Philip Goff on the “Brute” Identity Theory: Flogging a Dead Horse?

Philosopher Philip Goff tells us that “science is supposed to offer explanations [of the] subjective inner world of feeling and experience”. Does it?

The English philosopher and panpsychist Philip Goff offers us a broad dismissal of what he calls the “brute identity theory”. In Goff’s own words:

“The brute identity theory is very unsatisfying. Science is supposed to offer explanations I want to know how processes in the brain result in a subjective inner world of feeling and experience.”

It must be said here that Philip Goff is almost entirely beholden to the prior arguments and positions of the philosophers Saul Kripke (1940 — ) and David Chalmers (1966 — ). These two philosophers attacked identity theorists with the argument that they can’t — or couldn’t — identify (to use Goff’s own examples) feelings, experiences and pains with brain states (or, indeed, with anything physical). And that’s because human subjects are (as it’s often put) “directly aware” of the “qualitative” nature of their feelings, experiences and pains. That is, all these things have qualitative features (or properties) which no brain state ever has.

Explanations?

Firstly, science (if we can speak of science in the singular) does “offer explanations” of the “subjective inner world of feeling and experience”. It’s just that none of its explanations satisfy Philip Goff.

More relevantly, explanations as to how “processes in the brain result in a subjective inner world of feeling and experience” were even provided by the old-school identity theorists of the 1950s and 1960s. (Why is Goff going back so far? See the history here.) And neuroscientists and others today also provide explanations on this subject. It’s just — again — that Goff doesn’t like any of their explanations. That’s because Goff believes that all such explanations lack something — they lack a certain je ne sais quoi. And Goff’s je ne sais quoi is particularly philosophical.

What’s more, the (as it were) how-explanation which Goff demands may never be forthcoming. (David Chalmers asks “why”, not “how” — see here.) That may well be because it’s a demand which can never be met — not even in principle. (Remember Goff’s words “[s]cience is supposed to offer explanations” here.)

Think about this.

Would — or could — any physical how-explanation of what Goff calls the “subjective inner world” ever satisfy him? That is, would — or could — any move from the brain to the inner world of “feeling and experience” ever satisfy Goff? After all, if Goff believes — from the very start! — that feelings and experiences are both definitionally and metaphysically different to anything at the level of the brain, then literally all the how-explanations which lead from the brain to feelings and experiences will always be automatically ruled out. In other words, Goff demands an “explanation” which can never be given — at least not if given on his own impossible terms… And I use the word “impossible” because even a (careful) physicalist like the Korean-American philosopher Jaegwon Kim (1934–2019) had this to say on a closely- related matter:

“[I]f we think of certain properties as having their own intrinsic characterizations that are entirely independent of anther set of properties, there is no hope of reducing the former to the latter.”

In any case, Goff (at least partly) came to the conclusions stated above by analysing the claims and positions of the identity theorists of the 1950s and 1960s. (Goff doesn’t mention this historical detail.)

The Identity Theory

Let me quote Philip Goff in full:

“If we have sufficient empirical evidence that pain is identical with brain state X, which brute identity theorists claim we would have if pain were found to be systematically correlated with brain state X, then we can simply assert the identity and the case is closed. It is a philosophical confusion, according to the brute identity theory, to suppose that anything more is required.”

And, elsewhere, Goff puts the words “[f]eelings are no more real than the Loch Ness Monster” into the mouth of a Dr. Ivor Cutler; who’s a fictional neuroscientist — and presumably an Identity Theorist — at the factual California Institute of Technology.

Firstly, according to Goff’s take on identity theorists, there’s a too-smooth move from the fact that

pain Y is “systematically correlated with brain state X”

to the conclusion that

“we can [therefore] simply assert the identity and the case is closed”.

Yet it’s not that brain state X and pain state Y are systematically correlated which automatically leads to an identity. It’s that this systematic correlation gives the identity theorist a very strong reason to believe that there is — in fact — an identity. (The difference between type and token identity will be ignored here; as well as the fact that even if the identity theory were correct, a particular pain may still not — or even will not — be identical to a particular place in the brain.)

