Section Four: Timothy O’Connor and Emergent Necessitation
After all, naturalists have not spent the last fi fty years trying to eliminate or reduce solidity or the properties of digestion like they have mental states. This is because the latter are rightly seen as a threat to naturalism even if the former are not. As B. F. Skinner noted just before his death:
Evolutionary theorists have suggested that ‘conscious intelligence’ is an evolved trait, but they have never shown how a nonphysical variation could arise [in the fi rst place] to be selected by physical contingencies of survival. (Skinner 1990, p. 1207)
Indeed. The constraints on a naturalist ontology discussed in sections one and two place a severe burden of proof on adding emergent mental properties to that ontology, a burden that Searle has singularly failed to meet.
Section Four: Timothy O’Connor and Emergent Necessitation
The vast majority of friends and foes of agent-causal versions of libertarian freedom agree that it is either inconsistent or not plausibly harmonized with a naturalistic view of the world, including a physicalist depiction of particulars taken to populate the naturalist ontology. Thus, naturalist John Bishop claims that:
the idea of a responsible agent, with the ‘originative’ ability to initiate events in the natural world, does not sit easily with the idea of [an agent as] a natural organism. . . . Our scientifi c understanding of human behavior seems to be in tension with a presupposition of the ethical stance we adopt toward it. (Bishop 1989, p. 1)
In his excellent and penetrating development of an agent-causal count of freedom, Persons & Causes, Timothy O’Connor acknowledges that this is the case: “A great many contemporary philosophers will dismiss [an agent-causal account of freedom] as pointless, since it blatantly contradicts ‘the scientifi c facts’ ” (O’Connor 2000, p. 108; cf. Moreland 1997; O’Connor 2003). However, O’Connor is actually puzzled by the majority view on this issue, and claims that a robust version of AGC, including his own, may be very plausibly harmonized with the emerging naturalist picture of the world, including a physicalist view of the agent. O’Connor’s puzzlement is odd in light of the considerations we noted in sections one and two. In any case, for O’Connor, agent-causal power is an emergent property. To support this claim, O’Connor defends what I shall call the Harmony Thesis: the emergence of agent-causal power may be plausibly located within a widely accepted naturalist ontology, including a physicalist depiction of the agent.
To explain why I think O’Connor has failed to substantiate this claim, I shall describe features of his model and offer three lines of criticism. First, I will expose problems in O’Connor’s description of the agent. Second, I will show why a certain model of causation is crucial for O’Connor’s project and argue that, given this model, it is not true that consciousness in general, and active power in particular, are emergent properties. Third, I will try to show that certain epistemic features that characterize O’Connor’s own case for AGC, if applied consistently, provide adequate grounds for rejecting the Harmony Thesis. Besides problems intrinsic to O’Connor’s view, in light of considerations of sections one and two there is a substantial burden of proof – made precise in those sections and shown to be far from arbitrary – that he must meet to be successful. I believe it will become obvious that he fails to meet this burden.
O’Connor is a Christian theist, not a naturalist. Nevertheless, he is concerned to show that AGC, including active power, may be plausibly located in a widely accepted naturalist ontology, and it this claim that I wish to clarify and dispute.
AGC and the emerging naturalist picture of the world (N)
To assess the Harmony Thesis, it is important to get clear on the central features of O’Connor’s understanding of AGC and N that are relevant to our present concerns.
According to O’Connor, although it may be diffi cult to do so, AGC may be reconciled with the Causal Unity of Nature Thesis, but not with the Constitution Thesis (O’Connor 2000, p. 109):
The Causal Unity of Nature Thesis: Macro-level phenomena arise through entirely natural microphysical causal processes and the existence of macro-level phenomena continues to depend causally on microphysical processes.
The Constitution Thesis: All macro-level phenomena are constituted by micro-level phenomena.
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AGC
Regarding AGC, O’Connor claims that the core of every free act is an irreducible causal relation between a person and some appropriate internal event that triggers latter elements of the action. O’Connor holds to a realist view of causation, according to which the essence of causality is causal production or the bringing about of an effect. Active power constitutes a special type of causal event that is intrinsically active, that cannot be caused, even by the agent, and that is intrinsically a case of the agent directly causing/controlling his behavior, or at least, the action trigger. Agent causes bring about immediately executive states of intention to act in various ways.
What kind of agent is required for this account? Such an agent must have “rather special properties in her constitution” (O’Connor 2000, p. 49). To elaborate, entities that exhibit event causation are such that the capacity to generate a particular effect is exercised as a matter of course: given the right circumstances, the cluster of properties that ground the capacity directly give rise to the effect. By contrast, having the properties that subserve an agent-causal capacity does not produce the effect; it enables the agent to do so (O’Connor 2000, pp. xiv, 75). Such an agent is a “not wholly moved mover” (O’Connor 2000, p. 67) and an enduring continuant, but not a different kind of substance radically diverse from physical substances (O’Connor 2000, p. 73). Personal agents are biological entities with irreducible emergent properties, where properties are construed as universals that have essentially their dispositional tendencies (O’Connor 2000, p. 73). Sometimes O’Connor uses substance talk to describe the agent (O’Connor 2000, p. 73). However, he also describes the agent as a “complex system regulated by dynamic processes” (O’Connor 2000, p. 95) with a structured capacity, structured by tendency-conferring states of having reasons to act in specifi c ways (O’Connor 2000, pp. 97–8).
In various places, O’Connor describes the emergent properties essential to AGC. Only entities with more basic attributes can have free will, viz., volition, understanding, practical judgment and the power to believe the act is within one’s power (O’Connor 2000, pp. 45–6).
Thus, agent causes must possess conscious awareness (O’Connor 2000, p. 122). An agent must be able to represent to himself possible courses of action and have belief/desire sets relevant to each (O’Connor 2000, p. 72). Moreover, given that intentions are action triggers internal to the agent, an agent must be able to cause directly an event internal to the agent (O’Connor 2000, p. 72). In accounting for the role of reasons in AGC, O’Connor claims that an agent directly causes an action-triggering intention the content of which is that an action of a specifi c sort be performed for certain reasons the agent had at the time. Thus, an agent must have the potentiality to have intrinsic events that exemplify a twofold internal relation of direct reference and of similar content (O’Connor 2000, pp. xiv, 85–6).
Four relevant aspects of naturalism
There are four aspects of N relevant to our discussion. First, O’Connor accepts the mereological hierarchy: physics is the basic level of reality and, in the category of individual, all wholes above the fundamental level are systems constituted by parts at lower levels. On this view, the world is fundamentally event causal in nature (O’Connor 2000, p. 107). This seems to mean two things: (1) all strictly physical entities exhibit event causality; and (2) all macrowholes with or without emergent properties exhibit event causality except for
libertarian agents. O’Connor’s view of the hierarchy is fairly standard, but it does have an aspect that would be considered controversial among those who accept N, namely, O’Connor rejects the causal closure of the physical (2000, p. 79).
Second, all particulars are physical objects. When discussing N, O’Connor calls the agent
“a macrophysical object or system” (2000, pp. 95, 109, 111, 118), and a physical substance (2000, p. 73). According to O’Connor, N requires substance monism (2000, p. 121).
Third, there are genuinely emergent properties (cf. O’Connor 1994). For O’Connor, an emergent property has three important traits: It is (1) a simple, intrinsically characterizable, new kind of property qualitatively different from and not composed of subvenient parts, properties, relations; (2) a property which has its own ontologically basic type of causal infl uence; and (3) a property which is necessitated by and causally grounded in its base (O’Connor 2000, pp.70, 110–5, 117–8). Trait (3) requires further elaboration. According to O’Connor, the causal powers of properties are essential aspects of those properties and, thus, belong to properties with an absolute, metaphysical necessity. The causal potentialities of a property are part of what constitutes the property’s identity (O’Connor 2000, pp. 70–1, 117–8). It is in this sense, that in the right circumstances, a subvenient property necessitates an emergent property. Thus, properties constitutive of consciousness, including the property of active power, are emergent (O’Connor 2000, pp. 115–23).
Finally, O’Connor embraces Causal Unity but rejects the Constitution Thesis (O’Connor 2000, pp. 108–10). While recognizing that most naturalists take N to require both, he claims that only the former is required. The Constitution Thesis allows only structural macroproperties. In rejecting it, O’Connor accepts emergent properties. And by accepting the Causal Unity Thesis, he believes that he can harmonize AGC with N.
Problems with O’Connor’s description of the agent
There are two problems with O’Connor’s agent: it is no mere physical particular, and O’Connor cannot justify naturalism over panpsychism as the appropriate ontological framework for locating the agent. Let us consider these in order.
O’Connor’s agent is not a purely physical particular
When he speaks of the self qua agent, it is essentially mental in nature. When O’Connor describes the self from the perspective of N, he talks as though it were a physical object (O’Connor 2001, p. 51). Galen Strawson claims that a necessary condition for free agency is that one have a concept of oneself as single just qua mental, quite independently of whether one also has a concept of oneself as an indissolubly psychophysical thing: In some very strong and straightforward sense, we intuitively require that there be a mental subject in the case of any free agent, a mental subject that is in some way or other properly distinguishable from all its particular thoughts . . . ; a mental subject that is moreover present to itself as such in some way. Whether or not there can correctly be said to be such a thing, we require at the very least that any free agent’s thought or experience be such that it is overwhelmingly natural for us (and for it) to talk in terms of such a subject. . . . (Strawson 1986, pp. 161–2; cf. 146–69, 323–9)
All that follows from this, says Strawson, is that the concept of the self as a mental particular is a necessary condition for taking the self to be a free agent, not that there actually
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are mental substances. O’Connor’s description of the agent seems to present it as a subject essentially characterized by a range of mental properties necessary for agency. Since O’Connor offers a characterization of agents themselves, and not simply an analysis of our common sense concept of agents, O’Connor’s agent appears to be a mental particular, an essentially mental particular qua agent cause.
It is not clear how he can hold that the agent self is a physical substance necessarily characterized by emergent mental properties. If the agent self is essentially mental, and if we recognize that a particular’s actual and potential properties are both relevant for characterizing the kind of entity the particular is, then the agent self would seem to be essentially a mental/physical particular, and not simply a physical particular with emergent mental properties attached to it. When John Locke argued that thinking matter was possible, some of his critics (Edward Stillingfl eet, S. G. Gerdil, Malcolm Flemyng) responded by pointing out that a “material” substance whose essence was constituted in part by mental potentialities was no longer simply a “material” substance (Yolton 1983). I believe O’Connor’s agent is subject to the same criticism.
