The Unexplained Intellect

Complexity, Time, and the Metaphysics of Embodied Thought

Christopher Mole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317294665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The relationship between intelligent systems and their environment is at the forefront of research in cognitive science. The Unexplained Intellect: Complexity, Time, and the Metaphysics of Embodied Thought shows how computational complexity theory and analytic metaphysics can together illuminate long-standing questions about the importance of that relationship. It argues that the most basic facts about a mind cannot just be facts about mental states, but must include facts about the dynamic, interactive mental occurrences that take place when a creature encounters its environment.

In a discussion that is organised into four clear parts, Christopher Mole begins by examining the mathematics of computational complexity, arguing that the results from complexity theory create a puzzle about how human intelligence could possibly be explained. Mole then uses the tools of analytic metaphysics to draw a distinction between mental states and dynamic mental entities, and shows that, in order to answer the complexity-theoretic puzzle, dynamic entities must be understood to be among the most basic of mental phenomena. The picture of the mind that emerges has important implications for our understanding of intelligence, of action, and of the mind's relationship to the passage of time.

The Unexplained Intellect is the first book to bring insights from the mathematics of computational complexity to bear in an enquiry into the metaphysics of the mind. It will be essential reading for scholars and researchers in the philosophy of mind and psychology, for cognitive scientists, and for those interested in the philosophical importance of complexity.

Part 1
The complexity of intelligence

1
The neglect of noology

1.1 Elements of mind

The philosophy of mind is very often concerned with the explanation of facts that are obvious. One of these is the fact that mental states have content. The belief that Vancouver is north of Seattle has, as its content, the proposition that Vancouver is north of Seattle. If it had had a different content, it would have been a different belief. The having of that content is therefore essential to its being the particular belief that it is. Other mental states are related with equal intimacy to the propositional contents that they carry.

Despite this essential role for content, in giving mental states their identities, it may not be the case that every mental state has a content, whether propositional or otherwise. Perhaps there are certain pure sensations – such as tickles or twinges – that do not carry content by themselves (Block 1995). Perhaps there are certain states in which, as in ‘East Coker’, one is ‘conscious, but conscious of nothing’ (Eliot 1944, see also Thompson 2015). Even among belief-like states, the having of content may not be absolutely necessary: illusions might occasion mental states that are contentless (Evans 1982, p. 173), but those states are nonetheless mental, and they are sufficiently belief-like to be the causes of sincere speech.

Any of these examples might be questioned – and philosophers have indeed questioned them – but even if they could all be established as cases in which there really is a mental state without content, they would make only limited trouble for the idea that the having of content is essential to the mind (Brentano 1874). These examples can merely be treated as deviations from a necessarily content-involving norm. Much as false or nonsensical utterances would cease to have the character of speech acts if they occurred without the background of meaningful attempts to speak the truth, so any system in which content was never achieved might cease to have the character of a mind. The having of content might then be essential to the mind, even if some states of mind are contentless.

* * *

From the premise that content is essential to the mind, it can be argued that perception must be too. A first argument to this effect is owing to the empiricists. It starts from the idea that the content of our simplest thoughts has to come from somewhere. The things and properties that feature in the contents of a creature’s simplest thoughts are things that that creature gets to think about only by meeting with them in experience: I, for example, am able to think that this particular cup is this particular shade of blue, only because I have had experiences of this cup, and of this blue (or of some appreciably similar ones). The need for mental states to have contents therefore brings with it a need for the subject of those states to be a subject of perception, and so makes perception essential to the mind, just as content is.

This last claim can be endorsed, on only slightly different grounds, by those whose epistemological sympathies are aligned with the rationalists, and who are therefore committed to the existence of innate ideas, with contents that are not derived from episodes in which the environment is perceptually encountered. Even if a creature is born with an innate repertoire of concepts, having such contents as ‘object’, ‘property’, or ‘noun phrase’ (as postulated in Chomsky 1986, or Spelke and Kinzler 2007), the status of these innate structures as concepts – and not as merely syntactic residents of the brain – depends on the creature’s being able to make use of them during episodes in which it encounters a world of property-bearing objects, or of meaningfully-structured sentences. Even if perception is not the only route by which to stock the mind with concepts, and even if our innate concepts do not need to derive their contents from those that have been given in perception, a perceptual encounter with the world is necessary for giving our innate concepts their status as content bearers. Concepts without ‘intuitions’ are, as the Kantians say, empty. The friend of innate ideas can therefore share the empiricist’s commitment to the idea that perception is essential to the mind, just as (and just because) the having of content is.

1.2 On not explaining intelligence

If it is right to say that every mind has content, including those that have got going most recently, and if it is right to say that the simplest of contentful states gain at least some of their content by having a more or less direct relationship to perception, it must then be the case that every mind starts with states that are contentful and perceptual. This suggests that perception and contentfulness might be elementary in the mind, as well as being essential to it: it suggests (although it does not entail) that if contentfulness and perception emerge from the concatenation of something simpler, then it cannot be from the concatenation of simpler mental things; for there are no simpler mental things, in the minds where these phenomena have their first instances, from which they could plausibly be built.

