ebola?
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2001
- Messages
- 22,071
Here's a paper I wote:
An Exploration of the Mental and Physical
Since the modern era, the question of the divide between mental and physical phenomena has been on the mind of philosophers. To the present-day layperson, who has inherited the social and philosophical framework of the modern era, the mental-physical divide seems immediately apparent and natural and is intimately tied to our experience of the subject-object division. It seems sensible to say that there are, on one hand, material objects out in the world that are subject to physical laws and are objectively observable by anyone and, on the other hand, there is a private mental life trapped inside the head of the perceiving subject, immaterial and accessible only to him or her. Metaphysical dualists, such as Descartes, have argued that this sharp division between the mental and the physical is reflective of a natural state of affairs in the universe and that the divergent behavior of the mental and the physical indicates that the two are constituted of different substances. Dualism, as a metaphysical formulation, has proved problematic as it is unclear how two completely separate substances could ever interact even at the most intimate of meeting points, where body and mind come together as a person.
In response to this Cartesian dogma, later philosophical perspectives have also attempted to address the rift between the mental and the physical. Coinciding with an explosion of discoveries in the physical sciences in the twentieth century, the theorists of the time have attempted to explain the mental in terms of the physical. With advances in neuroscience, materialist philosophers, such as identity theorists, have attempted to explain the mental in terms of neural theory. Identity theorists such as Smart have gone so far as to argue that mental descriptions in fact refer directly to neural activity. Materialist theories such as identity theory share a common weakness: the denial of qualia. In the process of explaining the mental purely in terms of the physical, these materialist explanations deny what is most distinctive about the mental, its quality as consciously experienced, its subjective character.
For this reason, materialist philosophies of mind have proven as inadequate as Cartesian dualism, spurring the formation of later conceptions of the mental and physical. In “Does Consciousness Exist?”, William James presents a philosophical perspective that avoids the problems that stem from radical Cartesian dualism and the denial of qualia on the part of the materialists. James argues that experience is ontologically primary and consists of the fusion of subject and object. Experience is of one substance, undivided into the mental and physical. It is through this subject object interaction of experience that mental and physical properties emerge, describing different experiential aspects but not consisting of different substances. James’ theory, in negating the division of the mental and physical, brings to the forefront another problem, the problem of other minds. How is it that experience can be ontologically primary when different individuals can have different experiences which often fall into conflict? Such problems have continued to crop up, leaving the debate over the nature of the mental and physical open.
Descartes’ conception of the mental and physical begins, logically, from what he considers to be the sole, irrefutable truth, the cogito. In “The Meditations”, Descartes writes, “I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (Descartes 21). After doubting anything and everything that he possibly can, Descartes finds that he cannot doubt that this process of doubting is occurring and goes on to conclude that when he says “I doubt”, there must exist a mind which is doing the doubting. Descartes goes on to consider the nature of physical objects as well. Pondering the mutability of wax, he writes, “Let us concentrate, take away everything which does not belong to the wax, and see what is left: merely something extended, flexible and changeable” (Descartes 23). While the flexibility of wax and its changeable nature merely describe its mutability, through all these changes, the wax remains extended in space. This “extension” in space Descartes finds to be the defining characteristic of physical, or corporeal things, which may be placed in contrast with the incorporeal mind, which is not extended in space.
Continuing to explore the contrast between the mental and physical, Descartes goes on to examine the apparent division between body and mind. Descartes writes, “. . .I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, insofar as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing. . .I have a distinct idea of body, insofar as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing” (Descartes 26). Thus, Descartes creates a rift between the body and mind, on one hand the mind consisting of incorporeal, non-extended substance, and the body consisting of corporeal substance extended in space on the other hand. Descartes continues to explore the contrast between mental and physical substances within the context of body and mind. He explains, “. . .there is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible” (Descartes 28). Thus, another distinction of properties is added to the mental and physical substances, that mental things cannot be partitioned into smaller parts whereas physical things can.