Perhaps in response to arguments such as these, O’Connor has developed his view of the agent beyond what appeared in Persons & Causes and now advances the idea that persons are material substances in a qualifi ed sense (O’Connor & Jacobs 2003; O’Connor
& Wong 2005). Working within a framework of immanent universals, O’Connor uses these descriptors for the person-as-agent: a biological organism with emergent properties (in his three senses, including top/down active power) that are as basic as the negative charge of an electron; a three-dimensional continuant with a mental life grounded in its physical nature; a cluster of immanent universals with its own unique particularity not reducible to that of the mereological aggregate from which it arises; an emergent biological organism with a new thisness; a new composite that exhibits an objective substantial unity. These descriptors express O’Connor’s desire to steer a via media between a mere ordered mereological aggregate on the one hand and a view such as William Hasker’s, according to which a brand new emergent mental whole exists and is in no way composed of subvenient entities (Hasker 1999).
O’Connor claims that the standard mereological aggregate is inadequate to ground an enduring continuant, one that is needed to satisfy the requirements for a responsible libertarian causal agent. He also rejects a Haskerian view on the grounds that only a theistic solution along the lines of AC could account for how a complex physical system could give rise all in one go to a brand-new emergent mental entity.5 O’Connor wants to avoid universalism regarding composite objects, so he specifi es conditions, under which a new emergent individual arises, and he offers an ontological account of how such an individual could arise in the fi rst place. Regarding the former, emergent properties are the best candidates for emergent individuals (and the only clear evidence we have for such properties is consciousness). All other macrowholes are merely mereological aggregates. So in the category of individual, O’Connor’s ontology includes atomic simples, mereological aggregates, emergent biological organisms (and as a Christian theist, at least one purely spiritual substance – God).
5. O’Connor rejects this move because it suffers from the causal pairing problem for which most plausible solution to that problem – singular causation – is bogus. O’Connor seems unfamiliar with Thomistic solutions. See Moreland and Wallace (1995).
When it comes to offering an account of all this, O’Connor is not clear about his task, and it is sometimes hard to tell which of these two questions he is answering: (1) How are we to explain ontologically how emergent individuals could come about? (2) When should we judge that an emergent individual has come about? Questions (1) and (2) are ontological and epistemological, respectively, and I shall take (1) to be O’Connor’s focus. So understood, he claims that subvenient entities are always trying to bring about the emergent individual, but it is only when a certain threshold level of complexity is reached that conditions are right for that base to cause the emergent individual to come into being. When emergent mental properties appear, they constitute holistic mental states – perhaps enduring baseline mental states – and these, in turn, confer on persons their substantial unity as thinking biological substances, presumably by bringing about through top/down causation a new particularity over and above that of the series of subvenient mereological aggregates that are in a constant state of fl ux. This “composition-conferred-by-holism” view produces an emergent individual that is somehow composed by its parts yet has a new thisness all its own.
Why should we believe any of this? First, according to O’Connor fi rst-person direct awareness justifi es the view that consciousness is emergent in his three senses and this justifi cation overrides any a posteriori ascriptions of microstructure to conscious states. All empirical knowledge, he tells us, presupposes this knowledge. Second, we should limit our account to the constraints provided by the naturalist mereological hierarchy and the grounds we have for accepting it, we should avoid a theistic explanation of emergent individuals, and on the basis of theoretical simplicity, we should adopt a view of the emergent individual that does two things: grounds endurance and agency beyond the fl ux of change in a mere ordered aggregate and is as close to the mereological aggregate as possible in order to fi t the naturalist viewpoint.
What should we make of O’Connor’s modifi ed view? I believe the objections raised against his earlier position apply with equal or greater force to the modifi ed view. For example, it is still not clear how a particular with basic mental potentialities is a physical object. To his credit, O’Connor seems to recognize this and, thus, he calls persons material substances “in a qualifi ed form.” Moreover, O’Connor’s new view is more clearly a version of panpsychism, and it is far from clear that this is a legitimate specifi cation of positive naturalism. For example, when he claims that consciousness is just as basic as negative charge, this claim is closer to theism than to naturalism and it will be a hard pill for naturalists to swallow. This view also renders impossible a strict naturalist explanation of emergence as, for example, in the Causal Unity Thesis. Instead, mental potentialities and their causal interaction with physical conditions are required, and this is a long way from (positive) naturalism.
Besides retaining diffi culties from the earlier position, the modifi ed view suffers from some new problems not present in the older version. I mention two. First, there are deep metaphysical problems with O’Connor’s emergent individuals. For one thing, the framework of immanent universals renders unintelligible the claim that the emergent individual has its own thisness while at the same time being constituted by the relevant mereological complex. The framework of immanent universals depicts property instances as states of affairs (the so-called thick particular) – in the case of O’Connor’s persons, states of affairs that are substantial continuants – with three constituents: the universal, the nexus of exemplifi cation, and an individuator (the thin particular, in my view, a bare particular). Whatever conditions ground the exemplifi cation of the universal are external to (not constituents
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of) the instance itself. And since the person can endure even though the mereological aggregate is in constant fl ux, it would seem that the aggregate is accidental to the continuant. To the degree that his emergent individuals provide what is needed (e.g. being enduring continuants), they look strangely like Hasker’s emergent mental ego rather than some via media.
Moreover, there just is no baseline conscious state that is constant throughout a person’s life and apt for grounding endurance. The property of being conscious cannot provide such a baseline because it is both a universal and a second-order property of mental properties (being a sensation) that comes-to-be and ceases-to-be exemplifi ed when fi rst-order states come and go. Our mental lives team with fl ux as does the “underlying” aggregate.
There seems to be no account of the individual that grounds its endurance unless we treat the individual as a state of affairs constituted by a mental essence, exemplifi cation, and particularity with the aggregate its cause but outside the being of its effect. But, again, this is Hasker’s view, not O’Connor’s. Finally, in criticizing Hasker, he claims that unless one appeals to a theistic explanation, one cannot explain how a complex physical system could give rise, all in one go, to unique emergent whole. As an advocate of AC, I am cheered by this admission. Unfortunately, this argument has been repeatedly raised against emergent properties themselves.
Second, I fi nd O’Connor’s composition-conferred-by-holism to be deeply troubling. He apparently accepts the dictum that “thought implies a thinker,” or more generally, that consciousness requires a particular to possess it. So far so good. But it seems to me that this is so because the bearer of consciousness is more basic ontologically that the mental properties it exemplifi es or the mental states that obtain within it. But O’Connor’s view has this backward. If I understand him correctly, when the mereological aggregate reaches the proper threshold, emergent consciousness arises and this, in turn, causes the conscious individual to come into existence via top/down conferral (by generating a new thisness).
Thus, thinkings cause thinkers, but it seems to me that something like the converse is true
– the dependence goes the other way.
O’Connor also claims that emergent states are caused by temporally prior subvenient states and, thus, emergence is diachronic and not synchronic (see O’Connor & Wong 2005).
Thus, the following scenario seems to arise: at t1 subvenient conditions cause emergent conscious state C1 to obtain at t2 which, in turn brings about emergent individual I1 at t3.
Two things seem to follow. First, the very fi rst mental state in one’s life (C1) seems clearly ownerless, since at t2 there is no individual to possess it.
Second, beyond the very fi rst conscious state, the following would seem to hold: for all CN+1 (for N greater than zero) at tN+2, the individual IN+1 conferred by and, thus, ontologically tied to CN+1 exists at tN+2. I see no further relevant ontological relationship between a conscious state and an emergent individual other than the conferral relation. If this is correct, then it is hard to see how a continuing “self ” can exist, since there just is no single, ongoing “baseline mental state” throughout one’s life. Since conscious states are in fl ux, so are the instantaneous individuals upon whom they confer existence. In this case, for any time t greater than one, there may be an emergent individual that exists while a particular conscious state obtains, but it is the wrong one. In general, each emergent individual at a time is ontologically associated with a mental state that obtained instantaneously earlier and, thus, is ownerless.
Additionally, his modifi ed view is even less compatible with naturalism than his earlier view. In light of the ontology-constraining factors surfaced in section one and their
associated graded burden of proof on any ontology that goes beyond them, O’Connor exceeds those factors (e.g. the mental is as basic as negative charge, the emergence of active power and a new individual, neither emergent entity satisfi es the “entry by entailment”
condition, top/down causation, epistemic authority given to fi rst-person introspection that trumps a posteriori considerations) and fails to meet the burden of proof required for his position to be a plausible version of naturalism. Moreover, given the presence of AC which O’Connor himself acknowledges, his dismissive attitude toward theistic explanation begs the question at several points and fails to take into account adequately the epistemic impact of AC for his project.
O’Connor and panpsychism
So much for O’Connor’s depiction of the agent. Here is the second diffi culty with his account: As McGinn points out, in the contemporary setting, a “material” substance such as O’Connor’s would properly be characterized according to weak panpsychism (McGinn 1999, pp. 95–101). The vast majority of naturalists take panpsychism to be a rival to a naturalist understanding of matter and not a permissible version of N. We will examine this issue in more detail in this section. For present purposes, recall that according to N, the fundamental level of reality is strictly physical and emergent entities “up” the hierarchy depend for their existence, or at least instantiation, on strictly microphysical entities.
However, according to panpsychism, mental properties (either potential or actual properties) are fundamental and sui generis, and this confl icts with the naturalist hierarchy according to which the fundamental level is strictly physical.
O’Connor can simply disagree here that panpsychism is a rival to naturalism. He acknowledges that his view implies that “the presence of agent-causal capacities in select complex entities has always been among the potentialities of the world’s primordial building blocks . . . ” (O’Connor 2001, p. 58). Elsewhere he argues that “[t]he basic properties and relations of our world will be those properties whose instantiation does not even partly consist in the instantiation of distinct properties by the entity or its parts. It is the thesis of emergentism that some basic properties are had by composite individuals” (O’Connor & Wong 2005, p. 665; italics in the original). Again, “[e]mergent features are as basic as electric charge now appears to be, just more restricted in the circumstances of their manifestation”
(O’Connor & Jacobs 2003, pp. 541). I suspect that these are hard sayings for most naturalists. In order for O’Connor to justify the claim that this assertion is a permissible version of N, two things seem to be required.
First, he must show that the emergence of active power is causally necessitated by the relevant physical base. This is a necessary condition for him to show that the actual emergence of active power is consistent with the Causal Unity Thesis. Further in the discussion, I argue that O’Connor fails in this regard. Even if he successfully shows that strictly natural microphysical entities are necessary causal conditions for the emergence of active power, this would not show that his view is an appropriate revision of N and not an abandonment of N in favor of panpsychism as a rival framework because O’Connor’s view requires abandonment of the Causal Unity Thesis. Recall that this thesis states that macrolevel phenomena arise through and continue to depend on entirely natural microphysical causal processes. On O’Connor’s treatment of emergent active power (and consciousness in general), emergence depends on the actualization of nonphysical mental potentialities which are not themselves “natural micro physical properties,” even if strictly
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natural microphysical entities are necessary causal conditions for such emergence. Second, he could argue that we have prephilosophical intuitions for taking mental properties in general, and active power in particular, to be emergent properties in his specifi c sense of emergence. I shall consider these moves in what follows.
