Matter and Consciousness

5 The Methodological Problem

5 The Methodological Problem It is plain that the familiar conceptual framework of folk psychology gives one a nontrivial understanding of many aspects of human mentality. Equally plain, however, are the many aspects of conscious intelligence it leaves largely in the dark: learning, memory, language use, intelligence differences, sleep, motor coordination, perception, madness, and so on. We understand so very little of what there is to be understood, and it is the job of science, broadly conceived, to throw back the enveloping shadows and reveal to us the inner nature and secret workings of the mind. On this much, all parties can agree. There is major disagreement , however, on how any science of mind should proceed if it is to have the best chance of success. There is disagreement, that is, on the intellectual methods that should be employed. Here follows a brief description and discussion of the four most influential methodologies that have guided research into the mind over the last century. 1 Idealism and Phenomenology Here it is useful back up a few steps and provide a little history. While de la Mettrie (see pp. 157–158) was trying to reduce mind 136 Chapter 5 to matter, other thinkers were concerned to effect a reduction in precisely the opposite direction. Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) argued that material objects have no existence save as ‘objects’ or ‘contents’ of the perceptual states of conscious minds. To put the point crudely, the material world is nothing but a coherent dream. If one holds that the material world is one’s own dream, then one is a subjective idealist. If one holds, as Berkeley did, that the so-called material world is God’s dream, a dream in which we all share, then one is an objective idealist. In either case, the fundamental stuff of existence is mind, not matter. Hence the term “idealism.” This is a startling and intriguing hypothesis. We are asked to think of the ‘objective’ world as being nothing more than the ‘sensorium of God’: the material world stands to God’s mind in the same relation that your sensory experience stands to your own mind. We are all of us participants, somehow, in God’s dream: the physical universe! This hypothesis may seem to some a faintly mad dream in its own right, but we can at least imagine how serious evidence might support it. Suppose that we could provide detailed explanations of the behavior and constitution of matter, or of space and time, explanations grounded in theoretical assumptions about the constitution of the mind— ours, perhaps, or God’s. Idealism would then start to look genuinely plausible. In fact, no genuinely useful explanations of this sort have ever been provided, and so idealism remains comparatively implausible. Explanations in the other direction—of various mental phenomena in terms of physical phenomena—have been far more substantial. We need only think of evolutionary theory, empirical psychology, artificial intelligence, and the several neurosciences to see the breadth of the advancing mate- The Methodological Problem 137 rialist front. (These will be examined in some detail in chapters 6–8.) There was a time, however, when such idealist explanations of the material world did seem available. Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804) made a lasting impression on Western philosophy when he argued, in his Critique of Pure Reason, that the familiar human experience of the material world is in large measure constructed by the active human mind. As Kant saw it, the innate forms of human perception and the innate categories of human understanding ‘impose’ an invariant order on the initial chaos of our raw sensory input. All humans share a common experience, therefore, of a highly specific ‘material world’. Kant tried to explain, in this way, why the laws of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics were necessarily true of the world-of-humanexperience . He thought they were an inescapable consequence of the mind’s own cognitive structuring activity. Both Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics have since turned out to be empirically false, which certainly undermines the specifics of Kant’s story. But Kant’s central idea—that the general forms and categories of our perceptual experience are imposed by an active, structuring mind—is an idea that survives . The material objects in our constructed experience may therefore be empirically real (= real for all possible human experience ) but they need not be transcendentally real (= real from...