Having construed the mental and physical as distinct substances with differing properties, Descartes is left with one nagging problem: the question of how these two radically different substances interrelate as body and mind. To carry out the task of bridging the body and mind, Descartes conceives of tiny material particles in the blood, called animal spirits, which circulate throughout the body and are taken up by the brain, acting as messengers moving between the mind and body. Describing these animal spirits in “The Passions of the Soul”, Descartes writes, “. . .what I here name spirits are nothing but material bodies and their one peculiarity is that they are bodies of extreme minuteness and that they move very quickly like the particles of the flame which issues from a torch” (Descartes 336). At this point, Descartes has still failed to describe how these corporeal animal spirits interact with the incorporeal mind. Descartes claims that these animal spirits affect the mind and are affected by the mind through the brain, specifically by way of the pineal gland. He is so convinced that the point of this interaction is the pineal gland because only this organ in the brain is unitary, lacking the bilateral symmetry of the rest of the brain and body (Descartes 346). The singular nature of the pineal gland helps Descartes account for how bodily perceptions that are dual in source, coming from our two eyes and two ears, are unified into a singular, coherent perceptive experience.
Despite positing the existence of these animal spirits, Descartes still fails to truly unify the mental and physical. Even though it seems as if Descartes was trying to create a true intermediary between the physical and mental with his invention of the animal spirits, he is forced to fit these spirits within the context of his dualistic metaphysics, and accordingly describes them as purely physical. Although it is clear how these physical animal spirits could interact with the physical pineal gland, it is decidedly unclear how the pineal gland could interact with the incorporeal mind. Since the mind, as incorporeal, does not exist in extended space, it is unclear how the pineal gland could interact with the mind on physical terms. Similarly, since the pineal gland, as corporeal, does not exist as a mental “thing”, it is unclear how the mind could affect the pineal gland on mental terms. Thus, in attempting to accurately explain the difference in behavior of mental and physical phenomena, Descartes has created an insurmountable rift between the two.
In the over 300 years since Descartes was writing, advances in neuroscience have made it clear that what is construed as the mind is somehow strongly affected by what happens in the brain. This has led certain thinkers, such as Smart, to argue that mental phenomena, in a strict sense, are neural processes. It is not that certain mental events are correlated with certain physical events or that certain neural events cause certain mental events. Rather, working primarily by way of analogy, Smart argues that much like the way in which we say that lightening is an electrical discharge, mental events are neural processes (Smart 171). For example, if I experience gut-wrenching terror, this could simply be neural activity localized in the amygdyla and higher cortical areas coupled with sympathetic activation of the peripheral nervous system.
Next, Smart attends to several common objections against the identity theory of mental phenomena. One common objection, coming from a dualistic, Cartesian perspective, is that mental phenomena such as the after-image left in one’s visual field do not occupy physical space whereas physical, neurological phenomena do occur in physical space and are subject to physical laws, meaning the two types of phenomena cannot refer to the same thing. Smart replies, “I am not arguing that the after-image is a brain-process, but that the experience of having an after-image is a brain-process. It is the experience which is reported in the introspective report . . .There is, in a sense, no such thing as an after-image or a sense-datum . . .” (Smart 173). In this sense, both the mental, phenomenological explanation of an event and the biological, neural explanation of an event could both be referring to the same thing, a particular process within the brain. For example, if I say that I see a red dot or that the cones in my retina that receive red wavelengths of light are triggering activation in my visual corticies, I am in both cases referring to a neural event.