The Harmony Thesis, mental properties,
and the causal grounding condition
Emergent necessitation and contingency
For two reasons, to justify the Harmony Thesis, O’Connor needs the “necessitation” of emergent active power by the subvenient base. The best way to clarify “necessitation” is to characterize it in the context of presenting the fi rst reason. To get at that reason, it will be useful to begin by reviewing insights from Frank Jackson that were presented in section one (Jackson 1998).
According to Jackson, advocates of N should take naturalism to be a piece of serious metaphysics because in so doing, they pattern the epistemic justifi cation of N on that of good scientifi c theories, and they provide grounds for preferring N to its rivals on the basis of N’s superior explanatory power. Accordingly, one must face the location problem: the task of fi nding a place for some entity (e.g. agency) in the Grand Story. The mereological hierarchy results from serious metaphysics. For Jackson, some entity is located iff it is entailed by the basic account. Thus, if Φ is true of the actual world and all of its minimal physical duplicates told in purely physical terms, and Ψ is the corresponding true description of the actual world told in psychological terms, then Φ entails Ψ. In this way, the physical may be said to “necessitate” the psychological. It is important to keep this framework in mind for what follows.
Although he does not mention it explicitly, O’Connor seems concerned to take N as an expression of serious metaphysics, and he understands this to require the location of emergent properties, including mental properties such as active power, in terms of the understanding of “necessitation” just mentioned. Since he is concerned to show that those who accept N are not thereby given adequate grounds for rejecting AGC, O’Connor must be assuming that AGC may be adequately located in N and, moreover, that AGC does not provide evidence for a rival to N, say theism, along with substance dualism as a component of theism. As O’Connor admits, many – perhaps most – have seen AGC as evidence against N and reject the Harmony Thesis. Thus, O’Connor argues that if one is going to have a scientifi c understanding of an emergent property, one cannot merely accept a property as emergent without explaining its existence. Rather, one must require that an emergent property be causally grounded in its base properties if it is to be naturalistically explicable (O’Connor 2000, pp. 111–2).
O’Connor also claims that if an emergent property is contingently linked to the base properties causing it to emerge, then apart from an appeal to God’s contingent choice that things be so and to God’s stable intention that they continue to be so, there will be no explanation for the link itself or its constancy (O’Connor 2000, pp. 70–1). In short, if the link is contingent, the Harmony Thesis is false and AGC provides evidence for theism, and there is less need to preserve physicalism in the category of individual.
The second reason why O’Connor needs the “necessitation” of emergent active power by the subvenient base involves O’Connor’s view of causation: The causal powers of
properties are essential aspects of those properties and, thus, belong to properties with an absolute, metaphysical necessity. The causal potentialities of a property are part of what constitutes the property’s identity (O’Connor 2000, pp. 70–1, 117–8). O’Connor’s realist view of causation – event and agent – entails that a cause produces or brings about its effect in virtue of the properties of the cause, and properties are universals that have essentially their causal powers (O’Connor 2000, p. 73). Since most philosophers identify the supervenience relation with the causal relation in the case of emergent properties, it is in this causal sense that in the right circumstances, the instantiation of a subvenient property necessitates the instantiation of its associated emergent property.
Since an emergent property is the actualization of causal potentialities in the right circumstances, the emergent property seems to be a part of its causal property’s identity as well. Thus, an emergent property seems to require its base property to exist. In an earlier account, O’Connor accepted this robust claim about emergent properties because he took an emergent property to be an expression of the very nature of the subvenient base causing it. However, in Persons & Causes he says that the notion that an emergent property could not exist without its subvenient base is “possibly gratuitous” (O’Connor 2000, p. 112). His concession seems to result from his desire to offer as minimalist an account of emergence as possible to increase its chances of being accepted by critics and, thus, he leaves open the sort of modality (metaphysical, nomological) required for a minimalist account of emergence. But O’Connor himself continues to accept the more robust account of causality, and this would seem to require that he also continue to accept the stronger notion of emergence.6
Unfortunately, while the Harmony Thesis requires the relevant physical circumstances to necessitate emergent mental properties, including active power, the link between mental properties and the relevant physical circumstances seems utterly contingent. Grounded in strong conceivability, thought experiments that provide strong justifi cation for this claim proliferate throughout the literature. For example, inverted qualia and Chinese Room scenarios seem to be coherent and entirely possible. No strictly physical proposition of N
employing solely physical terms for particulars, properties, relations, or laws renders these thought experiments broadly logically impossible, even in worlds that resemble ours in every physical respect.
Again, different forms of the well-known knowledge argument seem to be quite plausible. Since O’Connor himself accepts a property dualist interpretation of the argument, given this interpretation, no knowledge whatever of merely physical facts gives one any information at all about the presence, absence, or nature of mental facts. If this is so, it is diffi cult to see how one could justify the claim that Φ entails Ψ. No amount of information about the former entails anything at all about the latter. Φ is consistent with our world and with inverted qualia and zombie worlds that are minimal physical duplicates of our world.
The physical/mental link seems contingent indeed.
Further, the modal argument for substance dualism seems plausible. If so, then at least certain versions of the argument imply that physical entities are not necessary for the instantiation of mental properties. Indeed, theism itself presents (at least) one case in which 6. If I am correct about this, then O’Connor cannot simply argue that the emergence of active power is merely metaphysically copossible with N. Rather, the existence of active power would seem to require N. Thus, the existence of substance dualism as a rival position is a crucial aspect of evaluating the Harmony Thesis, since the presence of substance dualism as a coherent rival counts against this stronger claim.
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active power is not dependent upon a physical base. Surely, the existence of God or angels with libertarian power is metaphysically possible, and if so, it is just not clear why the property of active power is causally tied to a physical base.
These thought experiments have been around a long time and there is no sign that they are going away. They provide evidence against the necessitation claim that is central to the Harmony Thesis. As far as I know, O’Connor does not consider the force of the modal argument. I wonder how he would handle cases in which the agent cause is a pure spirit (God). If he says that the presence of the relevant physical base necessitates the emergence of active power but that the latter could obtain without the former, then this would amount to a denial that an emergent property is an essential aspect of the subvenient property whose potentialities actualize it.
Given a functionalist analysis of mental kinds, it may be that a type of mental state could be “realized” in spirits and brains and this fact is consistent with certain brain states in certain circumstances necessitating the realization of a mental state by being suffi cient for such a realization. But this admission would not provide O’Connor with a rejoinder to my argument from the instantiation of active power in spirits. Given that active power is a simply, intrinsically characterized property that is instantiated, and not a structural property that is realized, O’Connor depicts active power as a disposition of its metaphysical base as a matter of metaphysical necessity, and it is hard to see how this disposition could be actualized without its categorical base. Further, most naturalists do not cash out emergent supervenience merely as the logical suffi ciency of the subvenient base. They spell out emergence in terms of two other principles which, together with logical suffi ciency, constitute minimal physicalism:
(1) The anti-Cartesian principle: there can be no purely mental beings (e.g. substantial souls) because nothing can have a mental property without having a physical property as well.
(2) Mind-body dependence: what mental properties an entity has depend on and are determined by its physical properties (cf. Kim 1996, pp. 9–13).
Naturalists employ (1) and (2) in their analysis of emergence precisely because they want to ensure that emergent properties are located in the naturalist ontology by guaranteeing that such properties require, depend on, and are causally determined by their entirely physical subvenient bases. If most naturalists are correct about this requirement for locating an emergent property in the ontology of N, then the actuality, or even the metaphysical possibility of the instantiation of active power in a pure spirit is a problem for the Harmony Thesis. It is one thing to reject the existence of God and angels. It is another thing altogether to claim that God or angels are metaphysical impossibilities, even if the modal status of such a claim is limited to possible worlds with the same physical particulars, properties, relations, and laws as the actual world.
O’Connor does address the knowledge argument and inverted qualia thought experiments. Regarding the former, he opts for a dualist interpretation of the argument and claims that two features of many mental phenomena are emergent properties causally necessitated by the appropriate physical bases: the phenomenal feature and subjectivity which he interprets as the fact that one can come into contact with a conscious property only by having it (O’Connor 2000, p. 116). What about the apparent contingency of the
mental/physical causal link? O’Connor simply denies that all causal necessity must be transparent. He says that there is no good reason to think that when we come to have a scientifi c understanding of some phenomenon, we will just be able to see that a causal effect had to follow from its cause. In the case of conscious properties, although they are necessitated by their causal bases, we just cannot see the necessity of the causal connection.
Regarding inverted qualia, O’Connor adopts the same dismissive strategy, claiming that inverted qualia thought experiments “implausibly drive a wedge between a phenomenal property’s qualitative features and its causal role” (O’Connor 2000, p. 120).
O’Connor’s rejoinder to these arguments sounds very much like a denial that there is a problem, but the intuitions of contingency that lie behind the various dualist arguments in focus are rooted deep within our prephilosophical intuitions, and surely, there is a burden of proof on O’Connor that is not met by his dismissive strategy.
Four arguments against consciousness as emergent
Four additional considerations cumulatively undercut O’Connor’s claim that conscious properties are emergent. First, O’Connor himself admits that “there are no widely accepted working theories that are committed to the existence of emergent properties . . . ” (O’Connor 2000, p. 114), and “there is a lack of hard evidence in favor of emergence in areas that are well understood . . . ” (O’Connor 2000, p. 115). He does not fi nd this particularly troubling, however, because he believes that our scientifi c knowledge is so incomplete that the absence of emergent properties is far from empirically established. But the burden of proof lies in the other direction, and the proper conclusion to draw is that, currently, “the hypothesis of emergence” is yet to be justifi ed.
Second, it is false to claim that “there is convincing evidence” (O’Connor 2000, p. 116) that mental properties are emergent. For three reasons, it is diffi cult and may be impossible to justify their emergence empirically. (1) The emergent hypothesis and substance dualism are empirically equivalent models and no empirical evidence counts in favor of one over the other. (2) To correlate mental and physical properties as a fi rst step toward justifying emergence, one of the two correlates is not available for empirical inspection, and this makes straightforward empirical justifi cation of emergence more diffi cult. (3) It is only in the case of fairly simple mental states (e.g. specifi c sorts of pains) that we have any hard evidence of specifi c mental/physical correlations. There is no evidence whatever that complex mental properties, such as the property thinking-about-the-history-of-skepticism, are correlated with specifi c base physical properties, much less emergent on them. Part of the problem here is the diffi culty of providing criteria for individuating complex mental states in an empirically testable way, a problem that O’Connor himself acknowledges (O’Connor 2000, p. 118). On a fi ne-grained theory of properties, this may be an impossible task, not just a diffi cult one. Thus, many strong physicalists adopt a course-grained view of mental properties as a response to inverted qualia arguments, but this move requires that mental properties be identifi ed with functional roles, and it is not available to O’Connor.