Explanations of content and perception therefore have a special, foundational status in our philosophical investigations of the mind. And since the simplest of minded creatures can enjoy contentful perceptions, without needing to engage in very much intellectual activity, the explanation of those perceptions must place few demands – and perhaps no demands at all – on the intelligence of those creatures.

One consequence of this last point is, in the present context, worth noting: since it is elementary mental phenomena that philosophers of mind are typically trying to explain, and since those phenomena place few or no demands on the intelligence of the creatures who enjoy them, such intelligence must be a phenomenon that our typical philosophical work stops short of explaining. Once we have allowed that a creature might have the capacity to have contentful perception while remaining incapable of intelligent thought, we have conceded that an explanation of the creature’s capacity for such thought must go beyond the explanation of its capacity for having those perceptions. Philosophy’s focus on the elementary mental phenomena is a sensible piece of explanatory tactics, but it has resulted in a philosophy of mind that is systematically negligent of the intellect: the philosophy of perception is well established as a sub-field in the philosophy of mind, with its own proprietary theories and questions (see, e.g. Fish 2010); the philosophical explanation of contentfulness is a similarly well-established topic, for which several theories have been canonically proposed and disputed (see, e.g. Fodor 1990). Noology has no such status.

* * *

Not all philosophers of mind study phenomena that they take to be elementary or essential. Those who study consciousness often suggest that there might be a ‘zombie mind’, in which consciousness was altogether lacking (Chalmers 1996). They therefore take it that consciousness is not essential to the mind in the way that we have suggested perception and content must be. It is nonetheless plausible that consciousness, like perception and content, is something that a relatively simple creature might enjoy. This makes it reasonable to suppose that any explanation we might give for consciousness should avoid being intellectualized. Like our theories of content and perception, our philosophical theories of consciousness are therefore in a business that casts no light on the explanation of intelligence.

Even the philosophy of cognitive science typically fails to attempt the kind of explanatory work that a satisfactory account of intelligence would require. One might have hoped that an account of cogitatio would be high on the cognitive scientist’s research agenda, but it turns out to be only rarely that cognitive scientists are concerned with intelligence per se. They are concerned with memory, with ‘concept acquisition’, and with perception (including the perception of significant, complex, and attention-demanding stimuli). These are, of course, relevant to intelligence, but it is clear that they are not the same thing as it. An explanation of them is not yet an explanation of how intelligence can be possible.

* * *

Philosophy’s neglect of intelligence has sometimes been lamented, but it has rarely been addressed. In the first chapter of his 1966 book, Cartesian Linguistics, Noam Chomsky remarked that:

It can hardly be claimed that we have advanced significantly beyond the seventeenth century in determining the characteristics of intelligent behavior, the means by which it is acquired, the principles that govern it, or the nature of the structures that underlie it. One may choose to ignore these problems, but no coherent argument has been offered that suggests that they are either unreal or beyond investigation.

(Chomsky 1966, p. 65)

Plenty of research that is relevant to the explanation of intelligence has been conducted in the decades since Chomsky made this remark. Much of it has taken the form of research into artificial intelligence. The progress that has been made has often taken the form of discoveries about which approaches cannot be made to work. It has largely been made outside of philosophy, and philosophers have been slow to give it the attention it deserves. It therefore remains true that the attempt to explain intelligence brings with it no repertoire of established philosophical issues, or canonical philosophical proposals.

1.3 Inseparable parts

Although intelligence would not be explained by our philosophical theories of content, perception, or consciousness, even if we had such theories with their details uncontroversially before us, the explanation of intelligence is not a piece of scientific business that is wholly separate from the explanation of those more elementary phenomena. To suggest that it is would be contrary to this book’s main claims. There is a sense in which the intellect can be regarded as a distinct part of the mind, but that sense depends on a very minimal notion of ‘distinct part’. Considering this will enable us to bring intelligence – our neglected explanadum – more clearly into view.

The weak sense in which the intellect is a distinct part of the mind was elucidated in The Republic, when Plato introduced his theory of the tripartite soul. Socrates notes (around §439 of book four) that wanting to drink and not wanting to drink are incompatible properties, but that there is nothing impossible, or even unstable, about one and the same person instantiating both of these properties at once: the patient who wants to comply with his doctor’s proscription of liquids might nonetheless be struck with thirst when a glass of water is placed before him. This patient wants to drink. He also does not want to. Leontius, similarly, can find himself wanting to look at the executed corpses in the square, while knowing that it will do him no good to look, and knowing that he will find the corpses to be disgusting when he does. He wants to look at the corpses. He also does not want to look at them. If we accept that such contrariant descriptions can be accurate – as I think we should – then we must follow Plato in acknowledging the possibility that one and the same mind can instantiate incompatible properties at a single time.

