear enough to talk about data (facts) and theories (propositions). Obviously, in actual theory development, there is a constant interaction between the facts and the theories. Still, it seems to be a useful way to think of how theories relate to reality.

Where I’m a bit more cautious about is with regard to the question what exactly ‘reduction’ amounts to in the context of “explanation by reduction”. If we take the left hand side of the biconditional to be the side of the theory and if we take the right hand side to be the side of the world (or the states of affairs or the facts). Then the formulation of the schemata that is supposed to indicate how this type of explanation is supposed to work (“reducing the complex visible phenomena to the simple underlying invisibles”, i. e. by finding “the fundamental concepts and basic laws”) seems to suggest some form of hierarchy. In some sense, there are facts that are more basic than others.

It might be that this hierarchy is on the side of the theory. In other words, it is an epistemological notion that has no counterpart in the natural world. This is sort of how I understand you when you say:

“Hence, abstraction seems to me to be a relation between more or less general theoretical entities, not between “observed things” and “things as they appear in theories.”

On the other hand, there is also the metaphysical thesis that the world itself is hierarchical structured. In other words, there are explanatory relations that hold between facts. These relations are such that one fact grounds the other. ‘Grounding’ or ‘metaphysical grounding’ is perhaps best understood as a relation on a par with causation, where causal relations order the world along time and grounding orders the world along levels.

I’m not defending this view, I’m merely pointing out that there are serious contemporary proposals in metaphysics. (And remarkably, some of these proposals can be worked out within axiomatized frameworks.) These proposals seem - prima facie - to have the potential to at least enable us to spell out what explanation by reduction means: finding more fundamental facts about how the world works.

Let me end by pointing out that I think these questions are interesting, but from the perspective of the developed sciences (basically physics, chemistry and biology), these interpretations can be ignored. However, this might not be true for less advanced disciplines.

3.) There is certainly a reading of your notion of ‘physicalism’ as consisting “in a special form of monistic ontology, enriched by some (open set of) additional criteria […].” as a proposal for how to approach questions about the mind/brain. Broadly conceived along the lines of, say, Fodor’s, or aspects of Dennett’s or Chalmers’s work. This is certainly a respectable and serious position and many in the philosophy of mind seem to be sympathetic to this view. On the other hand, most of the arguments and debates I’m familiar with do rely on some intuitive understanding of “the physical” (in the sense that “Water is H2O.”; “Arthritis is an inflammation of the joints.”; “The mental is grounded in the physical.”; and so on) And here is the worry: The notions of “what physics is about” and the notions of what ““the physical” is about” are difficult to distinguish (after all, neither term is gibberish). Which, unfortunately, also entails that it is hard to be certain, which of the two notions of ineligibility is at play.

To make this a bit more explicit: Suppose the first notion of intelligibility is given iff there is a proposition P containing a concept that satisfies all conditions of “object permanence”. And suppose proposition P is about some aspect of the world where we have no explanatory theory about. Then, all we have are basically intuitive judgments about the truth value of P. To make this concrete: In Newtonian Mechanics, we can calculate any speed of an object we like. It makes no difference how large the numbers are, it’s just the change in position over time. So, in this case, both notions of intelligibility are satisfied. Only if we have the right explanatory theory can we distinguish between (what Wesley Salmon calls “processes and pseudo-processes.” - anything that moves faster then the speed of light is a pseudo-process.

Now, suppose we use some proposition P and suppose we get somehow appropriate stimuli (apparently three dots in a row on a tachistoscope are sufficient for us to see an object in motion). Then, the truth value judgment will probably be “True”. Now, this part is trivial enough, the interesting point comes into play if we recognize that there is no way to distinguish a case where (in some unknown explanatory theory), P would turn out to be a pseudo-process. Thus, if we use the term ‘physical’ and assume that the term has some meaning (presumably something along the lines of in a more abstract sense ‘causation’ ore more concrete ‘object permanence’ - after all, it will be interpreted by the hearer in some way), and we don’t have en explanatory theory to back us up, then we are very likely to “just make stuff up”. And so, any argument that contains P can, in principle, contain a false premise – and that is bad. (Note again that this is basically normal scientific rationality, it is just not applied in other areas – even by scientists.)

Needless to say, this view is not particularly popular with philosophers. Which, again unfortunately, also leads (sometimes) to the conviction that one can discuss “the physical” without knowing the first thing about physics. Or this is at least what I have encountered. Again, one can see where this is coming from, but is is sometimes comical. After all, what one would naturally think is that physics is about the physical. Or, to put the point in the less-then-charitable way of the famous “Scumbag Analytic Philosopher”- meme: “Theorizes about Quantum Physics, Can’t Solve a Second Order Equation.”

Jokes aside, I understand Chomsky’s argument as follows: If ‘physics’ (in the technical sense) has no systematic connection with ‘the physical’ (in the intuitive sense), then one can only be certain that something is part of the world and not just made up by us is iff we can express it as the consequences from a successful explanatory theory. In all other cases, we cannot be certain. And so, any argument that relies, implicitly or explicitly, on an intuitive understanding of the physical, is in jeopardy – Which is kind of Chomsky’s point. (And the arguments he has in mind are central arguments presented by, for instance, Putnam, Burge, Davidson, Kripke, Lewis and so on).

Before I move on, it may be worth to get clear on why Chomsky looks at the history of science. He looks at it (slightly paraphrased) “not as a historian of sciences, but as a practitioner who want’s to understand what it was that the guys who started the scientific revolution (Galileo, Huygens, Leibniz, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, and so on) did right.” His credo is that we can learn a lot from trying to understand the actual history. (As a side note, I don’t want to be sexists, but I cannot come up with women that fit the descriptions, if you do, please let me know!)

What Chomsky tries to do is to develop a framework for how to study the higher cognitive functions of humans, that may lead to the development of explanatory theories that bring us closer to the underlying principles. There is a consistent reading of your points where ‘physicalism’ amounts pretty much to the same thing, but I think the consequences from this are not very well appreciated. At least not in the debates I’m familiar with.

Now, to the Quine-Chomsky debate. This is a long and interesting story. To make it short: Chomsky thinks that Quine is wrong on pretty much all accounts, while Quine thinks that what Chomsky does cannot possibly be done.

Quine is arguably one of, if not, the most influential figure(s) in analytical philosophy during - at least - the second half of the last century. He was the arch empiricist in the sense that Skinner was the arch behaviorist (and both regarded themselves as hard headed scientists). Quine rejected any internal structure of the mind/brain beyond the simplest possible mechanisms, i. e. basically, conditioned response. While Chomsky postulated rich internal structures from the beginning. So, the battle lines between Quine and Chomsky are drawn along the lines of how rich the internal structures - in fact - are. (And, consequently, along the lines of what follows from this).

To make this more explicit, consider Quine’s definition of language: “Language consists of a set of interrelated sentences established by the mechanisms of conditioned response.” This is incompatible with Chomsky’s view that language is the biological property of an organism. In the sense that the language system depends on the mechanisms of conditioned response as much as our visual, immune or digestive systems do.

On Chomsky’s view, the capacity to use language is due to a physically resized procedure within the mind/brain of an organism. This recursive procedure takes in elements (colloquially called “words”) or compositions thereof, and constructs new expressions from them. This recursive procedure generates an unbounded set of hierarchically structured expressions. Each has an interpretation at two interfaces. The conceptual-intentional interface and the interface with the sensory-motor systems. The former is responsible for interpreting and making the meaning of expressions accessible to other cognitive systems. The later is responsible for externalization.

On Quine’s view, all this is “merely verbal behavior” that can be accounted for in terms of statistical principles in conjunction with conditioning (with some modifications). Unfortunately, this view is more then prevalent in, what is sometimes called, computational cognitive sciences. There is the idea that somehow, “sophisticated Bayesian analysis in conjunction with Big Data” (Chomsky) can tell you something about what is going on (in the sense that it predicts behavior). I’m not sure if this is what you have in mind when saying that Skinnerian paradigms prevail (after all, in any but the most trivial cases, his explanations fail. Pointing this out was the topic of one of Chomsky’s first papers A Review of BF Skinner’s Verbal Behavior). Sure, there is the trivial fact that we model and observe primarily behavior, but recognizing this was hardly Skinner’s achievement (or if so, it is one of the above mentioned most trivial cases). In any event, similar ideas where already discussed in the seventeenth century. I would say that this is simply scientific common sense. After all, finding the properties of the system that generates all and only the grammatical expressions does exactly the same thing (albeit on a different level of explanation). If, on the other hand, all that you want to do is use ‘Skinnerian’ in some honorific way, then I have no objections.

There is a sense in which Quine’s views prevail – in the sense that “something along the lines of what Quine said must be right” is a prevailing doctrine in philosophy (and apparently also in psychology and related disciplines). Within the Generative Grammar framework (basically contemporary linguistics), Quine’s actual worries seem to be ignored (with the possible exception of Formal Semantics, but that would take us too far).

This might sound unfavorable and I must hasten to point out that Quine’s arguments are in general very powerful, if not beautiful (after all, he was a major logician). This might, at least partially, explain the appeal that his conception of “language” has to philosophers. For Quine, language in the relevant sense can only be understood in terms of Quantified First Order Predicate Logic and empirical evidence. Everything else can be attributed to the mechanisms of conditioned response. (So, in effect, all there is are fundamental particles and logic, the rest is nonsense.) This gives rise to extremely important arguments that brought back metaphysics as a serious subject. Basically, Quine realized that you cannot consistently believe in the existence of, for instance, the fundamental particles that need to be there for physics to work, and simultaneously reject the existence of the things required to do physics. i. e. numbers. So, his famous indispensability argument is a formulation of an insight that is more or less accepted by now: it is hard to get away with the view that all there is is concrete.

This is particularly relevant when we begin to ask “How are concrete entities related to abstract objects?” On Quine’s view, this question is answered by assuming that languages are abstract objects in the first place and he relates these abstract objects to the world by postulating a one-to-one relation between (some) words and things in the world. (This is not just Quine’s view, this is the core of analytic philosophy). This notion, the notion of reference (that also underlies the Correspondence Theory of Truth), is what Quine did his major work on.

Unfortunately, on Chomsky’s view, this relation doesn’t exist. Which might explain some of the animosities. Again, to be very clear: Externalism, broadly the view that these relations (‘reference’, `denotation’, `correspondence’, `broad content’, and so on) exist in some sense or another, is the dominant view in analytic philosophy. In that sense, Quine is validated. How much water that carries, I don’t know. The consistency in the applications seem to indicate that there must be something going on.

4) I think it is worth getting clear on the differences between the way Descartes formulated the mind-body problem and the modern way to formulate the problem. For Descartes, res extensa could be explicated in terms of the mechanical philosophy. Descartes actually thought that he had a physics of everything (unfortunately, he apparently destroyed his own work when he heard of what happened to Galileo.) The way the traditional mind-body problem is generated is by the realization that certain aspects of the worlds, higher cognitive capacities of humans - essentially language and thought - cannot be explicated in terms of the mechanical philosophy. Hence, a second substance was postulated. Now, the res extensa in the modern version includes anything that was attributed to the res cogitans in the traditional version (albeit often only tacitly), while the notion of res extensa in the traditional sense is gone. The res cogitans in the modern sense has no analogue in Descartes’s work. Rather, it seems to be the case that the dubious distinction between “me” and “the world” is what it is most often appealed to when introducing the modern version (or “me” and “my brain”, if you prefer).

One may argue that this has lead to significant and prevailing confusions. (Actually, Chomsky is quite explicit about this – it has.) Even in the cases that do not suffer the usual deficiencies (roughly the cases that are clear enough so a mathematical representation can be given), we seem in no way closer to understanding the higher cognitive capacities of humans then the grate figures of the scientific revolution were.

This is not my judgment, in a recent overview article on the state of the art regarding voluntary action, Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian eloquently end their paper by pointing out that “we have some idea as to the intricate design of the puppet and the puppet strings, but we lack insight into the mind of the puppeteer.” Insight into the “mind of the puppeteer” is incidentally what Hume was after when he wrote: “May we not hope, that philosophy, if cultivated with care [may] discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations?” I take this as fanciful ways to say the same thing: We have no clue of what the heck is going on.

If this diagnosis is even close to being correct, then the lack of progress is what justifies Chomsky. The question of “How to actually study the mind?” is not an easy one to answer, but a lot depends on it. If Chomsky is even close to a viable answer, then much of what is going on in philosophy today is totally on the wrong track. On the other hand, in some ways, philosophical problems have a way to present serious challenges to the naturalistic approach to the mind– for instance: How are we related to abstract objects? (Not to mention all the other fun things that philosophers have came up with :).

I hope this makes any sense. What I’m basically trying to say is that if we take analytic philosophy and theoretical linguistics seriously, and if we drive both to its logical conclusions, then all hell breaks loose.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Joachim,

J:''However, this also means that, in opposition to what Louis wrote, the problem does in fact NOT vanish, since both mind and body are theoretical entities. The mind-body-problem is a problem of reconciling theories about the mind with theories about the body, not a problem of reconciling some mental reality with some physical theory. That is, both "mind" and "body" are simply different ways to describe (aspects of) reality.''

The mind and the body are not separated in our experiennce. When I hit my finger with an hammer, it is very intense in my finger and at that instant all there is in my mind is the pain in my finger. An I have to disagree with you that they are at that particular instant ''theoretical''. Nothing theoretical in my finger hurting. It is not a theoretical abstraction but it is as real as it can be. As soon as you begin theorize, model this, you obviously begin to leave behind most of reality and the mind body problem starts to exist if this is not recognized.

Claims such as: ''The world consists of events, not of things that endure for a long time and have changing properties''

Do not resist examination. Each living organism do endure for a period of time and since each of us happen to be a living organism, it is self-evident. It does not entail that we endure in a constant way which is obviously not the case. Even the act of remembering that we endure by itself is such a change. What endure is our self-construction as a interacting being. But notice that the theoretical method of science can't enter this realm by its method. In that sense the claim above is true for scientific modeling.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis Brassard

I agree that in our experience, there is no separation between mind and body in the way that there is in our theories. I only mean to say that there is such a problem in our theories, and that seems a grave enough problem.

Similarly, I take Russell to talk about our theoretically-informed access to the world, rather than our subjective experience. There, the "things" are constructed from the phenomena to be explained. In that sense, that there is an enduring organism is a theoretical construction which is, to use Russell's word, transient, since our theories, and hence our theoretical categories (things, properties) are transient.

In any case, I do not disagree with you - just tried to clarify.

Regards,

Joachim

Dear Joachim,

'' I only mean to say that there is such a problem in our theories, and that seems a grave enough problem.''

There is only a mind body problem in our theories if these pretend to say what experience is theoretically. If this pretention is let go, there is not mind body problem. It is the pretention of giving a mecanistic/theoretical reduction of experience that is creating the mind body problem. The problem was not existing in philosophy prior to the totalizing claim that all that exist could in principle be theoretically said. Without this claim, the mind body problem does not arise. Prior modernity and the myth of the machine, no such problem arise. It is an artefact of the myth of the machine. Find anybody prior to the 16th century being puzzled by the mind body problem. Why is there nobody prior to modernity being puzzled by this problem. This was not a problem in their way of thinking. They did not assume that organism were mecanistic. This is this assumption that create de facto the problem. The real problem is this assumption. It is a false assumption. Actually, no being in Nature is like is actually machine-like. It does not imply that we can't theorize Nature. THis is what science has been doing and will keep doing. But theorizing nature, findind order, machine-like aspects of the Natural world in no way implies there is any machine-like beings in the Universe. Why is this false assumption been so much universally adopted and walking the street in the form of a fallacious mind body problem? We refuse to see a limit to the mode of thinking we call science. This refusal is mostly subconscious, it is an attitude that the air of modernity breath into almost everybody. Then from this unrecognize assumption arise a big puzzle: the mind body problem. A puzzle that immediatly vanish as a mirage as soon one recognize why it is a puzzled. It is only a puzzled for a mode of thinking trying to go beyonds its limit and become a fundamentalism or the promulgation that nothing is beyong this mode of thinking. It is evident that we have plenty other mode of thinking and these are never going to be replaced. And beyong the mode of thinking, mode of talking, there are many mode of being not reducable to any mode of talking.

Regards

- Louis

Dear Sven Beecken

thanks for your great reply! It was an excellent read and made me realize that I have not thought many of these points through as thoroughly as you have, so please take my following comments with a grain of salt.

1) Our discussion about intelligibility:

The reason why I mentioned object permanence as an example or analogy was that I am not convinced that anything that exceeds such heuristics related to perception should be assumed to be substantially innate. I say “substantially” because I suspect that the mere FORM of causality may well be innate, i.e. that we tend to “automatically” see causes and effects in the world; but I don’t think that any particular (and in that sense “substantial”) causal law is innate. Hence, I do not believe that any particular causal law could in that sense be more intelligible than another (apart from simplicity of formulation etc.). Rather, as I wrote, I take it that we are simply used to certain kinds of causal laws more than to others, but, in principle, instances of gravity or electromagnetism, or even quantum entanglement, are in my opinion causally just as intelligible as billard balls pushing one another. To adapt your words, for every “explanation that is fully in accord with our intuitions”, my first assumption would be that this is because we are simply used to similar explanations.

You wrote: “The question about intelligibility of theories in the modern sense is a difficult matter. I’m not aware of any proposal that tells us anything about a system that corresponds to, what basically amounts to, doing mathematics. i. e. our capacity to develop and use abstract concepts in conjunction with symbols and rules of inference”.

Here, again, I would say this is because these are intelligible to us to the degree that we are used to them.

You wrote: “Even the question “Why can we do mathematics to begin with?” is somewhat problematic. After all, being a mathematician doesn’t seem to have many evolutionary advantages (not to mention that mathematics was never used until quite recently in evolutionary terms)”.

But having a multi-purpose cognitive apparatus, which can get used to doing mathematics (among many other things), is evolutionarily quite advantageous. Also, mathematics probably reflects the (highly formalized) bare bones of our capacity to make inferences, which also is evolutionarily (and socially) advantageous.

You wrote: “Now, if we set all the complications aside, then we can simply restrict ‘intelligibility’ to the rigid and clear standard of mathematical or logical models.”

I am not sure how you arrive at this stipulation. As I wrote, I take intelligibility to mostly amount to familiarity – to knowing (in theory) what is meant or (in practice) how it works.

You wrote: “Even then - as far as I can tell - there is no explanation for the intelligibility of mathematical models in terms of internal systems. Other than the fact that we must have, as Chomsky puts it, “some sort of science forming faculty”. What exactly this amounts to is - to the best of my knowledge – unknown”.

Well, that’s pretty much what I meant by the multi-purpose cognitive apparatus, coupled with our innate explanatory forms (if these are innate at all), such as the form of causal law. A “science faculty” would be easily derivable from a need for causal explanation and inference (and, at some point, axiomatization). But that’s just my own view, not my take on Chomsky.

You wrote: “What seems to be clear is that whatever this faculty is, it is probably very different from the system responsible for causation in the first sense. After all, one form of intelligibility is based on a system we have from birth, which in Hume’s words “works effortlessly and without error”. Where the other form is based on the most hated subjects in school – mathematics. And for most people (myself included), learning and doing math is the very opposite of “effortless” and “without failure”. I think the most important point here for now is that we seem to agree on the following two claims: a) the mechanical philosophy, which includes Descartes, is based on the first kind of intelligibility; and b) that there are other kinds of intelligibility”.

Actually, I don’t agree, since I take the reason for the supposed first system’s working “effortlessly and without error” to be importantly based on familiarity – but that’s also what your supposed second system depends on. So, my assumptions of innateness are so sparse as to be negligible (beyond a potentially innate “form” of causality or inference). Hence, I think the intelligibility of “mechanical philosophy” – like that of every other scientifically explanatory system – is based on familiarity. Now, there may still be other forms of intelligibility, but the distinction between these does, in my opinion, not line up with that between “mechanical philosophy” and the explanations of modern science.

You wrote: “I would further add that, in an idealized sense, the modern version of `intelligibility’ is based on mathematics. In other words, we have - at least - two notions of intelligibility here. Note further, that the first kind is abandoned by the natural sciences, while the later seems to be very much obscure (at least as far as understanding the underlying mechanisms goes). Albeit proven by its success”.

For my previously stated reasons, I do not follow. I am not sure (a) why a modern version of `intelligibility’ should be based on mathematics (since mathematical and scientific explanation seem to be quite different things), (b) why the natural sciences should be thought of as abandoning any kind of intelligibility (for they certainly depend on the sheer form of causal explanation), and (c) why the kind of intelligibility to do with modern science “seems to be very much obscure”.

2) Our discussion about reductive explanation:

Here, you importantly mention the Correspondence Theory of Truth, and the biconditional “A proposition P is true iff the fact that P obtains” to get at the relation between theory and observation. I agree that the relation between language (or theory) and the world (or reality) are core issues under ongoing dispute in philosophy, and hence rather controversial. So, I guess it’s not too surprising that I have some nitpicks. For starters, I don’t think the Correspondence Theory of Truth so much works with that biconditional as that that biconditional is actually a problem for the Correspondence Theory of Truth: Propositions cannot be made to match directly with the world, but only with “the fact that P”, and there’s no sensible way to “reduce” “the fact that P” to the world (which has been my point in our discussion about reductive explanation). For this reason, Davidson meandered between Coherence and Correspondence Theories for a significant part of his professional life: said biconditional makes much more sense when only requiring Coherence, but Coherence simply isn’t (metaphysically) enough to yield empirical truth. I do not have a solution, but that also means, at least for now, I cannot accept any kind of “reduction” of theoretical statements to observation. Observations support or undermine theories, that much is clear and true.

You wrote: “So, the observations are about the facts and the facts are related to theories by the biconditional in a way clear enough to talk about data (facts) and theories (propositions). Obviously, in actual theory development, there is a constant interaction between the facts and the theories. Still, it seems to be a useful way to think of how theories relate to reality”.

For my reasons given above, I do not see how that way is “clear enough” or a “useful way to think of how theories relate to reality”. I basically agree with you, but I simply think there is nothing clear and only little that is useful about it. Of course, we usually manage to get from world to proposition without trouble, simply because we have learned how to describe the world using propositions.

You wrote: “What I’m a bit more cautious about is with regard to the question what exactly ‘reduction’ amounts to in the context of “explanation by reduction”. If we take the left hand side of the biconditional to be the side of the theory and if we take the right hand side to be the side of the world (or the states of affairs or the facts). Then the formulation of the schemata that is supposed to indicate how this type of explanation is supposed to work (“reducing the complex visible phenomena to the simple underlying invisibles”, i. e. by finding “the fundamental concepts and basic laws”) seems to suggest some form of hierarchy. In some sense, there are facts that are more basic than others”.