Third, even if mental properties are, in some sense, emergent, that does not entail that they are emergent in O’Connor’s sense. Recall that for O’Connor, emergent properties have these three features: (1) they are simple, intrinsically characterizable, new kinds of properties; (2) they have their own ontologically basic type of causal infl uence; and (3) they are causally necessitated by their subvenient physical base.
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Roughly, the fi rst two features correspond to what John Searle calls Emergence1 and Emergence2, respectively (Searle 1994, pp. 111–2). Now Searle is typical of those naturalists who accept emergent properties as merely emergence1 and not Emergence2. Since we have seen reasons for this in section one, I will not rehearse them here. But one point needs to be emphasized. O’Connor claims that mental properties are the best examples of emergent properties, since they exhibit subjectivity and a phenomenal nature, and he claims that we have “direct evidence” of emergence in the case of consciousness (O’Connor 2000, p. 114).
I agree that we have direct access to and introspective knowledge by acquaintance of our own mental states, but naturalists such as Searle claim that this “direct evidence” merely justifi es conscious properties as Emergence1 and not Emergence2. As I will argue next, the sort of introspective evidence that might be cited to support the claim that some mental properties, especially active power, have their own causal powers also supports substance dualism and, thus, that evidence provides a defeater for the claim that mental properties are emergent. At the very least, this additional introspective evidence goes beyond the sort of direct evidence O’Connor cites to justify consciousness as Emergence2. At best, it merely justifi es them as Emergence1.
However, even if this “direct evidence” justifi es taking active power to be emergent in the fi rst two senses, it utterly fails to justify the third sense. The vast majority of people agree that in introspection they are completely unaware of anything physical. They have no introspective acquaintance with their brain or any other strictly physical object, or with any subvenient physical properties. When philosophers argue that consciousness is a set of emergent properties, they do not appeal to fi rst-person introspection to justify the claim.
No inspection of the brain or any other candidate for the subvenient physical base from either a fi rst- or third-person perspective provides “direct evidence” for treating any conscious property as emergent in sense three.
This is an important conclusion that O’Connor apparently fails to see. In a publication subsequent to Persons & Causes, O’Connor acknowledges that:
[t]he emergentist can and should allow that there is an epistemological presumption against emergentist hypotheses for systems of currently-untested complexity levels absent special reason to suspect that they are different from run of the mill cases. (O’Connor & Wong 2005, p. 674)
But right after this concession, O’Connor attempts to refute a claim by Brian McLaughlin to the effect that, while emergence is a coherent concept, it is enormously implausible that there are any such properties, and least for those with ostensible scientifi c sobriety.
O’Connor’s response consists in two claims: (1) a person’s experiences and other conscious mental states are sui generis simple emergent properties and (2) claim (1) is defeasibly justifi ed by direct fi rst-person awareness of conscious states with an epistemic strength that precludes the a posteriori ascription to them of hidden microstructure hidden to introspection. But O’Connor is simply mistaken about this. Direct fi rst-person awareness completely fails to provide any justifi cation whatsoever for his third characterization of emergent properties, and this is the sense he needs to justify conscious properties as emergent in the sense needed for his Harmony Thesis.
Finally, given O’Connor’s employment of “direct evidence” to justify the claim that conscious properties are emergent ones, the epistemic grounds for this claim derive from
fi rst-person introspection and not from empirical research. As we have just seen, O’Connor insists on this. Given that this evidence provides accurate information about the intrinsic nature of mental properties (his sense one of emergence), and given that we have a fairly good idea of the nature of physical properties, most have seen their connection to be contingent, and that is why naturalists have had such a hard time “locating” them in light of the necessitation condition discussed earlier.
The contingency of the link between mental/physical properties stands in stark contrast to paradigm cases of located macroproperties. Jackson cites macrosolidity, understood as impenetrability, as something easily construed as necessitated by subvenient base traits (e.g.
intermolecular forces, lattice structures) (Jackson 1998, pp. 3–4). Jackson also points out that the prescientifi c notion of macrosolidity as being everywhere dense has been rejected by those who accept N. The reason for this rejection is clear. If real, the latter notion of solidity would be a macroproperty only contingently connected to its microphysical base and, thus, it would not be located in N.
Irreducible mental properties are like the prescientifi c notion of solidity. Since they cannot be located, our dualistic prescientifi c conception of them must be revised according to some strict physicalist strategy. If mental properties are emergent, they fail to resemble paradigm cases of located macroproperties (e.g. solidity as impenetrability), and O’Connor has failed to provide an adequate justifi cation for assimilating them to the paradigm cases.
Interestingly, he acknowledges that:
[r]eductionism nowadays is much disparaged. Yet by our lights, the most plausible variety of physicalism is reductionist, as it does not require one to make dubious moves in the underlying metaphysics of physical properties. (O’Connor & Wong 2005, p. 661)
It is no accident that strong physicalism is (and ought to be) the ontology of naturalism precisely because it does not require such dubious moves. For self-refl ective positive naturalists, the Constitution Thesis is an essential component that fi ts naturalism like a hand in a glove.
AGC, the Harmony Thesis, and the epistemic features of
O’Connor’s case
In contending for his views, O’Connor makes implicit or explicit reference to certain epistemic features of his case both for AGC and the Harmony Thesis. I shall focus on two of these features and argue that, if applied consistently, they place a burden of proof on O’Connor’s defense of the Harmony Thesis – specifi cally, the harmony of AGC and a physical agent – that he has failed to meet: the role of prephilosophical intuitions in his case, and his view of the nature of prephilosophical intuitions about mental properties.
O’Connor and the role of prephilosophical intuitions
In arguing for AGC, O’Connor accepts two important epistemic requirements: (i) one’s view of agency should be guided by and justifi ed in light of prephilosophical, commonsense intuitions, which place a burden of proof on views that abandon them; (ii) these intuitions justify beliefs about the nature of human action itself, and not merely about our concept of human action (O’Connor 2000, pp. xii–xiii, 3–5, 42). O’Connor uses these intuitions to
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place a burden of proof on compatibilists and on critics of the Harmony Thesis. Thus, his task in both areas of debate is to rebut and not refute his interlocutors. Applied to agency, O’Connor claims that incompatibilism is prima facie justifi ed by these intuitions, they ground a modal argument for incompatibilism, and compatibilists fail to overturn the argument based on these prima facie justifi ed intuitions. Applied to the Harmony Thesis, given N and the prephilosophical intuitive justifi cation of AGC, O’Connor says that the burden is on those who reject the Harmony Thesis and accept the Constitution Thesis.
Since the latter is neither entailed by the Causal Unity Thesis nor empirically established, then we are not required to accept it. Failure to meet this burden, coupled with positive grounds for emergent properties (see further discussion), means that there is no good reason to reject the Harmony Thesis.
How does one know one’s prephilosophical intuitions have suffi cient justifi cation to do the work required by O’Connor’s case? There are two features of such intuitions. First, they should be held widely and deeply by normal folk with no ideological axe to grind. Throughout the literature, friends, and foes of incompatibilism acknowledge that it enjoys this sort of intuitive support, and O’Connor makes explicit use of this fact in his case (O’Connor 2000, pp. 4–5; cf. Kane 1996, p. 4; Foster 2001, p. 267). Second, both sides of a dispute employ concepts derived from or based on those intuitions. John Bishop is typical of many compatibilists when he explicitly employs a libertarian concept of agency to develop his own compatibilist model that falls under that concept “closely enough” to be adequate (Bishop 1989, pp. 58, 69, 72, 95–7, 103–4, 114, 120, 126–7, 140–4, 177–80). Bishop allows a libertarian conception of agency to guide the development of his own account, and to be the legitimate source both of counter arguments in the form of thought experiments and of the sense of adequacy for his responses to those counterarguments. Libertarian intuitions seem pervasive in debates about agency.
Both characteristics seem present for intuitions on behalf of substance dualism and against physicalist views of the self. Friends and foes of dualism admit that it is the commonsense view, and the vast majority of people throughout history have been dualists about the self in one form or another. Jaegwon Kim acknowledges that:
We commonly think that we, as persons, have a mental and bodily dimension. . . . Something like this dualism of personhood, I believe, is common lore shared across most cultures and religious traditions . . . (Kim 2001, p. 30)
Along similar lines, Frank Jackson says that “. . . our folk conception of personal identity is Cartesian in character . . . ” (Jackson 1998, p. 45).
Prephilosophical intuitions in support of a substantial, immaterial self are widely and deeply held, and they ground the modal argument for substance dualism. These intuitions seem expressed in the concepts and arguments used by dualists and physicalists. The intelligibility of near-death experiences, arguments from the unity of one’s conscious fi eld, thought experiments about personal identity to the effect that the person is merely contingently related to his body or psychological traits, and responses to these thought experiments (e.g. various causal chain analyses of personal identity) seem to employ a substantial, immaterial conception of the self.
O’Connor could respond that in the case of substance dualism, grounds for N justify a rejection of these prephilosophical intuitions, but in light of his own employment of similar prephilosophical intuitions for AGC and the Harmony Thesis, this response seems
arbitrary. After all, most naturalists employ N to justify a rejection of the intuitions in support of AGC, a fact that O’Connor acknowledges. Most naturalists agree that prephilosophical intuitions are on the side of AGC and substance dualism, but they adopt a consistent attitude – rejection – toward both sets of intuitions. While strictly consistent with the grounds for N, most naturalists believe that AGC and substance dualism are not as plausible as compatibilism (or noncausal versions of incompatibilism) and physicalism in light of those grounds.
Moreover, just as the Causal Unity Thesis fails to entail the Constitution Thesis and the latter has not been empirically established, so the empirical grounds for N fail to entail or empirically establish a physical agent. If O’Connor thinks otherwise, he is invited to cite the empirical evidence that accomplishes this feat. In the absence of such evidence and in light of his own epistemic characterization of the requirements placed on those who would reject the Harmony Thesis, it is hard to see what O’Connor would say to the same claim made by substance dualists about the epistemic status of physicalism, given the presence of prephilosophical intuitions for substance dualism.