Smart goes on to address an additional Cartesian criticism, that mental states are private while neural states may easily be observed publicly. In reply, Smart argues that introspective reports simply follow a different logic than reports of objectively observable phenomena and that until the methods of neuroscience improve, there will be now way to externally verify introspective reports (Smart 173-4). Smart’s reply is rather dissatisfying. It could just as easily be argued that because mental phenomena, in terms of the individual’s experience, and physical phenomena exhibit differing sets of properties, linguistic structures have evolved to reflect and convey this difference. Similarly dissatisfying is Smart’s reply to the objection that phenomenological, introspective events have properties distinct from those of physical matter even though it may be through physical, neural activity that they are induced. In reply, Smart argues that when we report a particular subjective experience, we are merely declaring that this subjective experience is similar to a set of prior experiences involving objects outside ourselves (Smart 172-3). In this way, when one says that she is imagining a red house, she is only saying that her current experience resembles prior experiences where she has seen red houses. This reply is ultimately wholly inadequate. The criterion Smart uses to link the two experiences in question as being similar remains quite vague. One could rather easily describe such a criterion on mentalistic terms, such as using the quality of the experience of redness to mark the experience of red objects, real and imagined, as similar, but to do so would introduce phenomena with purely mental properties.
Both Cartesian and materialist explanations of mental phenomena have failed to completely account for our experience of the world as physical and mental. Cartesian dualism, while accounting for our experience of the world on both physical and mental terms, fails to account for how these two substances, these two realms, interact. Materialist theories of mind, on the other hand, do not have the problem of a world irrevocably split in two, but they instead deny the existence of phenomenological qualities so that the world may be reduced to the purely physical. The question left by both philosophical perspectives is as to how the mental and physical realms can be fused without denying the existence of events with mental properties.
In “What is Consciousness?”, James presents a perspective that successfully unifies the mental and physical without denying mental or physical properties of things. It is through experience that, firstly, subject and object are united, and secondly, the mental and physical truly coincide. On experience, James writes, “ . . .a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, [plays] the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective 'content.' In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing” (James II). Here, James is arguing that any object within experience is at once both the subjective, mental perceptions involved and at the same time the physical object being perceived; the two are one and the same and may only be analyzed after the fact. Take, for example, a woman viewing a glass of water. The dualist would argue that on one hand, there is the actual, physical glass sitting on the table and then on the other, there are the woman’s perceptions of that glass. In this woman’s experience, however, the glass itself cannot be separated from the woman’s perceptions of that glass. They are truly the same thing.
One objection to this experiential conception of the mental and physical is that objects of memory and conceptual structures, as opposed to sensory experiences in the here and now, do not relate to any physical object in the world and are thus purely mental, even in unanalyzed experience. Working from experience, James argues that the subject-object relation of experience still exists regardless of the amount of separation between the two through time and space. James writes, “And yet, just as the seen room (to go back to our late example) is also a field of consciousness, so the conceived or recollected room is also a state of mind; and the doubling-up of the experience has in both cases similar grounds” (James III). To present another example, if I recall the image of my grandmother, I call up not just an image that happens to resemble my grandmother, but I call up and image of my grandmother. Had she not existed, I would not be able to recall her image. This recollection of her is historically contingent upon her existence, and similarly her existence, in my experience, is exhausted by the mental phenomena which concern her. In this case, too, when the mental object and physical subject are separated by time and space, they still are bound together through experience.
Although the case is more complicated with concepts, they follow the same general pattern. James argues that concepts arise as the initial chaos and confusion of experience is rendered more definite, clear, and static through later reflection (James III). These concepts, first arising out of the interaction of subject and object, exist in their relation to the later experience of phenomena to which this concept applies. For example, my concept of the just first arises through the interactions by which I learned language and my experiences with just entities and situations. At the same time, my concept of the just exists insofar as I experience justice in actual, concrete situations. Thus, concepts, rather than being locked away in some separate, Cartesian mental realm, are contingent upon and directly shape the experience of that which is typically construed as purely physical. This shows that what is typically construed as the mental is simply one half of experience, analyzed out.
The flip-side to this first dualist criticism is the similarly dualist criticism that physical phenomena, as we know them, exist outside of outside of experience and thus there are cases where the mental and physical remain unfused. For example, one could argue that an atom, on physical terms, exists as a composite of protons, neutrons, and electrons, regardless of anyone’s perception of that atom. Lucky for James, this is simply not true. The atom, as it is known, exists through the knower-known relation of the scientist and her objects of study and due to inquiry on the part of that scientist. The atom, as it is known, is dependent upon the scientist’s method of inquiry and the instruments she employs, and, in experience, the atom itself is inseparable from the scientist’s experience of that atom. Thus, even when it comes to the objects of science, the mental and physical stand as united.