That seems to be what I meant when I said that object-terms are always kinds: they subsume instances. However, the biconditional obscures that a bit: What actually happens is that you describe a certain (relevant) phenomenon “in the world”, using the kind- and property-terms you already have (by way of established theories). This description may be seen as the right-hand side of the theory, but the fact that you have described it (or rather: you do not have any theoretically relevant access to that phenomenon except by way of your description) means you also, at the same time, already have your left-hand side. And then you check whether this description is plausibly an instance of the theory you wish to support. So I don’t see a “more basic / less basic”-relation at work here, but a relation of kinds and instances on the one hand and of theoretical descriptions and “world” (i.e. phenomenon) on the other.

You wrote: “On the other hand, there is also the metaphysical thesis that the world itself is hierarchical structured. In other words, there are explanatory relations that hold between facts. These relations are such that one fact grounds the other. ‘Grounding’ or ‘metaphysical grounding’ is perhaps best understood as a relation on a par with causation, where causal relations order the world along time and grounding orders the world along levels. I’m not defending this view, I’m merely pointing out that there are serious contemporary proposals in metaphysics. (…) These proposals seem - prima facie - to have the potential to at least enable us to spell out what explanation by reduction means: finding more fundamental facts about how the world works”.

Well, all I would personally say for now is that theories are hierarchically structured. Reality would only be hierarchically structured if the kinds and properties of the higher-order theories ultimately turn out to be respectable ontological entities, which I doubt more and more. In any case, I gravitate towards an epistemic reading of scientific kinds anyway, so I sort of can duck out of the ontological and metaphysical questions. (Also, I think that grounding is just a fancy en-vogue way to describe the process of identifying a property’s actual realizer, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.)

3.) Our discussion about physicalism:

You wrote: “There is certainly a reading of your notion of ‘physicalism’ as consisting ‘in a special form of monistic ontology, enriched by some (open set of) additional criteria […]’ as a proposal for how to approach questions about the mind/brain. (…) here is the worry: The notions of “what physics is about” and the notions of what ““the physical” is about” are difficult to distinguish (after all, neither term is gibberish). Which, unfortunately, also entails that it is hard to be certain, which of the two notions of ineligibility is at play”.

Given that I have serious doubts regarding said distinction between two notions of intelligibility for present purposes, I would retreat to the claim that there are persisting mind-body-problems which are coherently stateable without clarifying what’s substantially physical (in the sense of “what physics is (ultimately) about”).

You wrote: “To make this a bit more explicit: Suppose the first notion of intelligibility is given iff there is a proposition P containing a concept that satisfies all conditions of “object permanence”. And suppose proposition P is about some aspect of the world where we have no explanatory theory about. Then, all we have are basically intuitive judgments about the truth value of P”.

Interesting case. Well, I would say we have a case which is “innately intelligible” but scientifically unexplained. Though I have to say that, at the moment, I have no intuitions about how that case would actually play out.

You wrote: “To make this concrete: In Newtonian Mechanics, we can calculate any speed of an object we like. It makes no difference how large the numbers are, it’s just the change in position over time. So, in this case, both notions of intelligibility are satisfied. Only if we have the right explanatory theory can we distinguish between (what Wesley Salmon calls “processes and pseudo-processes.” - anything that moves faster then the speed of light is a pseudo-process”).

Again, that’s an interesting case I wasn’t familiar with, so I can’t say I fully grasp what would be accurate to say here. My first intuition was that it’s a case of deriving a true statement from a theory, where the fact corresponding to the statement simply isn’t instantiated; but that can’t be, since that statement would have to be counterfactually sound, which it obviously isn’t. Well, it’s counterfactually sound under Newton Mechanics, I guess, which may suffice.

You wrote: “Now, suppose we use some proposition P and suppose we get somehow appropriate stimuli (apparently three dots in a row on a tachistoscope are sufficient for us to see an object in motion). Then, the truth value judgment will probably be “True”. Now, this part is trivial enough, the interesting point comes into play if we recognize that there is no way to distinguish a case where (in some unknown explanatory theory), P would turn out to be a pseudo-process. Thus, if we use the term ‘physical’ and assume that the term has some meaning (presumably something along the lines of in a more abstract sense ‘causation’ ore more concrete ‘object permanence’ - after all, it will be interpreted by the hearer in some way), and we don’t have en explanatory theory to back us up, then we are very likely to “just make stuff up”. And so, any argument that contains P can, in principle, contain a false premise – and that is bad. (Note again that this is basically normal scientific rationality, it is just not applied in other areas – even by scientists.)”

Just to make sure what you’re getting at: Would a pre-Einsteinian philosopher, who constructed an argument which involves speed faster than light, be just such a case? If so, the problem would have been solved by Einsteinian physics though, right? Which means this philosopher would have erred in accordance with the best theory available to him, and that doesn’t seem too terrible, don’t you think? So, what exactly do you think is the problem here?

You wrote: “Needless to say, this view is not particularly popular with philosophers. Which, again unfortunately, also leads (sometimes) to the conviction that one can discuss “the physical” without knowing the first thing about physics. Or this is at least what I have encountered”.

That’s true, but I don’t see how it follows from your previous paragraph. In fact, it seems completely independent from the rest of our discussion. Here, the problem you describe seems to be that philosophers may want to make a point about physics without knowing enough about current physics. If the validity of their points depends on physics, then I’d simply say they should get sufficiently educated in physics. But I don’t think coherently formulating the mind-body-problem (at least in the way I understand it) means making a point whose validity is to be judged by physics. This is of course not to say it doesn’t depend on philosophy of science, which in turn depends on a sufficient understanding of science.

You wrote: “I understand Chomsky’s argument as follows: If ‘physics’ (in the technical sense) has no systematic connection with ‘the physical’ (in the intuitive sense), then one can only be certain that something is part of the world and not just made up by us is iff we can express it as the consequences from a successful explanatory theory. In all other cases, we cannot be certain”.

I disagree on two levels. Firstly, the “the physical” which is relevant here is not that which is intuitive, but that relevant to those who work on the mind-body-problem (and who therefore should take pains to define it non-intuitively [by which I don’t mean counterintuitively, but independent of intuitions]). That is, what the physical is taken to be usually follows from some philosophical theory, not from intuitions (or from a study of physics, although it may). Hence, secondly, it does not matter so much that “physics” has a systematic connection to (what philosophers take to be) “the physical”, but that “the physical” is soundly and relevantly defined. If, as I wrote in my previous reply, physicalism is to be explicated as some kind of monistic ontology, then what needs to be made sure is that this monistic ontology is sound, or that it is at least a viable view. Thirdly (but that should be no surprise by now), this has nothing to do with intelligibility, since – even if the pertinent kind of intelligibility were to depend on some innate principles – whether this monistic ontology is sound or not cannot be established by mere accordance with some innate principles (or, if so, then these innate principles would have to additionally be established as applicable in that context).

You wrote: “And so, any argument that relies, implicitly or explicitly, on an intuitive understanding of the physical, is in jeopardy – Which is kind of Chomsky’s point. (And the arguments he has in mind are central arguments presented by, for instance, Putnam, Burge, Davidson, Kripke, Lewis and so on)”.

Then I reject Chomsky’s argument for the reasons stated above. I also think that none of the views of the philosophers you mention depend on any such notion of physicalism as corresponding to some innate intelligibility.

You wrote: “What Chomsky tries to do is to develop a framework for how to study the higher cognitive functions of humans, that may lead to the development of explanatory theories that bring us closer to the underlying principles. There is a consistent reading of your points where ‘physicalism’ amounts pretty much to the same thing, but I think the consequences from this are not very well appreciated. At least not in the debates I’m familiar with”.

Sorry, what exactly do you mean by “the same thing” here?

(3.a) The Quine-Chomsky debate

You wrote: “the battle lines between Quine and Chomsky are drawn along the lines of how rich the internal structures - in fact - are. (And, consequently, along the lines of what follows from this)”.

You presented some important points from this point very succinctly, and I have little to add. So, I’ll offer just three brief comments on what I actually do disagree with (but this shouldn’t obscure the fact that I agree on the majority of what you wrote). The first being that I don’t think Chomsky’s evidence in favor of internal/innate cognitive mechanisms is so strong as to prefer it over the much sparser Quinean theories. Hence, until the evidence is in, I (roughly) side with Quine.

You wrote: “On Quine’s view, this question is answered by assuming that languages are abstract objects in the first place and he relates these abstract objects to the world by postulating a one-to-one relation between (some) words and things in the world. (This is not just Quine’s view, this is the core of analytic philosophy). This notion, the notion of reference (that also underlies the Correspondence Theory of Truth), is what Quine did his major work on”.

I disagree. The relevant correspondence is not between words and things. If I correctly remember reading “Word and Object”, Quine took sentences to be the applicable units of correspondence (famously, he took “gavagai” to be a sentence). In any case, I’d rather side here with Davidson, who, in his “On the very idea of a conceptual scheme”, I think, takes entire theories to be the units of correspondence. If I further remember correctly, Quine made the exceedingly important remark, versus Popper, that theories are not falsified by single observations or on the basis of singular theoretical statements, since you can always introduce auxiliary hypotheses to save your theory. Hence, postulating word-object correspondences seems far from “the core of analytic philosophy”.

You wrote: “Unfortunately, on Chomsky’s view, this relation doesn’t exist. Which might explain some of the animosities. Again, to be very clear: Externalism, broadly the view that these relations (‘reference’, `denotation’, `correspondence’, `broad content’, and so on) exist in some sense or another, is the dominant view in analytic philosophy. In that sense, Quine is validated. How much water that carries, I don’t know. The consistency in the applications seem to indicate that there must be something going on”.

In accordance with my comment above, said relation needn’t exist, and I think it misrepresents the kind of externalism Quine inspired and which has been popularly held (including terms like ‘reference’, `denotation’, `correspondence’, `broad content’). Personally, I am an externalist – probably no surprise there – but I currently don’t see any further points between us which depend on it.

4) Our discussion about res extensa vs res cogitans:

You wrote: “the res extensa in the modern version includes anything that was attributed to the res cogitans in the traditional version (albeit often only tacitly), while the notion of res extensa in the traditional sense is gone. The res cogitans in the modern sense has no analogue in Descartes’s work. Rather, it seems to be the case that the dubious distinction between “me” and “the world” is what it is most often appealed to when introducing the modern version (or “me” and “my brain”, if you prefer)”.

That is what I took Chomsky to mean, and I disagree. I think the pressure has always been to explain everything – the non-mental (“physical”) world and the contents and agency of the mind – by only one substance. Descartes’ introduction of the additional substance has simply been a weakness in his theory-building, supported by ad hoc hypotheses about God and whatnot. Today, scientists face exactly the same pressure, except they have less support from God, and, more importantly, progressed to a point where they actually CAN explain some aspects of the mind in non-mental ways. (Also, but less importantly, I do not see your distinction between “me” and “the world” or “me” and “my brain” fundamentally/systematically at work in modern science, which is not to say that the distinction isn’t occasionally popularly appealed to.) Therefore, in my view, the res extensa and res cogitans distinction, in my opinion, still exists in much the same way – large conceptual shifts and scientific progress notwithstanding.

You wrote: “One may argue that this has led to significant and prevailing confusions. (Actually, Chomsky is quite explicit about this – it has.) Even in the cases that do not suffer the usual deficiencies (roughly the cases that are clear enough so a mathematical representation can be given), we seem in no way closer to understanding the higher cognitive capacities of humans then the great figures of the scientific revolution were. This is not my judgment, in a recent overview article on the state of the art regarding voluntary action, Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian eloquently end their paper by pointing out that “we have some idea as to the intricate design of the puppet and the puppet strings, but we lack insight into the mind of the puppeteer.” Insight into the “mind of the puppeteer” is incidentally what Hume was after when he wrote: “May we not hope, that philosophy, if cultivated with care [may] discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations?” I take this as fanciful ways to say the same thing: We have no clue of what the heck is going on”.

Hm. I do have a rather different image of the sciences of the mind today. It is of course true that for many psychological phenomena, we lack sufficiently deep or detailed explanations in terms of, say, neurobiology. And hence, cognitive scientists such as Bizzi and Ajemian may very well state that they lack crucial insight. But, frankly, these things are not what I think many philosophers have been after anyway (although some might deny this fervently). In my opinion, the great questions in philosophy of mind, about intentionality, consciousness, and free will, have been developed to a point where they are so readily integratable with an empirically informed picture of the world that I would just about consider them in principle solved – with the notable exception of phenomenal consciousness. I really think that there has been immense progress, and that a lot of the open questions “only” concern the (admittedly tough-to-come-by) details.

You wrote: “If this diagnosis is even close to being correct, then the lack of progress is what justifies Chomsky. The question of “How to actually study the mind?” is not an easy one to answer, but a lot depends on it. If Chomsky is even close to a viable answer, then much of what is going on in philosophy today is totally on the wrong track. On the other hand, in some ways, philosophical problems have a way to present serious challenges to the naturalistic approach to the mind– for instance: How are we related to abstract objects? (Not to mention all the other fun things that philosophers have came up with :). I hope this makes any sense. What I’m basically trying to say is that if we take analytic philosophy and theoretical linguistics seriously, and if we drive both to its logical conclusions, then all hell breaks loose”.

Well, all that is left to say is that, due to what I said above, I do not think this diagnosis is close to being correct. But even if it were, I actually do not see how Chomsky tells us “how to actually study the mind”. Perhaps my knowledge of Chomsky is too limited, but to me, he’s always been the guy who mainly postulated huge innate mechanisms for linguistic behavior, based on rather brittle cross-cultural evidence. Sure, his theories do explain a lot, but the economy of explanation seems completely off balance: compared to the strength of his assumptions, the explanatory value is relatively modest. That is not to say that he didn’t recognize many important issues about language production or even advanced them, I simply think he didn’t solve them in a convincing way. But, again, it might well be that I haven’t immersed myself enough in his work, or perhaps I am missing some other important part of the big picture.

Best,

Joachim

Dear Joachim Lipski ,

Thank you for your endorsement and for your very interesting and illuminating comment! I think I’m beginning to get a better grasp of what seems to account for some of our differences (be they merely verbal or actually substantial). Basically, I think we look at certain issues from different perspectives. Since in what follows I intend to primarily focus on three issues (ineligibility, physicalism and on what follows from this for the mind-body problem) in some detail, I shall first try to indicate where I see substantial differences: The first issue is the way we think about physicalism. The way you use the term is really unlike the way in which I was thought to think about it. I shall try to explore this further. The other issues is the importance of reference in analytic philosophy. I strongly disagree with your reading of this (and related) notion(s) and I think that it has a lot to do with what we discuss. On the other hand, it is my impression that it would take too long to even attempt to make clear why. So, in the interest of keeping my reply manageable (at least for me), I shall not pursue the issue further (for the moment). For the same reason, I have to either ignore or only briefly strive several of your very interesting points.

To our discussion about intelligibility:

You wrote: “The reason why I mentioned object permanence as an example or analogy was that I am not convinced that anything that exceeds such heuristics related to perception should be assumed to be substantially innate. I say “substantially” because I suspect that the mere FORM of causality may well be innate, i.e. that we tend to “automatically” see causes and effects in the world; but I don’t think that any particular (and in that sense “substantial”) causal law is innate. Hence, I do not believe that any particular causal law could in that sense be more intelligible than another (apart from simplicity of formulation etc.).”

I have to admit that I’m not sure if I can follow your distinction between the form of causality and causal laws. In some sense, it is obviously not the case that causal laws (say, Newton’s laws) are innate, because they had to be discovered. On the other hand, the Mechanical Philosophy was based (partially) on the law that two objects interact with one another iff they are in contact with one another. This was a law and it is innate, but maybe I’m missing something here.

To continue with intelligibility, you wrote:

“Rather, as I wrote, I take it that we are simply used to certain kinds of causal laws more than to others, but, in principle, instances of gravity or electromagnetism, or even quantum entanglement, are in my opinion causally just as intelligible as billard balls pushing one another. To adapt your words, for every “explanation that is fully in accord with our intuitions”, my first assumption would be that this is because we are simply used to similar explanations.”

My reply is that this is a substantial empirical thesis. I think Lila Gleitman has nailed it: “You have to account for what goes in and what comes out, then you can tell.” Spelke and Kinzler make the empirical claim that object permanence is one of four (or perhaps five) cores systems of humans (“that humans are endowed with a small number of separable systems of core knowledge. New, flexible skills and belief systems build on these core foundations.” One of theses core systems satisfies the notion of intelligibility as it is required by the Mechanical Philosophy. What seems dubious to me is that it should be the same notion of intelligibility that underlies contemporary explanatory theories. Sure, it could be the case that the “new flexible skills and believe systems are build on these cores foundations.” But this does not seem to entail that the ineligibility involved in a mechanical explanation is the same as the ineligibility involved in contemporary theories. In particular, I don’t think this has much to do with “getting used to something” in the sense of a general learning mechanism. What it seems to entail is that the core systems can, to some degree, be used to build up the capacity to use modern theories, but it is by no means clear how this is done.

What, I think, throws the general learning mechanism out of the window is what has been learned about language acquisition in the last, say, fifty years. As far as I know the literature, Chomsky’s observation that children acquire the capacity to use language from very impoverished data automatically (often without any evidence at all) is by now strongly confirmed. Furthermore, it has been pretty much established that children do acquire language in an essentially uniform way (regardless of culture or context). If this is correct, then there is no general learning mechanism, or at least not in the way I understand the notion (basically, along the Quinean picture in the traditional sense or, in the contemporary sense, as “sophisticated Bayesian analysis and Big Data”). Instead there are rigid internal systems that account for our capacities.

Obviously, any capacity of an organism depends on, at least, three factors: data from the environment, genetic endowment and more general laws of nature. Any explanation offered has to take this into account. For this reason alone, I am very skeptical about your response to my worry that one can explain “our capacity to develop and use abstract concepts in conjunction with symbols and rules of inference” as the basis for the intelligibility of explanatory theories as opposed to ineligibility in the sense of the mechanical philosophy (my claim) by saying “this is because these are intelligible to us to the degree that we are used to them.” We can get used to it, but this doesn’t entail that it is only one form of intelligibility as provided by the internal systems. After all, we are locking at performance, not competence, when we look at the transition from the mechanical philosophy, based on an demonstrable internal cores system (Spelke & Kinsler), to explanatory theories.

To the question how our capacity to use mathematics could have evolved (a question that bothered Darwin and Wallace). You wrote:

“[Having] a multi-purpose cognitive apparatus, which can get used to doing mathematics (among many other things), is evolutionarily quite advantageous. Also, mathematics probably reflects the (highly formalized) bare bones of our capacity to make inferences, which also is evolutionarily (and socially) advantageous.”

I have to admit that your proposal that some “multi-purpose cognitive apparatus” is responsible for this (which I doubt exists for the reasons stated above) sounds suspiciously like what evolutionary biologists call “just-so” stories. Basically, we look at some trait of an organism, I tell you a story about why it’s there, then you tell me your story and if yours is better than mine, you win. What is required is to find the actual (molecular) mechanisms. And that was what I had in mind when saying that I’m not aware of any proposal for a mechanism that explains our capacity to do mathematics.

Actually, this is not entirely true, if Chomsky is right and there exists the recursive procedure Merge and a lexicon, then it is possible to derive a model for the natural numbers. But this possibility raise, in my view, more questions then it answers. In any case, it would not be a multi-purpose cognitive apparatus, but an offshoot of a human specific system that somehow works together with the other identifiable systems (and whatever else is going on in the mind/brain).

I wrote: “Now, if we set all the complications aside, then we can simply restrict ‘intelligibility’ to the rigid and clear standard of mathematical or logical models.” You replied: “I am not sure how you arrive at this stipulation. As I wrote, I take intelligibility to mostly amount to familiarity – to knowing (in theory) what is meant or (in practice) how it works.”

What I had in mind here is a claim from Leonard Susskind, who is quiet explicit that the only way to understand QM is by abstract mathematics. While we might be able to make some sense of classical physics in ways the could be seen as some form of abstraction form ‘object permanence’ to ‘causality’ this is not possible for QM. There is no intuitive intelligibility, just pure hard math.

I wrote: “Even then - as far as I can tell - there is no explanation for the intelligibility of mathematical models in terms of internal systems. Other than the fact that we must have, as Chomsky puts it, “some sort of science forming faculty”. What exactly this amounts to is - to the best of my knowledge – unknown”.

You replied: Well, that’s pretty much what I meant by the multi-purpose cognitive apparatus, coupled with our innate explanatory forms (if these are innate at all), such as the form of causal law. A “science faculty” would be easily derivable from a need for causal explanation and inference (and, at some point, axiomatization). But that’s just my own view, not my take on Chomsky.

Ok, but for the reasons stated above, the evidence is strongly against a multi-purpose cognitive apparatus. Thus, what ever is responsible for our capacity to do math cannot be derived in this way.

You wrote: So, my assumptions of innateness are so sparse as to be negligible (beyond a potentially innate “form” of causality or inference). Hence, I think the intelligibility of “mechanical philosophy” – like that of every other scientifically explanatory system – is based on familiarity.

Fair enough, it is spares and if it could be shown that this is what’s going on it might provide neat explanations (if it can be spelled out in appropriate ways) – unfortunately, the evidence seems to suggest that it is false.

Now, I’m aware that what you lay out here is pretty much the mainstream view in the more empirically minded approaches to thought and language. For instance, there is (in Chomsky’s words) “a small industry that tries to demonstrate that somehow [language] could be picked up by data and statistical inference.” - In all cases that I have checked, I side with Chomsky, they are total failures.

To continue: You close with the following statements:

“For my previously stated reasons, I do not follow. I am not sure (a) why a modern version of `intelligibility’ should be based on mathematics (since mathematical and scientific explanation seem to be quite different things),”

I refer to Susskind. I have to admit that the more I learn about the way science is actually done, the more skeptical I become about what philosophers call “scientific explanations”. That’s I why I work with the notion of explanatory theories in Einstein’s sense and with Chomsky’s concept of a scientific explanation.

“(b) why the natural sciences should be thought of as abandoning any kind of intelligibility (for they certainly depend on the sheer form of causal explanation),”

I don’t think this is about the “sheer form of a causal explanation”, but rather about different (and probably complex) internal systems. In any case, the notion that the intuitive ineligibility has been abandoned is not my (or Chomsky’s) judgment, but a claim from historians of science such as I. B. Cohen. In other words, you can track it in the history.