O’Connor and the nature of prephilosophical intuitions
In addition to the role of prephilosophical intuitions in O’Connor’s case for AGC and the Harmony Thesis, the nature of those intuitions is also of crucial importance. Philosophers differ about the nature of intuitions, for example, some hold that they are merely dispositions to believe certain things. However, the traditional view of intuitions takes them to be cases of fi rst-person direct awareness of a relevant intentional object reported by way of the phenomenological use of “seems” or “appears.” O’Connor seem to agree: intuitions in support of AGC are the way things “seem” to people (O’Connor 2000, p. 4); people have
“direct evidence” of the nature of conscious properties themselves. Thus, one has direct fi rst-person access to one’s own mental states and, indeed, if this is so, such access seems to provide nondoxastic justifi cation for prephilosophical beliefs about/concepts of mental properties, including the nature of active power. He also claims to experience himself directly bringing about the formation of an intention (O’Connor 2000, p. 124). If one accepts this account of intuitions, then one has the resources to explain why certain beliefs are so widely and deeply held.
But the same claim is often made by dualists regarding intuitions about the self. Stewart Goetz has argued that we are directly aware of ourselves and, on this basis, we are justifi ed in believing substance dualism (see Goetz 2001, pp. 89–104). It is on the basis of such fi rst-person self-awareness that people have the prephilosophical dualist beliefs they do, and this is why these beliefs (or, at least, dualist concepts) play such a regulative role in philosophical arguments about personal identity and related topics.
Of course, it is fashionable to claim that people have direct access to their mental states but not to their selves. Since Hume, the major strategy employed to justify this assertion is the claim that people just are never aware of themselves. I believe that dualists have provided adequate responses to this strategy, but that is beside the present point because I do not believe that O’Connor can avail himself of this strategy. To see why, we need to examine his response to an epistemological objection raised against his version of AGC.
The objection is that we cannot know whether any events are produced in the manner that AGC postulates, since agent-caused events would be indistinguishable from ones that were essentially random (O’Connor 2000, pp. 123–4).
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O’Connor points out that this Humean type objection would be equally telling against his realist version of event causation (event causes produce their effects). The Humean allows direct evidence for the pattern of relations among events, but not of the causal event bringing about its effect. O’Connor says that in some cases we seem to observe directly the causal connectedness between cause and effect. He illustrates this by pointing out that we do not merely observe the movement of the hammer followed by the movement of the nail; rather, we see the hammer’s moving the nail.
Now it is not clear how one can directly see the hammer’s moving the nail without directly seeing the hammer. Similarly, it is hard to see how one could directly be aware of one’s own self producing an intention to act without being directly aware of one’s own self.
Indeed, O’Connor acknowledges that:
. . . in the deliberate formation of an intention, the coming to be of my intention doesn’t seem to me merely to occur at the conclusion of my deliberation; I seem to experience myself directly bringing it about. (O’Connor 2000, p. 124)
This would seem to imply that people are able to be directly aware of their own selves. If so, and given that prephilosophical intuitions are widely acknowledged to be of a substance dualist sort, the very nature of intuitions as fi rst person forms of direct access seems to offer defeasible justifi ed beliefs of a substance dualist sort.
Perhaps O’Connor has other reasons for rejecting the use of fi rst-person direct awareness of the self as grounds for substance dualism. To my knowledge, he has not addressed the topic in writing. If he does, there seem to be two requirements for such response. First, without begging the question, he is going to have to provide suffi cient grounds for rejecting fi rst-person awareness of the self and the role such awareness plays in justifying substance dualism in such a way that he does not undermine his own use of fi rst-person awarenesses as a source of justifi cation for AGC. For example, he cannot simply assert that naturalism makes substance dualism implausible, so we must reject the force of this dualist argument, because the same thing is widely said about the epistemic impact of naturalism on the justifi cation of AGC.
Second, he would need to offer an explanation of the origin and justifi cation of the various dualist intuitions that are a part of O’Connor’s own characterization of the agent, one I accept. From where did it come and why we should believe it. I believe there is a good answer to these questions – fi rst-person awareness of the self – but these questions would need to be answered in a way that avoids lending support to substance dualism. For example, it seems implausible to suggest that we have fi rst-person awareness of ourselves as physical substances. If we are physical substances, yet we lack fi rst-person awarenesses that this is so and, in fact, seem to have awarenesses that support substance dualism, we would need to know the source of and justifi cation for dualist intuitions that form an essential part of the self qua agent.
The fact is that it does not seem to most folks that they are macrolevel objects. On the contrary, it seems to them from the fi rst-person perspective – the perspective upon which O’Connor draws to justify AGC – that they are mental subjects who fail to be aware of exemplifying any physical properties. The issue then becomes whether there is any good reason to think we are physical objects, although we are not aware of being such. As far as I know, O’Connor never gives us any reason to think we are physical objects, and he must provide such an argument. When he does, he runs the danger of bringing forth
considerations of a kind (e.g. from the third-person perspective) that, if persuasive, could also undermine our conviction that we have libertarian freedom. If he simply breaks rank with most people and says that he is, in fact, aware of being a material object by fi rst-person introspection, then this would at best justify locating his view within panpsychism and not within naturalism.
Section Five: Colin McGinn and Mysterian “Naturalism”
Unsatisfi ed with strong physicalism on the one hand and the various extant naturalist solutions for the origin of consciousness on the other, Colin McGinn has offered the most radical “naturalist” alternative to date (McGinn 1999).7 It is so bizarre that it is fair to question whether, even if successful, it is a naturalist position in any meaningful sense of the term. In this section, I shall describe and seek to rebut McGinn’s position.
McGinn’s mysterian “naturalism”
According to McGinn, given the radical difference between mind and matter, due to our epistemic limitations inherited from evolution, there is, in principle, no knowable naturalistic solution to the origin of consciousness or its regular correlation with matter that stays within the widely accepted naturalist epistemology and ontology. Nor is there a plausible nonnatural alternative. What is needed is a solution radically different in kind from anything previously offered, one that must meet two conditions: (i) it must be a naturalistic solution; and (ii) it must depict the emergence of consciousness and its correlation with matter as necessary and not contingent facts. More specifi cally, there must be three kinds of unknowable natural properties that solve the problem. We can unpack McGinn’s position by examining four different aspects of his view.
McGinn and property/event dualism
First, McGinn is committed to property/event dualism. He defi nes consciousness by giving fi rst-person, introspective, ostensive defi nitions of particular phenomenal states. He also believes that a fairly simple form of the knowledge argument is conclusive.
McGinn on standard naturalist solutions
He also rejects all other naturalist solutions for many of the reasons mentioned in section one: the uniformity of nature, the inadequacy of Darwinian explanations, the centrality for naturalism and inadequacy of combinatorial modes of explanation along with the bottom/up combinatorial processes constituitive of the Grand Story, the acceptance of a necessitation requirement for an adequate naturalist account.
7. Unless otherwise noted, my description of McGinn’s position is taken from The Mysterious Flame. McGinn fi rst thought of his mysterian naturalism in the late 1980s [see his The Problem of Consciousness (1991, p. vii; cf.
chaps. 1–4)], and his view has remained largely unchanged until the present [see his Consciousness and its Objects (2004, reprinted unchanged in 2006, p. 1)].
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McGinn on antinaturalist solutions
Third, various antinaturalist solutions must be rejected. He evaluates and rejects three of them: theistic dualism and AC, hyperdualism, and panpsychism. For present purposes, let us examine McGinn’s treatment of theistic dualism and AC.
McGinn says that AC is a plausible argument and that there is no plausible naturalist rival outside of his own. But for six reasons, AC is a bad argument. For one thing, if we appeal to a conscious God to explain fi nite consciousness, we generate a vicious infi nite regress for we will have to explain why God Himself is conscious. And if we stop the regress with an unexplainable conscious God, we could just as easily do the same thing by taking fi nite consciousness as an unexplainable brute fact.
Second, the God hypothesis dignifi es consciousness with the word “soul” as an independent thing that uses the body, and thereby generates unanswerable questions that undercut AC: Do rats have souls? Why does God give souls to rats and not worms? Third, theists exaggerate the gap between minds and brains. Mind depends on brain. Why would this be so if mind depends on God? Fourth, the existence of causally powerful substantial souls that are dependent upon brains to which they are contingently connected implies that zombie worlds possible. Now, such a world seems prima facie possible, says McGinn, but on further inspection it faces an insurmountable diffi culty. It means that consciousness is epiphenomenal and any view that entails epiphenomenalism must be rejected. Epiphenomenalism ensues because if a zombie world is possible if follows that the physical will chug along just the same regardless of whether or not consciousness obtains. Fifth, we do not know how God produces consciousness, so at best AC is a stalemate vis-à-vis naturalism.
Finally, AC gets off the ground only if consciousness is a mystery for which we need an explanation. But, claims McGinn, his account provides a defl ationary explanation for why consciousness is a mystery and, in so doing, it becomes obvious that the sort of mystery involved is not of the right kind needed to justify AC.
McGinn’s solution
Finally, McGinn offers his own “solution” to the problem. He begins by claiming that while evolutionary processes formed noetic faculties in us apt for doing science, it did not develop faculties capable of doing philosophy. Thus, we have cognitive closure regarding philosophical topics, where an organism has cognitive closure with respect to some domain of knowledge just in case that domain is beyond the organism’s faculties to grasp. An area of inquiry in which there is no progress is a good sign of cognitive closure, and philosophy in general, and the mind/body problem in particular are cognitively closed to human faculties due to their limitations that follow from the evolutionary processes that generated them. Thus, the mystery of consciousness would not exist if we did not have the cognitive limitations we do.
What we can do, however, is characterize the kinds of conditions that must be true of any adequate solution: (i) There must be some order underlying the heterogeneous appearances of mind and matter because nature abhors a miracle. (ii) It must be a naturalistic solution. (iii) It must depict the emergence of consciousness and its regular correlation with matter as necessary and not contingent facts. More specifi cally, there must be three kinds of unknowable natural properties that solve the problem: some general properties
of matter that enter into the production of consciousness when assembled into a brain (thus, all matter has the potentiality to underlie consciousness); some natural property of the brain he calls C* that unleashes these general properties under the right conditions; just as the brain must have a hidden unknowable structure that allows consciousness to emerge from it, so consciousness must have a hidden unknowable essence that allows it to be embedded in the brain.
There is one fi nal aspect to McGinn’s position that provides a naturalistic solution to the apparent nonspatiality of the mental. According to McGinn, ours is a spatial world, yet conscious states have neither spatial extension nor location. This raises a problem: If the brain is spatial but conscious states are not, how could the brain cause consciousness?
