Materialism, Mediationalism, and the Mind-Body Problem

February 23, 2022

I’ve seen it suggested a few times recently that panpsychism and illusionism are much closer to one another than they seem. This is big, if true—perhaps the only form of progress we ever really see on these deep philosophical questions is when apparently opposing positions begin to converge in their most sensible articulations. I personally remain sceptical of this convergence, and feel that there are still some thorny disagreements here. A nice opportunity to explore this came up recently in Twitter conversation with Matt Segall, who shared an essay of his (Retrieving Realism: A Whiteheadian Wager) which aims to position Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy in relation to the mind-body problem and other contemporary debates. The essay is interesting in that it highlights both some of the similarities between what I shall be calling ‘deflationary physicalism’ (a family of views to which illusionism belongs) and Whitehead’s panexperientialism, and some of the places where their disagreements remain robust. Speaking as someone who finds deflationary physicalism compelling, I thought it might be fun to go through the essay and see what those disagreements look like from the other side.

By ‘deflationary physicalism’ I am referring to a particular current in physicalist thought that runs through Wittgenstein, Rorty, Davidson, and more recently Dennett and Frankish. While quite different in certain respects, what these thinkers share is a common strategy on the mind-body problem which is essentially deflationary—rather than trying to solve this problem, they try to show that the appearance of a problem is a mirage caused by a mistake made further upstream. This general strategy is shared by Whitehead, who also thinks the mind-body problem appears insoluble only because badly formulated. Even better than this, at a first approximation they all seem to agree on what the upstream mistake is, namely what Dreyfus and Taylor have dubbed ‘mediationalism.’ Mediationalism is the metaphor of the mind as a kind of inner space—specifically an inner space of immediately accessible appearances through which we gain only a mediated knowledge of outer reality. Both Whitehead and the deflationary physicalist think that once you get rid of the mediationalist image of the inner eye, the intuition that makes the relationship between mind and matter seem ontologically intractable loses its force.

So where is the disagreement? Well, the thread of Segall’s argument runs like so. First he follows Dreyfus and Taylor in their argument that the deflationary physicalists still retain elements of the mediationalist framework, despite their protests to the contrary. The effect is that rather than providing a true dissolution of the mind-body problem, they simply change the subject. He then goes on to muster some more general anti-materialist arguments to critique the framework Dreyfus and Taylor suggest as a replacement for that of the deflationary physicalists, suggesting that their continued commitment to the ontological primacy of the space of causes must ultimately force them either to play a similar subject-changing move, or embrace epiphenomenalism. This puts in place a motivation to develop the Whiteheadian picture, which will finally dispatch with all these Cartesian badnesses and collapse the illusory bifurcation between the space of causes and the space of feels.

I’ll work through this by first probing the question of mediationalism and its link to the mind-body problem, then use this analysis to offer a few criticisms of both Segall’s use of Dreyfus and Taylor’s arguments against deflationary physicalism, and his critique of their own view. This will set the stage for a more general discussion of materialism and what looks wrong with it from a Whiteheadian perspective. It should be mentioned that while I’ll focus heavily on the mind-body problem here, Segall’s essay is also concerned with the related though distinct matter of realism—this is a thread I won’t be picking up in this post, for reasons of brevity. I note the omission for the sake of completeness.

Mediationalism and the Mind-Body Problem

Let’s recap on how the mediationalist frame ossifies the mind-body problem, as seen from the perspective of deflationary physicalism. Intuitively, the thing that separates the conscious from the material realm is that we can’t be wrong about the contents of our own consciousness—I may be wrong about whether there is a tomato in front of me, but I cannot be wrong about whether there seems to be a tomato in front of me. In the first place, the mind-body problem manifests as an epistemic gap: as a discrepancy in our ways of knowing how things seem and how they are. But an epistemic gap is insufficient to secure an ontological gap. This point can be illustrated with a trite example of Rorty’s: the fact that a tennis umpire cannot be wrong about whether the ball lands in or out does not give us reason to suspect that the event of the ball landing has mysterious tennistic properties (Rorty, 1979, p. 32). Epistemic gaps can arise as a result of sheer social-linguistic convention, in this case because the tennistic language game contains a rule which says the ball is in whenever the umpire calls it so.

Those who wish to convince us that there is a mind-body problem need to say more, namely that the epistemic gap associated with it is not an artefact of socio-linguistic conventions, but that it speaks to a legit ontological gap. They need to say that not only are there certain propositions which in certain discursive contexts have a first-person epistemology (i.e. they’re true insofar as they’re believed) but that there are certain things—qualia, phenomenal properties, mental events, etc—which have a first-person ontology (i.e. they exist insofar as they’re experienced). This latter is, of course, simply the mediationalist picture of an inner realm of immediately accessible items of conscious experience. By denying the mediationalist picture, the deflationary physicalist aims to block the inference from an epistemic gap to an ontological gap.