“and (c) why the kind of intelligibility to do with modern science “seems to be very much obscure”.”

The mechanisms are obscure, for the reasons stated above.

2) Our discussion about reductive explanation:

This is the section where I believe we have the least amount of differences, or at least with regard to our present discussion. Consequently, I shall restrict myself to some brief remarks. I do agree that the Correspondence Theory of Truth is hotly debated. Personally, I’m used to think of the relation between propositions and facts as an asymmetric relation (in the sense that the facts “make” the propositions true, not vice versa). But I think we can set the metaphysical issues aside. What I would like to point out (and what I think accounts for much of our difference here) is that I don’t understand “explanation by reduction” to mean a reduction of propositions to facts. Rather, I understand it as a term that indicates how sciences is done, which in turn needs to be spelled out in some way. I think (and please correct my if I’m wrong) that we can get along by restricting the proposal to the left hand side, i. e. to a reduction along the lines of theories and not a reduction of one side to the other. Furthermore, this type of scientific explanation is an empirical claim about how science is actually done. And so, the way it works should be inferred from actual cases - including any explication of ‘hierarchy’ or ‘fundamental’.

3.) Our discussion about physicalism:

You wrote: Given that I have serious doubts regarding said distinction between two notions of intelligibility for present purposes, I would retreat to the claim that there are persisting mind-body-problems which are coherently stateable without clarifying what’s substantially physical (in the sense of “what physics is (ultimately) about”).

I strongly disagree with your claim “that there are persisting mind-body-problems which are coherently stateable without clarifying what’s substantially physical”.

Let me restate the setup. Suppose there is some proposition P. & P is about some aspect of the world (let the world be as broad as you like, as long as it is concrete). & It is not the case that we have an explanatory theory that allows for the derivation of P. Then, for a human observer who makes a truth value judgment about P, it is possible that the the judgment solely depends on internal systems and not on anything from the external world.

(A case in question would be a laboratory situation where the organisms internal sensory systems would be directly stimulated. In other words, the external world “doesn’t have to be there”, it is sufficient to provide whatever stimulus is required.)

If this is possible and if we take Einstein seriously, i. e. we assume that “on the possibility alone of [...] a correspondence [between consequences and data of experience] rests the value and justification [of the explanatory theory].”

Then, for all cases where we judge P to be true (or false) and where we don’t have a theory that allows for the derivation of P. There is the possibility that the truth value judgment solely depends on internal systems and not on anything in the external world.

Now, the only way to avoid the conclusion is to is to come up with a story that ensures that it is not the case that a human judges P to be true (or false) and there is nothing in the external world that corresponds to P (which I take it is what externalism is about).

The Mechanical Philosophy was such a story, unfortunately, the history of sciences has thought us that the world can be as strange as you like (even inconceivable), the only criterion that allows to be as certain as we can be is Einstein’s criterion.

Now, consider your characterization of “physicalism’ as consisting ‘in a special form of monistic ontology, enriched by some (open set of) additional criteria […]” and let P follow from the ontology in accordance with any additional criteria you like. Then, if P cannot be derived from an existing explanatory theory, it is not possible for a human observer to distinguish between cases where the truth value of P solely depends on the internal systems and cases where the truth value depends on the external world. (Again, that this is possible is hotly denied, but it seems to me that this is an empirical question that no amount of “philosophical theorizing” can solve. And all empirical data that I’m aware of strongly suggests that it is not only possible, but actual.)

Thus, for these cases, the possibility that P can be contradicted by an (unknown) explanatory theory cannot be excluded. And thus, consistency cannot be established.

This is a long (but I suspect perhaps not long enough) restatement of the way I understand Chomsky’s argument against the possibility to consistently state the mind-body problem. I assume that your disagreement applies directly to the argument

You wrote: “I disagree on two levels. Firstly, the “the physical” which is relevant here is not that which is intuitive, but that relevant to those who work on the mind-body-problem (and who therefore should take pains to define it non-intuitively [by which I don’t mean counterintuitively, but independent of intuitions]). That is, what the physical is taken to be usually follows from some philosophical theory, not from intuitions (or from a study of physics, although it may).”

The argument applies to any philosophical theory as well that. That is, if the relevant philosophical theory allows for the derivation of P in the sense above, you cannot be certain about whether or not the truth value depends solely on us or also on the world.

“Hence, secondly, it does not matter so much that “physics” has a systematic connection to (what philosophers take to be) “the physical”, but that “the physical” is soundly and relevantly defined. If, as I wrote in my previous reply, physicalism is to be explicated as some kind of monistic ontology, then what needs to be made sure is that this monistic ontology is sound, or that it is at least a viable view.”

I’m not sure how you use ‘soundly’ here (do you mean ‘sound’ in the sense that an axiom system can be shown to be sound?) - if so, I would agree that you can come up with a consistent axiom system, but axiom systems of this kind cannot be taken to be about “the world” in the sense that you can do a lot in mathematics that has nothing to do with physics.)

Finlay, I would go along with physicalism, in the sense you use the term, as a research program. Where the ontology and the restrictions change in accordance with the development of relevant explanatory theories, but this is really not the way most philosophers think about physicalism – or that is at least my experience.

Again, the way most philosophers seem to think about physicalism is to assume some “core-level” facts (in the sense that we do have a grasp of what the physical or the material or whatever) is and build up from there. An all cases where I have looked at the actual arguments (or pestered my teachers) it always came down to the physical being what physics is about. But, and that is very likely, I may have not understood them correctly.

To end this section: This is a point where I have to skip further direct replies (most regrettably, I might say). It is my hope that the sketch of an argument above gives at least an indication how I would directly reply to the remaining points in this section. Since I suspect that you may have some objections, I shall wait for a reply.

Furthermore, as I have said in the introduction, I set reference aside (hence the entire section 3a) and go directly to the mind-body problem.

4) Our discussion about res extensa vs res cogitans:

I wrote: “the res extensa in the modern version includes anything that was attributed to the res cogitans in the traditional version (albeit often only tacitly), while the notion of res extensa in the traditional sense is gone. The res cogitans in the modern sense has no analogue in Descartes’s work. Rather, it seems to be the case that the dubious distinction between “me” and “the world” is what it is most often appealed to when introducing the modern version (or “me” and “my brain”, if you prefer)”.

Your replied: “That is what I took Chomsky to mean, and I disagree. I think the pressure has always been to explain everything – the non-mental (“physical”) world and the contents and agency of the mind – by only one substance. Descartes’ introduction of the additional substance has simply been a weakness in his theory-building, supported by ad hoc hypotheses about God and whatnot. Today, scientists face exactly the same pressure, except they have less support from God, and, more importantly, progressed to a point where they actually CAN explain some aspects of the mind in non-mental ways. (Also, but less importantly, I do not see your distinction between “me” and “the world” or “me” and “my brain fundamentally/systematically at work in modern science, which is not to say that the distinction isn’t occasionally popularly appealed to.) Therefore, in my view, the res extensa and res cogitans distinction, in my opinion, still exists in much the same way – large conceptual shifts and scientific progress notwithstanding.”

I strongly disagree on pretty much all accounts. It is often said (in the modern debate) that the second substance was introduced to account for, in your terms, “God and what not”. As far as I can tell, that is simply false. What is true is that Descartes worked within the (mandatory) theological framework of his time, but this can be easily overcome, at least for the purpose of rational inquiry, by substituting “God” with “Nature” and so on.

The second substance was introduced by Descartes (and worked out by his followers, the so-called “Minor Cartesians”), because they recognized that some aspects of human cognition, basically language and thought, cannot be dealt with within the Mechanical Philosophy.

Let me give you an example, often discussed by Chomsky. It is a phenomenon called “Creative Aspects of Language Use”. When we use language, we do this in a way that is (hopefully) appropriate to the situation, but it is not caused by the situation. So, what I write in this comment is (again, hopefully) appropriate to our discussion, but I could choose to write completely unrelated nonsense. In this sense, there is no cause for my choice of words. Or even stronger, “there is no identifiable internal or external stimulus” that causes me to do what I do.

This observation can be restated in contemporary terms. Suppose (slightly simplified) that all there is in nature are phenomena that are either determined or random. So, if it is true that we use language “appropriate to the situation, but not caused by it”, then language use is not determined (not caused by an internal or external stimulus), but it is also not random, because it is appropriate to the situation.

So, in other words, there seem to be phenomena in Nature that do not fall under determinacy or randomness.

This is one example for what compelled Descartes to introduce the second substance. The problems persists, but unlike the grate figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth, they are barely recognized. In that sense, I strongly disagree with your claim that “the great questions in philosophy of mind, about intentionality, consciousness, and free will, have been developed to a point where they are so readily integratable with an empirically informed picture of the world that I would just about consider them in principle solved [...]”. - I would say that the opposite is true: The actual problems haven’t even been recognized, much less solved.

You wrote: I really think that there has been immense progress, and that a lot of the open questions “only” concern the (admittedly tough-to-come-by) details.

Well, the only progress in the cognitive and the neurosciences, in comparison with the seventeenth and eighteenth century, that has been made, is with regard to gathering facts. We know much more about the brain (and related aspects of nature), but this is largely because of advancements in technology. Understanding in any serious sense is, by enlarge, missing.

With regard to your assessment of Chomsky that “his theories do explain a lot, but the economy of explanation seems completely off balance: compared to the strength of his assumptions, the explanatory value is relatively modest.” It might come as no surprise that I take the opposite view: His contemporary theory seems to be the most successful theory (in terms of depth of explanations reached) about aspects of the mind/brain that I’m aware of. In fact, his core thesis that language is essentially a rigid system that is universal to humans and governed by natural law amounts to the claim that language is basically a system for thought (and not, as it is commonly held, for communication). If this is correct, it throws more then two millennia of theorizing about language out of the window.

Let me finally add an impression that I got from your assessment that “the great questions [are] in principle solved” (with the exception of the Hard Problem) . This is very close to what people in the nineteen-fifties thought about language and cognition (basically Skinner, Quine, Harris and so on). I think this is because they didn’t even recognized the problems. In this sense, there has been a lot of progress, but this seems simply be due to the fact that the bar wasn’t set too high to begin with.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Sven,

The human capacity to do mathematic derives like all human capacities from our senses and thus our mammalian imagination. Mathematics is today a vast abstract language but it all began from human practices of counting concrete events and objects, and surveying the land for agriculture and irrigation purpose and from accounting practices, and large construction practices. All these practices begin with writing or recording practice and are only usufull for large scale civilisation. Geometry, the measurement of the earth, were practice with rope and rods. At some point these practices developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt began to be abstracted around 600 BC by the first greek philosopher. Thales demostrated the first geometrical theorem. Here mathematics began to abstract itself from the practices of its origin. It ceased to be empirical and become theoretical. It does this by cutting itself from reality by creating foundational axioms. These are abstraction of geometrical practice but are posited as being truth in themself. In the next four hundred years, abstract euclidean geometry will be flesh out and stand on its own. By being an abstract language, it also become a modeling language. Boat form can be modeled, volume estimated by differiential technique similar to later Calculus. The argumentation in the court of justice will gradually be abstracted into what will become formal logic by the first philosopher. It is an abstraction of language. The notion of truth will become disconnected with reality again and become simply a mecanic of prooving by following formal logical rules originally abstracted from language practices. Arithmetic and system of numbers derived from sophisticated accounting practices that need all these operations will be abstracted. Then in modern time with Descartes, the different branches of mathematics will gradually merged. Analytic geometry merges algebra (functions, equations) and geometry (forms). Then Galois will abstract the notion of group out of analysis and formalized all geometries as symmetry group of transformation and this will open the way for the generalisation of the notion of geometry and the creation of the new basis of modern physics. Physics is closely tight with geometry from the very beginning. The processus of abstaction that created mathematics and physics is not that different from what created the physiological sensory-;motor apparutus in the living. In both case , the need of abstracting from concrete case is there. Rudolph Arnheim has elapborated on this in his two most famous book: Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye ,. and Visual Intelligence . At the core of our physiology,, at the core of our mammalian imagination, in the pysiology of our nervous system, is embedded an implicit science of the interaction with the world which we call our reality. There is nothing surprising that we can abstract from our concrete practice and create abstract world out of this, this is what Nature has done since the beginning.

We think that we invent mathematic but we in fact re-invent the wheel, most of what we think we discover was already in our sensory motor system actually participating in the processus of abstraction, and just echoing itself. Look at the stars in the night sky. You do see kind of lines connecting near by stars and forming groups call constellation. Here is the basis of Euclidean geometrical axiom: by two points passes one line. All these are basic visual phenomena in the first place. I still remember when I was taugh for the first time Euclidean geometry in grade 6 and to have been wondering why is the teacher telling me evidences?

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

Thank you for your very interesting and eloquent comment. I largely agree with your characterization of different historical periods, although I’m a bit skeptical about the gradual development that you seem to suggest (more on this below).

Just to clarify, when I was asking about an explanation for the capacity of humans to do mathematics, I was asking for an evolutionary explanation. To make this a bit more concrete: There is only one organism that has the capacity to do mathematics. But there are many organism with similar sensory systems. So, to use the title of a resent book by Chomsky, Why Only Us?

Furthermore, look at the time frame: Humans exists as a genetically identifiable species for about 200 000 years. Now, it seems that we haven’t used the capacity to do math for most of this time. Why is this? Or in other words, if we look at a genetically heritable trait, then when did the genetic change occur and, more importantly, what was it that allows for only one organism to use higher cognitive capacities, not to mention something as specific as mathematics?

Now, to the empirical side. There is interesting evidence from linguistics. There are languages without number words (basically, they only have words for one, two and many). The linguist Kenneth Hale has observed that people with such a language (in this case an aboriginal one, Warlpiri) who were for the first time introduced to a market economy, pretty much instantly understood how to use money. Basically, they instantaneously developed the capacity to do arithmetic. Note that having the natural numbers is an all-or-nothing affair. The natural numbers are infinite and you cannot reach infinity in small steps.

It seems that these few facts fit most uncomfortably with your nice, gradual picture. If you look at the archaeological record for the last 200 000 years (and not only on the “recent” history) then we find for the first 100 000 plus years nothing that indicates culture. Then, roughly 70 000 years ago, occurred, what paleoantropologists call, “The Great Leap Forward”. An explosion of artifacts indicating a dramatic increase in art, tools, weapons and so on in pretty much all respects. The paleoantropologist Ian Tattersall argues that this might be when, what he calls, “symbolic thought” (basically language and cognition) has emerged.

On the other hand, we know that no genetic change could have taken place that is relevant for the core systems (at least for language, but probably also for other core cognitive capacities) for about the last 50 000 years (roughly when we left Africa). The reason is that there seem to be no identifiable group differences between humans with regard to thought and language.

So, if this, as Chomsky calls it, “evolutionary fairy tale” (a neat “just so” - story) is even close to being correct, then this seems to suggest that there was a rather sudden (in evolutionary time frames) genetic change that enables us to do what we do.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Sven,

S:‘’Just to clarify, when I was asking about an explanation for the capacity of humans to do mathematics, I was asking for an evolutionary explanation. ‘’

Most of what human do and non-human animal can’t do have no biological evolutionary explanation. Our capacity of doing mathematics is typical in this respect. What we have to explain is the unique human cultural learning capacity. I will elaborate later.

S:‘’To make this a bit more concrete: There is only one organism that has the capacity to do mathematics. But there are many organism with similar sensory systems. So, to use the title of a resent book by Chomsky, Why Only Us?’’

Effectively we are biologically very similar to our most bonobos and chimpanzee and gorillas but behaviorally into another Universe. In terms of evolutionary time our departure from them is quite recent, maybe half million years. Not a lot to develop biologically very different physiological structures in our nervous system. So it is likely that our unique cultural learning capacity depends not on a lot of unique physiological system but this allow us to use in entirely more flexible way our nervous system, ways that allow it to learn culture. I will elaborate later.

S:‘’Furthermore, look at the time frame: Humans exists as a genetically identifiable species for about 200 000 years.’’

Our evolution is mostly a cultural one and so it do not deman much biological evolution wich is a much slower process.

S:‘’Now, it seems that we haven’t used the capacity to do math for most of this time. ‘’

Yes.

S:‘’Why is this?’’

Because most of this time we live in small extended family tribe of at most 100 persons in the hunter gatherer life style. No need for math in such lifestyle. No need for writing in such lifestyle. The need of this form of culture only appears for large scale societies starts to exist, so-called civilized societies. Only then, the normal human memories is totally exceed by the demand of a centralized leadershif and recording or writing and accounting is absolutely necessary for such type of society to exist.

S:‘’Or in other words, if we look at a genetically heritable trait, then when did the genetic change occur and, more importantly, what was it that allows for only one organism to use higher cognitive capacities, not to mention something as specific as mathematics?’’

See my previous answer. The need to do math did not exist in small scale human societies of hunter gatherers and the need did not exist for our earlier hominin ancestors. Biolocal evolution could not select for a non existent need and it did not.

S:‘’Now, to the empirical side. There is interesting evidence from linguistics. There are languages without number words (basically, they only have words for one, two and many). The linguist Kenneth Hale has observed that people with such a language (in this case an aboriginal one, Warlpiri) who were for the first time introduced to a market economy, pretty much instantly understood how to use money. Basically, they instantaneously developed the capacity to do arithmetic. ‘’

Again, why bother having numbers in a language for a hunter gatherer lifestyle. Showing each other fingers will do the job when needed. But if they are introduced money then they instantly ceased to be only hunter gatherer and then enter into a cultural domain invented by earlier civilisation. They are not more stupid than all the children that learn counting around the age of three or four. By the age of 7 , they get arithmetic.

S:‘’Note that having the natural numbers is an all-or-nothing affair.’’

It is far from being an all-or-nothing affair. You should look at the topic of animal numeracy or the topic of children numeracy learning difficulties. Kindergarten teachers makes children grasp these concepts very gradually with all kind of exercise. Reconizing the two sets of objects have the same number of elements is one skill among many others. Lion family facing each other will not fight if one family is much bigger the other indicating that they in a certain way estimate numbers.

S: ‘’The natural numbers are infinite and you cannot reach infinity in small steps.’’

I do not see the relevance of this point. Nobody reach infinity. The concept of infinity is just the concept of a process that does not stop. The notion of reaching infinity is nonsensical. The notion of limit in mathematics is sensical but does not need reaching infinity.

S:‘’It seems that these few facts fit most uncomfortably with your nice, gradual picture. If you look at the archaeological record for the last 200 000 years (and not only on the “recent” history) then we find for the first 100 000 plus years nothing that indicates culture. Then, roughly 70 000 years ago, occurred, what paleoantropologists call, “The Great Leap Forward”. An explosion of artifacts indicating a dramatic increase in art, tools, weapons and so on in pretty much all respects. The paleoantropologist Ian Tattersall argues that this might be when, what he calls, “symbolic thought” (basically language and cognition) has emerged.''

The transition to humanity went throw a number of steps, it is a transition from biological evolution to cultural evolution. What was the nature of the physiological transformation that brought along this transition? A better question is what is what type primate behavior would have promote this transition, the transition towards a flexible culturally learning nervous system? I think that it is the appearance of all that is uniquely human but not yet separated or discriminate in a plethora of uniquely human behavior. I think it is the appearance into a bonobo type matriarchal hominin family of a new type of politic that actually synchronise their nervous system: singing dancing together. Here you have the first language, the first human politic, the first religion and the first dance and music or first art. At suspect a uniquely prodigious female that has started all, our first shaman that started the first collective transe and started the living dream. This has allowed what I call the decoupling of the mammalian imagination were we can enact dream-like experience in the waked state. I would have to elaborate much more. I came to this hypothesis throw a long path from my research in vision but also about a long personal fascination on what is music and its connection with dance. I later discovered Mithen's work (singing neanderthal) and others which came to similar hypothesis from a totally different path of evidences.

S:'’On the other hand, we know that no genetic change could have taken place that is relevant for the core systems (at least for language, but probably also for other core cognitive capacities) for about the last 50 000 years (roughly when we left Africa). The reason is that there seem to be no identifiable group differences between humans with regard to thought and language.’’

Language is a new way to self-enact the mammalian imagination that is similar to a dream in a waked state. When you read these words you enter a common dream , we in a way enter a common consciousness, a common dream. All mammal dreams but we are the only awaked dreamers. Other mammals do not have the control of their attention or the way their imagination is enacted. It is the environment that trigger their imagination while we live in a mixed reality where what we experience is environmentally triggers as all other animals but where a part of our attention self-enact our imagination and this is the dreamed part of our experience. I would have to elaborate much further but I hope you get the geist of it.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

I should have been a bit more explicit about terminology. I use ‘evolution’ to refer to genetic change, taking place in an organism. What you seem to describe is change in behavior over time. This can happen with or without genetic change.

On the other hand, any observable trait of an organism must have some genetic basis. Now, when I was asking how the capacity to to do mathematics could have evolved, I was asking for the molecular mechanisms that enabled us to develop the capacity to do math. What you describe might have been a trigger, but that wasn’t what I was asking for (all it tells me that it happened).

I realize that this might be an impossible question to answer. First of all, no one was there. Second, as the evolutionary biologists Richard Lewontin has pointed out, non of the now known methods to study the evolution of any trait can be applied to the study of higher cognitive capacities of humans. This is because there is no variation in the species and there are no species to compare it with.

Here, it might be worth getting a bit more explicit about the infinity thing. The set of natural numbers is infinite. If you have only a finite set, you don’t have the natural numbers. We know that both steps exists. Now, what happens when we get that you can go on forever (which is usually what one associates with “having the natural numbers”). This is a logical problem and it also draws a sharp line between us and any organism. No other organism has this capacity. “Numerosity” in the sense that one can compare objects has really nothing to do with this. Furthermore, you cannot pick this up from being exposed to a necessarily finite number of stimuli. Finally, you can restate this problem for any story, in particular the vague notion of "unique cultural learning capacity" - we seemingly are able to come up with endless unique things in "culture", always on the basis of finite data.