This seems like a rupture in the natural order. The nonspatiality of consciousness raises serious problems for emergence and causal interaction. McGinn proffers two solutions to this problem. First, he argues that the Big Bang had to have a cause, this cause “operated”
in a state of reality temporally prior to the creation of matter and space, and this reality existed in a nonspatial mode. So the cause of the Big Bang was not spatial or material, yet it obeyed some laws in the prior state. At the Big Bang, we have a transformation from nonspatial to spatial reality, and at the appearance of consciousness we have a converse transformation. The nonspatial dimension continued to exist in matter after the Big Bang, lurking behind the scene until brains evolved, at which time this dimension showed itself again.
McGinn’s second solution focuses on our concept of space. Typically, we think we are correct to depict space as a three-dimensional manifold containing extended objects. But perhaps this depiction is wrong. Maybe its not that consciousness is nonspatial; perhaps it is spatial according to the real nature of space that is quite different from the commonsense view. If we defi ne “space” as “whatever is out there as a containing medium of all things,”
then it may be that the real nature of space allows it to contain consciousness and matter in a natural way. Here the Big Bang was a transformation of space itself and not a transition from nonspace to space.
Critique
I do not believe that McGinn’s position will be widely accepted and that for good reason.
In this section, I will criticize his evaluation of theistic dualism and AC and reserve discussion of McGinn’s view of the mystery of consciousness for latter.
Theistic dualism and AC
McGinn argues that by appealing to God to explain fi nite consciousness, one generates a vicious infi nite regress and if the regress is stopped with divine consciousness as a brute fact, then one could just as easily stop with fi nite consciousness. This sort of argument has been around a long time and McGinn appears to be ignorant of what many believe is a long-standing, successful rebuttal to it. Let us consider the fi rst horn of McGinn’s dilemma.
McGinn seems to think that if we acknowledge there is a problem with cases of fi nite consciousness that must be solved by appealing to other fi nite consciousness, then this problem generalizes and applies equally to a conscious God. Unfortunately, McGinn is wrong about this and fails to appreciate what motivates the relevant regress and the sort of regress it is.
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For one thing, the infi nity of the regress is impossible because it involves traversing an actual infi nite and, arguably, that cannot be done. To illustrate, one cannot count from one to ℵ0 for no matter how far one has counted, he will still have an infi nite number of items to count. Such a task can begin, but it cannot be completed. Moreover, trying to count from −ℵ0 to 0 can neither be completed (it involves the same number of tasks as going from one to ℵ0) nor begun for the following reason: trying to reach any number in the past will itself require an infi nite traversal as a preliminary step. Now in a per se regress (see further discussion), the transitivity of the relation ordering the regress implies that the dependence among members runs from the earlier to latter members. Thus, such regresses are precisely like traversing from −ℵ0 to 0. Space considerations forbid me to discuss this line of argument further, but in philosophy of religion it is part of what is called the kalam cosmological argument. I believe the argument is sound, and I refer the reader to some relevant sources that provide a more thorough evaluation of it than can be done here (cf.
Craig & Smith 1993; see also Moreland 2004).
If this is correct, the regress must be fi nite, and this requires there to be a fi rst member.
I shall describe next some necessary conditions that must be satisfi ed if one is to select an adequate fi rst member. For now, I merely note that it is not an arbitrary decision to stop the regress because it is vicious, indeed.
The fi rst problem with the existence of an infi nite regress of the sort McGinn mentions is, as it were, its length – it involves traversing an actual infi nite series of members. Besides the problem of traversing an actual infi nite, there is another problem with the regress that McGinn fails to note: by its very nature it is vicious. To see this, let us ask how should
“vicious” be characterized here? At least four characterizations have been offered. Roderick Chisholm says that, “One is confronted with a vicious infi nite regress when one attempts a task of the following sort: Every step needed to begin the task requires a preliminary step”
(Chisholm 1996, p. 53). For example, if the only way to tie together any two things whatever is to connect them with a rope, then one would have to use two ropes to tie the two things to the initial connecting ropes, and use additional ropes to tie them to these subsequent ropes, and so on. According to Chisholm, this is a vicious infi nite regress because the task cannot be accomplished.
D. M. Armstrong claims that when a reductive analysis of something contains a covert appeal to the very thing being analyzed, it generates a vicious infi nite regress because the analysis does not solve anything, but merely postpones a solution (Armstrong 1978a, pp.
19–21). No advance has been made. He says that this is like a man without funds who writes checks from an empty account to cover his debts, and so on, forever.
Chisholm and Armstrong’s analyses are helpful. But far and away, the most sophisticated treatment of regresses, including vicious ones, was provided by Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. According to Thomas Aquinas a vicious regress is a per se regress which exhibits two key features (see Brown 1976): (1) it is not just a list of members, but an ordering of members in the sequence; and (2) the relationship among the members of the series is transitive. If a stands in R to b and b in R to c, then a stands in R to c, and so on. According to Aquinas, if there is no fi rst member in the series that simply has the relevant feature in itself, no other member of the series will have that feature, since each subsequent member can only “pass on” that feature if it fi rst receives it.
Consider a chain of people borrowing a typewriter. Whether or not the chain is vicious depends on one’s view of the correct description of entities at each stage in the chain.
Suppose a goes to b to borrow a typewriter and b complies, claiming to have just what a
needs. If asked how b has a typewriter to loan, he claims to have borrowed it from c who, having already borrowed one from d, has one to give to b. Allegedly, at each stage in the chain, the relevant entity can be described as “a possessor of a typewriter who can loan it to another.” Thus, it is alleged, the regress is not vicious.
But it is incomplete to describe each person as “a possessor of a typewriter who can loan it to another.” Rather, each person is “a possessor of a typewriter who can loan it to another who fi rst had to borrow it from another.” At each stage, the person qua lender is such only because he is also a borrower. Thus, given the nature of the series, each stage cannot be adequately described without reference to the earlier stage. Because each member is a borrowing lender, no one will ever get a typewriter unless the regress stops with someone who differs from all the other members of the series in being a lender who just has a typewriter without having to borrow it.
Analogously, because fi nite conscious beings are contingent, before each such being can give what it has (consciousness) to another, it must fi rst undergo the preliminary step of receiving fi nite conscious being fi rst. In Armstrong’s terms, each member of the chain exhibits the same problematic feature, namely, being a lender of consciousness who must himself “borrow” consciousness from another. In Aquinas’ terms, the members of the regress qua conscious lenders stand in a transitive relationship to the relevant other members in the chain, so without a member who just has consciousness without lending it, there would be no consciousness.
Finally, Duns Scotus offered detailed analyses of various regresses some of which is relevant for present purposes (Cross 2005, pp. 17–28). According to Scotus, there are two very different sorts of ordered sequences involving causal or other sorts of dependence relations: an essentially ordered or per se regress and an accidentally ordered or per accidens regress.
The former are irrefl exive (if refl exive, Scotus says one will have self-causation, which is absurd), asymmetrical (if symmetrical, then a member will be both a cause and an effect of the same member in the series), and, most importantly, transitive. In some essentially ordered regresses, an earlier member actually causes a latter member to cause: either a causes effects in b suffi cient for b to cause the relevant effect in c ( a effects b) or a causes b’s causing c ( a affects b). In various sorts of per se dependency chains, the ordering of dependency is (at least) an ordering of necessary dependency conditions from earlier to latter members in the chain.
Scotus identifi es three essentially ordered regresses relevant to our discussion: existence, getting the power to operate, and exercising the power to operate. Scotus’ main argument against the infi nity of such regresses is crafted to avoid a fallacy of composition (e.g. since each member of the series is dependent, the whole must be dependent). His argument is that there is something in the fi nal effect, the last member of the chain about which we are puzzling and seeking an adequate explanation (existence, causal power, consciousness), that is missing in all the other members precisely as essentially ordered with respect to each other, and that requires a fi rst member which is (1) not a part of the chain and (2) simply has the feature of the fi nal effect in itself without having to get it elsewhere.
But why must we stop with God and not some particular fi nite conscious being? The decision to stop with God is not arbitrary for this reason. The sort of regress we are considering is one such that in the respect relevant to the ordering of the regress’s members, the stopping place must be unique and different from all others. In the typewriter case, the relevant respect is that each member does not simply have a typewriter; he is himself one who must borrow before he lends. The proper stopping place is with a “fi rst mover” who
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simply has a typewriter with no need to borrow one before lending it. Now, each fi nite conscious being is contingent in two senses: with respect to its existence and with respect to the fact that consciousness was actualized in it. These types of contingency disqualify fi nite conscious beings from being the proper fi rst mover. Being a necessary being in both senses, God is such a proper First Mover.
This kind of dialectic occurs frequently in philosophy. In agency theory, an advocate of AGC begins with certain concerns about human action and responsibility, opts for AGC, and confronts a problem, viz., what does the agent do to bring about an action? Desiring to avoid a vicious infi nite regress, the advocate of AGC concludes that an agent cause is a fi rst cause, a fi rst mover, an entity that may bring about a change without having to change fi rst or be changed to do so. In this sense, agent causes are sui generis compared with ordinary event causes in that the latter are changed changers characterized by passive liabilities; and agents, being characterized by sui generis active power, cannot be caused to act freely.
In epistemology, foundational beliefs are discovered to be such that they provide justifi cation for nonfoundational beliefs without having to receive their entire justifi cation from their relationship with other beliefs. In one way or another, foundationalists stop the epistemic regress with an epistemic fi rst mover, for example, a nondoxastic self-presenting property. In ontology, discussions of relations and Bradley’s famous regress lead to the notion that relations are discovered to be able to relate relata without having themselves to stand in a different relation to those relata. They are unrelatable relaters. AC is an argument form relevantly analogous to these.
McGinn’s second critique of theistic dualism and AC is the claim that it uses “soul” to dignify consciousness, and this generates serious diffi culties (do rats have souls and, if so, why rats and not worms?). As it stands, this is not much of an argument. For one thing, it is simply false. AC does not quantify over souls in any of its premises, and Premise (1) launches AC on the basis of the existence of consciousness or its lawlike correlations with the brain.
Second, the question “Why do rats have souls and not worms?” is an ambiguous question. If it is the question “Why would God, if He exists, give souls to rats and not worms?,”
presumably, the answer would be along the lines of why I painted my dining room walls and not the bathroom yellow: I wanted to. What is so problematic about that? If He exists, presumably, God wanted to create certain things and give them certain accidental attributes, and He did not wish to do so for other possible beings He refrained from creating or giving certain accidental attributes. If, instead, the question is about why some things are conscious and others are not, one could say that this is just part of the nature of different things. It is part of the nature of a rat to be conscious and not part of the nature of, say, a tree or rock. Obviously, such an answer involves a commitment to some form of essentialism, but whether or not essentialism is a plausible metaphysical framework is not specifi cally a theistic concern. This theistic response could employ “nature” in a variety of ways and still be successful.