This can be made more precise. Many of the thought experiments used to illustrate the mind-body problem—philosophical zombies, brains in vats, etc—attempt to convince us of the conceivable non-identity of mind and body. From this we are then asked to conclude the actual non-identity of mind and body—for instance that if we accept p-zombies are conceivable, then we should also accept that minds are not ontologically reducible to bodies. Back in 1980, Saul Kripke formulated a version of this argument that makes explicit a hidden assumption that authorises the passage from its epistemic premise (conceivable non-identity) to its ontological conclusion (actual non-identity) (Kripke, 1980, p. 146). He observed that the conceivable non-identity of the referent of two terms only implies their actual non-identity when the terms are ‘rigid designators,’ which is to say they designate the same entity in all possible worlds in which they designate at all. Rigid designators are terms which pick out their referent via an essential property, either by definition (intension) or by a pure act of nomination (ostension). A proper name like ‘Richard Nixon’ is a rigid designator (it refers to that man), whereas a definite description like ‘the last word of Julius Caesar’ is not. The fact that the last word of Julius Caesar might not have been dolus doesn’t mean that it wasn’t. Conversely, both ‘water’ and ‘H2O’ are rigid designators—by Kripke’s argument, the discovery that water is H2O is thus also the discovery that it couldn’t not be (his famous necessary a posteriori).

In the context of the mind-body problem, the lesson here is that conceivability arguments go through only if consciousness can be designated rigidly, either by intension or by ostension. Now, if consciousness were designated by an intension—defined in the abstract by some necessary and sufficient conditions—then it would be perfectly coherent to deny its existence, just because whenever something is defined in the abstract it remains an open question whether any existent satisfies that definition. But since most will want to insist that it is not only wrong, but unintelligible to deny the existence of consciousness, we must assume that the reference of the term ‘consciousness’ is understood to be fixed by ostension. Ostension is the only way of fixing reference rigidly in way that makes it unintelligible to deny the existence of the referent (just because if the referent did not exist, then there would not have been anything to point at and name in the first place). What Kripke’s formulation reveals is that conceivability arguments gain their force only via an extra premise, namely that items of consciousness experience can be designated rigidly via acts of ostension. Since conscious experience is not something publicly observable, this is tantamount to a belief in private ostension (if you try to point out the sensation of what it’s like to see a tree in a public setting, you will find yourself doing no more than pointing at a tree).

The key move of the deflationary physicalist is therefore to deny the possibility of private ostension, a denial which finds its historical precedent in Wittgenstein’s private language argument. In sum, Wittgenstein argued that a language spoken by one person is impossible. He reasoned that understanding a language is essentially a matter of rule-following, and a rule followed by only one person cannot be made intelligible as having a normatively binding content. When there is only a single locus of authority, there is no reason why that authority should obey its own former directives: there are no grounds to say that it should follow an old rule as opposed to changing to a new rule. In this sense the content of any rule will be inherently unstable. Rule-following—and hence language use—is thus only intelligible in the context of a community of rule-followers. This rules out private ostension, which would be an act that established a rule (in this case a phenomenal concept which picks out an item of conscious experience) in an opaque context available only to one concept user. Ostension, Wittgenstein suggests, is an inherently public activity. What this amounts to is nothing less than a deconstruction of the mediationalist framework—the metaphor of the inner eye occupying something analogous to a public space, relating to its own content in roughly the same way that the viewer relates to the screen. The effect of this bad metaphor, the deflationary physicalist argues, has been to make the incoherent notion of private ostension seem intuitively valid, and it is this mistake which has in turn made the bad inference from an epistemic gap to an ontological gap seem good.

The private language argument is not uncontroversial, and represents a site on which substantial disagreement is very possible. What distinguishes the deflationary physicalist from those who assert the mind-body problem’s status as a hard ontological problem tends, it seems to me, ultimately to come down to a position on the private language argument (often tacit), and thus on the intelligibility of private ostension. This is where the deflationary physicalist stakes their claim as an anti-mediationalist. But it’s worth pausing at this point to appreciate how strong Kripke’s formulation of the mind-body problem really is. It draws its resources only from the notions of necessity, identity, and reference-fixing. If it were to succeed it would have an incredibly broad target, causing problems not just for physicalists, but for monists of all stripes. It is also indifferent to deep ontology—it is not relevant to the argument whether we think of reality as composed of substances, objects, properties, events, relations, or processes—all that matters is whether these things are conceivably non-identical and rigidly designateable. I mention this because one argument made by the Whiteheadian is that the mind-body problem is an artefact of substance-property metaphysics, the implication being that adopting a process-event metaphysics would somehow make it evaporate. Given Kripke’s argument I do not see how this can possibly be so. Perhaps we can all agree that ‘substance’ was never anything more than a philosopher’s term of art and that what we think of as objects are in fact eddy currents in processes, but all that will mean is that Kripke is giving us an argument for process dualism rather than substance dualism. Even within the context of a process ontology, the question must surely remain: what is the Whiteheadian response to Kripke?