Since the mental and the physical are not types of substances for James, the question arises as to what substance experience consists of and what substance or substances exist within James’ framework. James writes, “ . . . there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced . . . ‘It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not’” (James V). Thus, we cannot speak of experience as a special substance set off from material reality, much less as a special, mental substance. Rather, experience consists of that which is experienced, namely the qualities which are rendered apparent in the on-going interaction of subject and object. Unfortunately, In “What is Consciousness?”, James does not address the substance or substances out of which existence is made. Could it be that existence is exhausted by experience? James is no Berkelian, and experience tells us otherwise. The world does not disappear when we close our eyes, and there appear to be new discoveries to be made through encounters with as of yet unexperienced things. It would be absurd to say that such things are all of a sudden given existence when they enter into experience for it seems likely that these things existed prior to our experience rather than having been given birth by us. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that existence is of the same substance as experience, namely the multiplicity of qualities of the object, its hardness, the wavelength of light it reflects, its mass, etc.
Because of the nature of the relation between experience and existence, there appears one nagging problem: that of other minds. If experience stands as qualities emergent from the bound interaction of subject and object, how is it that multiple individuals can experience the same object in different lights? If a color-blind man and a woman of “normal” vision are both viewing a rose, how can they both be viewing the same object? Is the object not in their heads, in the realm of the mental? To argue along this strongly dualist line of reasoning is to ignore the human being’s nature as social. For the human being, the mind operates not in terms of a private language and private mental representations; rather, shared linguistic constructs, other shared cultural symbols, and in many cases shared physiology orient us together in shared experience. To return to the example of the rose, the man and the woman are tied together by the word “rose”, orienting each individual towards the same object. Through conversation, shared aspects of the rose can be mutually explored, culturally shared qualities and qualities based on shared sensation of that rose, such as its odor, shape, size, and role as symbolizing love, emerge in the interaction of the two individuals and the rose. Thus, “experience” in the case of this example consists of sensory qualities and cultural symbolism which are linked through language, these qualities of experience being one and the same as the rose itself.
Finally, the mental and physical have been reduced to experience, experience consisting of socially situated subjective perceptions and the actual object of experience, which directly coincide as a unity of subject and object. The final remaining question is as to what role the mental and physical, having been stripped of their status as substances, actually play in this picture. James argues that the mental and physical, the subjective and objective, are simply two “functional attributes” which emerge when experience is later analyzed (James III). The physical, objective world consists merely of those qualities which remain stable in experience. If I go out and measure the weight of a rock and then, a few hours later measure it again, its weight is likely to remain stable, and it is for this reason that we say that we are measuring this rock’s physical properties. The mental, subjective world, on the other hand, consists of those qualities which are precarious and fleeting. If I ponder the rock’s visual form and the aesthetic pleasure it gives me, this aesthetic pleasure is fleeting and will disappear when the mind wanders or maybe even if the rock is viewed again when I am in a different mood. It is for this reason, that we consider such aesthetic experiences subjective and mental.
Thus, it is apparent that James’ non-dualist framework, through which the mental and physical are united through the intertwining of subject and object in experience, avoids many of the pitfalls of previous conceptions of the mental and physical realms. Since James unites the mental and physical as aspects of the same experience, consisting of the same substance, he avoids the Cartesian rift between the mental and physical and the difficulties Cartesianism has in explaining their interaction. Similarly, because James is able to explain both physical and mental aspects of experience and existence in the same terms, he has no need to reduce the mental to the physical like the materialists must; he can effectively account for qualia. Truly, by beginning with that which is nakedly apparent, experience, and attempting to capture experience in its entirety, James has created an account of the mental and the physical that is more robust and unproblematic than prior formulations.