The following is how the American experimental psychologist Edwin Boring (as quoted by U.T. Place) put it in the 1930s:

“To the author a perfect correlation is identity. Two events that always occur together at the same time in the same place, without any temporal or spatial differentiation at all, are not two events but the same event. The mind-body correlations as formulated at present, do not admit of spatial correlation, so they reduce to matters of simple correlation in time. The need for identification is no less urgent in this case.”

And the following is how Valerie Gray Hardcastle went on to put it some 60 years after Boring:

“[I]f you find structural isomorphisms between our perceptions and twitches in the brain, then that is taken to be a good reason to think that the mind is nothing more than activity in the brain. (What other sort of evidence could you use?)”

Of course it’s the case that not all correlations entail — or even imply — identities. It’s just that in some cases they do.

So, clearly, smoking lots of cigarettes came to be strongly correlated with lung cancer. However, smoking lots of cigarettes is still not (to state the obvious) identical to lung cancer.

As already stated, Philip Goff essentially tackles the positions of the identity theorists of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet I doubt that any identity theorist — even at this stage in philosophical history — ever denied that there’s a first-person (or “inner”) angle to the physical-mental identities they posited.

The View From the Inside

Perhaps the seemingly(?) non-physical nature of Goff’s “feeling and experience” is largely — or even entirely — down to people’s subjective (or first-person) take on them. That is, to the (as it were) “owners” of feelings and experiences, such things do indeed seem to be non-physical. Yet do feelings and experiences seeming-to-be-non-physical mean that they are non-physical? Perhaps there’s a fundamental reason (purely phenomenological in nature) as to why the owner (or haver) of experience or feeling C takes it to be non-physical.

All this all ties in with broader takes on the privacy of feelings and experiences.

So why is fundamental privacy given so much credence in this philosophical debate?

Firstly, how do we move from that stress on the view-from-the-inside (in this particular case, the non-physical nature of feelings and experiences) to anything outside that inner domain? How do we move to anything specifically scientific — and indeed anything philosophical — from that which is deemed to be intrinsically private? In other words, what work is this innerness doing? Is it just a brute or fundamental fact — full stop?

The following argument is how the British-American philosopher Peter Carruthers (1952- ) expresses the relevance of privacy to this debate. He writes:

(1) Conscious states are private to the person who has them.

(2) Brain-states are not private: like any other physical state, they form part of the public realm.

(Conclusion) So (by Leibniz’s Law) conscious states are not in fact identical with brain-states.”

Not many people would doubt premise (1) above. What’s more, a behaviourist or eliminativist position isn’t being advanced here either. However, this question remains:

What can we conclude given that feelings and experiences are inner or private?

More clearly:

Is the claim that feelings and experiences are are non-physical itself largely (or even entirely) down to their being (as it were) viewed from the inside?

This means that it follows that because “[c]onscious states are private to the person who has them”, then the notion of the non-physicality of those states will be private to the person who has them too. Yet how can we draw out the actual non-physicality of (in Goff’s case) feelings and experiences from such personal “reports” on them?

Again, from a private (or phenomenological) viewpoint, feelings and experiences do seem to be non-physical. Yet that private seeming doesn’t mean that feelings and experiences are non-physical. Perhaps that seeming-to-be-non-physical is largely a product of personal psychology, learning, culture, history and sociology.

To repeat.

When a subject has a feeling or experience, it seems (to that subject) to be non-physical. Yet why should we accept that feeling or experience C is non-physical simply because its owner takes it to be that way? What relevance does that personal (or private) account of a feeling or experience have on its actual metaphysical status?

To take an extreme analogy.

To subject S, the cricket bat in the water seems to be bent. Yet that doesn’t mean that the cricket bat in the water is bent — it’s refracted. Similarly, subject S hallucinating a red goblin is “private to the person” who has that hallucination. Yet we wouldn’t conclude that the red goblin exists.

Now take another loosely analogical argument.

The reader’s experience (or observation) of a specific concrete building isn’t identical to that concrete building itself. And my own experience (or observation) of that concrete building isn’t identical to the reader’s experience (or observation) of that very same concrete building. In these simple cases, then, few people would claim an absolute identity between an experience (or observation) of a concrete building (or an experience/observation of anything else) and the building itself. That is, the experiences (or observations) of that building are never confused (or conflated) with the building itself (unless, that is, one is an out-and-out idealist).