The Space of Causes

How does this help us to evaluate the accusation that deflationary physicalists retain elements of the mediational frame? My view is that once the above account of how they attempt to dispatch with this frame and what is at stake in it is taken into consideration, then the accusation begins to look rather thin. As Segall relays, Dreyfus and Taylor argue that the presence of the mediational frame is often marked by an ‘only-through’ structure, which is to say “a mind’s or organism’s epistemic access to external nature comes only through structures endogenous to the mind or the organism,” which is later connected to the “bifurcated view of a deterministic nature passively apprehended by a spontaneously reflective mind.” Essentially Dreyfus and Taylor want to argue that even once you get rid of the metaphor of inner space, the mediational distinction of inner/outer lives on in the form of a passive/active distinction, where the mind is still portrayed as a passive medium receiving imprints from the external world. They argue that to truly get beyond the mediational frame what is required is a ‘contact theory,’ in which mentality is understood as essentially constituted by reciprocal interactions between organism and environment in which the passive/active structure breaks down.

While I don’t disagree with this, it does seem to me that this point will fall on deaf ears, for the simple reason that is has already been integrated by those it is supposed to be targeted at. Rorty, for example, stands accused of claiming that “knowledge comes only through intersubjective agreement between publicly expressed sentences,” as if once intersubjective agreement has been reached it must then be delivered somewhere. But this is not right—Rorty’s position was that knowledge is intersubjective agreement, or, to put it in a more Rortyish way, that once intersubjective agreement has been reached there is simply nothing left to say about some other thing called ‘knowledge.’ Point here is that identity is not an only through structure. Indeed, all deflationary physicalists make some claim of identity between mental events and physical events, but all this implies is that mental events are fully fledged denizens of the space of causes and thus stand in interactive, reciprocal relationships with everything else in that space. Of course, it is precisely these identity claims—like when Dennett reckons that mental states just are functional states—that are liable to get them accused of changing the subject. But it’s important to note that this is a very different accusation to that of smuggling the mediational frame in round the back. The deflationary physicalist has already explained the reasoning that clears the path for these kind of identities—it is precisely their rejection of the mediational frame! If you want to accuse them of changing the subject, then you will have to engage them on the matter of private ostension and the ontological gap. To not do so is to beg this question.

For what it’s worth, I do think there are some really important points raised by the Dreyfus and Taylor line of questioning. It is totally reasonable to suggest that Rorty (for example) reduces mentality too far in the direction of social-linguistic practice, in the process eliding what is contributed by direct organism-environment interactions and losing any kind of contrast between sapience and sentience. Recent years have seen some interesting attempts to respond to this with two-stage (or ‘bifurcated’) theories of intentionality, where a first ‘somatic’ stage of direct environmental interaction constitutes a rudimentary mentality which then constrains a second, ‘discursive’ stage in such a way as to allow us to describe the latter as propositionally contentful (see e.g. Carl Sachs). However, none of this is likely to satisfy Segall’s complaint, since all this achieves is to describe different levels of patterning within the space of causes. This brings us to some of the more toothy objections he raises against the materialistic background that frames Dreyfus and Taylor’s project, and which motivate the invocation of Whitehead’s metaphysics. There’s a number of these, including some general objections to scientific materialism relating to teleology, substantialism, and the implications of modern physics. I’ll say something about these in the second half of the post.

For now I’ll just say a brief word about the following complaint: that having effectively critiqued the mediational frame that still haunts scientific materialism, Dreyfus and Taylor’s commitment to this paradigm leaves them unable to follow through on the consequences of their own analysis.

Modern philosophers have put the wrong end first in their attempts to know the world, as though knowledge was produced inside the mind through the internal representation of an external reality. […] Humans are first of all beings-in-the-world, participants in cosmic becoming, and only later become capable of abstract theorization about the possibility of an “external” world. […] If Dreyfus and Taylor were serious about the “necessary sequence in the genesis of modes” that places the learning processes of embodied coping before and beneath the knowledge produced by disengaged scientific theorizing, they cannot then go on to insist that the disengaged mode somehow conceptually transcends or is logically independent of the embedded mode and thus justified in its claims to a view from nowhere.