The problem here is that we both tell stories how things might have happened. It’s a fun game, but, again, not was I was asking for. According to the evolutionary biologists Robert Sapolsky, an important step taken in the field to overcome this limitation was by asking “Show me the molecular mechanism(s).” If this cannot be done, at least we should admit that we have no idea.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Sven,

We do not use specific or dedicated ''math'' nervous mecanism while doing math. Like this browser I am using does not make use of any dedicated or specific ''browser'' parts of my computer. There is a specific process or program running in my computer that is called ''Safari'' and is my browser but Apple computer never design its computer with special parts dedicated for running this specific application. In the same manner, I am doing math with the same hardware that biological evolution which allowed my primate ancestor to live in the forest and the savana, but I am using it in for an entirely different function. So it is why your question . is irrelevant. There is no genetic basis specific to math or to language or to music. We are not hardware for doing these things that none of our ancestors were doing as the computer are not hardwared for running specific applications. Von Newman who design the basic architecture of our type of computer did not even imagine about the possibility of window based interface and internet and social network. These are not evolution of the computer hardware but the evolution of our use of computer hardware for communication and interraction purpose, i.e. cultural purpose. Your math question is a cultural evolutionary question and not an physiological question.

''No one was there'' . No one was there for most of our scientific question and it does not prevent us to answer many. When polices enter a crime scene, they very rarely get a video footage but they get a lot of traces and clues and like policements and lawyers scientists and philosophers used these traces of what happen. We foud traces on cave wall of vertical bars grouped in such a way that they most probably were recording days since the grouping correspond to moon cycle. This is a trace. Archeology has found many recording in clay tablet of the first practices of numeracy , addition etc.

As soon as human devised a numerical system for counting and adding , these systems imposed no limit. This lack of limit is what infinity is. Of course no non human animal can perceived this non limitation because this is not something there concretely but a non concrete abscence , something that can only exist in a fiction and only us live in fictitious world or narratives or controled waked dreams.

Regards,

- Louis

Louis Brassard soooo, it's magic then?

Dear Sven,

Is inventing a internet browser magic? No, it is a communicative invention that people were in need and which advantageously replaced many slow and costly printed way to communicate. Was is an invention of the pionneers of computer technology? NO. Is it strange or magical that the formers had no intention or even the faint idea of internet browser and their invention was used for creating it? NO. Cooks invent new recipies with old traditional ingredients every day. Call it magic if you like but me I call this creative cooking.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Sven Beecken

thank you kindly for your likewise interesting and illuminating reply! I’ve found that here on ResearchGate it’s rare to be able to lead a constructive discussion at this level of depth, so I’m grateful for the opportunity.

Since we are now zooming in on our disagreements, I will be able to write a less accommodating reply, but of course this does not mean I bear any ill will toward you or your views. As I wrote, I may well be wrong on many (hopefully not all!) accounts. If I phrase my claims as strongly, it’s because I think sharpening them makes it easier to directly pit them against yours, and, hopefully, to learn something from seeing them clash. I will also try to clear up misunderstandings where I see them.

Before I start in earnest: You mentioned that you “strongly disagree with [my] reading of reference in analytic philosophy, (…) [but] in the interest of keeping [your] reply manageable (…), [you] shall not pursue the issue further (for the moment)”. Even if we set this aside for the moment, in the meantime I would be grateful for a tiny hint regarding your disagreement.

1) Our discussion about intelligibility:

You wrote: “I have to admit that I’m not sure if I can follow your distinction between the form of causality and causal laws. In some sense, it is obviously not the case that causal laws (say, Newton’s laws) are innate, because they had to be discovered. On the other hand, the Mechanical Philosophy was based (partially) on the law that two objects interact with one another iff they are in contact with one another. This was a law and it is innate, but maybe I’m missing something here.”

Indeed, I may not have been clear enough on this point. Roughly, I imagine this mere “form of a causal law” to amount to something like: When A happens, then B must happen (afterwards), in virtue of A’s happening and by natural law (or what is often called “by nomic necessity”).

By no means did I mean to say that the principle “two objects interact with one another iff they are in contact with one another” is innate. I do not know if that principle is innate, and so far, I haven’t seen any compelling evidence to establish as much.

A little preface to my further reply: I have seen that, in the meantime, you and Louis have been discussing innateness and evolutionary explanations of certain cognitive capacities. I have to say I broadly side with Louis Brassard on these matters. In your latest reply, you clarify that you do not mean that, say, the invention or discovery of mathematics immediately followed some specific gene mutation, but rather that our being able to do mathematics ultimately rests on some innate disposition. While I agree with that, I fear that it is not sufficient to explain mathematics in reference to this innate trait – whatever it may be – since we lack additional evidence that any such trait specifically explains our doing maths (rather, it may explain a whole lot of potential cognitive capacities, and maths simply happens to be the one we developed, as Louis said, due to external requirements or conditions). Hence, I think it only explains our doing maths in a much more restricted sense than Chomsky or any of the folks doing evolutionary psychology would need it to.

So much for my preface. Now let’s get to continuing our actual argumentation.

Let me briefly present you with an alternate account of causality which does not depend on an innate principle such as “two objects interact with one another iff they are in contact with one another”, and which further means to support my previous claim that “in principle, instances of gravity or electromagnetism, or even quantum entanglement, are in my opinion causally just as intelligible as billard balls pushing one another”.

Firstly, please consider some recent empirical evidence for our psychological attribution of agency, namely what is referred to under the umbrella term “body transfer illusion”. The diverse effects subsumed under this term show that when we consistently observe effects in the world synchronous with our own sense of agency, we attribute control over that entity to ourselves – as if that entity were part of our own body. Everyday examples include driving a car or playing video games. Secondly, it is also well known that we have a strong tendency to automatically attribute agency to all sorts of external entities. Cultural history and contemporary psychology is full of people thinking there to be strange forces at work in the world, guiding events and their own lives, from rain dance to astrology, homeopathy and religion. Indeed, some say that there is a direct line from this attribution to modern science – modern science simply has the superior methodology to support or falsify such attributions. So, crucially, it seems that attributions of causality are already part of that psychological mechanism of attributing agency (perhaps agency is really the more fundamental psychological concept, but I wouldn’t insist on that).

So, here’s my proposal: The notion of causality comes from psychological attributions of agency and synchronicity without a sense of self (i.e. feeling that whatever “action” one observes is caused by an exterior entity). That is: Causality = Agency + synchronicity – sense of self

Now, I claim that this principle covers all the “intelligible” causal laws you (or Chomsky and others) associate with “Mechanical Philosophy”. However, it also covers spooky action at a distance, electromagnetism, gravity, and so on (indeed, video games may already establish agency attributions to “spooky actions at a distance”, i.e. we have no problems at all attributing our agency to objects which we are not directly connected to, or to whom we at least observe no such connection). I further claim that there is no available empirical evidence which prefers Chomsky’s innate mechanisms over the sparser mechanism I proposed above.

And now, I believe my proposal has been sharpened to a point where it may be readily evaluated, if not falsified, by counterarguments based on empirical counterexamples.

You wrote: “Spelke and Kinzler make the empirical claim that object permanence is one of four (or perhaps five) cores systems of humans (“that humans are endowed with a small number of separable systems of core knowledge. New, flexible skills and belief systems build on these core foundations”). One of these core systems satisfies the notion of intelligibility as it is required by the Mechanical Philosophy. What seems dubious to me is that it should be the same notion of intelligibility that underlies contemporary explanatory theories”.

How precisely do you think their core systems support Chomsky’s notion(s) of intelligibility and/or refute what I wrote above?

You wrote: “Sure, it could be the case that the ‘new flexible skills and belief systems are built on these cores foundations’. But this does not seem to entail that the intelligibility involved in a mechanical explanation is the same as the intelligibility involved in contemporary theories. In particular, I don’t think this has much to do with “getting used to something” in the sense of a general learning mechanism. What it seems to entail is that the core systems can, to some degree, be used to build up the capacity to use modern theories, but it is by no means clear how this is done”.

My claim is that we have no reason, based on the available evidence, to prefer the assumption that the intelligibility of Mechanical Philosophy (in opposition to that of modern science) could be derived from an innate “core system” over my claims regarding the much sparser “innateness” of causality as sketched above. This is not necessarily an argument against Spelke and Kinzler, but more directly one against deriving that distinction in intelligibility from Spelke and Kinzler (but that also depends on your reply to my previous question regarding how exactly you take their core systems to refute my claims). Neither is this an argument against innate “core systems” in general, but at the very least for a much sparser or more general construal of such innate mechanisms, and for the view that the results, such as specific cognitive skills, of such core systems more heavily depend on interaction with the environment (in our specific case e.g. the cultural proliferation of scientific theories, but also certain affordances or restrictions Louis Brassard has been alluding to).

Also, in my opinion, the notion that it is the core systems themselves (no matter whether and in what shape or form they exist) which must be “used to build up the capacity to use modern theories” may already be misleading. All we need to do in the cases presently under discussion is acquire a cognitive skill – in much the same way as learning to ride a bike does not depend on building on core bike riding systems, but on using basic motor and balancing skills to learn how to ride a bike. Of course there are such basic skills, but, in my opinion, it would be misleading to say that there are innate mechanisms for riding a bike (just as it would be to say there are some for Universal Grammar in Chomsky’s sense or for Mechanical Philosophy).

You wrote: “What, I think, throws the general learning mechanism out of the window is what has been learned about language acquisition in the last, say, fifty years. As far as I know the literature, Chomsky’s observation that children acquire the capacity to use language from very impoverished data automatically (often without any evidence at all) is by now strongly confirmed. Furthermore, it has been pretty much established that children do acquire language in an essentially uniform way (regardless of culture or context). If this is correct, then there is no general learning mechanism, or at least not in the way I understand the notion (basically, along the Quinean picture in the traditional sense or, in the contemporary sense, as “sophisticated Bayesian analysis and Big Data”). Instead there are rigid internal systems that account for our capacities”.

Actually, I am working under the assumption that “poverty of stimulus” and related arguments are highly dubitable. A former colleague of mine has specifically been working on innateness as related to Chomsky (including “poverty of stimulus”), and while I have not been working on Chomsky and such arguments myself, I trust her fully on this. As far as I am aware, a lot of the counterarguments boil down to dubious methodology, not being able to rule out plausible counterarguments, lack of control groups etc. – which is of course rather likely in cross-cultural studies, studies with infants and the like, which are tough to conduct and control for confounders. In a nutshell: I have little to no confidence in these studies.

I realize that settling this point warrants more detailed argumentation, and I am sorry I cannot currently say more about this myself. However, if you are interested, I could try to contact my former colleague and ask for her results. Personally, I can only say that the innateness crowd has always been and still is under heavy fire, and the literature I am aware of has sufficed for me to deem their views far from straightforwardly citable as evidence. You yourself mentioned “just so stories” in your latest reply (more on that below), so I am a bit puzzled that you would not be more skeptical of innateness claims, which, given their close links to evolutionary psychology, are what the word “just so story” had been invented for in the first place (which may all sound a bit more polemic than I mean it).

You wrote: “Obviously, any capacity of an organism depends on, at least, three factors: data from the environment, genetic endowment and more general laws of nature. Any explanation offered has to take this into account. For this reason alone, I am very skeptical about your response to my worry that one can explain “our capacity to develop and use abstract concepts in conjunction with symbols and rules of inference” as the basis for the intelligibility of explanatory theories as opposed to ineligibility in the sense of the mechanical philosophy (my claim) by saying “this is because these are intelligible to us to the degree that we are used to them.” We can get used to it, but this doesn’t entail that it is only one form of intelligibility as provided by the internal systems. After all, we are locking at performance, not competence, when we look at the transition from the mechanical philosophy, based on a demonstrable internal cores system (Spelke & Kinzler), to explanatory theories”.

This seems to me to amount to two points: I straightforwardly agree on the second one, namely that what I said does not establish that there is “only one form of intelligibility as provided by the internal systems”. I am simply saying that I do not think such internal systems have been credibly established, and until they have, I remain in that other camp. The first point I take to be what you mean when you write that any explanation of any capacity of an organism has to take three factors (data from the environment, genetic endowment and more general laws of nature) into account because said capacity depends, at least, on these. While I do agree that such capacities depend on these, your conclusion exploits two crucial vaguenesses here, namely the fact that any such capacity depends on these aspects in different ways, and that, secondly, explanatory interests can differ depending on what dependency relation you wish to know about. And here’s how it relates to my argument: Some explanations can (or even should!) afford to gloss over all three of your aspects and simply mention some fact about educational or cultural upbringing. For instance, if you wish to explain why I am a native German speaker (which I assume counts as a cognitive capacity or skill) and you (I suspect) aren’t, it is entirely enough to point out that I was brought up living in Germany. While this does not establish that there is no innate core system for German, it strongly suggests that we have no reason to assume that there is one until we have actual empirical evidence and prefer an explanation which postulates sparser internal mechanisms which, when in an environment of German speakers, produces in that individual a mastery of the German language.

You wrote: “I have to admit that your proposal that some “multi-purpose cognitive apparatus” is responsible for this (which I doubt exists for the reasons stated above) sounds suspiciously like what evolutionary biologists call “just-so” stories. Basically, we look at some trait of an organism, I tell you a story about why it’s there, then you tell me your story and if yours is better than mine, you win. What is required is to find the actual (molecular) mechanisms. And that was what I had in mind when saying that I’m not aware of any proposal for a mechanism that explains our capacity to do mathematics”.

I have to admit I find this somewhat ironic, as I am a vocal opponent of such just-so-stories (see my remark about EvoPsych above). Really, all I am saying is: Until we have evidence that some mechanism is innate, we should assume the sparsest hypotheses about innateness as possible. Why? Because innateness is ontologically costly, and social learning is sparse. It’s basically the same reason why proponents of the embodied/embedded mind avoid postulating internal representations unless they have to.

You wrote: “Now, if we set all the complications aside, then we can simply restrict ‘intelligibility’ to the rigid and clear standard of mathematical or logical models. (…) What I had in mind here is a claim from Leonard Susskind, who is quite explicit that the only way to understand QM is by abstract mathematics. While we might be able to make some sense of classical physics in ways that could be seen as some form of abstraction form ‘object permanence’ to ‘causality’ this is not possible for QM. There is no intuitive intelligibility, just pure hard math”.

In my opinion, this is because causality may not be the ultimate way to describe reality. The processes underlying what we describe as causal processes may well be so complicated that we have a hard time grasping them. I would not readily attribute that to some divide between a science whose explanations accords with innate intelligibility and a science that does not accord with it, but to the simple fact that we find some things more complicated than others (and of course the basis for doing so is innate, some cognitive training notwithstanding – it’s just a different form of innateness that has nothing to do with causality, but with what we might call the “computational power” of our brain and nervous system).

While I now understand better why you wrote that “we can simply restrict ‘intelligibility’ to the rigid and clear standard of mathematical or logical model”, I think this is only an instance of a more general principle underlying explanation: That of being able to anticipate a consequence from some initial conditions. It is not akin to what everybody means by “explanation” (since many would take an explanation to require producing some human understanding or comprehension), but once a scientific model exceeds what I just called “computational power”, it may well take the place of scientific explanation: We simply feed a computer with some initial conditions and get a result, by which we can anticipate what in reality will happen (even if no human being understands why that happens). Interestingly that’s roughly a causal model as well (e.g. in terms of counterfactual or interventionist accounts).

You wrote: “for the reasons stated above, the evidence is strongly against a multi-purpose cognitive apparatus. Thus, whatever is responsible for our capacity to do math cannot be derived in this way (…) unfortunately, the evidence seems to suggest that [my claims for sparser innateness] are false. (…) I’m aware that what you lay out here is pretty much the mainstream view in the more empirically minded approaches to thought and language. For instance, there is (in Chomsky’s words) “a small industry that tries to demonstrate that somehow [language] could be picked up by data and statistical inference.” - In all cases that I have checked, I side with Chomsky, they are total failures”.

Perhaps this is a bit on-the-nose, but I did not take what you wrote above as strong evidence. Neither am I aware of any great successes on Chomsky’s side which one could compare the purported “total failures” to. In fairness, the history of replicating any of our more complicated cognitive capacities could probably be described as a “total failure” so far, if one had a stake in doing so. But I have also asked you about more specific evidence in the meantime, so perhaps you’d just like to clarify/strengthen the evidence.

In closing this point, please allow me to ask you – more informally – a basic question: What is the explanatory benefit you see in employing innateness for this particular question, i.e. intelligibility? Personally, I am wondering: if the theory about an innate criterion of intelligibility is our explanans here, what’s the actual explanandum? Is it supposed to be an explanation of why a handful of people says that, upon discovering theory A, say “ah! It’s intelligible” and, upon discovering theory B, say “gadzooks! It’s totally obscure”? What do these statements signify, in the bigger picture, and why should we have to specifically explain them with such a costly theory? What we actually started with was the mind-body-problem, which, in the way Chomsky treated it in his “Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding” paper, does not strike me as one that should even be attempted to relate to matters of innateness – in such a roundabout way, no less.

In any case: To sum up, at present I do not see any reason to assume that there is any distinction between the intelligibility of causal explanations of “Mechanical Philosophy” and that of more recent scientific explanations which would be explained by innate cognitive mechanisms. That is, neither do I see the distinction, nor do I think we have evidence to prefer assuming there is an innate mechanism explaining that distinction over assuming more general innate mechanisms from which no such distinction follows.

2) Our discussion about reductive explanation:

You wrote: “What I would like to point out (and what I think accounts for much of our difference here) is that I don’t understand “explanation by reduction” to mean a reduction of propositions to facts. Rather, I understand it as a term that indicates how sciences is done, which in turn needs to be spelled out in some way. I think (and please correct my if I’m wrong) that we can get along by restricting the proposal to the left hand side, i. e. to a reduction along the lines of theories and not a reduction of one side to the other”.

If I am not mistaken, this is what I meant when I said that I understand reductive explanation as a reduction-relation between theories, so I agree.

You wrote: “Furthermore, this type of scientific explanation is an empirical claim about how science is actually done. And so, the way it works should be inferred from actual cases - including any explication of ‘hierarchy’ or ‘fundamental’”.

Here, I only half-agree. I think scientific explanation interacts with theories about scientific explanation, so, while I agree that scientific practice informs theories of scientific explanation, scientific practice is also informed by theories about scientific explanation. (As an example, just think of the numerous theories about kinds, and the recent rise of Boyd’s HPC theory, which seems to have spawned an industry of studies about “homeostatic clusters” of properties – e.g. locationism vs constructionism in cognitive neuroscience.) Also, there are many pragmatic (social, institutional, political…) pressures on science, so I think we shouldn’t straightforwardly assume that the way science is done straightforwardly reflects the way science should be done. One aim of philosophy of science is to clarify scientific practice in a way which scientists within their practice cannot.

3.) Our discussion about physicalism:

You wrote: “I strongly disagree with your claim “that there are persisting mind-body-problems which are coherently stateable without clarifying what’s substantially physical”. Let me restate the setup. Suppose there is some proposition P. & P is about some aspect of the world (let the world be as broad as you like, as long as it is concrete). & It is not the case that we have an explanatory theory that allows for the derivation of P. Then, for a human observer who makes a truth value judgment about P, it is possible that the the judgment solely depends on internal systems and not on anything from the external world. (A case in question would be a laboratory situation where the organism’s internal sensory systems would be directly stimulated. In other words, the external world “doesn’t have to be there”, it is sufficient to provide whatever stimulus is required.)

I would always assume such “internal systems” to be crucially shaped by interaction with the environment. For instance, if you would lead me into a room that completely blocks out all sensory stimuli and only directly stimulate my (hypothetical) aesthetics center in the brain, I would probably spit out all my acquired taste judgments. It would have little to do with innate systems.

You wrote: “If this is possible and if we take Einstein seriously, i. e. we assume that ‘on the possibility alone of [...] a correspondence [between consequences and data of experience] rests the value and justification [of the explanatory theory]’. Then, for all cases where we judge P to be true (or false) and where we don’t have a theory that allows for the derivation of P. There is the possibility that the truth value judgment solely depends on internal systems and not on anything in the external world”.

Even granting Einstein’s quote: That only follows if your internal systems are in some “virgin” state, which practically is never the case – not even for newborn infants.

You wrote: “Now, the only way to avoid the conclusion is to is to come up with a story that ensures that it is not the case that a human judges P to be true (or false) and there is nothing in the external world that corresponds to P (which I take it is what externalism is about)”.

Okay, I additionally grant that you stimulated some internal innate system in its virgin state (which, again, I think can never happen). Then, yes, according to externalism, this system would not have any truth-capable states because its states would not represent any content.

You wrote: “The Mechanical Philosophy was such a story, unfortunately, the history of sciences has thought us that the world can be as strange as you like (even inconceivable), the only criterion that allows to be as certain as we can be is Einstein’s criterion”.

I don’t understand. The Mechanical Philosophy did not rest on causal laws themselves being innate, as you conceded above (you wrote “it is obviously not the case that causal laws (say, Newton’s laws) are innate, because they had to be discovered”). So how could a proposition P, which does not follow from any scientific theory (as you stipulated above), amount to a proposition which fully accords with a proposition derived from Mechanical Philosophy? The one case I can think of would be someone stating by complete coincidence a proposition which was identical to one of the later-discovered laws, but how could that case presently be relevant?

You wrote: “Now, consider your characterization of “physicalism’ as consisting ‘in a special form of monistic ontology, enriched by some (open set of) additional criteria […]” and let P follow from the ontology in accordance with any additional criteria you like. Then, if P cannot be derived from an existing explanatory theory, it is not possible for a human observer to distinguish between cases where the truth value of P solely depends on the internal systems and cases where the truth value depends on the external world. (Again, that this is possible is hotly denied, but it seems to me that this is an empirical question that no amount of “philosophical theorizing” can solve. And all empirical data that I’m aware of strongly suggests that it is not only possible, but actual)”.

Sorry, I don’t understand this either – why should P follow from this ontology independently of any scientific theory? How could any proposition follow from any ontology which we do not “have an explanatory theory” for? Let’s assume I were a naïve physicalist, in the sense that I think quarks and strings and such form the ultimate ontology and everything else is ontologically based on what quarks and strings (can) do. I guess now I could derive some P from this ontology, but obviously I can only do so because this ontology, naïve as it is, is informed by current explanatory theory.

You wrote: “Thus, for these cases, the possibility that P can be contradicted by an (unknown) explanatory theory cannot be excluded. And thus, consistency cannot be established”.

You see, I really didn’t get that. I don’t’ even see why it’s bad to have your Ps contradicted or consistency to not be established between your improvised Ps and your actual theory-Ps. I’m truly sorry.

(I am omitting some further comments here which, given that I didn’t understand your argument, I currently cannot reply to. I hope we can get back to them once I do.)

You wrote: “Again, the way most philosophers seem to think about physicalism is to assume some “core-level” facts (in the sense that we do have a grasp of what the physical or the material or whatever) is and build up from there. An all cases where I have looked at the actual arguments (or pestered my teachers) it always came down to the physical being what physics is about. But, and that is very likely, I may have not understood them correctly”.