An Exploration of the Mental and Physical
Since the modern era, the question of the divide between mental and physical phenomena has been on the mind of philosophers. To the present-day layperson, who has inherited the social and philosophical framework of the modern era, the mental-physical divide seems immediately apparent and natural and is intimately tied to our experience of the subject-object division. It seems sensible to say that there are, on one hand, material objects out in the world that are subject to physical laws and are objectively observable by anyone and, on the other hand, there is a private mental life trapped inside the head of the perceiving subject, immaterial and accessible only to him or her. Metaphysical dualists, such as Descartes, have argued that this sharp division between the mental and the physical is reflective of a natural state of affairs in the universe and that the divergent behavior of the mental and the physical indicates that the two are constituted of different substances. Dualism, as a metaphysical formulation, has proved problematic as it is unclear how two completely separate substances could ever interact even at the most intimate of meeting points, where body and mind come together as a person.
In response to this Cartesian dogma, later philosophical perspectives have also attempted to address the rift between the mental and the physical. Coinciding with an explosion of discoveries in the physical sciences in the twentieth century, the theorists of the time have attempted to explain the mental in terms of the physical. With advances in neuroscience, materialist philosophers, such as identity theorists, have attempted to explain the mental in terms of neural theory. Identity theorists such as Smart have gone so far as to argue that mental descriptions in fact refer directly to neural activity. Materialist theories such as identity theory share a common weakness: the denial of qualia. In the process of explaining the mental purely in terms of the physical, these materialist explanations deny what is most distinctive about the mental, its quality as consciously experienced, its subjective character.
For this reason, materialist philosophies of mind have proven as inadequate as Cartesian dualism, spurring the formation of later conceptions of the mental and physical. In “Does Consciousness Exist?”, William James presents a philosophical perspective that avoids the problems that stem from radical Cartesian dualism and the denial of qualia on the part of the materialists. James argues that experience is ontologically primary and consists of the fusion of subject and object. Experience is of one substance, undivided into the mental and physical. It is through this subject object interaction of experience that mental and physical properties emerge, describing different experiential aspects but not consisting of different substances. James’ theory, in negating the division of the mental and physical, brings to the forefront another problem, the problem of other minds. How is it that experience can be ontologically primary when different individuals can have different experiences which often fall into conflict? Such problems have continued to crop up, leaving the debate over the nature of the mental and physical open.
Descartes’ conception of the mental and physical begins, logically, from what he considers to be the sole, irrefutable truth, the cogito. In “The Meditations”, Descartes writes, “I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (Descartes 21). After doubting anything and everything that he possibly can, Descartes finds that he cannot doubt that this process of doubting is occurring and goes on to conclude that when he says “I doubt”, there must exist a mind which is doing the doubting. Descartes goes on to consider the nature of physical objects as well. Pondering the mutability of wax, he writes, “Let us concentrate, take away everything which does not belong to the wax, and see what is left: merely something extended, flexible and changeable” (Descartes 23). While the flexibility of wax and its changeable nature merely describe its mutability, through all these changes, the wax remains extended in space. This “extension” in space Descartes finds to be the defining characteristic of physical, or corporeal things, which may be placed in contrast with the incorporeal mind, which is not extended in space.
Continuing to explore the contrast between the mental and physical, Descartes goes on to examine the apparent division between body and mind. Descartes writes, “. . .I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, insofar as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing. . .I have a distinct idea of body, insofar as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing” (Descartes 26). Thus, Descartes creates a rift between the body and mind, on one hand the mind consisting of incorporeal, non-extended substance, and the body consisting of corporeal substance extended in space on the other hand. Descartes continues to explore the contrast between mental and physical substances within the context of body and mind. He explains, “. . .there is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible” (Descartes 28). Thus, another distinction of properties is added to the mental and physical substances, that mental things cannot be partitioned into smaller parts whereas physical things can.