Finally, focusing on consciousness and not souls, McGinn may be claiming that there is a sort of arbitrariness about theistic dualism such that it entails that at some point, God rather arbitrarily decided to create beings with consciousness and others without it. In response, the sort of “arbitrariness” that seems to underlie this claim is precisely what one would expect if property dualism is true. On a widely accepted dualist understanding of the knowledge of other minds, one starts with fi rst-person acquaintance of one’s own mental states and is justifi ed in attributing to other minds whatever mental states are
needed to explain the organism’s behavior. Ontologically, an organism either is or is not conscious, it either does or does not have some specifi c mental state. But epistemologically, as organisms become increasingly disanalogous to humans, one is less and less justifi ed in attributing specifi c mental states or consciousness itself to the organism. Thus, one is increasingly less justifi ed in such attributions applied to another normal human, a rat, or a worm. As with other cases involving degreed properties (in this case, “being justifi ed to such and such a degree”), sorites-style diffi culties surface about drawing precise lines among the relevant ordered entities. However, far from being a problem, this is precisely what one would expect from a dualist perspective and McGinn is mistaken if he thinks otherwise.
McGinn also criticizes theistic dualism and AC on the grounds that, if true, it entails that consciousness depends entirely on God’s will but this is not true, since consciousness clearly depends on the brain. Again, McGinn’s objection is ambiguous. I can see two interpretations each of which is fairly easy to rebut. His question assumes that if something depends entirely on God, then it will not depend on something else in any sense. But this is a bizarre view of divine providence and God’s act of sustaining contingent beings in existence. No matter what the precise theistic formulation of these matters is, theists agree that there is a relevant distinction between primary and secondary causality. For example, just because God created and continually sustains the physical universe and its laws, and is in this sense that upon which they “depend entirely,” it hardly follows that lightning does not causally depend on certain antecedent conditions within the cosmos. Various causal relations and dependencies within the created order are consistent with the view that if God had not created and does not continually sustain the universe (or some feature within it), then the universe (or some feature within it) would not exist. Clearly, there is no problem here.
Alternatively, the question may be asking why, if the creation of consciousness is a contingent act, there is a covarying dependence among life forms according to which as brains become less and less complex, consciousness does so as well. Note the sort of question this is. It is a theological question about why God would arrange things in this way. So understood, the question is not a request for a scientifi c answer or even a distinctively philosophical one. It is a question whose answer requires reference to God’s possible intentions and motives for arranging things in this way. As I see it, the question is part of a larger one about why there are bodies in the fi rst place.
What are the adequacy requirements for a theological answer to this question? In my view, we have a situation parallel to the difference between a theodicy and defense regarding the problem of evil for theism. A theodicy aims at providing an account of why God actually permits evil in the world. By contrast, a defense offers no such account but seeks merely to show that atheists have failed to carry their case that evil is inconsistent with the existence of God. A defense seeks to undercut the atheist’s argument by providing a possible solution on the grounds that there is a substantial burden of proof on the atheist for which a defense is adequate.
It is hard to see the force of this problem. McGinn would need to give reasons for thinking that the dependency of mind on the brain in the manner specifi ed earlier (and the dependency goes in both directions) is such that there is no reason God would have for creating such a situation. To be successful, McGinn would have to assume that there is no possible reason for God to make things this way. But it is hard to see why this would be the case.
The theist could easily hold that God has reasons for doing things this way and even if the
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details of those reasons are not available to us, the mere fact that God could easily have them is suffi cient to undercut this objection.
Moreover, according to a theology of the body that I favor, God created bodies to provide a source of power for living things so they could act in ways independent of God’s own exercise of effi cient causal power. Bodies provide power for action in the created world.
Further, the more complicated an animal’s consciousness is, the more complex and fi nely tuned the body would need to be to be responsive to the fi ne-graded mental states in causal interaction with it. Consider a form of consciousness with a complexity suffi cient to engage in a variety of quite specifi c actions associated with precise nuances in thought, believe, emotion, desire, and so forth. On this view, if such a consciousness were causally connected to a material object without the physical complexity needed to register in the physical world the appropriate mental complexity, that mental complexity would be wasted. Such a theology of the body is clearly a possible reason God could have for making things the way he has, and it is suffi cient for the purposes of defense required to undercut McGinn’s objection.
McGinn’s fourth criticism of theistic dualism is that, if true, it entails the possibility of zombie worlds that imply an implausible epiphenomenalism regarding conscious states.
But the latter entailment is not the case. One could consistently embrace a form of dualism that entails the possibility of zombie worlds, and also believe that causal interaction between consciousness and matter in the actual world is contingent. From this, it follows that an epiphenomenal world is, indeed, a possible world, but it does not follow that the actual world is an epiphenomenal one. One could go on to unpack “brings about” in “mental state M brings about brain state B” in terms of causal necessitation, viz., “M brings about B in all interactionist worlds relevantly similar to the actual world.” All this is clearly consistent with zombie worlds.
I am among those dualists who believe that the causal relation (and any other relevant relations, e.g. the emergent supervenient relation construed in noncausal terms) between consciousness and matter is a contingent one. If God wished, He could have created an epiphenomenal world. Inverted qualia worlds, zombie worlds, the metaphysical possibility of body switches, or disembodied existence are part of the case for the contingency of the relevant mind/matter relations. Since McGinn’s objection assumes that dualism entails such contingency, I need not defend it in the present dialectic. Rather, I am arguing that if we grant this contingency and the possibility of both zombie and epiphenomenal worlds, it does not follow that our word is an epiphenomenal one. The dualist will hold that as a matter of contingent fact we live in a world of causal interaction and nothing McGinn says threatens this claim.
McGinn’s fi fth objection is that the theistic solution does not solve anything because it does not tell us how God created consciousness. Without providing such a mechanism, the God hypothesis is vacuous and fails to be an advance over a naturalistic explanation which likewise fails to answer the how question.
There are two things to be said in response to this argument. First, McGinn’s claim simply fails to understand the logic of personal explanation. I will not repeat here our discussion in section two of the nature of personal explanation. I make one simple point: a personal explanation can be epistemically successful without making any reference to a mechanism or other means by which the hypothesized agent brought about the state of affairs in the explanandum. I can explain the existence and precise nature of a certain arrangement of objects on our dinner table by saying that my wife brought it about so we
could have an Italian dinner with the Isslers. That explanation is informative (I can tell its Italian food we are having, that we are having the Isslers over and not the Duncans, that my wife did this and not my daughter, that natural processes are inadequate). And the adequacy of such a personal explanation is quite independent of whether or not I know exactly how my wife did it.
There are many sciences that involve formulating criteria for inferring intelligent agent causes to explain certain phenomena and for refraining from inferring such causes. And in these sciences, such an inference is usually both epistemically justifi ed and explanatorily signifi cant completely independently of knowledge as to how the agent brought about the phenomena. In forensic science, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), psychology, sociology, and archeology, a scientist can know that an intelligent agent is the best explanation of a sequence involving the fi rst 20 prime numbers in a row or that such and such is an intelligently designed artifact used in a culture’s religious sacrifi ces without having so much as a clue as to how the sequence or artifact was made.
Furthermore, an appeal to a particular epistemic value, in this case to the requirement that a necessary condition for successful explanation is that a theory explains how a certain phenomenon was produced, is question-begging against AC and represents a naive understanding of the role various epistemic values play in adjudicating between rival explanations of some phenomenon.
For one thing, two rivals may solve a problem differently depending on the way each theory depicts the phenomenon to be solved. Thus, the epistemic values for assessing one theory may differ substantially from those relevant to its rival. Thus, it is often more complicated to compare rivals than McGinn seems to assume. It is possible for two rivals to rank the relative merits of epistemic virtues in different ways or even give the same virtue a different meaning or application. Rivals can differ radically about the nature, application, and relative importance of a particular epistemic virtue. Thus, it is question-begging to claim that a criterion P set by one hypothesis should be most important for its rival such that if it fails to satisfy P it is explanatorily inferior.
Finally, sometimes one rival will consider a phenomenon basic and not in need of a solution, empirical or otherwise. It may, therefore, disallow questions about how or why that phenomenon occurs and, thus, can hardly be faulted for not being fruitful in suggesting lines of empirical research for mechanisms whose existence is not postulated by the theory. By way of application, a theistic dualism could take God’s creation of consciousness and its precise causal correlation with the brain to be a basic action for which there is no further “how” question to be asked. And the theistic dualist can also claim that, given the nature of personal explanation, the epistemic value of citing a mechanism in answer to a
“how” question is not as important as other epistemic values. Thus, failure to answer such a question is not a signifi cant issue in light of its own inner logic. But the same cannot be said for naturalism, and given the way physical explanation works, the importance of answering “how” questions by citing a mechanism is, indeed, quite high. Thus, the naturalist’s failure to answer this question is a serious one but the same cannot be said for theistic dualism.
Four problems with mysterian “naturalism”
We come to an evaluation of McGinn’s own position – mysterian “naturalism.” For at least four reasons, it must be judged a failure. First, given McGinn’s agnosticism about the
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properties that link mind and matter, how can he confi dently assert some of their features?
How does he know they are nonsensory, prespatial, or spatial in an unknowable way? How can he confi dently assert that we are naturally constituted from smoothly meshing materials, as seamless as anything else in nature? How does he know some of these properties underlie all matter? These seem unanswerable.
The only one he proffers is that we must provide a naturalistic solution and all ordinary naturalistic ones either deny consciousness or fail to solve the problem. But given the presence of AC, McGinn’s claims are simply question-begging and ad hoc according to criteria developed in section two. Indeed, his agnosticism seems to be a convenient way of hiding behind naturalism and avoiding a theistic explanation. Given that theism enjoys a positive degree of justifi cation prior to the problem of consciousness, he should avail himself of the explanatory resources of theism.
In a related fashion, it is sometimes argued, and not without some justifi cation, that attempts to draw a line between what we can and cannot know requires that one must fi rst cross the line to draw it. McGinn comes close to doing the very thing he claims cannot be done. Whether or not one accepts this claim about drawing lines, McGinn’s view seems self-refuting. He tells us that we did not evolve with faculties apt for doing philosophy, that when confronted with a lack of progress we should draw the conclusion that we are cognitively closed to the subject matter in question, and so on. Yet McGinn’s entire book is a species of philosophical argument, and he explicitly states that his purpose is to develop and defend his viewpoint over against rivals. He also derives philosophical theses (e.g. skeptical theses in areas for which we have cognitive closure) by philosophically studying the history of philosophy, he gives an analysis of the nature of human knowledge, he offers philosophical – not scientifi c – arguments against positions that rival naturalism. I may be missing something here, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that McGinn’s own project is refuted, or at least undercut by his own views that constitute the core of that very project.