Oh, I can absolutely see that. In fact, I think it’s rather sensible to hold a view like that. I simply have grown to doubt it, since, once it comes down to physicalism in the philosophical sense, people can’t help but allude to some “ultimate” or “ideal” physics at some point. And usually, people find it rather unlikely that future physics will, at the bottom, be too similar to current physics – or at least we simply can’t say. So, I think all the stuff at the bottom has to be a place holder for what future physics may bring. (But I am open to suggestions here… and everywhere else, really.)

4) Our discussion about res extensa vs res cogitans:

You wrote: “I strongly disagree on pretty much all accounts [regarding what I wrote about res cogitans and res extensa]. It is often said (in the modern debate) that the second substance was introduced to account for, in your terms, “God and what not”. As far as I can tell, that is simply false. What is true is that Descartes worked within the (mandatory) theological framework of his time, but this can be easily overcome, at least for the purpose of rational inquiry, by substituting “God” with “Nature” and so on. The second substance was introduced by Descartes (and worked out by his followers, the so-called “Minor Cartesians”), because they recognized that some aspects of human cognition, basically language and thought, cannot be dealt with within the Mechanical Philosophy”.

I did not say that “the second substance was introduced to account for ‘God and what not’”, but that introducing it was “supported by ad hoc hypotheses about God and whatnot”, meaning that being able to straightforwardly assume there was such a thing as an additional separate substance was relatively easily possible because Descartes’ views were underfed by the Divine. I mean, going ahead and just introducing a second substance just begs a lot of questions, about where and what and how and why, and being able to say: oh, here’s earth, and over there is the Divine, and the latter is a realm completely beyond this one – well, living in a society where people are actually likely to accept that suddenly renders your second separate substance plausible in a way which in secular frameworks is just much harder to do.

Insofar I disagree with your saying “this can be easily overcome, at least for the purpose of rational inquiry, by substituting “God” with “Nature” and so on”: Nature simply does not afford a separate realm; rather, as I wrote, the pressure on today’s cognitive sciences is to explain the mind exclusively within that realm. In any case: Of course Descartes did not introduce a second substance in order to account for the Divine, but to account for mental capacities (creativity, agency etc.) – here, it seems we agree. More specifically, he introduced it because he could not subsume mental capacities under his mechanistic worldview. Unlike the preceding scholastics, Descartes thought it possible to mechanistically explain a whole lot of things, such as “the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the limbs, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by the external sense organs of light, sounds, smells, tastes, heat and other such qualities, the imprinting of the ideas of these qualities in the organ of the ‘common’ sense and the imagination, the retention or stamping of these ideas in the memory, the internal movements of the appetites and passions, and finally the external movements of all the limbs” (AT XI: 201, CSM I: 108). And here, mechanistically straightforwardly means: The body is a mechanism in the same way as a watch is a mechanism. But, as modern as his views were, Descartes could not imagine accounting for mental capacities mechanistically: “anything in us which we cannot conceive in any way as capable of belonging to a body must be attributed to our soul. Thus, because we have no conception of the body as thinking in any way at all, we have reason to believe that every kind of thought present in us belongs to the soul” (AT XI: 329, CSM I: 329). [AT = Adam, C. & Tannery, P., eds. (1964–1974): Oeuvres de Descartes, 13 vols.. Paris: Vrin/CNRS. CSM = Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., Murdoch, D. (1984): The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.]

You wrote: “Let me give you an example, often discussed by Chomsky. It is a phenomenon called “Creative Aspects of Language Use”. When we use language, we do this in a way that is (hopefully) appropriate to the situation, but it is not caused by the situation. So, what I write in this comment is (again, hopefully) appropriate to our discussion, but I could choose to write completely unrelated nonsense. In this sense, there is no cause for my choice of words. Or even stronger, “there is no identifiable internal or external stimulus” that causes me to do what I do. This observation can be restated in contemporary terms. Suppose (slightly simplified) that all there is in nature are phenomena that are either determined or random. So, if it is true that we use language “appropriate to the situation, but not caused by it”, then language use is not determined (not caused by an internal or external stimulus), but it is also not random, because it is appropriate to the situation. So, in other words, there seem to be phenomena in Nature that do not fall under determinacy or randomness”.

I wouldn’t even grant the first premise, namely that language (i.e. utterances/expressions) is “not caused”. If our language production is a natural phenomenon at all – one that is realized within the brain – then it is caused by an interaction between neural structure/processes and environmental stimuli. It is simply the case that we can react in any number of ways to the same external stimuli, depending on our “internal” neural processes/structures. If I choose to write “completely unrelated nonsense”, then I do so because whatever I have previously internalized causes me to do so.

You wrote: “This is one example for what compelled Descartes to introduce the second substance. The problems persists, but unlike the great figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth, they are barely recognized. In that sense, I strongly disagree with your claim that “the great questions in philosophy of mind, about intentionality, consciousness, and free will, have been developed to a point where they are so readily integratable with an empirically informed picture of the world that I would just about consider them in principle solved [...]”. - I would say that the opposite is true: The actual problems haven’t even been recognized, much less solved”.

As I wrote above, I think Descartes introduced the second substance because to him it seemed inconceivable that mental capacities could be explained mechanistically. The difference is that we do not find it so inconceivable anymore (or at least I do).

You wrote: “the only progress in the cognitive and the neurosciences, in comparison with the seventeenth and eighteenth century, that has been made, is with regard to gathering facts. We know much more about the brain (and related aspects of nature), but this is largely because of advancements in technology. Understanding in any serious sense is, by enlarge, missing”.

I don’t agree that the only progress has been made “with regard to gathering facts”, although the power of these facts should not be underestimated! But the perhaps more important progress has been made in the explanation and “naturalization” of mental capacities – unlike Descartes, we now have theories about how mental capacities are implemented mechanistically. In fact, it seems rather absurd to hold that they aren’t implemented mechanistically, so there has been a 180 degree turn. Your rejection of my claims here is rather broad, so I’m not sure what exactly the problem is – perhaps you’re just so fundamentally opposed to certain schools of thought that you do not accept these theories, and hence do accept that there has been any progress.

You wrote: Chomsky’s “contemporary theory seems to be the most successful theory (in terms of depth of explanations reached) about aspects of the mind/brain that I’m aware of”.

But that’s what I wrote: this great explanatory depth (which, let’s not forget, is still hypothetical; see immediately below) is reached by extremely costly hypotheses which, at least in my opinion, are unsubstantiated, or, to put it more modestly, hugely controversial.

You wrote: “In fact, his core thesis that language is essentially a rigid system that is universal to humans and governed by natural law amounts to the claim that language is basically a system for thought (and not, as it is commonly held, for communication). If this is correct, it throws more then two millennia of theorizing about language out of the window”.

True, but that IF is too big for my taste.

You wrote: “Let me finally add an impression that I got from your assessment that “the great questions [are] in principle solved” (with the exception of the Hard Problem) . This is very close to what people in the nineteen-fifties thought about language and cognition (basically Skinner, Quine, Harris and so on). I think this is because they didn’t even recognized the problems. In this sense, there has been a lot of progress, but this seems simply be due to the fact that the bar wasn’t set too high to begin with”.

Well, if your adopted school of thought hugely deviates from what I recognize as progress in cognitive science, then you might also assign priority to different questions. What are some of the questions you deem unrecognized?

Best,

Joachim

Dear Louis,

sorry for the harsh reply! I was simply frustrated. What I meant by ‘magic’ is best expressed with the old physics joke “What happened between step four and five?” - “A wunder Rabbi, a wunder.”

In order even to begin to give an account of the mechanisms that enable us to do arithmetic, one has to come up with an account of how we get from a finite number of stimuli to an unbounded set of discrete objects, which is necessary to do arithmetic.

The evolutionary problem is to explain how this system emerged. What you are telling me avoids this completely and thus, cannot be an adequate account.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Sven,

My responses so far to your math question have attempted to explain to you that your expectation build into the question about the existence of a biological evolutionary answer is mis-placed. It amount to ask: Give me an agriculture evolutionary answer to why this type of cooking style was recently invented. Of course thousand of years ago some agricultural practices have been invented for producing the culinary produces the chiefs are using today but the only answer possible for a certain new cooking style today is an history of cooking answer, and not an history of agriculture answer.

Humans first biologically evolved hundred of thousand years ago and are more less biologically the same since that time and were doing no mathematics and the biological evolution did not prepare them for doing it but prepare them to evolve different life style and associated culture and mathematics or the practices such as accounting of which it was later very gradually abstracted were not needed until large scale agriculture based and trade based civilisation arise. Then humans started using their same cognitive apparatus for doing practical operation related to recording and accounding and measurements etc.

Record Keeping and the Origins of Writing in Mesopotamia

http://semiramis-speaks.com/record-keeping-and-the-origins-of-writing-in-mesopotamia/

This post is incomplete, I have to work, I will finish later.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

You can restate the problem with any origin story you like: You seem to assume some cognitive apparatus that enables us to develop arithmetic somewhere down the line, right? Then this cognitive apparatus enables us to use an infinite set of objects. How did this cognitive apparatus evolve in the first place? Meaning: What is the gnomic change responsible for this cognitive apparatus that enables us to use an unbounded set of objects on the basis of finite experience? You may not like it, but that’s the evolutionary question. I’m not asking for the history, I’m asking for an account in terms of contemporary evolutionary biology.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Sven,

''Then this cognitive apparatus enables us to use an infinite set of objects. ''

When we count objects, we NEVER count an infinite number of objects. Such infinite set of objects does not exist in the first place. The highest I counted personally was up to 2000 which I did with my kid in year 2000 as a fun activity.

''How did this cognitive apparatus evolve in the first place? ''

Children counts using their fingers. There is clear neuro-science evidences that motor control of fingers do play an important role in arithmetic.

https://www.youcubed.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Visual-Math-Paper-vF.pdf . Human have much more developed finger control than all other primate because the general use of the hand for manipulation of all sort. The development of these extra hand motor control probably took place million years ago much before homo sapiens. A lot of arithmetic processing is taking place in the visual cortex. We learn to count by being shown objects of all sort which we visually perceived. For small group (less than 11) We probably learn to make visual group and to also simultaneously activate fingers and addition could be done simply on finger. Children are introduced numbers one by one. Associating the number with part of the body is important. The number one is first explore. One has one head, one nose, one mouth, etc. The number two: two hands , two arms, etc. The number three is not very corporal but is associate withthe triangle. Two with two points forming a line. The given a group of objects visually presented or better fingers visually presented but children also making the same gesture can be decomposed on different sub-groups and this is the concept of addition. All the sub-groups form the same group of set and so the number of the group is the addition of all these sub number. All these relations are thus mapped in body relations and visual relations. From these embedding the dealing with all higher number is achieve via the numbering system. We use the decimal one . We have ten fingers. What a coincidence!!! We call number ''digit''. What a coincidence!!!! I can go on and on but kindergarten teaching of numeracy and arithmetic is basically helping children to use their sensory motor system in a very special way we call doing mathematics.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

You do get the you could – in principle – go on counting forever? If so, you have the natural numbers. No other organism can develop the competence to use this infinite set. So, the road has been crossed, at least, once. There must have been a genetic change within an organism that enables this organism to develop the competence to use arithmetic. It is this change that you have to account for when you want to say anything about the evolution of this capacity.

Note that the mathematics behind this – how one can get from a finite set of symbols to an infinite set of objects – has only been worked out during the first part of the last century by Church, Turing, Gödel and others. The theory of recursive functions (or equivalently Turing machines or algorithms) contains the function needed to generate the natural numbers. This function (or an equivalent one), the successor function must somehow be implemented in the human mind/brain. And since any capacity of an organism must have some genetic basis, the implementation of this function must also have a genetic basis. It is – again – this basis what any evolutionary explanation for our capacity to do math must take into account. That’s simply state of the art in evolutionary biology.

Consequently, your story about what children do or not do has nothing to do with evolution, Furthermore, what did children do during the about 200 000 years where there weren’t any numbers around? A question that the article you linked doesn’t even begin to take into account. As far as I can tell, it’s about performance in a highly artificial environment – classrooms. Questions about competence are barely touched, let alone questions about the genetic basis for this (which might be inaccessible, for Lewontin’s reasons.)

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Sven,

We teach arithmetic to very young kid in concrete operation is very small number of concrete objects and the notion of infinite set is only something that they could fully grasp later and thus it is not what is important. There are a number of mathematicians that have considered removing the notion of infinite set from mathematic and maybe they will do that in the future and I personally think it would be a good thing since infinity correspond to nothing of concrete. What concretely is all over the place, especially in the life of the living is cyclic phenomena and this is what we really mean by infinite although no cyclic phenomena will go forever. When we walk, we do it as if it will go forever although get interupt at some point. This is the important notion: the circle or the cyclic. So all living organism have this notion built in at all level in myriad of way into their body and mind.

''There must have been a genetic change within an organism that enables this organism to develop the competence to use arithmetic. ''

As I told you almost an infinite time , no genetic change are related to this specific skill which is one among many cultural skill that require no new change to our body for being performed. It has to be learned with the old primate apparatus. Our specific quality is this high capacity to learn to use our body in flexible ways, languages are this, math are this, all that we do that non-human animal can't do are culturally learned with a more or less ape body. I already told you a little bit about what is our fundamental difference and how it came about, its genesis.

''Furthermore, what did children do during the about 200 000 years where there weren’t any numbers around? ''

THis is not an argument. Human children do like all mammal youth do, learn from the herd or the tribe what the tribe do. Hunter gathererd did not need doing math and so their children did not learn it. Only the living in large societies doing trade requires doing maths and children of these societies learn it.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

The way children are thought is completely irrelevant here and be it only for the before mentioned case of aborigines understanding money (arithmetic) without any formal education. (I only mentioned the time frame because it highlights the limitations on what you can learn about human nature that way).

What is important is that the organism can develop the capacity to use arithmetic and that simply requires to grasp that the natural numbers go on forever. A capacity that can only be functionally represented by a recursive function (or an equivalent notion). (Brouwer and the others were concerned with problems in formal proof theory, something quite different).

I have no idea what you mean by “the cyclic”, if you mean that all organisms have the capacity to develop arithmetic then I would like to see the evidence. Until then I side with what seems obvious, no other organism has the capacity.

I know what you told me, but I don’t think you get the problem: Here is a simple argument

Any capacity of an organism has a genetic basis.

We have the capacity to develop arithmetic

Therefore, the capacity to develop arithmetic has a genetic basis.

I think what you are confusing is performance with the genetic basis required to develop the capacity to perform. The choice of a spider to put a net up somewhere is not encoded in the genes (presumably). But the capacity to make a net is. Likewise, the point in time when we developed arithmetic, or whatever cultural trade you like, is not encoded in our genes. But the capacity to develop it is. Furthermore, if you want to maintain that you can get, say, the successor function somehow inductively from a finite set, then demonstrate it.

Best,

Sven Beecken

Dear Sven,

S: ''The way children are thought is completely irrelevant here''

The way children are thaught and learns mathematics reveals what is they are learning not in terms of the internal objective structure of the math concepts being taught but in terms of what is it in sensory motor human terms doing mathematics. Of course the topic would demand much more attention that I had given to it and I bearely even touch the surface.

S:: ''What is important is that the organism can develop the capacity to use arithmetic and that simply requires to grasp that the natural numbers go on forever.''

As I said earlier, that capacity is not important and only come later.

S: ''I have no idea what you mean by “the cyclic”''

Infinity is equivalent to repeating a process forever , i.e. a cyclic process.

This is just an undevelop thought about how get rid of infinite sets.

S: ''Any capacity of an organism has a genetic basis.''

No. The is no genetic basis of doing mathematic. There is no genetic basis for going to a grocery store or to drive a car.

S:''We have the capacity to develop arithmetic''

We do not have such capacity waiting to be expressed. We can developed such a capacity if we are trained properly but we do not have it before this training.

S:''Therefore, the capacity to develop arithmetic has a genetic basis.''

Both premices are wrong therefore ...

S:'' Likewise, the point in time when we developed arithmetic, or whatever cultural trade you like, is not encoded in our genes. But the capacity to develop it is. ''

No it is not for the reason explained above..

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

I don’t see any explanation, only assertions. Look, since you cannot possibly mean what you write to be literally true, I give you the benefit of a doubt. The genetic component that is involved in whatever capacity an organism has might be extremely remote and involved in extremely difficult ways, but it is there. Otherwise, we are back to magic.

On the other hand, the fact that an explanation might be extremely difficult or even impossible to come by doesn’t license story telling and hand waving. Now, since your assertions cannot be taken to be literally true, they don’t affect the premises. And so, the argument stands.

In order to avoid further misunderstanding, let me point out that I asked the question about how and why we are able to use mathematics within a naturalistic framework. This means that one looks at human as organisms and studies them in the way one would study any other organism. These two assumptions alone exclude any story telling of the kind you propose. Or would you try to explain why a spider puts its net where it puts it by telling me something about spider culture?

Best,

Sven Beecken

Chapter Theory of perception: where the material touches the mental

Dear Sven,

I think it is the time to end this conversation which goes nowhere.

Regards,

- Louis

I feel like an intruder, sorry for interrupting

Dear Joachim Lipski ,

I have little to add to your preamble (in the sense that I adopt any one of your points for myself). The only thing I want to add is this: Please don’t hold back on my account! Much like you, I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with the views we discuss and in particular my own understanding of them.

With regard to reference. I shall try to give a brief account of how I think about the notion at the end of my comment. This also ties into why I’m so interested in Chomsky’s views. Unfortunately, the only way I see to give you an indication here is by giving biographical details. That’s why I put it off until the end of my reply.

1) Our discussion about intelligibility:

Thanks for the clarification with regard to causality. Just one brief point with regard to evolutionary explanations: I did not mean to suggest that finding the genetic basis alone accounts for whatever underlies our capacity to do math. I meant that any “explanation” of this capacity that does not take the three factors into account is inadequate by default. Since this binds into something you said below, I shall return to this.

You wrote: “So, here’s my proposal: The notion of causality comes from psychological attributions of agency and synchronicity without a sense of self (i.e. feeling that whatever “action” one observes is caused by an exterior entity). That is: Causality = Agency + synchronicity – sense of self.

Now, I claim that this principle covers all the “intelligible” causal laws you (or Chomsky and others) associate with “Mechanical Philosophy”. However, it also covers spooky action at a distance, electromagnetism, gravity, and so on (indeed, video games may already establish agency attributions to “spooky actions at a distance”, i.e. we have no problems at all attributing our agency to objects which we are not directly connected to, or to whom we at least observe no such connection). I further claim that there is no available empirical evidence which prefers Chomsky’s innate mechanisms over the sparser mechanism I proposed above.”

This is an interesting proposal and I have no quarrel with the observed facts about agency or the consistency of your proposal. Then, as you say, the question remains: is this really so? As far as I understand your proposal, for your account to hold, there cannot be a substantial difference between causal explanations along the lines of object permanence and, say, explanations involved in QM. By “substantial difference” I mean a reason to believe that there are different systems involved.

My replay is twofold: First, if you are right and the only difference would be that we are somehow getting used to more abstract notions, then we should see no difference in infants with regard to action by contact and action at a distance. For any infant should be used to both kinds in the same way, simply because they aren’t used to either form. Second, I shall try to demonstrate that your claim commits you to a strong biological thesis that I currently see no way even to address.

Research into infant cognition seems to show that only the first kind is recognized. Just to be clear, I follow the standard assumption in developmental psychology (according to Spelke) that the earlier something can be demonstrably observed, the more certain we can be that what we observe is innate (obviously, what I said above is an idealized situation).

As far as I know the literature from developmental psychology, the recognition of causality based on contact can be demonstrated as early as it can be tested. (See, for instance Weiner et al. Handbook of Psychology, Volume 6: Developmental Psychology, p. 77 f.)

Now, does this entail that there are, at least, two systems? Clearly no, for it could be the case that we start with one systems (let’s assume it is one along the lines you propose) and somehow incorporate more complicated cases as we go along. The rival view can be take to consists of two parts. The first part is Spelke’s and Kinsler’s claim that one of the core systems, the system for object representation contains the requirement of “contact (objects do not interact at a distance)”. I make the further claim that with the other spacial-temporal requirements this system just constitutes the type of explanation required for the Mechanical Philosophy. All we can really say about the second kind of intelligibility is that it does not seem to work in the same way.

Now, you wrote: “My claim is that we have no reason, based on the available evidence, to prefer the assumption that the intelligibility of Mechanical Philosophy (in opposition to that of modern science) could be derived from an innate “core system” over my claims regarding the much sparser “innateness” of causality as sketched above.”

My claim is that the available evidence from studying infant cognition strongly favors the view that causality in the version required for the Mechanical Philosophy is innate, because that is the version we observe. While your account faces the additional burden of explaining why we don’t observe recognition of action at a distance at the early stages. Or in other words, if there is only one system of the kind you propose that is responsible for both versions of causality, then why is one so much stronger developed then the other?

I anticipate a reply along the following lines : “[In] my opinion, the notion that it is the core systems themselves (no matter whether and in what shape or form they exist) which must be “used to build up the capacity to use modern theories” may already be misleading. All we need to do in the cases presently under discussion is acquire a cognitive skill – in much the same way as learning to ride a bike does not depend on building on core bike riding systems, but on using basic motor and balancing skills to learn how to ride a bike. Of course there are such basic skills, but, in my opinion, it would be misleading to say that there are innate mechanisms for riding a bike (just as it would be to say there are some for Universal Grammar in Chomsky’s sense or for Mechanical Philosophy).”

Just to be clear: I do not doubt the facts about agency. I further assume, for the sake of argument, that we can observe agency the same early stages. Furthermore, I even grant that your proposed mechanism is responsible for the first kind of causality. What I doubt is that is that the mechanism you propose is also responsible for whatever is required for us to be able to develop explanatory theories has anything to do with agency.

Furthermore, your proposed explanation along the lines of acquiring cognitive skills sounds sparse and also plausible. However, it does carry a heavy commitment in terms of evolutionary explanations. If any capacity of an organism depends on at least three factors, then your claim entails that at least the genetic component is minimally involved. Therefore, the sparseness commits one to the the claim that the genetic endowment is minimal. Since this is a substantial empirical claim and since there is (as far as I can tell) currently not way to test it, it seems to me that one should restrict oneself to the claims I granted, since for this we might find evidence, and assume further a modest number of different systems. Which at least doesn’t entail the same strong commitment with regard to the genetic endowment. We can just remain neutral about it, in the sense that one isn’t committed to any claim about the way the different factors are involved.