We can see what the objection is here: on the one hand Dreyfus and Taylor have made a case for the primacy of embodied coping over disengaged theorising, or the precedence of participation over observation, or of existence over essence, or however you want to say it, yet at the same time they want to retain the ontological primacy of the space of causes over the space of reasons. This, Segall thinks, entails the very ontological bifurcation they set out to critique. I disagree. I think the apparent tension disappears as soon as we realise that what we are dealing with are two different kinds of primacy: one ontological and one epistemic. The fact that matter has precedence over mind in the spaces of causes—that you can have stuff without experience but no experience without stuff—is not in conflict with the observation that all positions within the space of reasons presuppose an experiential context of participation. The only reason you might find a problem here is if you were in the habit of confusing epistemic gaps with ontological gaps. And as the deflationary physicalists have taught us, the main reason you might do that is if you were the one still haunted by mediational imagery.

The general complaint often levelled against people like Dennett is that they grant an unlimited authority to the 3rd-person perspective, to the exclusion of all others. I think this is somewhat misleading—a better way to characterise their project is as an attempt to deconstruct certain privileges commonly assumed to be held by the 1st-person perspective. It may be true that the 1st-person has a special kind of authority with respect to phrases like ‘I want a drink’ and ‘there seems to be a tree,’ but the deflationary physicalist denies that this authority is underwritten by a privileged access we each have to some private realm. It is rather, they think, simply a feature of the mentalistic language game that one has this kind of authority with regard to one’s self-description in these vocabularies, a normative role akin to the authority a tennis umpire has with respect to calling the shot foul. When the complaint is put to them that a complete physical description of the world will contain nothing that speaks to our participation within it, the deflationary physicalist simply shrugs and agrees. That may be, they will say, but this omission does not derive from the fact that the description is physical, but from the much simpler fact that it is a description. It is a banal consequence of the fact that description is precisely that language game in which one’s role as a participant in the world is implicitly bracketed. When the further complaint is raised that this account misses out the experiential aspect of being-in-the-world, they will respond by challenging the speaker to explain what exactly has gone missing without making a tacit appeal to private ostension.

Whitehead’s Metaphysics

So far I have been trying to defang the objection that deflationary physicalism retains aspects of the mediational frame, and thereby to preserve its claim to provide a legit dissolution of the mind-body problem. As mentioned in the introduction, Segall positions Whitehead’s metaphysics as a competitor to this throne, and regardless of how deflationary physicalism fares there may be independent reasons to prefer it. In this final section, I shall zoom out to consider how Segall’s Whitehead offers a response to scientific materialism in a wider sense, one that extends beyond the cloistered nit-picking of the contemporary mind-body problem. By my count there’s four objections raised by Segall against scientific materialism: i. that causal descriptions of the world necessarily omit the 1st-person, experiential dimension of being here, ii. that the mechanistic picture of the world is out of date with respect to modern science, iii. that law-governed efficient causality is insufficient to account for empirical reality and that some form of teleology is required, and iv. that scientific materialism is implicitly committed to a substance-property ontology which forces it into a bunch of antimonies and hard problems, including the mind-body problem.

1. 1st-personness

The first of these has been addressed throughout this post, so I won’t say much more than to restate the response in the most general terms. As I’ve argued, the correct reply to this objection is deflationary: of course our physical descriptions of the world—of what things or processes it contains and how those things or processes behave—does not contain the 1st-person perspective. This is because a perspective is not a thing or a process or a behaviour. If we look closely we will see that it does not contain the 2nd or 3rd person perspectives either (the view-from-nowhere is not contained in the materialistic picture, it is a normative role, one that is socially constructed whenever we play the scientific language game). To expect a description of the world to contain these things is to make the absurd demand that the map contain the territory. It is—somewhat ironically—to make Whitehead’s own fallacy of misplaced concreteness, by “mistaking abstract models of reality for concrete transactions with it.” It is certainly true that science only provides us with abstract models, but this is exactly why we should not expect them to contain any concrete transactions. Trying to bundle ‘experientiality’ into the model as a basic feature of reality will not solve this problem—all it will achieve is to add a redundant, causally spooky term to the image.

2. Materialism and Contemporary Science

The second point leads us to the question of what the claims of scientific materialism actually are. By Segall’s reckoning, materialism is the worldview derived from Galilean-Newtonian mechanistic science, in which the world is conceived as “a collection of isolated things” crashing together without meaning or purpose. I’ll return to this billiard-balls view of the universe later, as I think it is something of a red herring. At this point, however, we can agree that the essence of the mechanistic worldview is the absorption of Aristotelean formal and final causes into law-governed efficient causality, a view amounting to the claim that the space of causes possesses both ontological priority and explanatory closure. The claim of the contemporary scientific materialist is that the modern revolutions in quantum mechanics, relativity, and non-linear dynamics do not force any fundamental revision in this stance. Segall disagrees, suggesting that the threefold move of the Whiteheadian picture—replacing a substance-property ontology with a process-event ontology, building experientiality into the base, and building teleology into the base—is the only way to provide a metaphysics adequate to the world picture provided by modern science.

