Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind

Appendix: Liar-Paradox Monism

Appendix: Liar-Paradox Monism It should not be news in philosophy departments that qualia pose a serious philosophical problem. A succession of philosophers of mind, beginning with Levine (1983), have suggested that “the explanatory gap between materialism and qualia” is uncrossable. According to Galen Strawson (1994: 93), “the existence of experience [qualia] is the only hard part of the mind-body problem for materialists.” What makes it hard for them, Strawson suggests (ibid.: 47), is that experiential phenomena don’t seem physical, and indeed seem thoroughly alien to physical or physicalist explanation, but must be physical. Indeed, the very attempt to assimilate qualia to physics, or generally to a materialist or physicalist explanatory model, as Nagel (1974: 176) notes, makes it seem as if we don’t really understand physicality at all. While noting that some philosophers have been tempted to solve this problem by giving up on the dream of shoehorning qualia into a materialist monism and plumping instead for dualism, Strawson resists that temptation , offering in place of dualism two versions of materialist monism that arguably smuggle dualism into it. He cites the historical option (championed by William James—see Cooper 1990 and Crane 2000) of believing that “there is a fundamental sense in which reality is neither mental nor physical, as we understand those terms”—neutral monism—and yet another option, which Strawson himself cautiously champions, according to which “reality is, in its essential single-substanced nature, both mental and physical, both experiential and physical” (ibid.: 46). Strawson dubs the last view “mental and physical (M&P) monism.” Given that both conventional monistic idealism and conventional monistic materialism seek asymmetrically to normalize one data set and to reduce another (“deviant”) data set to the monistic norm, Strawson calls both of them asymmetry theories; neutral monism and M&P monism, by contrast, are “equal-status theories.” This distinction would appear to 178 Appendix implicate all standard materialists in the former, but things are not so simple: because the qualitative phenomena that standard materialists must somehow reduce to physicality are so utterly unphysical in every imaginable way, materialists keep finding asymmetrical reduction ultimately impossible, and end up incorporating qualia into materialism in a tentative form that is only marked for reduction—as a problem in search of a future solution, a qualitative conundrum in search of a materialist resolution. Some day, they believe, we will discover the true material nature of qualia, and so will be able to reduce them to materiality. Until then, Strawson argues, standard materialists are, in practice, M&P materialists. Of course, not all materialists fit this description: Allport (1988), Wilkes (1988), and Dennett (1988, 1991) deny the existence of experience of qualia altogether; and reductive representationalists like Dretske (1993) and Tye (2000) build radical asymmetry into their claims about the physical and the experiential , reducing the latter to the former. Even so, Strawson notes, it is not eccentric for philosophers who believe themselves to be standard materialists to ascribe equal status to claims in favor of the physicality and the experientiality of reality. It is perfectly normal. The mind-body problem from within this viewpoint is not that there is some significant difference between the mental/experiential/qualitative and the physical; the mental is by default a subordinate category of the physical. The problem is rather that we don’t yet know what the physicality of the mental or the experiential or the qualitative is. As Strawson puts it, this problem has been around for a few centuries: “Perhaps it only came to seem acute in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the evolution of a scientific conception of the physical as nothing more than particles in motion made it unclear how experiential phenomena could be physical” (ibid.: 58n). And it’s still unclear. M&P monism—Strawson’s solution to the difficulty, and, he argues, the fullest statement of the standard materialist position on experience or qualia—doesn’t solve it either. A year after Strawson’s 1994 book appeared, Chalmers published an article arguing a very similar case. There are, he suggested, many consciousness -related problems that seem difficult but are actually fairly easy to resolve: • the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli; • the integration of information by a cognitive system; • the reportability of mental states; • the ability of a system to access its own internal states; • the focus of attention; Liar-Paradox Monism 179 • the deliberate control of behavior; • the difference between wakefulness and...