With regard to the PoS – argument. You wrote:

“Actually, I am working under the assumption that “poverty of stimulus” and related arguments are highly dubitable. A former colleague of mine has specifically been working on innateness as related to Chomsky (including “poverty of stimulus”), and while I have not been working on Chomsky and such arguments myself, I trust her fully on this. As far as I am aware, a lot of the counterarguments boil down to dubious methodology, not being able to rule out plausible counterarguments, lack of control groups etc. – which is of course rather likely in cross-cultural studies, studies with infants and the like, which are tough to conduct and control for confounders. In a nutshell: I have little to no confidence in these studies.

“You yourself mentioned “just so stories” in your latest reply (more on that below), so I am a bit puzzled that you would not be more skeptical of innateness claims, which, given their close links to evolutionary psychology, are what the word “just so story” had been invented for in the first place (which may all sound a bit more polemic than I mean it).”

Fair enough, I should have anticipated this. The “Poverty of Stimulus”- argument has sparked much debate. As a side note, Chomsky very much regrets the introduction of the name, because it seems to be taken as a something special. All that it really is is the recognition that any capacity of an organism depends on at least the three factors. In other words, it’s normal growth and development.

What I had in mind are - what I take to be - serious empirical studies in the area of language acquisition. As carried out by Erika Hoff, Susan Carey, Stephen Crain, Lila Gleitman and many others.

As far as I’m able to asses (which, admittedly, isn’t worth all that much), they all confirm the general outline of the “Poverty of Stimulus”- argument. Sure, one can criticize their studies. As far as I can tell, they all present detailed and long running studies. If you wish, I can provide references, but they seem to be house hold names and their work can be easily found on Google.

I would be interested to see any work that contradicts their findings in a way relevant to the PoS- argument, which basically says that the development of language is too early and too rapid to be explainable by primary linguistic data alone. I don’t see what methodological worries could contradict such blatantly obvious fact. To be as concrete as I can be here, I think the following claim from a recent paper expresses the state of the art in language acquisition:

“It is astonishing that every typically-developing [...] child acquires a natural language without formal instructions or scaffolding in the form of progressively sequenced linguistic input. Children thus converge on a grammatical system parallel to that of the local linguistic community, in the face of significant variability in the linguistic input (Crain, 1991, p. 597). Considering how hard it is even for trained linguists to discern grammatical principles, it is remarkable that research on language acquisition has demonstrated that young children know them, often by the age of three.” (Anne Mette Nyvad, 2019)

With regard to the two points, you wrote:

“I straightforwardly agree on the second one, namely that what I said does not establish that there is “only one form of intelligibility as provided by the internal systems”. I am simply saying that I do not think such internal systems have been credibly established, and until they have, I remain in that other camp.”

Again, fair enough, just out of curiosity: What exactly would you count as sufficient evidence? Sure, we can imagine better tests, but rationality should compel us to go with the best evidence available, and I don’t see any better then what developmental psychology provides us with. So, what exactly is wrong with this?

Your wrote: “The first point I take to be what you mean when you write that any explanation of any capacity of an organism has to take three factors (data from the environment, genetic endowment and more general laws of nature) into account because said capacity depends, at least, on these. While I do agree that such capacities depend on these, your conclusion exploits two crucial vaguenesses here, namely the fact that any such capacity depends on these aspects in different ways, and that, secondly, explanatory interests can differ depending on what dependency relation you wish to know about.”

I partially agree with the second of your points regarding the vagueness here: Let me just restate something I said quite some time ago: I look at our problems from the perspective of a naturalistic framework. Within this framework, only a certain type of explanations is of interest. For instance, within linguistics, it is by no means acceptably to account for the fact that you are a native speaker of German by pointing out that you were brought up in Germany. Now, I do understand what you mean, and I should have been more clear on the framework I’m presupposing here.

With regard to the first point: “any such capacity depends on these aspects in different ways” - that’s the point: One has to figure out in which ways. This might be horrifyingly complicated (which seems to be the norm, as far as I can tell) or, as I said in my debate with Louis, even in principle impossible. However, it is my hope that I have indicated why I don’t think I’m exploiting a weakens here.

Just out of curiosity, what makes you think I’m not a native speaker of German (which I am)? To be clear, I’m not upset or anything, just curious.

To sum up, you wrote: “Really, all I am saying is: Until we have evidence that some mechanism is innate, we should assume the sparsest hypotheses about innateness as possible. Why? Because innateness is ontologically costly, and social learning is sparse. It’s basically the same reason why proponents of the embodied/embedded mind avoid postulating internal representations unless they have to.”

With regard to the point about evidence, I rely on your explanation on what exactly is wrong with developmental psychology. But I think there is a deeper conceptual point here. While parsimony is important, adequacy is - I would say - even more important. To quote David Lewis “Assuming too much results in clutter, assuming too little results in inadequacy” (General Semantics). Let’s assume that you are right and there is currently not enough evidence to decide which option is correct (if either is). And let us assume we want answers (which I take to be the case), then the choice of ontology determines (at least on the level of logic) the range of possible models that can be derived from this ontology. If the ontology is too spars, then only inadequate models can be derived. I return to this in the next section.

With regard to your very interesting take on reality. You wrote:

“In my opinion […] causality may not be the ultimate way to describe reality. The processes underlying what we describe as causal processes may well be so complicated that we have a hard time grasping them. I would not readily attribute that to some divide between a science whose explanations accords with innate intelligibility and a science that does not accord with it, but to the simple fact that we find some things more complicated than others (and of course the basis for doing so is innate, some cognitive training notwithstanding – it’s just a different form of innateness that has nothing to do with causality, but with what we might call the “computational power” of our brain and nervous system).”

An interesting Idea which I’m ready to follow - up to our debate about intelligibility.

“While I now understand better why you wrote that “we can simply restrict ‘intelligibility’ to the rigid and clear standard of mathematical or logical model”, I think this is only an instance of a more general principle underlying explanation: That of being able to anticipate a consequence from some initial conditions. It is not akin to what everybody means by “explanation” (since many would take an explanation to require producing some human understanding or comprehension), but once a scientific model exceeds what I just called “computational power”, it may well take the place of scientific explanation: We simply feed a computer with some initial conditions and get a result, by which we can anticipate what in reality will happen (even if no human being understands why that happens). Interestingly that’s roughly a causal model as well (e.g. in terms of counterfactual or interventionist accounts).”

Again, this sounds very interesting, although I might not really understand what exactly you are after. As I’m sure you know, the debate about grounding is about non-epistemic, non-causal explanations, where, on one possible view, the fact that A obtains explains the fact that B obtains. I don’t suppose this is the direction you are thinking about?

To continue, you wrote: Neither am I aware of any great successes on Chomsky’s side which one could compare the purported “total failures” to. In fairness, the history of replicating any of our more complicated cognitive capacities could probably be described as a “total failure” so far, if one had a stake in doing so. But I have also asked you about more specific evidence in the meantime, so perhaps you’d just like to clarify/strengthen the evidence.

With regard to the evidence, I have tried. So, I can only wait for your objections. With regard to the success, I ask you to be patient until the end of my comment.

“In closing this point, please allow me to ask you – more informally – a basic question: What is the explanatory benefit you see in employing innateness for this particular question, i.e. intelligibility? Personally, I am wondering: if the theory about an innate criterion of intelligibility is our explanans here, what’s the actual explanandum? Is it supposed to be an explanation of why a handful of people says that, upon discovering theory A, say “ah! It’s intelligible” and, upon discovering theory B, say “gadzooks! It’s totally obscure”? What do these statements signify, in the bigger picture, and why should we have to specifically explain them with such a costly theory? What we actually started with was the mind-body-problem, which, in the way Chomsky treated it in his “Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding” paper, does not strike me as one that should even be attempted to relate to matters of innateness – in such a roundabout way, no less.”

First of all, it is about adequacy (if not to say, it’s about truth), which, again, I take to be much more important then any worry about ontological commitment, which I think is only a relevant factor if adequacy is established for at least two theories about the same aspect of the world (which I don’t think has been established for either of our different views). The second, and more important, reason is the limitations that follow from the differences between the two kinds of causality.

If the world is unintelligible to us (in the sense that we can only come up with explanatory theories about it), then we can be horrifyingly wrong about pretty much anything with regard to the external world (which I think is at least interesting). This is essentially the point of the argument in the section 3, which I shall try to explain better.

2) Our discussion about reductive explanation:

I wrote: “Furthermore, this type of scientific explanation is an empirical claim about how science is actually done. And so, the way it works should be inferred from actual cases - including any explication of ‘hierarchy’ or ‘fundamental’”.

You replied: “Here, I only half-agree. I think scientific explanation interacts with theories about scientific explanation, so, while I agree that scientific practice informs theories of scientific explanation, scientific practice is also informed by theories about scientific explanation. […] I think we shouldn’t straightforwardly assume that the way science is done straightforwardly reflects the way science should be done. One aim of philosophy of science is to clarify scientific practice in a way which scientists within their practice cannot.”

While I agree that many who are concerned with scientific explanations try to clarify aspects of sciences, I’m not sure that this helps much with the more successful sciences. Basically, I take physics to be the most advanced science, then chemistry and then biology. It seems to me that within these disciplines, scientists can work without paying much attention to philosophy of science. This is because they work within an established and highly successful program. Discovering how this program works is basically the goal of “explanation by reduction”. While it is clear that science can go heavily astray, we can learn as much from the failures as we can from the successes.

3.) Our discussion about physicalism:

I wrote: “I strongly disagree with your claim “that there are persisting mind-body-problems which are coherently stateable without clarifying what’s substantially physical”. Let me restate the setup. Suppose there is some proposition P. & P is about some aspect of the world (let the world be as broad as you like, as long as it is concrete). & It is not the case that we have an explanatory theory that allows for the derivation of P. Then, for a human observer who makes a truth value judgment about P, it is possible that the the judgment solely depends on internal systems and not on anything from the external world. (A case in question would be a laboratory situation where the organism’s internal sensory systems would be directly stimulated. In other words, the external world “doesn’t have to be there”, it is sufficient to provide whatever stimulus is required.)

You replied: “I would always assume such “internal systems” to be crucially shaped by interaction with the environment. For instance, if you would lead me into a room that completely blocks out all sensory stimuli and only directly stimulate my (hypothetical) aesthetics center in the brain, I would probably spit out all my acquired taste judgments. It would have little to do with innate systems.”

I wrote: “If this is possible and if we take Einstein seriously, i. e. we assume that ‘on the possibility alone of [...] a correspondence [between consequences and data of experience] rests the value and justification [of the explanatory theory]’. Then, for all cases where we judge P to be true (or false) and where we don’t have a theory that allows for the derivation of P. There is the possibility that the truth value judgment solely depends on internal systems and not on anything in the external world”.

You replied: “Even granting Einstein’s quote: That only follows if your internal systems are in some “virgin” state, which practically is never the case – not even for newborn infants.”

Suppose an experimental situation where I would somehow be able induce the appropriate stimuli that causes you the see, say, an object in motion. And suppose that the setup is such that you would also be able to see an object in motion that is really there, without being able to detect which of the two stimuli is given. Then you would have no way to distinguish between cases where your truth value judgments depend on the directly introduced stimuli (without an object being there) and cases where the object is in fact there.

So, the assumption of a “virgin” state is not necessary. Actually, I’m not sure why you would think this in the first place. The way I try to interpret this is as follows:

It all depends on how much of these systems is shaped by the environment. If the internal systems are sparse and therefore almost totally shaped by external stimuli, then one can be reasonably certain that there is a causal relation (and the case above can be thought of along the lines of, say, hallucinations). At least that is how I understand your point about a “virgin” state. Now, on the other hand, if the internal systems are also determined (in an non-minimal way) by the second and third factor, then the likelihood that the systems are only to a small part shaped by the environment increases. In such a case, we could, in principle, not be certain that what we identify to be in the world corresponds to something in the world.

I may not understand your point about the “virgin” state, if so, please correct me. For now, I shall continue under two assumptions: We cannot be certain about the degree in which the three factors are involved and that the experimental situation described above is independent of any “virgin” state.

I wrote: “The Mechanical Philosophy was […] a story [that ensures that the P is true iff P is fully in accord with our intuitions], unfortunately, the history of sciences has thought us that the world can be as strange as you like (even inconceivable), the only criterion that allows to be as certain as we can be is Einstein’s criterion”.

You replied: “I don’t understand. The Mechanical Philosophy did not rest on causal laws themselves being innate, as you conceded above (you wrote “it is obviously not the case that causal laws (say, Newton’s laws) are innate, because they had to be discovered”).”

I may not have been clear enough: I never meant to say that the Mechanical Philosophy itself is innate, only that the explanations given within the Mechanical Philosophy must be in accord with the innate principles of causality.

“So how could a proposition P, which does not follow from any scientific theory (as you stipulated above), amount to a proposition which fully accords with a proposition derived from Mechanical Philosophy? “

What I meant was that the Mechanical Philosophy does not fall under our current conception of a scientific theory. So, a proposition P can be derived from the Mechanical Philosophy & It is not the case that P can be derived from a scientific theory. I hope this is what you meant here, if not, then I’m not sure what exactly the problem is. Perhaps you could help me?

I wrote: “Now, consider your characterization of “physicalism’ as consisting ‘in a special form of monistic ontology, enriched by some (open set of) additional criteria […]” and let P follow from the ontology in accordance with any additional criteria you like. Then, if P cannot be derived from an existing explanatory theory, it is not possible for a human observer to distinguish between cases where the truth value of P solely depends on the internal systems and cases where the truth value depends on the external world. (Again, that this is possible is hotly denied, but it seems to me that this is an empirical question that no amount of “philosophical theorizing” can solve. And all empirical data that I’m aware of strongly suggests that it is not only possible, but actual)”.

You replied: “Sorry, I don’t understand this either – why should P follow from this ontology independently of any scientific theory? How could any proposition follow from any ontology which we do not “have an explanatory theory” for?”

The basic assumption is that the ontology for pyhsicalism is independent from physics. In this sense, there is no explanatory theory that warrants the ontology. Now, the way I think about ontology is along the lines of “the inventory of the world” - a set of objects, individuated by their properties. What I meant by ‘following’ is that any set of objects can be used to set up a model. You can have a semantic consequence by simply setting up some proposition P and then show that your model satisfies P.

You wrote: “Let’s assume I were a naïve physicalist, in the sense that I think quarks and strings and such form the ultimate ontology and everything else is ontologically based on what quarks and strings (can) do. I guess now I could derive some P from this ontology, but obviously I can only do so because this ontology, naïve as it is, is informed by current explanatory theory.”

No, you can derive P simply from the ontology, in the sense of a semantic consequence. How you arrive at your ontology doesn’t matter for this.

I wrote: “Thus, for these cases, the possibility that P can be contradicted by an (unknown) explanatory theory cannot be excluded. And thus, consistency cannot be established”.

You replied: “You see, I really didn’t get that. I don’t’ even see why it’s bad to have your Ps contradicted or consistency to not be established between your improvised Ps and your actual theory-Ps. I’m truly sorry.”

I hope that I’m getting a better grasp. For any ontology that is not warranted by any of the natural sciences, a proposition P that follows from the ontology, one cannot exclude the possibility that the reason why the ontology was chosen only depends on the our intuitions about causality. So, you cannot exclude the possibility that your ontology is inconsistent with reality.

It does not matter how scientifically informed one is, all that matters in the hard sciences is Einstein’s criterion. So, when someone proposes a formulation of the mind-body problem on the basis of some ontology, unwarranted by the hard sciences, then there is no way to establish that the formulation is consistent with reality, even if there is no contradiction to be derived from the formulation.

‘Consistency’ here means consistent with how the world works. For the original formulation, consistency was warranted by the assumption that your intuitions are consistent with the way the world works. I hope that helps to clarify things a bit, if not, I hope for further pointers.

You wrote: “[Since], once it comes down to physicalism in the philosophical sense, people can’t help but allude to some “ultimate” or “ideal” physics at some point. And usually, people find it rather unlikely that future physics will, at the bottom, be too similar to current physics – or at least we simply can’t say. So, I think all the stuff at the bottom has to be a place holder for what future physics may bring. (But I am open to suggestions here… and everywhere else, really.)”

I would (on the basis of what I said above, so you may have further objections) say that what you wrote about the reason why you grew doubtful about the philosophical version of physicalism seems to me to be very much akin to the worry I have about your version.

4) Our discussion about res extensa vs res cogitans:

I wrote: “I strongly disagree on pretty much all accounts [regarding what I wrote about res cogitans and res extensa]. It is often said (in the modern debate) that the second substance was introduced to account for, in your terms, “God and what not”. As far as I can tell, that is simply false. What is true is that Descartes worked within the (mandatory) theological framework of his time, but this can be easily overcome, at least for the purpose of rational inquiry, by substituting “God” with “Nature” and so on. The second substance was introduced by Descartes (and worked out by his followers, the so-called “Minor Cartesians”), because they recognized that some aspects of human cognition, basically language and thought, cannot be dealt with within the Mechanical Philosophy”.

You wrote: “I did not say that “the second substance was introduced to account for ‘God and what not’”, but that introducing it was “supported by ad hoc hypotheses about God and whatnot”, meaning that being able to straightforwardly assume there was such a thing as an additional separate substance was relatively easily possible because Descartes’ views were underfed by the Divine. I mean, going ahead and just introducing a second substance just begs a lot of questions, about where and what and how and why, and being able to say: oh, here’s earth, and over there is the Divine, and the latter is a realm completely beyond this one – well, living in a society where people are actually likely to accept that suddenly renders your second separate substance plausible in a way which in secular frameworks is just much harder to do.

Insofar I disagree with your saying “this can be easily overcome, at least for the purpose of rational inquiry, by substituting “God” with “Nature” and so on”: Nature simply does not afford a separate realm; rather, as I wrote, the pressure on today’s cognitive sciences is to explain the mind exclusively within that realm. In any case: Of course Descartes did not introduce a second substance in order to account for the Divine, but to account for mental capacities (creativity, agency etc.) – here, it seems we agree. More specifically, he introduced it because he could not subsume mental capacities under his mechanistic worldview. Unlike the preceding scholastics, Descartes thought it possible to mechanistically explain a whole lot of things, such as “the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the limbs, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by the external sense organs of light, sounds, smells, tastes, heat and other such qualities, the imprinting of the ideas of these qualities in the organ of the ‘common’ sense and the imagination, the retention or stamping of these ideas in the memory, the internal movements of the appetites and passions, and finally the external movements of all the limbs” (AT XI: 201, CSM I: 108). And here, mechanistically straightforwardly means: The body is a mechanism in the same way as a watch is a mechanism. But, as modern as his views were, Descartes could not imagine accounting for mental capacities mechanistically: “anything in us which we cannot conceive in any way as capable of belonging to a body must be attributed to our soul. Thus, because we have no conception of the body as thinking in any way at all, we have reason to believe that every kind of thought present in us belongs to the soul” (AT XI: 329, CSM I: 329). [AT = Adam, C. & Tannery, P., eds. (1964–1974): Oeuvres de Descartes, 13 vols.. Paris: Vrin/CNRS. CSM = Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., Murdoch, D. (1984): The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.]”

You are right to point out that my formulation that “the second substance was introduced to account for ‘God and what not’” was sloppy. What I meant when saying “this can be easily overcome, at least for the purpose of rational inquiry, by substituting “God” with “Nature” and so on” is basically that you can restated the relevant problems within an agnostic framework. They turn out to be the same (as I tried to indicate below).

Now, it is clear to me by now that you work under the assumption that Descartes notion of the body is in principle the same as the contemporary notion. Which in turn depends on whether or not your proposed mechanisms (or similar ones) actually exist. Only then can I make sense of your problem with the second substance. If your mechanism does not exist, then there doesn’t seem to be a problem: We can simply study the the second substance (which then would be the only substance) within whatever contemporary framework we like. The only thing that we would have to concede is that the explanatory theories are independent of any intuition. Io quote Sheldon Cooper, if we could “rip off the mask from the universe and stare into the face of God.” Then there is a God ;) To be clear, I’m a total atheist and this is joke, but it may illustrate the point I tried to make above: We simply cannot be certain, which is unfortunately what we are reduced to by the demolition of the mechanical philosophy.

I wrote: “Let me give you an example, often discussed by Chomsky. It is a phenomenon called “Creative Aspects of Language Use”. When we use language, we do this in a way that is (hopefully) appropriate to the situation, but it is not caused by the situation. So, what I write in this comment is (again, hopefully) appropriate to our discussion, but I could choose to write completely unrelated nonsense. In this sense, there is no cause for my choice of words. Or even stronger, “there is no identifiable internal or external stimulus” that causes me to do what I do. This observation can be restated in contemporary terms. Suppose (slightly simplified) that all there is in nature are phenomena that are either determined or random. So, if it is true that we use language “appropriate to the situation, but not caused by it”, then language use is not determined (not caused by an internal or external stimulus), but it is also not random, because it is appropriate to the situation. So, in other words, there seem to be phenomena in Nature that do not fall under determinacy or randomness”.

You replied: “I wouldn’t even grant the first premise, namely that language (i.e. utterances/expressions) is “not caused”. If our language production is a natural phenomenon at all – one that is realized within the brain – then it is caused by an interaction between neural structure/processes and environmental stimuli. It is simply the case that we can react in any number of ways to the same external stimuli, depending on our “internal” neural processes/structures. If I choose to write “completely unrelated nonsense”, then I do so because whatever I have previously internalized causes me to do so.”

Ok, let me restate the problem in other terms: Suppose an individual has the choice between two options. And suppose whenever the individual makes a choice, then the individual has a “previously internalized cause”. Then, we can be certain that this cause existed after the choice was made (along the lines of “actions reveal intentions”). What about before? Suppose the cause is preference and the choice is between a banana and an apple. Then we simply know, that no matter how much I hate apples and love bananas, up to the point where I choose, I could have taken the apple.

In this sense, it is at least a very peculiar form of causality that is at play here. What I have used to illustrate this is a fundamental assumption from economic theory that is used to predict and explain behavior. While the (post hoc) explanation seems to work, the predictive part doesn’t. In that sense, most seem to agree that human behavior is undetermined. Sure, what I have previously internalized influences my choice, but it doesn’t cause my choice.

The point of Chomsky’s way to state Descartes observation that language use is neither determined nor random is that this presents a problem for physics! Note further that the contemporary way does not require any additional substance. If this could be figured out, physics would simply change.