Sadly the essay does not go into much detail about how exactly these scientific revolutions support Whitehead’s metaphysics against materialism. I can’t help but wonder how relativity is supposed to figure in any of this, for instance. Minkowskian spacetime is in many respects the most un-Hericlitean notion of all time, and if anything seems to lend support to the theory of a block universe, the world as a Parminedean One in which every appearance of change is a perspectival illusion. And while it may be true that the linear models of causality that gave us steam engines and clocks dominated the imaginary of Western science for a long time, it is not at all clear how non-linearity could move us out of the space of causes. After all, a non-linear machine is still a machine. If anything, the triumph of non-linear dynamics has been to show how purely causal notions—for instance that of a negative control feedback loop—can yield the kind of structure in a system’s phase space that might previously have required appeal to formal or final causes. Quantum non-locality may be indicative of a conflict between the causal constraints implied by quantum mechanics and those implied by relativity, but it tells us nothing about the limits of causality as such. It is true that quantum mechanics deals a blow to determinism, but only to replace it with a kind of quantified indeterminism. Probability is not teleology.

One idea from modern physics that might help support the Whiteheadian picture is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the subjectivity of the observer is implicated in the collapse of the wavefunction. Historically this would check out—the Copenhagen interpretation was coming to fruition between 1925–7, while the lectures that later became Process and Reality were given by Whitehead in 1927–8, so these ideas must have been thick in the air at the time. This notion could conceivably give us the link between experientiality and teleology. Take Segall’s gloss of the key Whiteheadian notion of ‘prehension’:

The concept of prehension is Whitehead’s attempt to resolve what Dreyfus and Taylor call the most “notorious problem of modern philosophy” by articulating a truly amphibious account of the apparent boundary between spontaneity and receptivity. Whitehead’s new concept of prehensive unification is offered as a replacement for the more abstract concept of causal impact and its associated view of a dead and disconnected nature whose final real constituents are fully and inertly present “at an instant.” Instead, prehension entails a process-relational view of the concrete passage of living nature, where the final real creatures composing nature are not inert material things but actual occasions of experience.

We could imagine a Copenhagen-like version of prehension which acted as an infinitesimal observer picking a path through the collapsing wavefunction at each moment of its unfolding, like an infinity of tiny double-slit experiments. Obviously, the problem with this kind of move is that it makes metaphysics extremely sensitive to unresolved debates in physics. I’m no expert on the subject, but my understanding is that later work on decoherence effectively annulled the role of subjectivity that seemed essential to quantum mechanics in its early formulations, and that very few people subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation any more, at least not to versions of it that hold onto subjectivist readings of observation. These days we find a much greater influence of e.g. Everett’s many-worlds interpretation, which is just the thesis that the wavefunction never collapses (which not only removes the role for subjectivity but also seems to revive determinism).

Very wisely, Segall never mentions the Copenhagen interpretation, and so I cannot attribute this account of prehension to him. But then how should it be interpreted? If it does appeal directly to specific notions from contemporary physics, then what are those notions? But if it doesn’t then it risks becoming a virtus dormitiva, defined as doing whatever it is that the theory needs it to do, in this case combining experientiality, teleology, and insubstantiality but without any particular indication of how these moving parts are supposed to fit together. We are told that this concept is less abstract than causality, yet the role it plays in the theory seems to leave it doomed to remain unarticulated. What gives? (Part of my problem here is that I do not believe in such a thing as a ‘non-abstract concept’—the closest thing we have to a concrete concept is a proper name, and a proper name doesn’t explain anything, precisely because it attributes no abstracta. To demand a non-abstract explanation is, it seems to me, to misunderstand what kind of a task explanation is. Faced with this impossible job, how could prehension not end up becoming a virtus dormitiva?)

3. Teleology

The matter of teleology demands its own treatment, because it seems to me that Segall takes it that there are independent reasons to require it. Consider the following:

It cannot be repeated enough that a coherent world-picture requires that the nature known to science be capable of producing scientific knowledge as one of its expressions. If science’s idea of nature is not so capable (as is the case with the mechanistic picture, for which the emergence of living organisms and especially of intelligent minds remains an incomprehensible mystery), then clearly the picture is too abstract and has failed to account for what has actually occurred in our universe.

Key here is the comment in parentheses, which shifts register from challenging materialism on its conceptual coherency to challenging it on its empirical adequacy. This line of argument reminds me of one made by Thomas Nagel in Mind and Cosmos, where he distinguishes between the ‘constitutive problem of consciousness’ (what is consciousness?) and the ‘historical problem of consciousness’ (why did consciousness come to exist?). Nagel argues that even if we ignore the first question, the second is still unanswerable on an assumption of scientific materialism. We know enough about consciousness, he reasons, to know that its vast improbability hugely exceeds what could be possible within the context of evolutionary processes as understood by neo-Darwinism, and so we must posit a kind of ‘natural teleology’ to account for this discrepancy. The Whiteheadian posits a similar natural teleology in the guise of reality’s “intrinsic tendency towards increasing complexity,” one which is then cooked into the notion of prehensive unity.