Yet aren’t many people doing something similar to that when it comes to their own feelings and experiences?

Again, feelings and experiences seem to be non-physical. Therefore many people believe that feelings and experiences are non-physical. Yet that would be like seeing the concrete building as actually being black and white when wearing sunglasses (or even if one is suffering from a retinal problem of vision). Sure, the cases aren’t identical because feelings and experiences are private or inner; whereas the concrete building is far from being private. Yet that doesn’t mean that we can’t make mistakes about private conscious (or mental) states. Indeed there’s a large literature on this very subject which tells us that we often do (see here).

So perhaps we can conclude that the seemingly non-physical nature of feelings and experiences is purely a product of private states or describing things from the inside. As Carruthers (again) puts it:

“Even if descriptions of consciousness experiences are logically independent of all descriptions of physical states (as the cartesian conception implies) it may in fact be the case that those descriptions are descriptions of the very same things. This is just what the thesis of mind/brain identity affirms.”

Thus we shouldn’t also conclude that such feelings and experiences actually are non-physical from our descriptions.

In addition, does this mean that such people are taking their own positions — or descriptions — on the (metaphysical) nature of their own feelings and experiences to be gospel?

That last claim doesn’t mean that people make mistakes about the very (as it were) having of a feeling or experience or even about its phenomenology. The mistakes come only when people describe — or theorise about — their feelings and experiences. Mistakes also come about because of people’s assumptions about their own feelings and experiences. (The non-physical nature of feelings and experiences isn’t the only example of this.) Thus such descriptions, theories and assumptions may be highly mistaken or confused.

All that said, there’s no eliminativist or behaviourist denial of feelings and experiences here. What is being questioned is what people say or believe about their own feelings and experiences. And, in this case at least, many people believe (if only when pressed by philosophers and given a philosophical vocabulary) that all their feelings and experiences are non-physical.

Yet despite all the above, mental privacy can be — or at least it can become — scientifically kosher.

Paul Churchland on the Introspection of Neural States

So let’s finally consider the Canadian philosopher Paul Churchland (1942 — ) position on the introspection of mental states.

Despite what some (or even many) philosophers and laypeople believe, Churchland doesn’t deny that there’s such a thing as introspection. (For that matter, Churchland doesn’t deny that people have thoughts, pains or mental states generally.) That said, his position on introspection — and on much else — is truly radical.

For example, take Churchland’s detail as to why even introspection deals with scientifically-acceptable phenomena.

To begin with, Churchland states the following:

“For if mental states are indeed brain states, then it is really brain states we have been introspecting all along, though without fully appreciating what they are.”

So when we introspect we “may discriminate efficiently between a great variety of neural states”. However, we may not “being able to reveal on its own the detailed nature of the states being discriminated”.

The conclusion here is that although Churchland wants to eliminate propositional attitudes (see here) such as beliefs, desires, etc. (as basically seen as being “sentences in the brain”), he doesn’t actually want to eliminate mental states such as feelings and experiences (see here) in toto. Quite simply, that’s because this would be virtually impossible today or even in the future. Instead Churchland wants to re-envision what mental states are and how we should theorise (or philosophise) about them.

Conclusion

The last two sections directly above were partly counterpoised against Thomas Nagel’s very-well-known and much-discussed paper ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (1974). Arguably, it can be said that the very essence of this paper isn’t the non-physicality or irreducibility of “qualia” or the impossibility of “knowing what it’s like to be a bat”: it is the prime importance of human subjectivity or the human first-person perspective. (Of course all these issues are strongly related to each other.)

As Nagel himself puts it in that paper:

“[E]very subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”

Nagel also says that “one must take up the bat’s point of view” and that

“[i]t is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it”.

Yet in the above a position was advanced which was roughly similar to John Heil’s in that there was no denial of the inner there. In Heil’s own words:

“Attempts to accommodate subjectivity to the ‘third-person perspective’ are bound to fail. We must recognise ‘subjectivity as a rock-bottom element’ of reality and find a way of reconciling subjectivity with the ‘third-person perspective’ in a way that leaves subjectivity intact.’”