I wrote: “This is one example for what compelled Descartes to introduce the second substance. The problems persists, but unlike the great figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth, they are barely recognized. In that sense, I strongly disagree with your claim that “the great questions in philosophy of mind, about intentionality, consciousness, and free will, have been developed to a point where they are so readily integratable with an empirically informed picture of the world that I would just about consider them in principle solved [...]”. - I would say that the opposite is true: The actual problems haven’t even been recognized, much less solved”.

You relied: “As I wrote above, I think Descartes introduced the second substance because to him it seemed inconceivable that mental capacities could be explained mechanistically. The difference is that we do not find it so inconceivable anymore (or at least I do).”

What I described above concerns at least two of the problems you state (intentionality and “free will” - I try to avoid loaded notions). If there is something in nature that is neither determined nor random and deeply connected to at least these two problems, then, as far as I know the relevant debates, there isn’t even a proposal for how to approach this question – including Chomsky.

I wrote: “the only progress in the cognitive and the neurosciences, in comparison with the seventeenth and eighteenth century, that has been made, is with regard to gathering facts. We know much more about the brain (and related aspects of nature), but this is largely because of advancements in technology. Understanding in any serious sense is, by enlarge, missing”.

You replied: “I don’t agree that the only progress has been made “with regard to gathering facts”, although the power of these facts should not be underestimated! But the perhaps more important progress has been made in the explanation and “naturalization” of mental capacities – unlike Descartes, we now have theories about how mental capacities are implemented mechanistically. In fact, it seems rather absurd to hold that they aren’t implemented mechanistically, so there has been a 180 degree turn. Your rejection of my claims here is rather broad, so I’m not sure what exactly the problem is – perhaps you’re just so fundamentally opposed to certain schools of thought that you do not accept these theories, and hence do accept that there has been any progress.”

I’m not in principle opposed to certain schools of thought. I’m just concerned with the question: “What is the right way to approach certain question?” And I also think that a lot depends on the answer. I do agree that the facts are important, but I think that if we would begin to study the actual arguments presented back then in a contemporary framework, we will find many valuable insights that are often only barely (or not at all) recognized. The argument I tried to clarify above has been presented by Hume (albeit in a very different way; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, VI, §15). Today, he is regarded as a proponent of the much ridiculed “idealism”. If you look at the actual argument, what he presented was a rational argument that shows the limitations of science and human cognition that was only accepted centuries later (and only in the hard sciences).

You wrote: “Well, if your adopted school of thought hugely deviates from what I recognize as progress in cognitive science, then you might also assign priority to different questions. What are some of the questions you deem unrecognized?”

For starters the problem that there might be things in the world that are neither determined nor random. Another problem arises from the consequence of the argument above, we cannot be certain what else is there, no matter how strongly we feel that there is matter, the physical, only one substance and so on.

With regard to the question of progress. My point is: Progress in relation to what? For instance, one often hears the claim that today, we understand that cognitive processes are entirely natural (in one version or another). Well, Darwin new this: “Why is thought being a secretion of brain more wonderful than gravity a property of matter?” (Darwin, Private Notebook, The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness) So, what counts as new today was clear in the eighteenth century.

I’m not trying to insult you, I merely think we could benefit a lot from trying to come to terms with discussions that took place centuries ago.

Let me finally come to reference and in some sense to why I think Chomsky is on the right track. As I said, I think it might be best to start with some biographical details. I have started out with philosophy within an environment that was heavily sided on philosophy of language, metaphysics and logic. One of the most central notions that where discussed was truth (primarily within the framework of metaphysical grounding, i. .e. questions about the structure of reality). In turn, the question: What is truth?” was basically answered along Tarski’s lines as the basis for the Correspondence Theory of Truth. So, the notion of reference is of tremendous importance for this debate. Furthermore, the strong tendency towards logical analysis of really any philosophical argument made it abundantly clear that the notion (in one form or another) appears in pretty much any interesting argument.

So, when I stumbled about Chomsky, the claim that this notion doesn’t exist was quite a shock, but it also sparked my interest. When I worked through his arguments, it became increasingly clear that there is a deep divide between the way most analytic philosophers think about language and what his theories suggest. Finally, I was able to drive the problem down to the claim that the explanations for why logical analysis works fail, but the fact that logical analysis works cannot be denied, because it yields such robust (and interesting) results. This strongly suggests that there must be something there. On the other hand, Chomsky’s theory (in its contemporary version) turned out to be – to the degree that I could determine it – strongly confirmed. (Note that I do not mean it is accepted or even confirmed within linguistics. Just with regard to what I could check.) Unfortunately, his theory cannot deal with a core notion of logical analysis, the notion of truth.

Now, Chomsky has apparently managed to drive the complexities of language down to extremely simple principles. Basically, there is a core system for language, universal to all (normally developed) humans that is directly determined by natural law. This system seem optimally designed for the interaction with whatever though systems we have. Furthermore, this system can only be the result of a very simple change in our gnomic makeup. This seems to suggest that our higher cognitive capacities may be based on very simple principles. Which in turn might mean that the connection between logic and language is based on a very simple (and presently unknown) principle.

This is the main reason why I decided to follow his program. The way he approaches questions about the mind together with his current theory seems to be the most promising way come to terms with the deep contradictions that seem to be there. Whether or not it is the right choice, only time can tell.

Best,

Sven

Irving B Weiner, M Easterbrooks, Jayanthi Mistry, and Richard M Lerner, editors. Handbook of Psychology, Volume 6: Developmental Psychology. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2003.

Nyvat, The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition Revisited: Insights from Error Patterns in Typical and Atypical Development, in Nyvat et al. A Sound Approach to Language Matters – In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn, 2019

David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford University Press, USA, first edition, 2007.

Zelazo, P., Moscovitch, M., & Thompson, E. (Eds.). (2007). The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dear All,

Our discussions have taken a high flight and I do not feel competent to go on into several of the themes dealt with. Hence I restrict my contribution to the intelligibility theme that has affinities with my old psychological research on social cognition from which I will make some – perhaps wild – generalizations. In addition, I will briefly intervene in the dispute between Sven and Louis about the evolutionary basis of mathematics.

1.- INTELLIGiBILITY

Joachim Lipski argues that there are no raw observations: "Things or properties are always theoretically constructed entities."

I can agree, but I would add that the so-called "theoretical constructions" involved in so-called "raw observations" are to be regarded as a sort of primary "hard wired" constructs (a “hard wired way to see the world.”)

Indeed, developmental psychology and cultural anthropology suggest that there's such a primary theory (or primary world view) according to which we live in a space-time world consisting of thing-like beings that subsist in themselves (Dinge an sich). They are experienced as are more or less autonomous animated beings, somewhat in the way we experience ourselves as more or less autonomous animated beings involved in relationships with other beings.

In my own experimental research on social cognition that world view seemed to show up unexpectedly as the product of a sort of cognitive information processing program. I have touched on it earlier in this debate. What matters now is that people were found to be biased to process information following that program and that it produced outcomes of which cross-cultural research suggests that they are universal (hard wired in the brain). Hence intelligibility of a theory may relate to the extent the theory can be represented using concepts shaped following that basic default program of cognitive organization. For instance, atom theory has been made (more) intelligible by representing electrons not as abstract wave functions but as minuscule concrete things orbiting around a bigger thing (the nucleus) in the way planets orbit around the sun. However, quantum theory may seem intelligible because it is less (or not at all) suited to be represented by constructs shaped consistent with the primary cognitive program at stake.

The foregoing suggests that a theory (quantum theory) may be qualified as "less intelligible" to the extent that it is less representable using constructs shaped consistent with a primary default program of cognitive organization. However, it was found that information could be processed in an alternative way using a second, much more flexible, cognitive program was found. This second program enables to break down the original "beings in themselves" generated by the first program into mere sets of abstract features. These features are detached from the beings from which they are abstracted and they can be rearranged into novel sets. Subsequently the novel sets can be processed again by the first program, which may result in cognitive representations of quasi beings in themselves comparable with the originally experienced beings in themselves. In this way one can create fictitious characters in a novel, but also constructs such as plans, projects, and alternative views on (parts of) the intuitively experienced world . And those views may become that familiar that they are experienced as part and parcel of the primary intuitive experience (e.g., the encompassing animism can be replaced with a duality of living/animated versus non-living/unanimated things, though the original animism can be traced in etymology and metaphorical language – see for instance the personalization of good and evil in the article added).

However, features are not necessarily rearranged in ways that fit harmoniously the original intuitive experiences. They can be rearranged in ways that seem incompatible with the familiar way of representing the world through the first program. Actually that's what happens in the creation of hermetic poetry and... quantum theory. So constructs in hermetic poetry and quantum theory may no longer seem intelligible, but the basic materials they are composed of are drawn from the intelligible default representations of the world. In this way, "quantity" has been a privileged conceptual component of scientific modelling, and although the resulting scientific models of (parts of) the world may not always fit our intuitive representations of the world, the mere concept of quantity reflects an intelligible aspect of the familiar things in that world (some things are larger, heavier, in larger numbers... than others).

At this point the question may arise if science still differs from poetry. Indeed, both may reveal particular veiled aspects of reality that are not simply intuitively accessible. However, the criteria to differentiate good poetry from good science are different. Good poetry should appeal to (at least some) people. If science appeals to people, that’s O.K. But good science should at least meet two following criteria.

(1) A valid theory should fit particular experiences, and those experiences may be intuitively intelligible in the way explained above. For instance the observation that the speed of a body is not proportional of its weight may surprise but it does not detract from the familiar thing-status of the body and the floor it drops on. However, only very few of the wide range of existential experiences we have can be accepted as "scientific observations" suited to support a "scientific theories." Scientific observations must fit strict conditions regarding controllability, replicability, etc. This may explain the primordial role of "quantity" in science. Observations regarding quantity are suited to be controlled by different observers at different points in time. (Remember that also Descartes has focused on quantity by conceiving the material world as "res extensa.")

(2) The theory should fit (intelligible) criteria concerning the internal organization of the theory. It should be a rational construction, logically sound and marked with properties such as Joachim's formal simplicity, symmetry, etc.).

Here I should draw attention on another dichotomy which at a first glance seems to correspond to the above dichotomy of cognitive programs, although I think that the matter is not that simple. For safety's sake I treat it as a separate issue. It is the issue of "evidence."

On the one side there is "evidence" involved in our intuitive experience of the world. The apple on the table may be a hallucination, but the fact that I see the apple is undeniably evident. Let us call this "intuitive evidence." Intuitive evidence is involved in scientific observations. In the CERN the scientist does not look at particles, but at solid things such as displays of measuring instruments.

On the other hand there's also evidence involved in the abstract thinking enabled by the second cognitive program. For instance, it is undeniably evident that if A>B and B>C, then A>C. Let us call this "logical evidence." It is the latter logical sort of evidence that enables scientific theory to transcend (and even contradict) intuitive default experience of the world. This may be particularly the case when scientists accord greater weight to logical evidence than to intuitive evidence. They may even suspect intuitive evidence when it fits the rigorous criteria of scientific observation. For instance, Michelson and Morley thought that their observations regarding the speed of light were flawed until Einstein showed that they fitted perfectly his relativity theory.

But let us not bother Einstein and turn to the present discussants.

It seems to me that both Sven and Joachim may accept the abovementioned criteria (1) and (2) and the two sorts of “intuitive” and “logical” evidence as a basis of intelligibility, but Joachim seems to focus more on the role of (2) and logical evidence.

Sven seems to accord greater weight to (1) and intuitive evidence as a basis of intelligibility. Nevertheless he also agrees that "the modern version of `intelligibility’ is based on mathematics”, which belongs to (2). What seems to bother Sven is that the combination of "(1)" and "(2)" leads to theories that fit the rigorous "scientific observations" but clash with some intuitive, existentially valuable, experiences. Does this mean that those theories are wrong? I think they are not. They shed some true light on (some aspects of) a reality that reaches far beyond the power of our understanding (cf. Chomsky about the understanding achieved by ants and bees). So the clash between intuitive experience and scientific theory may just be a manifestation of the limited power of our understanding. And that's something we have to live with.

2.- EVOLUTIONARY BASIS OF MATHEMATICS: JUST SOME SUGGESTIONS

I am afraid not to be able to point to some actual molecular mechanisms that would underlie mathematical thinking. However, taking the risk to end up with some abhorrent "just-so" stories, it may not be that difficult to point to some genetically based faculties or propensities that belong to human nature and that have enabled humans to transcend nature and to create culture. The problem then seems to be why it took that long to have culture developed mathematics.

As Sven has put it: what did children do during the about 200 000 years where there weren’t any numbers around? Louis' answer is that, like mammals do, they learned from the tribe what the tribe does.

However, human children (and adults) did more. Like rats, humans are characterized by curiosity and explorative behavior. And like puppies and kittens, they play. Add to this the capacity of abstract thinking (involved in our second cognitive program above), and the stage is set for the establishment of a huge variety of cultural products (narratives, rituals, artefacts...) one of which is mathematics.

Notice that mathematics is only one realization from a huge potential that will never be exhausted. It was one of the striking findings regarding our second cognitive program that it is extremely flexible enabling to go any possible way out. So it is feasible that some curious playful child or adult hunter gatherer got fascinated by the numbers he or she abstracted from amounts of nuts (or fingers) and so started inventing mathematics. However, he or she seems to have been less successful in infecting others than the inventor of the wheel. Anyway, I once read in the newspaper that a prehistoric bone was found with notches grouped in a way representing an ascending series of prime numbers. A mathematical plaything? Or was it useful in an egalitarian society of hunter-gatherers to dispose of a list of quantities that could be divided in equal parts? Or both? Let us not forget that formal logic has been a plaything for a long before it became an extremely useful tool after the computer was invented. And what about infinity? It may not be that difficult to have it abstracted by people who as young children were fascinated by fairy tales such as that about a magic cooking pot that produced an infinite stream of delicious rice pudding (with brown sugar!).

To summarize, natural propensities for exploration (curiosity) and functional pleasure (playing) combined with an extremely flexible ability to think on an abstract level have led to amazing cultural achievements, one of which is mathematics.

P.S. Warning before you would decide to spend time reading the article added! The article just ioffers an illustration of how animism transpires in a subtle way into today language use.

Dear Guido,

Your wild generalisations are welcome.

G:''Indeed, developmental psychology and cultural anthropology suggest that there's such a primary theory (or primary world view) according to which we live in a space-time world consisting of thing-like beings that subsist in themselves (Dinge an sich). They are experienced as are more or less autonomous animated beings, somewhat in the way we experience ourselves as more or less autonomous animated beings involved in relationships with other beings.''

You are assuming a priori coception of space-time. Putting a dash between the two word would have been unconcievable by Descartes, Newton and became conceivable only after Mikowski-Eintein conceptualisation. Very hard for us to see the world like chimps do. I think we can throw long practice of attention to our conscious experience as well as throw learning history from a varirty of disciplines as well as studying animals and their evolution and also from the popular stories of all ages. Althoug we will remain enculturate in specific here and now we can intuitively learn un-mixing ordering our phenomenal in ways corresponding to its evolutionary and cultural historical making. A wild story is'nt! Would Vico like it although it goes a bit further?

''cross-cultural research suggests that they are universal (hard wired in the brain). ''

The existence of cultural universal may or may not indicate that these are not purely very early cultural developments.

''For instance, atom theory has been made (more) intelligible by representing electrons not as abstract wave functions but as minuscule concrete things orbiting around a bigger thing (the nucleus) in the way planets orbit around the sun.''

Wrong example. The old atom theory had no problem of intelligibility. Not everybody agree with it but every body understood it. Its problem were its failure to account certain phenomena. The modern quantum theoey of particle is unanymously recognize as very effective at predicting phenomena but almost nobody understand it in the general culture and we are told by those learning it and improving it that in many ways they don't understand it. They agree on its pecification, use itcorrectly but do not agree on its interpretation with Guru such as feynman claiming that nobody understand quantum mechanic. So we are left in the popular scientific interpretation in the science pop culture that most specialists would disagree. Since they are hundred of interpretations then there is no way to agree on one that could be explain in the science pop culture. This pop culture of quantum mechanics keep on using the word ''weid'' as if we are back to magic.

''The foregoing suggests that a theory (quantum theory) may be qualified as "less intelligible" to the extent that it is less representable using constructs shaped consistent with a primary default program of cognitive organization. ''

I think it is a premature conclusion. It is easy to blame our biology for our cultural failure. I am convince that we will eventually succeeded to have a very intrelligible theory of physics both for specialist and with a good pop culture version that is relatively close to the specialist version. This apply with math as well. The current math language need to change as well of its education. It is currently a disaster. Almost everybody hate math the most. This is a red flag that should br taken seriously. Math could be made relevant and intelligible at least up to university level for all.

''The foregoing suggests that a theory (quantum theory) may be qualified as "less intelligible" to the extent that it is less representable using constructs shaped consistent with a primary default program of cognitive organization. ''

Reification is a central cultural practice. Those inclined in the theoretical are crypto platonist which pretend to show the world in itself behind the cave wall of the apparence while they abstract aspect of the phenomenal world, create a model which is substitute for the real, Whitehead false of the false concreteness and the model become an idol. The pop story that scientists are immune to dogmatism because they keep changing their dogma when necessary does only make the false concretness fallacy evolutionary and thus even more robust forn of dogmatist.

Will continue later...

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Guido,

''At this point the question may arise if science still differs from poetry. Indeed, both may reveal particular veiled aspects of reality that are not simply intuitively accessible. However, the criteria to differentiate good poetry from good science are different. Good poetry should appeal to (at least some) people. If science appeals to people, that’s O.K. But good science should at least meet two following criteria.''

All human behaviors, all professional activities, all artistic activities are differentions among a single biocultural artistic activity. On this premise, first we have to first search what is common between these two arts: scienc and poetry.

Interestingly Vico thoutgh of the first most primitive humans as poets.

I will not bring Vico but search for similarities before the distinctions.

1. this is the affair of a group of people culturally trained into this type of cultural practice

2. There are contributors and reviewers and these role are interchangeable

3. There is a judgement made my the reviewer or the public and it is the cultural practice style the most approved which pass from one generation to the next.

4. The evolution of these practices are punctuated, rare event of massive extinction followed by very creative period where revolutionary stlyles emerged followed by long periods of development within given styles

5. In the judgement of the public there are consideration of forms but also aesthetic consideration, these are not purely rationally determined judgements, emotions are guiding judegment and the best contributor are usually passionate about what there are doing and touch emotionally the public for many generations.

These cultural practice are also distinct.

Their mode of expression or language are different. All the ancient myths were originally poetic lyrics of songs. Like myths, poetry in first apparence is not about our world but innocent pleasurable play of words. And unlike myths, science is not a play of words and is not about the pleasure of expression and is all about saying something true about the world. But the later story is simply a naive story scientists like to tell themself about their cultural practices. Science as a cultural pratice is very recent , one centuey and half for most sciences, but also very old as part of the more ancient philosophical practices that came as relatively late development of the highly elaborate ancient mythical practices of the first civilisations. In fact, the first people that call themselfve philosophers were not really the first since this style was already mixed and part of the first cosmogenies. Philosophy and the first cosmology at first is simply the extraction of the relations of the gods and goddests into relations among inanimate abstract object. This process of eliminating the divinities had already happened in the first monotheistic cosmogonies. All these development were made possible by the writing medium of cultural communication, greatly expanding memory limits, removing necessity of anthromorphic analog for memory, removing the need to refer to easily observables as a material substrat for memory. The biggest novelty which explain the gradual separation of philosophy from mythical practices is the invention of ''truth'' totally abscent from the purely mythic style.

Truth was there but hidden and was living in the people ascent to certain story. The mythic style is about the world even more so than the philosophical style because it is based on our most ancient bio-social constructs in a direct corresponding manner without any specification why it is so.

To be continued. Sorry for not being very concise.

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Sven Beecken ,

thank you for yet another stimulating and insightful comment, and my sincere apologies for my belated reply. It seems that in some key aspects we are at a point where further clarification or resolution depends so much on our initial premises that we may soon be at an impasse. Still, I will once again go through your points one by one and leave it to you to decide whether to also reply to mine individually or just “start fresh” in some aspects – or leave things be entirely where they are now. I think the “battle lines” are by now firmly drawn.

1) Our discussion about intelligibility:

You wrote: “I did not mean to suggest that finding the genetic basis alone accounts for whatever underlies our capacity to do math. I meant that any “explanation” of this capacity that does not take the three factors into account is inadequate by default.”

First, a general remark: I suspect that by “explanation” you mean something like a “complete explanation”. I must admit that when I hear people talking about explanations – even scientific ones –, I am thinking more of something which is always restricted, depends on interests and takes the explanantia for granted; that is, an explanation is always a process of making intelligible things in terms of what we already think is intelligible; but what we think is intelligible is by no means always ontologically fundamental, or requires “complete” pictures (given that we don’t have any, and may never have them, but, in the meantime, we do have explanations) and, hence, there is no explanation that is “complete” or should reasonably be required to rely on completeness.

Now, note that the crucial factor out of the three we have been discussing (“data from the environment, genetic endowment and more general laws of nature”) is not directly in play, but only indirectly, and it is this indirectness which I reject. Specifically, I do not think we have any genetic evidence, but only evolutionary just-so stories which mean to make plausible some genetic bases. Since evolutionary explanations of higher-level psychological capacities are presently extremely incomplete, I believe any explanation in fact benefits of leaving them out. Hence, in my opinion, explanations are actually more adequate when they do not rely on evo-psych (at least of a certain kind, namely that purporting to explain high-level cognition by indirect evidence).

You wrote: “As far as I understand your proposal, for your account to hold, there cannot be a substantial difference between causal explanations along the lines of object permanence and, say, explanations involved in QM. By “substantial difference” I mean a reason to believe that there are different systems involved.”

That would require that such substantial differences are in fact explainable by innate capacities, which I don’t think they are. That is, I do not think in terms of “involved systems” at all; if we can learn to explain A in terms of B, then A is intelligible (no matter whether A or B are also “innately” intelligible). In fact, I see no reason why the mere fact that we presume causality to rest on direct contact should mean that causality in terms of direct contact is more intelligible, except in a technical (Chomskyan?) sense which equates intelligibility with meeting some innate assumptions.

You wrote: “My reply is twofold: First, if you are right and the only difference would be that we are somehow getting used to more abstract notions, then we should see no difference in infants with regard to action by contact and action at a distance. For any infant should be used to both kinds in the same way, simply because they aren’t used to either form.”