The important thing to note about these kind of arguments is that they tangle not only with certain metaphysical positions, but with empirical science itself. Some cosmologists, for instance, predict that the endgame of the universe is total heat death, nothing more than a thin plasma of random quantum fluctuations spread out to infinity. Is that scenario not in conflict with reality’s intrinsic tendency towards increasing complexity? If so, where exactly does the Whiteheadian disagree with these cosmologists’ models? If not, then what exactly is expressed in the claim that it has such an intrinsic tendency? Thing is that if natural teleology does exist, then there there should be at least some sites at which it manifests empirically—where we could in principle make observations that systematically deviated from the predictions of our best causal models. But if so, then why aren’t the natural teleologists and Whiteheadians out there doing experiments to look for it? Given this it is perhaps unsurprising that it is always the current unknowns—like abiogenesis of the origins of cognition—that are invoked to support the thesis, in a move reminiscent of hopeless ‘God of the gaps’ arguments. The weakness of this position is displayed in the fact that, in order to check the hubris of the scientific worldview, it has to first adopt an even wilder hubris in pretending that we already understand all the implications of this worldview. Of course there are gaps in our understanding of the natural world. But what grounds do we have to fill those gaps with teleology, as opposed to, say, some as yet unknown causal mechanism, or the unknown richness of known causal mechanisms?

4. Anti-substantialism

Earlier I mentioned the contention that the mind-body problem is symptomatic of substance-property ontology, and that the antimonious nature of this problem therefore provides reasons to reject such an ontology, or any position implicitly committed to it. That the mind-body problem might be directly connected to these questions of deep ontology is not at all far fetched. Thomists, for example, can occasionally be found arguing that the mind-body problem is parasitic on the problem of universals (we need only consider how often the concept of qualia is illustrated with reference to e.g. ‘the redness of red’ to see how reasonable this suggestion is). However, a claim that the mind-body problem depends on a substance-property ontology can only be justified via an account of how exactly the dependency works. I personally do not see how such an account could go—as explored earlier, Kripke (among others) has shown that the mind-body problem can be formulated in a way that doesn’t seem to depend on this question—but I remain open to the possibility that one might exist. In this final section I want to turn to a different question, namely whether materialism is committed to a substance-property ontology. Segall seems to take it that it is—this is one of the points that allows him to position Whitehead’s process ontology as a remedy for problems inherent to materialism. Against this, I want to argue that materialism is an inherently anti-substantialist doctrine.

One person who agrees with this is Philip Goff. Goff has argued that scientific materialism is minimally committed to what he calls ‘dispositional essentialism,’ according to which “there is nothing more to the nature of a fundamental property than what it disposes its bearer to do.” (see e.g. this talk, 6:40) If true, then fundamental entities lack any intrinsic nature. Post-Galilean science based on causal explanation, he argues, does not tell us anything about what things are, only what they do—how they are disposed to behave and interact with other things. A materialistic metaphysics which claims that such causal explanations tells us how reality really is thus amounts to the claim that ultimately things just are whatever they (or their parts) do. This, Goff thinks, is incoherent—it conflates the form of reality with its content. In Goff’s brand of panpsychism, phemonenal consciousness is envisaged as providing the content necessarily left out by a materialist picture that renders reality only in its formal or dispositional structure.

Goff’s objection to materialism is in a sense the exact opposite of Segall’s. Segall complains that materialism is committed to a problematic conception of substance (that “dead and disconnected nature”), while Goff complains that materialism simply omits any conception of substance, and thus can’t claim to have provided an adequate account of reality. What to make of this? My own position: I agree with Goff (against Segall) that materialism is anti-substantialist, but agree with Segall (against Goff) that anti-substantialism is not only coherent, but required. The questions that need answering here are: what is anti-substantialism? what motivates an anti-substantialist program? and, what does it mean to carry the consequences of such a program through to their logical conclusions?

Fundamentally, anti-substantialism is the attempt to think the identity of form and content. To be an anti-substantialist is to reject the idea that there is some inert stuff which must have form or ideality imposed on it from outside—like God shaping Adam from a lump of clay—and any echoes of this dualism that may live on in attempts to conceive morphogenesis in more immanent terms. It denies that subject-predicate grammar tracks a fundamental distinction in the ontological machinery of reality, or that there is any sense to be made of bare particulars, or a pure substance considered antecedent to any of its properties, like Descartes’ lump of wax stripped of all qualities. Process philosophy is one kind of anti-substantialism, but by no means the only one. We could also think here of what Ladyman and Ross have dubbed ‘ontic structural realism,’ according to which reality is composed fundamentally of relations without relata (Ladyman & Ross, 2007), or Rorty’s much less directly realist ‘panrelationalism,’ which he considered to be a consequence of pragmatism (Rorty, 2021, p. 84). In light of this characterisation, Goff’s objection to materialism will seem question-begging unless it is accompanied by independent reasons to sustain the form/content distinction, as this is exactly the point at issue.