Having construed the mental and physical as distinct substances with differing properties, Descartes is left with one nagging problem: the question of how these two radically different substances interrelate as body and mind. To carry out the task of bridging the body and mind, Descartes conceives of tiny material particles in the blood, called animal spirits, which circulate throughout the body and are taken up by the brain, acting as messengers moving between the mind and body. Describing these animal spirits in “The Passions of the Soul”, Descartes writes, “. . .what I here name spirits are nothing but material bodies and their one peculiarity is that they are bodies of extreme minuteness and that they move very quickly like the particles of the flame which issues from a torch” (Descartes 336). At this point, Descartes has still failed to describe how these corporeal animal spirits interact with the incorporeal mind. Descartes claims that these animal spirits affect the mind and are affected by the mind through the brain, specifically by way of the pineal gland. He is so convinced that the point of this interaction is the pineal gland because only this organ in the brain is unitary, lacking the bilateral symmetry of the rest of the brain and body (Descartes 346). The singular nature of the pineal gland helps Descartes account for how bodily perceptions that are dual in source, coming from our two eyes and two ears, are unified into a singular, coherent perceptive experience.
Despite positing the existence of these animal spirits, Descartes still fails to truly unify the mental and physical. Even though it seems as if Descartes was trying to create a true intermediary between the physical and mental with his invention of the animal spirits, he is forced to fit these spirits within the context of his dualistic metaphysics, and accordingly describes them as purely physical. Although it is clear how these physical animal spirits could interact with the physical pineal gland, it is decidedly unclear how the pineal gland could interact with the incorporeal mind. Since the mind, as incorporeal, does not exist in extended space, it is unclear how the pineal gland could interact with the mind on physical terms. Similarly, since the pineal gland, as corporeal, does not exist as a mental “thing”, it is unclear how the mind could affect the pineal gland on mental terms. Thus, in attempting to accurately explain the difference in behavior of mental and physical phenomena, Descartes has created an insurmountable rift between the two.
In the over 300 years since Descartes was writing, advances in neuroscience have made it clear that what is construed as the mind is somehow strongly affected by what happens in the brain. This has led certain thinkers, such as Smart, to argue that mental phenomena, in a strict sense, are neural processes. It is not that certain mental events are correlated with certain physical events or that certain neural events cause certain mental events. Rather, working primarily by way of analogy, Smart argues that much like the way in which we say that lightening is an electrical discharge, mental events are neural processes (Smart 171). For example, if I experience gut-wrenching terror, this could simply be neural activity localized in the amygdyla and higher cortical areas coupled with sympathetic activation of the peripheral nervous system.
Next, Smart attends to several common objections against the identity theory of mental phenomena. One common objection, coming from a dualistic, Cartesian perspective, is that mental phenomena such as the after-image left in one’s visual field do not occupy physical space whereas physical, neurological phenomena do occur in physical space and are subject to physical laws, meaning the two types of phenomena cannot refer to the same thing. Smart replies, “I am not arguing that the after-image is a brain-process, but that the experience of having an after-image is a brain-process. It is the experience which is reported in the introspective report . . .There is, in a sense, no such thing as an after-image or a sense-datum . . .” (Smart 173). In this sense, both the mental, phenomenological explanation of an event and the biological, neural explanation of an event could both be referring to the same thing, a particular process within the brain. For example, if I say that I see a red dot or that the cones in my retina that receive red wavelengths of light are triggering activation in my visual corticies, I am in both cases referring to a neural event.