Finally: the (to quote Nagel again) “single point of view” isn’t denied: it’s what we make of it that matters.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Quantum Time?

 Philosophical Shorts (2) Short philosophical pieces.

Michael Brooks (the science writer and journalist) writes the following:

“[Q]uantum states can evolve forward and backward in time. Researchers are even learning to do quantum experiments where information seems to come from the particles’ futures.”

Here again, the weirdness of quantum mechanics is largely a result of seeing quantum phenomena as classical phenomena. And then thinking — if only  tacitly! — that all the above and much else would be a strange way for classical phenomena to behave.

Take Brooks’ words “quantum states can evolve forward and backward in time” again.

Doesn’t that simply mean that in a quantum system there’s no difference which can be observed between an evolving quantum state and its reversal? That is, there’d be no telling if a state is going forward in time or going backward in time. (There is a symmetry between the two.) However, that’s not the same as stating that quantum states actually do evolve backward in time.

In any case, which time is Michael Brooks referring to?

Does the quantum world have its (as it were) own time anyway?

Can we even compare classical time to quantum time?

Alternatively, is time an acceptable notion at all in the quantum world?

Well, despite Brooks’ words, in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, time is treated classically. Thus, the foundations of quantum theory treat time classically too.

Interestingly enough, it’s also worth quoting Erwin Schrödinger here. He wrote:

“This contradiction [brought about by different interpretations of the path of an electron] is so strongly felt that it has even been doubted whether what goes on in an atom can be described within the scheme of space and time.”

Yet Schrödinger continues by telling why we do think is terms of space and time:

“For we cannot really avoid our thinking in terms of space and time, and what we cannot comprehend within it, we cannot comprehend at all.”

Schrödinger's words may well partly explain Brooks’ own words, as well as much of the weirdness which is brought about by our classical descriptions of quantum phenomena.

Added to all that, it’s of course the case that Albert Einstein’s Special relativity modified the notion of time. Yet quantum mechanics — for a few decades at least — was kept largely separate from Einstein’s theories of spacetime.

To return back to Michael Brooks on quantum theory and time.

Ironically enough, the same writer in the same chapter wrote that “quantum theory takes little note of time”. And, a little later than that, he adds that “quantum theory tells us that most subatomic particles exist independently of the direction of time”! And yet in the passage above Brooks did in fact also use the words (when referring to quantum states) “moving forward and backward in time”, the “future”, and “the passage of time”.

So perhaps time is, after all, relevant when it comes to what Brooks calls “quantum states”, though not also when it comes to  quantum particles.

But does that make sense?

Moreover, there must be more than one — or even many — times because that’s the only way to make sense of Brooks’ statement that

“special relativity tells us that massless particles, such a photons and the gluons that bind nuclei together, travel at the speed of light and do not even experience the passage of time”.

Yet photons take around 8 minutes and 20 seconds (“on average”) to reach us from the Sun. Thus, that’s a timespan being applied to a photon’s passage from the Sun. Does that mean that the photon itself “experience[s] the passage of time”? Well, I don’t know what Brooks means by those words.

In addition, if photons exist (as it were) outside of time (or there’s no passage of time for photons and gluons), then can such particles still exist exist in a spacetime in which time does exist? That is, do massless and timeless particles exist in time? Does the timeless exist in time?

It can of course be argued that there’s the observation of a photon (or light generally) expressed in time units and space units — and then there’s time as it applies purely to that photon itself. However, what do we know of the photon (as it were) in itself — as it’s separated from all observations and measurements?

In addition, I still don’t know what Brooks means by the words “[a photon] does not experience the passage of time” (i.e., specifically, the word “experience”). That said, it may simply be a poeticism or metaphor on Brooks’ part. In that case, how do we translate or interpret it?

Finally, the speed of light is measure in time units and spatial units. So how can light (which is made up of massless photons) be timeless? The speed of light is 300,000 kilometres per second. So what right do we have to use the measurements “300km” and “per second” when we’re supposedly dealing with timeless particles?

Again, is this the distinction between a photon (or light generally) as it is in itself and our own observations and measurements of it?

Can we sustain that distinction?