But are there independent reasons to reject it? Segall argues that since substantialism yields the impasse of mind-body problem (presumably via the mediational frame), this gives us a reason to abandon it. I don’t see the connection, so I can’t make this argument. But it seems to me that there’s a much better reason to reject substantialism, namely the very thing that motivates materialism in the first place: the unprecedented success of causal explanation in post-Galilean science. Every time some phenomenon is explained in causal (and typically reductionist) terms—heat is molecular motion, etc—some qualitative feature of reality (content) is ontologically identified with some behavioural, dispositional, or relational structure (form). Each time some mysterious phenomenon is shown to exhibit the properties it has not because some agent external to the natural world imposed that structure on it, but because that structure was in some sense immanent to nature already, the imagery of inert substance stamped with transcendent ideality is eroded further. In a sense, this is simply to reverse Goff’s argument. He argues that since the form/content distinction is given a priori, and since causal explanation only unpacks content in terms of form, then causal explanation necessarily leaves something out. I am arguing that since causal explanation has been astoundingly successful in illuminating the content of reality a posteriori, and since causal explanation only unpacks content in terms of form, then we have good reasons to jettison our a priori intuitions about the form/content distinction. I think my argument is stronger, for the simple reason that a posteriori arguments are always stronger than a priori ones. This final premise is not one I would expect Goff to agree with. But I would expect a Whiteheadian to agree with it, not least because they are the one proposing a counter-intuitive metaphysical system which justifies its weirdness on the a posteriori grounds that it must be to take contemporary science into account.

Looked at this way, the rise of scientific materialism to replace the Aristotelean metaphysics that preceded it can be seen as a chapter in the development of anti-substantialism. In the Aristotelean picture, while the idea of a transcendent form imposed on inert nature from without is no longer present, the distinction between form and content lives on in the immanent distinction between a thing and its telos, corresponding in Aristotelean science to distinction between efficient/material causes and final/formal causes. And this immanent difference is one that continues to manifest in the arguments of the natural teleologist and the Whiteheadian alike, as evidenced in their allusions to an explanatory deficit in purely causal accounts of phenomena, or in their persistent characterisation of materialism as a reduction of the world to ‘dead’ matter. To the materialist this kind of accusation will always seem question-begging, since materialism conceives itself as nothing other than the attempt to think the ontogenetic productivity of matter as such. There’s nothing dead about it. To the materialist, the retention of the internal distinction between matter and telos is indicative of a residual failure to think the identity of form and content.

A question that might be raised at this point: if materialism really does just collapse the difference between the orders of efficient causes and final/formal causes, then why does the collapse seem to happen only in one direction? Why do efficient causes absorb final and formal causes, not vice versa? Well, the answer is I think that it could happen either way, and it is only for accidental historical reasons that we tend to treat modern causality as a descendent of Aristotelean efficient causality. Consider the development of Hamiltonian dynamics, which provides an alternative to the Newtonian method for mathematically describing dynamic systems. Where Newtonian dynamics describes a system in terms of its masses and forces, Hamiltonian dynamics describes it in terms of the evolving relationship between different kinds of energy. The important difference is that a Newtonian system is ‘pushed’ while a Hamiltonian system is ‘pulled’—Newtonian forces are treated as acting on masses continuously at each moment in the temporal evolution of the system, whereas a system described in Hamiltonian terms seeks to minimise its free energy. In a sense, then, Hamiltonian dynamics is teleological—it describes the evolution of system in terms of a goal state it tends towards. The astonishing thing is that Newtonian and Hamiltonian dynamics can be shown to be strictly equivalent in the mathematical sense: any system that can be described in Newtonian terms can be described in Hamiltonian terms and vice versa. (Though of course it will often be easier to do so in one rather than the other—if you want to fire a rocket use the Newtonian method; if you want to model a double pendulum use the Hamiltonian.) Perhaps in a parallel universe Hamilton got there before Newton and established the dominant paradigm of modern physics, and modern causality is seen as a successor to Aristotelean formal or final causes, rather than efficient causes. (In his beautiful novella Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang portrays an encounter with an alien species whose science and perception developed along exactly these lines.)

Of course, the example of Hamiltonian dynamics is not going to satisfy materialism’s critics. Both Hamiltonian and Newtonian dynamics fall under the remit of modern causal explanation, in the sense that they specify a system’s evolution in terms of mathematical state transition laws. Given an initial state, they tell you what happens next. In contrast, an Aristotelean telos is not a mere tendency—it is a normative standard. In Aristotelean science, things are the way they are partly because that is how they should be. In modern science, things are the way they are because given the way they were there is no other way they could be. Instead of conceiving this transition as the absorption of final and formal causes by efficient causes, which for the reasons given above can be misleading, it is perhaps more useful to think of it as a fundamental shift in broad conceptions of modality and necessity, a shift tracked in the development of the Aristotelean notion of a ‘capacity’ into the modern notion of a ‘disposition.’ To say that a thing has a certain capacity is to say something about what it could do. To say that it has a certain disposition is to say something about what it will do in certain specifiable conditions. The stronger sense of the counterfactual embodied in the concept of a disposition both paved the way for the mathematisation of physics, and allowed the explanatory work performed in normative terms by the concept of telos to be replaced by natural laws specifying state transition rules of systems. This latter notion is the essence of modern causality. What distinguishes a causal relation from, say, a statistical relation, is not that it implicitly posits some kind of transfer of force between regions of inert substance behind the scenes, but its modal character. Unlike statistical relations, causal relations are counterfactually robust: the presence of one state necessitates the next. This is a character of relation that can apply not just to Newtonian billiard balls, but to the evolution of probability distributions, faster than light information transfer between quantum entangled particles, between mass and the curvature of spacetime, or to non-linear feedback loops.

As a final thought in this rather long meditation, let us briefly compare Whitehead to Deleuze. Both are process philosophers, but with some deep differences. Whitehead positions his process ontology as a challenger to scientific materialism, whereas Deleuze sees his as a consequence of it. For Deleuze the logic unfolds like so: a thorough-going materialism must involve a radical nominalism or anti-Platonism, a complete rejection of transcendent types or essences. Within a materialist framework the relationship between, say, a particular frog and its species can no longer be thought of as the instantiation in a particular of a timeless type. Rather the relationship between a frog and the species *frog* must be conceived as a relationship between two particulars at different scales, more like the relationship between a liver cell and the liver it belongs to. All apparent types are in fact concrete particulars, immanent to nature and subject to change. This raises a question: if beings have no essences, then how are they individuated? What accounts for the distinctive morphogenetic character and diversity of the natural world? Deleuze’s answer is that what individuates a thing is not any kind of essence or intrinsic nature, but its causal history. And it is for this reason that Deleuze’s whole philosophical enterprise revolves around the attempt to elucidate the category of causality in radically immanent terms, and focuses so heavily on the relationship of the virtual to the actual. What is absent from Deleuze’s system is anything even remotely analogous to the notion of prehension, or any attempt to make teleological or experiential concepts do any morphogenetic lifting. Without drifting too far down this line of thought, I’ll note only this. If it is possible to articulate a coherent, materialist process ontology, then this problematises the positioning of Whitehead’s system as an antidote to the impasses of a materialism conceived as inherently substantialist. Rather, if the Whiteheadian wants to build teleology and experientiality into their basic view of reality, they will need to provide independent arguments as to why.

Conclusions

In this post I’ve defended a materialistic metaphysics against some familiar criticisms. This has taken the form of a dialogue with Whitehead’s process philosophy as elucidated by Segall, not because I have hoped to provide a deep engagement with Whitehead, but because the way Whitehead’s thought is positioned by Segall as a response to flaws in materialism provides a productive friction with which to articulate the materialist idea. I’ve agreed with the insight that the mind-body problem is an artefact of bad mediationalist intuitions, and have given an alternative account of this problem both to defend a familiar current in physicalism from the charge that it retains the mediationalist frame, and to argue that this problem has nothing in particular to do with substantialism. Furthermore, I’ve suggested that the arguments mustered by Segall to the effect that all materialistic views of the mind either change the subject or entail epiphenomenalism all depend on intuitions which themselves rely on the mediationalist frame, typically manifesting as an implicit appeal to private ostension. I’ve gone on to consider some of the more general arguments levelled against materialism as a broad metaphysical program, defending it against the charge that it is both inadequate to the understanding of the world provided by modern science, and incapable of accounting for gaps in that understanding. I’ve argued that most of these complaints rest ultimately on an unnuanced conception of causality and causal explanation in their modern senses—once this conception has been remedied, materialism emerges not merely as taking on board the anti-substanstialist lessons of modern science, but as the only program which follows the thread of these lessons all the way to their logical conclusions.

References

  1. Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.
  2. Ladyman, J., & Ross, D. (2007). Every Thing Must Go. Oxford University Press.
  3. Rorty, R. (2021). Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. Belknap Press.
  4. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Principle University Press.

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consciousness   davidson   deleuze   dennett   illusionism   normativity   novelty   rorty   science   subjectivity  

Materialism, Mediationalism, and the Mind-Body Problem - February 23, 2022 - Divine Curation