Second, it is not clear that his solution is a version of naturalism. His hypothesized properties cannot be known by employment of the naturalist epistemology, nor are they relevantly similar to the rest of the naturalist ontology. McGinn may appropriately call these “naturalistic” properties in the sense that they are (1) not created by God and (2) are regularly involved in giving rise to consciousness in organisms. However, it is vacuous to call these properties “naturalistic” in the only sense relevant to theistic dualism and AC, namely, as entities whose nature, existence, and activity can be located in a natural ontology and given a naturalistic explanation. Given that naturalism is a worldview that claims superior explanatory power to its rivals, these are bizarre, sui generis brute facts on a naturalist view. Indeed, McGinn’s ontology is so bizarre that it may be taken as a reductio against naturalism if McGinn is correct that no other naturalist solution is available. McGinn’s solution is actually closer to an agnostic form of panpsychism than to naturalism, he is clear that panpsychism is a rival to and not a legitimate specifi cation of naturalism.
Third, McGinn does not solve the problem of consciousness, he merely relocates it.
Rather than having two radically different entities, he offers us three unknowable properties with radically different aspects, for example, his links contain the potentiality for ordinary spatiality and nonspatiality, for ordinary materiality, and for mentality. Moreover, these aspects of the linking properties are just as contingently related as they seem to be without a linking intermediary. The contingency comes from the nature of mind and matter as naturalists conceive it. It does not remove the contingency to relocate it as two aspects of unknowable intermediaries with both.
Finally, there are diffi culties with McGinn’s solution to the problem of the nonspatiality of mental states. According to his fi rst option, the Big Bang had to have a cause, this cause
“operated” in a state of reality temporally prior to the creation of matter and space, this reality existed in a nonspatial mode, and while the cause of the Big Bang was neither spatial nor material, it still obeyed some laws in the prior state.
There is much in this solution that brings a smile to the theist: the Big Bang had to have a cause, presumably because either events per se or those in which something comes-to -be must have causes, the cause is not spatial nor is it material. This cause shares important features with the God of classic theism. At the very least, it is hard to see how the hypothesized state of affairs satisfi es the conditions for location in a naturalist ontology specifi ed in section one. The presence of temporality is not suffi cient to claim this is a naturalistic state of affairs because on the basis of strong conceivability there are possible worlds in which angels alone exist temporally. As Kant argued, fi nite consciousness entails temporality, so such worlds are temporal but hardly apt for appropriation by a naturalist.
Nor is the presence of law suffi cient. In discussing constituent/whole relations, Edmund Husserl described a host of ( a priori) laws that he claimed governed the coming-to-be and perishing of various entities, and changes that take place among them (Moreland 2002a).
However, these laws are not physical laws of nature. Even if Husserl is wrong, his ontology and many others like it demonstrate that the mere presence of laws that govern change in some purported ontological model is far from suffi cient to claim that the model is a naturalistic one. Moreover, it seems reasonable to hold that the nature of a relation is constituted by the nature of its relata – spatial, musical, odor, and logical relations are such because they can relate certain kinds of entities and not others. If this is right, it is hard to see how the laws envisaged by McGinn are natural laws.
Finally, McGinn seems unfamiliar with the kalam cosmological argument (see chapter 3).
It is safe to say that the argument is suffi ciently robust to require inclusion in any discussion of the beginning of the spatiotemporal physical universe. If successful, it justifi es the claim that time itself had a beginning that was caused by something that can exist without time. And on the assumption that laws of nature govern temporal processes and, thus, require events to be instantiated, it becomes clear that the cause of the fi rst event was not governed by a law of nature. At the very least, McGinn’s speculations regarding his fi rst option are grossly incomplete and, moreover, they open the door for considerations quite favorable to theism.
What about McGinn’s second option, that we are wrong to think of space as a three-dimensional manifold containing extended objects? Perhaps the real nature of space is
“whatever is out there as a containing medium of all things.” If this is correct, then the real nature of space allows it to contain consciousness and matter in a natural way.
I do not have a knockdown argument against this option, but I do fi nd it highly counterintuitive and, in fact, unintelligible. And it may be useful to say why. I begin with an observation about the difference between formal concepts and certain material concepts.
In my view, formal concepts are capable of being expressed adequately by way of defi nite descriptions. To illustrate, the formal concept of a substance is “whatever is an essentially characterized continuant”; the formal concept of justice is “whatever outcome is fair and accords with the maxim ‘treat equals equally and unequals unequally’.” Functional concepts are good examples of formal concepts. By contrast, material concepts, at least those defi ned by ostensive defi nition, are defi ned by rigid designation. If we limit ourselves to sense
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perceptible entities with which we may be acquainted, then “red,” “sour,” and “middle C”
seem to express material concepts.
Now I take the notion of extension to be such a material concept. If I am right, then the only intelligible notion of a spatial dimension is the material concept of “extended one-directional magnitude,” which must be defi ned ostensively. Along similar lines, “space”
is a material concept defi ned by acquaintance as “extended three-directional magnitude.”
I, for one, have no idea what it means to use spatial language to speak of multidimensionality or in the way McGinn does. When a scientist claims that a three-dimensional object can be “spatially rotated” into other spatial dimensions, I can give no material content to the claim and, thus, I cannot understand what is being said. Likewise, when McGinn tell us that space is “whatever is out there as a containing medium of all things,” “out there,”
“containing,” and “medium” are either used in the ordinary way characterized earlier, in which case the defi nition is circular and seems to require ostensive defi nition to give these terms intelligible content, or else they are used equivocally in which case they are unintelligible, at least to me.
I recognize that physicists talk about a multitude of spatial dimensions. In my view, the scientifi c notion of an extra dimension of space is a mere mathematical devise, a formal defi nition with no material content that can intelligibly be ascribed to reality, and theories that employ such language should be understood in antirealist terms. When scientists speak of multidimensionality with respect to space, they say things such as the following: there are millions of dimensions of space; there could be an infi nitely small volume; mass and space are literally interchangeable; triangles can be identical to circles; that a one-dimensional line (a string) could literally have clockwise vibrations in 10 dimensions of space and counterclockwise vibrations in 26 space dimensions (Ross 1996). I fi nd such language unintelligible, and while the problem may my lack of imagination, I suspect that others may agree with me.
I have argued that McGinn’s position is not as plausible as AC and is not a legitimate version of naturalism. Long ago, Thomas Kuhn taught us that there are certain telltale signs of a paradigm in crisis, among which are the proliferation of epicycles and of rival specifi -
cations of the paradigm formulated to preserve that paradigm in the face of stubborn, recalcitrant facts. Especially signifi cant are specifi cations so bizarre that it is hard to recognize them as specifi cations of the paradigm. I take McGinn’s mysterian “naturalism” to be an indication that naturalism is in serious crisis with respect to consciousness. Kuhn also taught us that as bizarre and ad hoc as some of the specifi cations may be, if there is no rival paradigm, then an advocate of the degenerative paradigm must simply do the best he or she can with the recalcitrant facts and leave it at that. But if there is a plausible rival, a paradigm shift may well be in order. In my view, McGinn’s position, coupled with theism and AC as a rival, serve as evidence that such a paradigm shift away from naturalism toward theism is past due.
Conclusion
Strong naturalism/physicalism has been in a period of Kuhnian paradigm crisis for a long time, and physicalist epicycles have multiplied like rabbits in the last two decades. Moreover, the various versions of physicalism are in a stagnating period of stalemate. Increasingly, naturalists are turning to emergentist views of consciousness.
The truth is that naturalism has no plausible way to explain the appearance of emergent mental properties in the cosmos. Ned Block confesses that we have no idea how consciousness could have emerged from nonconscious matter: “we have nothing—zilch—worthy of being called a research programme. . . . Researchers are stumped” (Block 1994, p. 211).
John Searle says this is a “leading problem in the biological sciences” (Searle 1995, p. 61). Colin McGinn observes that consciousness seems like “a radical novelty in the universe” (McGinn 1999, p. 14); he wonders how our “technicolour” awareness can
“arise from soggy grey matter” (McGinn 1991, pp. 10–1). David Papineau wonders why consciousness emerges: “to this question physicalists ‘theories of consciousness’ seem to provide no answer” (Papineau 1993, p. 119). Papineau’s solution is to deny the reality of consciousness as a genuinely mental phenomenon (Papineau 1993, pp. 106, 114–8, 120, 121, 126). He correctly sees that strong physicalism is the only real alternative for a naturalist.
If one is a positive naturalist who embraces emergent mental properties, then he or she should admit defeat as Frank Jackson acknowledges:
Our primary concern is with physicalism as a doctrine of the kind of world we are in. From this perspective, attribute dualism is not more physicalistically acceptable than is substance dualism. (Jackson 1998, p. 6, n. 5)
Emergence, in particular, is a mere name for a problem to be solved, and it is consistent with substance dualism, double-aspect theory, certain forms of personalism, and epiphenomenalism. This is not a result most naturalists will want to accept.
Jaegwon Kim observes that:
if a whole system of phenomena that are prima facie not among basic physical phenomena resists physical explanation, and especially if we don’t even know where or how to begin, it would be time to reexamine one’s physicalist commitments. (Kim 1998, p. 96)
For Kim, emergent mental entities are the paradigm case of such a system of phenomena.
Not long ago, Kim’s advised fellow naturalists to simply admit the irreality of the mental and recognize that naturalism exacts a steep price and cannot be had on the cheap (Kim 1998, chap. 4, especially pp. 118–20).8 If feigning anesthesia is the price to be paid to retain naturalism, then the price is too high. Fortunately, the theistic argument from consciousness reminds us that it is a price that does not need to be paid.
Further Reading
Armstrong, D. M. (1999) The Mind-Body Problem: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Bealer, G. (1996) On the possibility of philosophical knowledge. In J. E. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 10: Metaphysics, 1–34. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
8. Curiously, Kim has become an emergent epiphenomenal dualist regarding phenomenal consciousness. See his Physicalism or Something Near Enough (2005). It is likely that his ontology has many brute facts, a curious situation for one who accepts ontological simplicity as a guide for ontology.
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Beauregard, M. and O’Leary, D. (2007) The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins.
Beilby, J. (ed.) (2002) Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Churchland, P. (1988) Matter and Consciousness, rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clayton, P. (2004) Mind & Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Connell, R. (1988) Substance and Modern Science. Houston, TX: Center for Thomistic Studies.
Martin, M. (ed.) (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Menuge, A. (2004) Agents under Fire. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld.
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The Argument from Reason
VICTOR REPPERT