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Stop Talking About “Quantum Weirdness”!

 Philosophical Shorts (1) Short philosophical pieces.

The science journalists and writer Michael Brooks kinda gives the game away when he says that

“[quantum] theory allows for quantum particles [] to exist in more than one state at any one time”.

Brooks doesn’t say that quantum particles do “exist in more than one state at any one time”. He says that quantum theory “allows” for such a thing. It will therefore turn out that this is nearly all down to measurements, probabilities, what-ifs, predictions, interpretations, etc. and not about what actually is. In other words, this is nothing like a cat or even a sand particle existing in more than one state at any one time.

And everything just said equally also applies to Brooks’ other words about an electron “spin[ning] clockwise and anticlockwise at the same” and a photon being both “here and there” at the same time. Finally, it also applies to an atom “hold[ing] two different energies”.

So, apart from our experimental arrangements and interpretations, there’s also no reason at all to be surprised that things at the quantum scale have different things said about them than things at the “classical” scale.

Yet it’s not only about size.

Indeed the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder says that “it’s not about size” at all. Yet clearly it’s definitely partly about size. And it also depends on what “it” means.

More clearly, the problems begin with the size and that, in turn, changes everything else when it comes to experiments, observations, interpretations, etc. (The physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose argues that different energy levels make all the difference — see here.) This particularly problematises the issue of whether or not we can talk of “particles” and “waves” at all. It also necessarily brings in matters about the nature of experiments, measurements, mathematical probabilities, predictions and theory generally — all of which are nothing like these things as they occur at the classical level.

Again, it’s not just that particles or quantum states are exceedingly small: it’s that this fact alters almost everything else about the science of these particles, waves and states. So the words we use about what happens when the exceedingly small is measured, experimented upon, predicted, etc. become the subject of probabilities, interpretations, etc.

This, in turn, means that any weirdness is largely brought about by what physicists do. It’s also brought about by how physicists (or laypersons) interpret matters — i.e., when physicists (or laypersons) attempt to explain and interpret quantum phenomena using classical words, images, analogies and metaphors.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Thomas Nagel on Wittgenstein and Other “Deflationary” Philosophers (Part Four)

Thomas Nagel’s Platonic attack on Ludwig Wittgenstein and other “shallow” (i.e., non-transcendent) philosophers.

Left: Thomas Nagel. Right: Ludwig Wittgenstein

Skip the following square-bracketed introduction if you’ve already read my ‘Thomas Nagel as Philosopher-Priest and New Mysterian (Part One)’, ‘Thomas Nagel on Darwinian Imperialism, Naturalism and Mind (Part Two)’ and ‘Thomas Nagel on Good and Bad Philosophy (Part Three)’.

[This essay was written quite some time ago. The style is somewhat rhetorical, literary and (as it were) psychologistic. That said, I still agree with much of its philosophical content. Indeed many analytic philosophers would probably regard this essay as one long ad hominem against the American philosopher Thomas Nagel (1937-). Sure; there is an element of the ad hominem in the following. Yet hopefully it will be shown that there’s more to the essay than that. In fact I chose to write in a rhetorical style partly in response to the clear and prevalent rhetoric and “psychologising” I found in Thomas Nagel’s own book, The Last Word.]

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Thomas Nagel on the Late Wittgenstein

It is the “spiritually degenerate” position of (as it’s often put) the late Wittgenstein which particularly irks the American philosopher Thomas Nagel (1937-).

But firstly, let’s take Nagel’s more general position on philosophy.

Nagel believes that what he calls “deflationary philosophers” are (or were) going “against the philosophical impulse itself”. So just as Noam Chomsky argued that there is a “language faculty” (or “module”) in the brain, so Nagel argues that there’s a (of course he doesn’t put it this way) philosophy faculty there too. More than that: a faculty (a philosophy machine in the mind) with a fixed stock of ahistorical and acultural questions, issues and concepts which make up the a priori of all philosophical thought from the Philosophy Department of New York University to the council estates of Bradford. According to Nagel, such philosophical givens are what “spring eternal from the human heart”.