Smart goes on to address an additional Cartesian criticism, that mental states are private while neural states may easily be observed publicly. In reply, Smart argues that introspective reports simply follow a different logic than reports of objectively observable phenomena and that until the methods of neuroscience improve, there will be now way to externally verify introspective reports (Smart 173-4). Smart’s reply is rather dissatisfying. It could just as easily be argued that because mental phenomena, in terms of the individual’s experience, and physical phenomena exhibit differing sets of properties, linguistic structures have evolved to reflect and convey this difference. Similarly dissatisfying is Smart’s reply to the objection that phenomenological, introspective events have properties distinct from those of physical matter even though it may be through physical, neural activity that they are induced. In reply, Smart argues that when we report a particular subjective experience, we are merely declaring that this subjective experience is similar to a set of prior experiences involving objects outside ourselves (Smart 172-3). In this way, when one says that she is imagining a red house, she is only saying that her current experience resembles prior experiences where she has seen red houses. This reply is ultimately wholly inadequate. The criterion Smart uses to link the two experiences in question as being similar remains quite vague. One could rather easily describe such a criterion on mentalistic terms, such as using the quality of the experience of redness to mark the experience of red objects, real and imagined, as similar, but to do so would introduce phenomena with purely mental properties.
Both Cartesian and materialist explanations of mental phenomena have failed to completely account for our experience of the world as physical and mental. Cartesian dualism, while accounting for our experience of the world on both physical and mental terms, fails to account for how these two substances, these two realms, interact. Materialist theories of mind, on the other hand, do not have the problem of a world irrevocably split in two, but they instead deny the existence of phenomenological qualities so that the world may be reduced to the purely physical. The question left by both philosophical perspectives is as to how the mental and physical realms can be fused without denying the existence of events with mental properties.
In “What is Consciousness?”, James presents a perspective that successfully unifies the mental and physical without denying mental or physical properties of things. It is through experience that, firstly, subject and object are united, and secondly, the mental and physical truly coincide. On experience, James writes, “ . . .a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, [plays] the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective 'content.' In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing” (James II). Here, James is arguing that any object within experience is at once both the subjective, mental perceptions involved and at the same time the physical object being perceived; the two are one and the same and may only be analyzed after the fact. Take, for example, a woman viewing a glass of water. The dualist would argue that on one hand, there is the actual, physical glass sitting on the table and then on the other, there are the woman’s perceptions of that glass. In this woman’s experience, however, the glass itself cannot be separated from the woman’s perceptions of that glass. They are truly the same thing.
One objection to this experiential conception of the mental and physical is that objects of memory and conceptual structures, as opposed to sensory experiences in the here and now, do not relate to any physical object in the world and are thus purely mental, even in unanalyzed experience. Working from experience, James argues that the subject-object relation of experience still exists regardless of the amount of separation between the two through time and space. James writes, “And yet, just as the seen room (to go back to our late example) is also a field of consciousness, so the conceived or recollected room is also a state of mind; and the doubling-up of the experience has in both cases similar grounds” (James III). To present another example, if I recall the image of my grandmother, I call up not just an image that happens to resemble my grandmother, but I call up and image of my grandmother. Had she not existed, I would not be able to recall her image. This recollection of her is historically contingent upon her existence, and similarly her existence, in my experience, is exhausted by the mental phenomena which concern her. In this case, too, when the mental object and physical subject are separated by time and space, they still are bound together through experience.
Although the case is more complicated with concepts, they follow the same general pattern. James argues that concepts arise as the initial chaos and confusion of experience is rendered more definite, clear, and static through later reflection (James III). These concepts, first arising out of the interaction of subject and object, exist in their relation to the later experience of phenomena to which this concept applies. For example, my concept of the just first arises through the interactions by which I learned language and my experiences with just entities and situations. At the same time, my concept of the just exists insofar as I experience justice in actual, concrete situations. Thus, concepts, rather than being locked away in some separate, Cartesian mental realm, are contingent upon and directly shape the experience of that which is typically construed as purely physical. This shows that what is typically construed as the mental is simply one half of experience, analyzed out.
The flip-side to this first dualist criticism is the similarly dualist criticism that physical phenomena, as we know them, exist outside of outside of experience and thus there are cases where the mental and physical remain unfused. For example, one could argue that an atom, on physical terms, exists as a composite of protons, neutrons, and electrons, regardless of anyone’s perception of that atom. Lucky for James, this is simply not true. The atom, as it is known, exists through the knower-known relation of the scientist and her objects of study and due to inquiry on the part of that scientist. The atom, as it is known, is dependent upon the scientist’s method of inquiry and the instruments she employs, and, in experience, the atom itself is inseparable from the scientist’s experience of that atom. Thus, even when it comes to the objects of science, the mental and physical stand as united.
