Mind, Matter, and Nature

7. Before the Philosophy of Mind—The Philosophy of Nature

217 Chapter 7 Before the Philosophy of Mind– The Philosophy of Nature Our discussion thus far might well amount to grounds for philosophical despair. The most promising versions of materialism cannot account for the reality of the qualitative aspect of our sensations, the intentional aspect of our thoughts, or the fact that we are intellectual and moral agents. The prospect of a naturalist, emergent property or substance dualism is not entirely without traction, but it is difficult to square with the broader metaphysical views held by most contemporary philosophers of mind, and there are strong arguments purporting to show that the universal aspect of thought and subsequently intellectual and moral agency cannot in principle be accounted for in terms of emergence. At the end of chapter 3 I argued that, even though it is plagued by difficulties, nonemergent dualism is believable. What I mean here is that there is no “knock-down” refutation of dual- 218 The Philosophy of Nature ism, such that it would be irrational or even just unreasonable to defend it. Certainly, issues regarding mind-body interaction are not perfectly clear, but we discussed that there are some promising strategies for the dualist to answer these worries. At the very least, the mind-body interaction problem is not so difficult as to undermine otherwise compelling arguments for dualism. We also noted that the nonemergent dualist has difficulties when it comes to explaining the obvious psycho-physical dependence between consciousness and the brain, the status of nonhuman animals as bearers of psychological states, and the morally significant experience we have of ourselves as living human bodies, as opposed to minds or souls contingently associated with human bodies. None of these concerns, however, is an absolute “dealbreaker ” for the dualist, and there are interesting ways of treating these problems proposed by contemporary dualists. Of course, the nonemergent dualist will need to tell increasingly tedious stories to account for a significant range of facts contrary to what we would most likely expect, should nonemergent dualism be true, but there is nothing incoherent about any of these stories. In short, even though nonemergent dualism raises philosophical perplexities, we should see it as a live option in the philosophy of mind. If we contrast nonemergent dualism with naturalism in its various forms we have discussed so far, the former comes out favorably at the expense of the latter. Dualism might require us to indulge in some tedious just-so stories, for example, “when I’m drunk my mind functions just fine, it’s just that my brain communicates bad information,” but it is by no means self-defeating. As we have seen in chapter 5, it is very difficult to sustain any version of materialism without “leaving something out,” that is, qualia, intentionality, or agency, which is at least paradoxical, because it seems that our engagement in the philosophy of mind, even if in doing so we are defending materialism, is itself among the phenomena that materialists seem to leave behind. We saw in chap- 219 The Philosophy of Nature ter 6 that similar paradoxical results still plague the naturalist versions of emergence because of the impossibility of giving an account of the universal aspect of thought. Since nonemergent dualism, despite its many problems, is free of these paradoxes, given the choice between only nonemergent dualism and any version of naturalism we have discussed (and my hope is that we have discussed all of the most important versions of naturalism ), nonemergent dualism is the more satisfactory philosophy of mind. You may very well be disappointed to find that we have done a great deal of difficult philosophical work in the preceding pages without much to show for the effort. If the philosophy of mind at best can recommend to us a position wrought with difficulties of its own solely on the basis of some highly contentious arguments offered in its favor and the fact that its competitor theories lead to intractable paradoxes, it would seem that we have grounds for intellectual despair. One might conclude that we would have done better just to leave well enough alone, rather than considering the litany of unsatisfactory theories of mind we have discussed in the preceding pages of this book. I agree that there is little hope for a fully satisfactory philosophy of mind: given the way the debate about the mind-body problem is typically framed, it is unlikely that we can...