Nagel also makes it clear he sees these deflationary philosophers (the one who don’t share his Platonic vision) as being spiritually degenerate. What’s more, they are (or were) making philosophy what he calls “shallow”. Basically, it’s the old not-really-philosophy accusation again (traditionally aimed at many philosophers from Descartes to Derrida). Indeed Nagel stated that Wittgenstein, Rorty, Sellars, Putnam, et al were all “sick of the subject and glad to be rid of its problems”. There is, of course, an element of truth in Nagel’s statement — at least when it comes to Wittgenstein and Rorty. And it’s also ironic that one of his targets, Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), also expressed his own problem with what he too called “deflationary” philosophers. (He mainly had Richard Rorty in mind.) In Putnam’s own words:

“There is an excitement in the air. And if I react to Professor Rorty’s book (1979) with a certain sharpness, it is because one more ‘deflationary’ book, one more book telling is that the deep questions aren’t deep and the whole enterprise was a mistake, is just what we don’t need right now.”

So we have Nagel accusing Putnam of being a “deflationary” philosopher and Putnam himself accusing other philosophers of exactly the same philosophical sin.

If we return to Wittgenstein.

Nagel puts forward what he sees as the main late-Wittgensteinian claim here:

“[I]t makes sense to say that someone is or is not using a concept correctly only against the background of the possibility of agreement and identifiable disagreement in judgments employing the concept [].”

So what’s wrong with that?

In other words, in which other way would the correctness of concept use be judged? By an individual philosopher himself and that philosopher alone? Would such a philosopher thereby be creating some kind of philosophical (as it were) private language?

So, on this Nagelian view, our contingent concepts need to match up with Platonic Forms or with Fregean (or Nagelian) concepts. And, if they mirror such Forms, then our concepts are the correct ones. And they must now be used correctly because they match up.

Clearly these Nagelian concepts share a lot with the ostensible abstract propositions which are then clothed with natural-language sentences. However, so the argument goes, no (abstract) proposition gains its identity from its natural-language expressions. Instead, we simply express the pre-existing proposition. Only in that sense can we (as it were) tell the truth about such a proposition.

It’s also worth noting that Nagel believes that it’s the late Wittgenstein (rather than, say, Nagel’s — to use his own words — “usual suspects” such as Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault) who (to use his own word again) “endangers” philosophy. This makes a lot of sense when bearing in mind that many analytic philosophers have claimed Wittgenstein as one of them. Therefore Wittgenstein is more directly responsible for the fact that the cancer of what Nagel calls “linguistic idealism” has spread to the Analytic Philosophy Department than any other philosopher.

Thus it’s philosophical transcendence that’s at threat because (according to Nagel) Wittgenstein’s position

“depends on a position so radical that it [] undermines the weaker transcendent pretensions of even the least philosophical of thoughts” .

Incidentally, the English philosopher Michael Dummett (1925 -2011) similarly stressed meaning and the invariants of language (see here) . And perhaps that was why Dummett also believed that if we fully took on board the positions advanced in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), then we’d be denied a systematic theory of meaning. (See Dummett’s ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics’.)

Now a few more words on Nagel’s broader vision.

Bad Language

Nagel believes that there’s no question that what he calls the “obsession” with language has “contributed to the devaluation of reason”.

Nagel doesn’t mince his words here. He also states that this emphasis on language has resulted in “decadence”.

All this clearly shows that Nagel believes that language shouldn’t be boss. Perhaps more than that (in the style of Plato ): Nagel believes that language is a hindrance to pure thought. (See Part Five where I analyse this claim.)

Nagel wants to see the world with what he calls an “unclouded eye”. He also wants concepts and even reasonings to be utterly free — per impossible — from language. In other words, philosophers would be giving up what he calls “the ambition of transcendence” if they weren’t sceptical — just like him — about language. Thus, to ignore Nagel’s own last words on philosophy would be to be held in the chains of something as contingent as language.

As hinted at, Nagel’s distaste for language has parallels with Plato’s distaste for the senses. Thus Plato escaped from the senses and ascended into the world of abstract and eternal Forms. Nagel, on the other hand, would like to get free from language in order to inhabit the (or his) View from Nowhere.

Who knows, perhaps Thomas Nagel already lives in Nowhere.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]