Since the mental and the physical are not types of substances for James, the question arises as to what substance experience consists of and what substance or substances exist within James’ framework. James writes, “ . . . there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced . . . ‘It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not’” (James V). Thus, we cannot speak of experience as a special substance set off from material reality, much less as a special, mental substance. Rather, experience consists of that which is experienced, namely the qualities which are rendered apparent in the on-going interaction of subject and object. Unfortunately, In “What is Consciousness?”, James does not address the substance or substances out of which existence is made. Could it be that existence is exhausted by experience? James is no Berkelian, and experience tells us otherwise. The world does not disappear when we close our eyes, and there appear to be new discoveries to be made through encounters with as of yet unexperienced things. It would be absurd to say that such things are all of a sudden given existence when they enter into experience for it seems likely that these things existed prior to our experience rather than having been given birth by us. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that existence is of the same substance as experience, namely the multiplicity of qualities of the object, its hardness, the wavelength of light it reflects, its mass, etc.
Because of the nature of the relation between experience and existence, there appears one nagging problem: that of other minds. If experience stands as qualities emergent from the bound interaction of subject and object, how is it that multiple individuals can experience the same object in different lights? If a color-blind man and a woman of “normal” vision are both viewing a rose, how can they both be viewing the same object? Is the object not in their heads, in the realm of the mental? To argue along this strongly dualist line of reasoning is to ignore the human being’s nature as social. For the human being, the mind operates not in terms of a private language and private mental representations; rather, shared linguistic constructs, other shared cultural symbols, and in many cases shared physiology orient us together in shared experience. To return to the example of the rose, the man and the woman are tied together by the word “rose”, orienting each individual towards the same object. Through conversation, shared aspects of the rose can be mutually explored, culturally shared qualities and qualities based on shared sensation of that rose, such as its odor, shape, size, and role as symbolizing love, emerge in the interaction of the two individuals and the rose. Thus, “experience” in the case of this example consists of sensory qualities and cultural symbolism which are linked through language, these qualities of experience being one and the same as the rose itself.
Finally, the mental and physical have been reduced to experience, experience consisting of socially situated subjective perceptions and the actual object of experience, which directly coincide as a unity of subject and object. The final remaining question is as to what role the mental and physical, having been stripped of their status as substances, actually play in this picture. James argues that the mental and physical, the subjective and objective, are simply two “functional attributes” which emerge when experience is later analyzed (James III). The physical, objective world consists merely of those qualities which remain stable in experience. If I go out and measure the weight of a rock and then, a few hours later measure it again, its weight is likely to remain stable, and it is for this reason that we say that we are measuring this rock’s physical properties. The mental, subjective world, on the other hand, consists of those qualities which are precarious and fleeting. If I ponder the rock’s visual form and the aesthetic pleasure it gives me, this aesthetic pleasure is fleeting and will disappear when the mind wanders or maybe even if the rock is viewed again when I am in a different mood. It is for this reason, that we consider such aesthetic experiences subjective and mental.
Thus, it is apparent that James’ non-dualist framework, through which the mental and physical are united through the intertwining of subject and object in experience, avoids many of the pitfalls of previous conceptions of the mental and physical realms. Since James unites the mental and physical as aspects of the same experience, consisting of the same substance, he avoids the Cartesian rift between the mental and physical and the difficulties Cartesianism has in explaining their interaction. Similarly, because James is able to explain both physical and mental aspects of experience and existence in the same terms, he has no need to reduce the mental to the physical like the materialists must; he can effectively account for qualia. Truly, by beginning with that which is nakedly apparent, experience, and attempting to capture experience in its entirety, James has created an account of the mental and the physical that is more robust and unproblematic than prior formulations.
Last edited:
