“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” - T. H. Key

The ontology of mind is an important subject because it concerns that aspect of our being that distinguishes mankind from all other forms of life. How we choose to understand our own mind and its products must inform our politics, metaphysics, worldview, and identity.

Unfortunately, the mind cannot be subjected to the same kind of investigation that allowed us to uncover the fundamental forces of nature as revealed in physics, and while it is true that we have been able to discern some things about the relationship between mind and brain these usually touch upon the secondary phenomena of our mental life and don’t directly inform an ontology of mind. Hence the reason for why the study of mind has been able to maintain its philosophical character over the years and remain as one of the most active subfields in philosophy today.

The Overall Structure of this Series

Throughout this series I will be focused on the following four views concerning the ontology of mind:

The mind is essentially mechanical

The mind is essentially deterministic but not mechanical

The mind is essentially materialistic but not deterministic

The mind is essentially immaterial

The first three can be thought of in terms of an overarching materialistic paradigm that grew out of the phenomenal success of the Western reductionist program and are not unusually assumed as being foundational to a scientific worldview in our time. The last position is typically identified with a perspective that is more traditional and premodern, where the mind is commonly conceived in terms of an immaterial soul (or spirit) that belongs to an invisible realm and is capable of surviving death.

Amongst the first three materialistic views there is an implicit dependency relation of Materialism ▶ Determinism ▶ Mechanism which I will now try to briefly explain. To say that something is mechanical is to say that its processes can be theoretically modeled by a physical contraption, which is made up of separate physical components that are otherwise independent from each other. More generally, determinism is the view that there is a causal materialistic chain that accounts for how physical states evolve over time. Ergo, to say that something is mechanical is also to say that it is deterministic, for the contraptions of mechanism have inherent to their workings the logic of a causal chain that explains how one state of the contraption transitions to the next. Lastly, both of these views presuppose materialistic accounts (the contraptions of mechanism and the causal chains of determinism are both materialistic).

In this series I will challenge this dominant materialistic paradigm of the mind’s ontology by examining the following arguments:

The Argument from Mathematics: The Gödelian Argument

The Argument from Physics: The Free Will Theorem

The Argument from Parapsychology : The Ganzfeld Experiment

The Dominant Argument

But before considering these in future installments I would like to first examine what I believe to be the dominant argument in favor of this paradigm:

(1) The brain and its processes are material

(2) The mind is a product of brain processes

(3) The mind is a product of material processes (using 1 and 2)

(4) Material processes are deterministic

(5) The mind is a product of deterministic processes (using 3 and 4)

(6) Deterministic processes are mechanical

(7) The mind is a product of deterministic processes (using 5 and 6)

First a reminder for the reader, philosophical argument is not the same thing as mathematical proof and shouldn’t be judged by the same standard. Good philosophical arguments are those that manage to be both logically sound and are supported by premises that seem more plausible than their negations; except in the case of tautologies, there is no such thing as a philosophical argument that manages to be both non-trivial and airtight.

Analysis of the Dominant Argument

Returning to the dominant argument, statement (1) is clear and statements (3), (5), and (7) are just simple consequences of preceding statements so all that leaves for discussion are statements (2), (4), and (6).

The justifications for statement (2) are inductive, the idea that the mind is a product of brain processes is a good explanation for two important facts that were also known to the ancient Greeks. First, and most importantly, a productive theory of mind explains why individual minds seem tethered to individual brains, and secondly, why alterations to the brain usually effect the mind in some way. Furthermore, this statement also has the additional benefit of metaphysical economy, thereby satisfying Occam’s razor, for there are no immaterial substances nor invisible realms that need to be accounted for.

However, there are at least two serious difficulties with this statement and at least one other model for the mind-brain relationship other than that of production. The first difficulty arises in trying to explain how biochemical processes in the brain can produce the unified realm of subjective experiences that characterize our mental life. As the American psychologist William James observed in his famous lecture on immortality:

“The production of such a thing as consciousness in the brain, they will reply with the late Berlin professor of physiology, is the absolute world-enigma - something so paradoxical and abnormal as to be a stumbling block to Nature, and almost a self-contradiction. Into the mode of production of steam in a teak-kettle we have conjectural insight, for the terms that change are physically homogeneous one with another, and we can easily imagine the case to consist of nothing but alterations of molecular motion. But in the production of consciousness by the brain, the terms are heterogeneous natures altogether; and as far as our understanding goes, it is as great a miracle as if we said, Though is ‘spontaneously generated’, or ‘created out of nothing’.”

The second difficulty arises in trying to explain the kinds of incredible experiences that seem to occur in every generation, and by that I mean experiences of an essentially mystical, telepathic, clairvoyant, or otherwise miraculous nature that seem to defy any strictly materialistic explanation. On this view it would seem that we would have to dismiss all of these experiences in some way as being invalid, or at the very least not what they claim to be - thus the need for “professional” skeptics.

Lastly, there is the matter of this alternative model, which William James identified in the same lecture as being that of transmission. In other words, our mental lives might possibly be the output of an immaterial substance (Dasein?) passing through brain structures, or coterminous with them, in a somewhat analogous way as colorful refractions are the output of light passing through a prism, or like wind passing through an organ and creating musical tones, or that of electromagnetic waves passing through a radio and creating programmed sound. If you damage either the prism, organ, or radio then the output of these will be effected. Moreover, under a theory of mind that is more transmissive (and/or extensive) it becomes much easier to imagine how we might go about explaining the more incredible experiences of our collective mental life in a way that is non-dismissive. However, this model is not without problems of its own as it cannot give an account of why individual minds are tethered to individual brains, except in a very speculative way, nor can it give an account of where the immaterial source of our mental being comes from.

The primary justification for statements (4) and (6) is also inductive as it hearkens back to the success of classical physics, where the objects of study are always material and subject to mathematical principles that are essentially mechanical and deterministic. In other words, regardless of the physical configuration it was believed that you could always know how that configuration would evolve over time solely by considering the mechanical procedures of classical physics. This perspective was so successful that it was assumed, for quite some time, that the kind of mathematics that worked for classical dynamics would eventually be made to work for all physical phenomena. It is a perspective that took a significant blow in the 20th century with the development of Quantum Mechanics (abbreviated as QM), which is a theory of physics that is not complete - you cannot completely know the evolution of physical configuration over time under QM - and whose dominant interpretations are neither mechanical nor deterministic. Of course, the blow may not be fatal as it is still theoretically possible that QM could be expanded into a complete theory that would have these properties of determinism and mechanism. Furthermore, even if such cannot be done it’s not at all clear if the more perplexing aspects of QM should have any bearing on the relationship between mind and brain, regardless of the doubt that they cast on the correctness of the Dominant Argument.