Well, I cannot claim to have a comprehensive grasp on all the things infant behaviour would be contingent on in such circumstances. So, just a few sketchy remarks: Prima facie, I wouldn't expect the same behaviour, given that actions at a distance would probably require higher cognitive load for causal attributions than those related to direct contact. And if “actions at a distance” are intelligible at all (i.e. even if they are somehow "less intelligible" to infants), then it seems science that relies on causality at a distance should also be intelligible, right? The Chomskyan argument so far seems to have been that some scientific explanations are unintelligible, not that they are less intelligible (which I would be more willing to grant for cases of "causality at a distance"). In any case: Primarily, I am questioning whether intelligibility needs to rest on innate capacities at all (see my “if we can learn to explain A in terms of B…” above). But secondarily, I would question that different kinds of causality need to be in the same way intelligible for infants in order to allow the strong implications the Chomskyan argument about intelligibility seems to require.

You wrote: “Second, I shall try to demonstrate that your claim commits you to a strong biological thesis that I currently see no way even to address. Research into infant cognition seems to show that only the first kind is recognized. (…) As far as I know the literature from developmental psychology, the recognition of causality based on contact can be demonstrated as early as it can be tested. (See, for instance Weiner et al. Handbook of Psychology, Volume 6: Developmental Psychology, p. 77 f.)

I have four critical points to make here:

Firstly, Weiner says that “infants do not perceive the causality until approx. 10 months of age”. So, at best, there is an innate mechanism which triggers the perception of causality at 10 months. I could not find any sources which say whether this development is conditional on external circumstances… or whether external circumstances might even be necessary.

Secondly, Spelke’s study was about “possible” vs “impossible” events, not about direct vs remote causality. That seems crucial to me, since that removes Spelke’s results from the entire intelligibility debate. (Obviously, causality at a distance is not impossible, and, even more obviously, not impossible in the sense Spelke tested.)

Thirdly, the studies mentioned in Weiner are really about object permanence, not about causality. This is important because “causality at a distance” does not coincide with object impermanence (as far as I am aware, modern science still assumes that even “remote” actions are mediated; so the distinction between intelligible and unintelligible is not that between up-close and remote, but between mediated and unmediated)! Rather, “causality at a distance” simply means that we cannot readily observe (or even conceptualize) the medium of causation.

Fourthly, to restate my central point: I don’t think that innate assumptions about the way the world is, if there are any, need to have any special bearing on the intelligibility of any kind of modern scientific explanation (including the notion of causality used in them). That is, I think that even scientific explanations which do not cohere with anything yielded by innate cognitive capacities, if there are any, should not be regarded as in any interesting sense less intelligible than those that do.

You wrote: “My claim is that the available evidence from studying infant cognition strongly favors the view that causality in the version required for the Mechanical Philosophy is innate, because that is the version we observe. While your account faces the additional burden of explaining why we don’t observe recognition of action at a distance at the early stages. Or in other words, if there is only one system of the kind you propose that is responsible for both versions of causality, then why is one so much stronger developed then the other?”

Given the studies we have been talking about so far, I do not see any such implications. The studies do not say anything about causality; my account does not face such a burden, for there are no results regarding “recognition of action at a distance at the early stages”, nor that the system favoring direct-contact causality is “so much stronger developed than the other”. Nor am I presently aware of any such studies.

You wrote: “What I doubt is that is that the mechanism you propose is also responsible for whatever is required for us to be able to develop explanatory theories has anything to do with agency.”

Well, agency depends on causality – on the capacity of agents to cause things in the world – so, at least in this sense, attributions of agency require some notion of causality. As far as underlying mechanisms go, the question is open, I think.

You wrote: “Furthermore, your proposed explanation along the lines of acquiring cognitive skills sounds sparse and also plausible. However, it does carry a heavy commitment in terms of evolutionary explanations. If any capacity of an organism depends on at least three factors, then your claim entails that at least the genetic component is minimally involved. Therefore, the sparseness commits one to the claim that the genetic endowment is minimal. Since this is a substantial empirical claim and since there is (as far as I can tell) currently no way to test it, it seems to me that one should restrict oneself to the claims I granted, since for this we might find evidence, and assume further a modest number of different systems”.

I don’t entirely agree. I don’t think that genetic contributions to intelligibility are minimal (that would require a common “contribution scale”, which we currently don’t know of, as far as I am aware), but that they are not explanatory. Granted, explanatory value depends on such contributions, but as I wrote above, explanatory value is determined by more than that. Firstly, if evolutionary facts do not explain anything – for instance, if they are too indirect –, then even a speculation about their considerable contribution does not mean that we should not prefer non-evolutionary explanations. As I wrote above, I think that our evidence for evolutionary determinants of psychological capacities at this stage is so indirect that I would not accept them until I saw the actual genetic evidence. The rest seems to me to mainly consist in just-so stories and indirect heuristics (such as a “universal” or homogeneous proliferation of cognitive capacities purportedly evidenced by infant or cross-cultural studies). Secondly, there is certainly a genetic basis which the relevant capacities are contingent on, but which does not explain these capacities. The environmental trigger may even be "minimal" (by whatever scale), but still the main component in the capacity's explanation (if the genetic basis is sufficiently general, such as the all-purpose mechanism I hypothesized).

You wrote: “The “Poverty of Stimulus”- argument has sparked much debate. As a side note, Chomsky very much regrets the introduction of the name, because it seems to be taken as a something special. All that it really is is the recognition that any capacity of an organism depends on at least the three factors. In other words, it’s normal growth and development”.

I don’t think scaling the PoS-argument back to the three factors speaks in Chomsky’s favor. For the mere acceptance of the claim that any capacity depends on genetically determined properties is too vague to say that any capacity can be sufficiently explained by genetic facts. I really think the only way to use PoS in Chomsky’s favor is to claim that there is NO WAY anybody can learn language unless some significant structural (grammatical/syntactical) properties of language were genetically predetermined. Also, I believe that is the way PoS is typically understood (which I take as confirmed by your quote immediately below).

You wrote: “What I had in mind are - what I take to be - serious empirical studies in the area of language acquisition. As carried out by Erika Hoff, Susan Carey, Stephen Crain, Lila Gleitman and many others. As far as I’m able to asses (which, admittedly, isn’t worth all that much), they all confirm the general outline of the “Poverty of Stimulus”- argument. Sure, one can criticize their studies. As far as I can tell, they all present detailed and long running studies. If you wish, I can provide references, but they seem to be house hold names and their work can be easily found on Google. I would be interested to see any work that contradicts their findings in a way relevant to the PoS-argument, which basically says that the development of language is too early and too rapid to be explainable by primary linguistic data alone. I don’t see what methodological worries could contradict such blatantly obvious fact. To be as concrete as I can be here, I think the following claim from a recent paper expresses the state of the art in language acquisition:

‘It is astonishing that every typically-developing [...] child acquires a natural language without formal instructions or scaffolding in the form of progressively sequenced linguistic input. Children thus converge on a grammatical system parallel to that of the local linguistic community, in the face of significant variability in the linguistic input (Crain, 1991, p. 597). Considering how hard it is even for trained linguists to discern grammatical principles, it is remarkable that research on language acquisition has demonstrated that young children know them, often by the age of three’ (Anne Mette Nyvad, 2019)”.

As for detailed arguments against PoS or the studies you mention, I’d have to get back to you in a separate reply (and, again, this has never been the focus of my own studies, so this would require a bit more researching and networking of my own). However, the quote you provide here seems entirely consistent with the view that these hard-to-discern grammatical facts are simply properties which, from the point of view of our cognitive make-up, are more basic than others. That is, the (nigh-)universal learning process observed in children may well be the result of a hierarchy of linguistic principles, determined partially by our cognitive make-up and partially by the structural properties of language. But none of this is to say that the grammatic principles of language themselves are part of our cognitive make-up – but rather that they appear as more readily learnable than others, in the sense that the sequence of learning them is pre-determined.

You wrote: “What exactly would you count as sufficient evidence? Sure, we can imagine better tests, but rationality should compel us to go with the best evidence available, and I don’t see any better than what developmental psychology provides us with. So, what exactly is wrong with this?”

Well, as you may have already discerned, I am extremely skeptical of the value of explanations of higher-level cognitive capacities which rely on references to evolutionary or innate facts. I don’t see that there is proper evidence for those, so of course neither would I say that “the best evidence” is in their favor. What would compel me is genetic evidence, i.e. explanations which link the development of neural structures responsible for linguistic acquisition directly to gene expression. I think all the other methods currently available to evo-psych are so indirect as to always be highly suspect and easily defeasible, even from the armchair.

You wrote: “Just out of curiosity, what makes you think I’m not a native speaker of German (which I am)? To be clear, I’m not upset or anything, just curious”.

Sorry about that – I simply didn’t expect any particular person on here to be a native German, and I may have misremembered your profile when writing my previous reply. In any case, it was not a matter of a specific assumption that you’re not a native German, much less did it depend on your comments – it was more of a general probabilistic judgment ;)

In response to my musings that “‘intelligibility’ [as a property] underlying explanation [may be a matter of] being able to anticipate a consequence from some initial conditions”, you wrote: “this sounds very interesting, although I might not really understand what exactly you are after. As I’m sure you know, the debate about grounding is about non-epistemic, non-causal explanations, where, on one possible view, the fact that A obtains explains the fact that B obtains. I don’t suppose this is the direction you are thinking about?”

Actually, no. I think grounding is simply one species of non-causal explanation. What I meant was that what we tend to think of as (the objective part of) causality might just be our current (and past) conceptualization of a more general property of the universe (in lack of a better phrasing: that of being able to anticipate its future states).

In response to my cascade of questions about ‘the explanatory benefit you see in employing innateness for this particular question, i.e. intelligibility’, you wrote: “First of all, it is about adequacy (if not to say, it’s about truth), which, again, I take to be much more important than any worry about ontological commitment, which I think is only a relevant factor if adequacy is established for at least two theories about the same aspect of the world (which I don’t think has been established for either of our different views)”.

Fair enough, but discussing “adequacy” would yield much of the same difficulties as a discussion about “correspondence”, which we already briefly grazed. In short, I don’t think you start out by accessing reality and then try to fit your explanations to it until they are “adequate”; rather, our access to reality is very much mediated by how we explain it. Hence, criticizing explanations from a point of view of adequacy might be putting the cart before the horse.

You wrote: “The second, and more important, reason is the limitations that follow from the differences between the two kinds of causality. If the world is unintelligible to us (in the sense that we can only come up with explanatory theories about it), then we can be horrifyingly wrong about pretty much anything with regard to the external world (which I think is at least interesting). This is essentially the point of the argument in the section 3, which I shall try to explain better”.

Well, perhaps I simply don’t understand why we shouldn’t be “horrifyingly wrong about pretty much anything” – at least about any empirical fact. That said, the comforting idea is that we can slowly, ever so slowly, learn to explain most phenomena (which is not to say that any such explanation could not at any point turn out to be majorly wrong, but that’s just science). If there are scientific truths hard-wired into us, they must depend on some past regularity or evolutionary advantage, and there is no guarantee that any such regularity will be overturned in the future, or depends on some restricted, or even “faulty”, historical evolutionary context. That is, even innate scientific truths can (or, given the epistemic restrictions of our evolutionary history and environments, even should!) turn out to be completely inadequate at any given time.

2) Our discussion about reductive explanation:

You wrote: “While I agree that many who are concerned with scientific explanations try to clarify aspects of sciences, I’m not sure that this helps much with the more successful sciences. Basically, I take physics to be the most advanced science, then chemistry and then biology. It seems to me that within these disciplines, scientists can work without paying much attention to philosophy of science. This is because they work within an established and highly successful program. Discovering how this program works is basically the goal of “explanation by reduction”. While it is clear that science can go heavily astray, we can learn as much from the failures as we can from the successes”.

I agree that there are notable differences in the sciences. Given this, what would your proposal be for inferring Chomsky’s (et al.) claims about intelligibility from the way the more established sciences (e.g. physics) work? (And here I mean from actual physical science, not from the self-reports of physicists about how puzzled they occasionally are about their results – which would depend on folk-psychology and circumstance, but probably not physics.)

3.) Our discussion about physicalism:

You wrote: “There is the possibility that the truth value judgment solely depends on internal systems and not on anything in the external world”.

I replied: “Even granting Einstein’s quote: That only follows if your internal systems are in some “virgin” state, which practically is never the case – not even for newborn infants.”

You replied: “Suppose an experimental situation where I would somehow be able induce the appropriate stimuli that causes you the see, say, an object in motion. And suppose that the setup is such that you would also be able to see an object in motion that is really there, without being able to detect which of the two stimuli is given. Then you would have no way to distinguish between cases where your truth value judgments depend on the directly introduced stimuli (without an object being there) and cases where the object is in fact there. So, the assumption of a “virgin” state is not necessary. Actually, I’m not sure why you would think this in the first place”.

Well, there are two options here: Either by “internal” you mean “innate”. Then, our knowing that it is due to internal systems would require that we knew that our reaction is not due to a learned cognitive process, for otherwise it would not be innate. Or by “internal” you mean “any cognitive system”. But under that latter interpretation, I don’t see how that claim does anything for your argument, so I readily assumed the first option.

You wrote: “I may not understand your point about the “virgin” state, if so, please correct me. For now, I shall continue under two assumptions: We cannot be certain about the degree in which the three factors are involved and that the experimental situation described above is independent of any “virgin” state”.

If we wish to interpret our reactions as a direct consequence of an innate cognitive system, then we have to make sure we are directly tapping into a virgin state. Otherwise, we cannot exclude that the observed reaction is learned. So, I don’t see how it can ever be independent of it.

You wrote: “The Mechanical Philosophy was […] a story [that ensures that the P is true iff P is fully in accord with our intuitions], unfortunately, the history of sciences has thought us that the world can be as strange as you like (even inconceivable), the only criterion that allows to be as certain as we can be is Einstein’s criterion”.

I replied: “I don’t understand. The Mechanical Philosophy did not rest on causal laws themselves being innate, as you conceded above (you wrote “it is obviously not the case that causal laws (say, Newton’s laws) are innate, because they had to be discovered”).”

You replied: “I may not have been clear enough: I never meant to say that the Mechanical Philosophy itself is innate, only that the explanations given within the Mechanical Philosophy must be in accord with the innate principles of causality”.

But that’s exactly what I wrote above: Not that the Mechanical Philosophy is innate (whatever that may mean), but that the causal laws it coheres with are.

You wrote: “What I meant was that the Mechanical Philosophy does not fall under our current conception of a scientific theory. So, a proposition P can be derived from the Mechanical Philosophy & It is not the case that P can be derived from a scientific theory. I hope this is what you meant here, if not, then I’m not sure what exactly the problem is. Perhaps you could help me?”

I think there’s some confusion between us regarding this point here. From my point of view, I honestly do not know what to make of your claim that “a proposition P can be derived from the Mechanical Philosophy & It is not the case that P can be derived from a scientific theory”, mainly because I don’t know what would be wrong with any scientific theory not cohering with anything that is innate. (In fact, we should expect good science to leave the domain of innate knowledge behind rather quickly.) Neither am I aware of any innate knowledge (if there is such a thing) to be so substantial as to be checked for formal incoherence with a scientific statement. The entire idea about empirical science is that it is not a priori known, isn’t it?

You wrote: “The basic assumption is that the ontology for physicalism is independent from physics. In this sense, there is no explanatory theory that warrants the ontology”.

How does it follow from physicalist ontology being independent of physics (which I don’t think I meant to say – what I said was that it has to be independent of what future physics turns out to be) that there is no explanatory theory that warrants the ontology? (As I wrote, I cannot imagine any ontology that is independent of explanatory theory. Of course, we can stipulate that we make up some ontology out of thin air, but what would that prove?)

I wrote: “Let’s assume I were a naïve physicalist, in the sense that I think quarks and strings and such form the ultimate ontology and everything else is ontologically based on what quarks and strings (can) do. I guess now I could derive some P from this ontology, but obviously I can only do so because this ontology, naïve as it is, is informed by current explanatory theory.”

You replied: “No, you can derive P simply from the ontology, in the sense of a semantic consequence. How you arrive at your ontology doesn’t matter for this”.

While your first sentence here is entirely true, I do not see why I should accept the second. As I wrote above, the point here is whether this ontology can be independent of an explanatory theory, tentatively in the scientific sense. Hence how you arrive at the ontology does matter.

You wrote: “For any ontology that is not warranted by any of the natural sciences, a proposition P that follows from the ontology, one cannot exclude the possibility that the reason why the ontology was chosen only depends on our intuitions about causality. So, you cannot exclude the possibility that your ontology is inconsistent with reality”.

Well, only with “ontology” in a qualified sense. If ontology always depends on explanatory theory, then your ontology being inconsistent with reality should motivate you to either make it accord with current explanatory theory, or to seek better explanatory theories. That is regular scientific progress, from my point of view, and nothing to be terrified of.

You wrote: “It does not matter how scientifically informed one is, all that matters in the hard sciences is Einstein’s criterion. So, when someone proposes a formulation of the mind-body problem on the basis of some ontology, unwarranted by the hard sciences, then there is no way to establish that the formulation is consistent with reality, even if there is no contradiction to be derived from the formulation”.

The problem is that I see no reason to deny that the ontology underlying the mind-body-problem IS informed by the “hard sciences”. Why shouldn’t it be? If you mean to say that any ontology which isn’t informed that way could be terribly wrong, then: yes, of course, anything else would be dumb luck, right?

4) Our discussion about res extensa vs res cogitans:

You wrote: “You are right to point out that my formulation that “the second substance was introduced to account for ‘God and what not’” was sloppy. What I meant when saying “this can be easily overcome, at least for the purpose of rational inquiry, by substituting “God” with “Nature” and so on” is basically that you can restated the relevant problems within an agnostic framework. They turn out to be the same (as I tried to indicate below)”.

I did not find your indication below. The point here seems to me to be that I am unaware of any (halfway common) notion of nature which justifies relegating mental capacities to an immaterial realm. But if there is no such common notion, then no such substitution has taken place.

You wrote: “Now, it is clear to me by now that you work under the assumption that Descartes notion of the body is in principle the same as the contemporary notion. Which in turn depends on whether or not your proposed mechanisms (or similar ones) actually exist. Only then can I make sense of your problem with the second substance. If your mechanism does not exist, then there doesn’t seem to be a problem: We can simply study the second substance (which then would be the only substance) within whatever contemporary framework we like. The only thing that we would have to concede is that the explanatory theories are independent of any intuition”.

I am not sure if we are talking about the same thing here. What exactly do you mean by “the second substance”? And why would we have to concede that the explanatory theories are independent of any intuition? (I’m not sure anything can be independent of any intuition, but that depends on what you think “intuitions” are, so the reason why you think we need to concede that is more important for now.) My basic point is that the similarities of the problem(s) then and now – explaining mental capacities in terms of the “material” afforded to us by physical/mechanistic explanation – seem to significantly outweigh than the differences, and our modern understanding of the issue seems largely inherited from Descartes.

You wrote: “Suppose an individual has the choice between two options. And suppose whenever the individual makes a choice, then the individual has a “previously internalized cause”. Then, we can be certain that this cause existed after the choice was made (along the lines of “actions reveal intentions”). What about before? Suppose the cause is preference and the choice is between a banana and an apple. Then we simply know, that no matter how much I hate apples and love bananas, up to the point where I choose, I could have taken the apple. In this sense, it is at least a very peculiar form of causality that is at play here. What I have used to illustrate this is a fundamental assumption from economic theory that is used to predict and explain behavior. While the (post hoc) explanation seems to work, the predictive part doesn’t. In that sense, most seem to agree that human behavior is undetermined. Sure, what I have previously internalized influences my choice, but it doesn’t cause my choice”.

Thanks for explaining. Yes, I agree here, but I think it reveals more about our choices of explanation in different fields (physics vs psychology vs economy) than the reality of things. That is, I wouldn’t say that this implies that “language use is neither determined nor random” and “that this presents a problem for physics”, but that we simply describe causes from different fields of explanation differently. I think that we adopt each explanation because it is useful in the field where it is employed, but this adoption doesn’t come with commitments regarding the “metaphysics” of adjacent fields (otherwise, we’d obviously have to abandon a lot of currently useful explanations). For example, the areas where psychological explanation is helpful are typically those where physical explanation is unhelpful, but that doesn’t mean that the basic assumptions of physics are in any sense overruled by those of psychology. Even to say that they are inconsistent is, in my opinion, a form of category mistake.

You wrote: “What I described above concerns at least two of the problems you state (intentionality and “free will” - I try to avoid loaded notions). If there is something in nature that is neither determined nor random and deeply connected to at least these two problems, then, as far as I know the relevant debates, there isn’t even a proposal for how to approach this question – including Chomsky”.

I disagree that there is no such proposal and additionally wonder: Is there something wrong with the proposal I just put forward? It seems to me to be a fairly common view.

You wrote: “The argument I tried to clarify above has been presented by Hume (albeit in a very different way; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, VI, §15). (…) If you look at the actual argument, what he presented was a rational argument that shows the limitations of science and human cognition that was only accepted centuries later (and only in the hard sciences)”.

I did not find a §15 in section VI. In VII, §15, I found Hume saying “That [our limbs’] motion follows the command of the will is a matter of common experience, like other natural events: But the power or energy by which this is effected, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable”? That, to me, just seems like the problem of mental causation, which – as persistent as it is – is far from having been offered tenable solutions. Or am I just bad at looking up Hume? (And if so, could you perhaps very briefly say what argument you meant to refer to?)

You wrote: “Progress in relation to what? For instance, one often hears the claim that today, we understand that cognitive processes are entirely natural (in one version or another). Well, Darwin knew this: “Why is thought being a secretion of brain more wonderful than gravity a property of matter?” (Darwin, Private Notebook, The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness) So, what counts as new today was clear in the eighteenth century”.

Oh, certainly the claim itself is nothing new. You can claim anything at any time, and I’m sure any philosophical claim has been made at one time or other. The question is whether (a) today we have much better theories than during Darwin’s time solidifying that claim and (b) what great reasons we still have to doubt that the mental is but a property of whatever lies below.

Finally, thank you also for your (biographically infused) explanation of why you feel drawn to this kind of argument associated with Chomsky. Now, as far as our disagreements here go, I think it really boils down to the fact that I do not see Chomsky’s arguments as undeniable or strongly confirmed. Other than that, our backgrounds seem reasonably similar to still (thankfully) be able to discuss this disagreement.

Best,

Joachim