There is nothing paradoxical about this. There is no problem, in general, with one and the same thing having incompatible properties: one brick can be both black and white. We need only suppose that the brick’s white parts are distinct from its black ones. The instantiation of incompatible properties is unproblematic because a brick is quite obviously a thing with parts. The point worth noticing is that this motivation for the postulation of parts can be applied quite generally: a capacity for the simultaneous instantiation of incompatible properties always gives some sense to the idea that there are parts needing to be distinguished, but does not require us to regard those parts as being independent, or spatio-temporally disjoint. Leontius’s simultaneous instantiation of wanting to look at the corpses and of not wanting to look at them is just as unparadoxical as the brick’s having a white top and a black bottom, but this is only because there is a sense in which the part of Leontius that wants to look is distinct from the part of him that does not. Plato’s contention is only that, in this minimal sense of ‘part’, the intellect qualifies as a separate part of the mind.

More than one line of thought suggests that the intellect cannot be separated out in any more substantive way. These are best seen by looking to the more recent literature.

1.4 The inseparability of intelligence

The first line of thought suggesting that the intellect is not a separable part of the mind emerges from the discussions of ‘embodied cognition’ (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991; Clark and Chalmers 1998; and Clark 1999). It has been a recurring theme in these discussions that an intellectual process may operate with information that is recorded and manipulated outside of the thinking subject’s head, or outside of her body entirely. The paradigm case of this is the process of working through a calculation with the help of a pencil and paper. In this case the processes that constitute one’s exercise of intelligence intersect with those that constitute one’s perception of, and action on, the pages that carry one’s workings. The faculty that is responsible for this intelligence is, therefore, not disjoint from the mind’s perceptive and active faculties. It is not the work of a spatially disjoint system, separable from that which accounts for one’s perception of, and action on, the pages which record one’s notes. Nor should we be looking for a clear dividing line between those times at which the thinker is exercising her intellect, and those at which she is being active with her notes.

Much the same disavowal of spatio-temporal disjointness has been arrived at in the philosophy of perception. It has been a theme in the work of several researchers, both in the philosophy of mind and in the mind-related sciences, that a creature’s perception of its environment is sometimes accomplished through an active process of exploration, where this is a process that might be conducted more or less intelligently (Brooks 1999; O’Regan and Noë 2001). This process of intelligent exploration should not be thought of as a composite phenomenon, in which an autonomous system, responsible for intelligent thought, happens to have been coupled to a system for the gathering of perceptual information. Perceptual exploration should instead be regarded as a process in which the agent intelligently exercises a range of exploratory skills (Hurley 1998, Noë 2004). Just as it would be artificial to separate the thing that an agent does from the skill with which she does it – and bizarre to seek an explanation for the second of these that was distinct from the explanation of the first – so, these researchers suggest, it would be bizarre to distinguish those activities of intelligent perception that are perceptual from those that are intellectual, and artificial to distinguish either of these from the creature’s bodily acts of exploration.

This line of thought again leads us to reject the idea that the processes constitutive of the intellect are disjoint from those that are responsible for other parts of the mind. That idea would distort our vision in two directions. On the one hand – which the ‘extended mind’ theorists have emphasized – the intellect is more environment-involving, and, therefore, more perception and action-involving, than it might seem to be if we were to regard the processes constitutive of the intellect as disjoint from the processes constituting these other phenomena (cf. Churchland 1986, p. 451). On the other hand – which the ‘enactive perception’ theorists have emphasized – perception is more skilful-exploration-involving, and therefore more intelligence-involving, than it might seem to be if we were to regard perception as disjoint from the processes constitutive of intelligence (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1965, p. 36).

* * *

An independent line of argument suggests that the difference between the intellect and emotion is equally unlikely to correspond to any distinction of physical basis. Patricia Greenspan has argued, in her Emotions and Reasons, that ‘emotions play an important role in both prudential and moral reasoning’ (Greenspan 1988, p. 174). Her point can be applied quite generally. Our reasoning is prone to being coloured by our emotional attachment to the facts we are considering. In many cases it is no less intelligently conducted on account of that colouring. In some cases it is conducted intelligently only because our emotions are brought to bear. One strand of feminist epistemology even suggests that the emotional contribution to our intelligent conduct may be essential to its reliability, so that ‘appropriate emotions are indispensible for reliable knowledge’ (Jaggar 1989, p. 163). If we accept that our emotional sensibilities can be an integral part of our intelligence, in negotiating all but the most academic corners of life, we should grant that the basis of that intelligence is not to be distinguished from the basis of those sensibilities.

* * *

These several arguments bring us from various starting points to the conclusion that there is no distinction to be drawn between the intellect and the rest of the mind – at least not if we are attempting to draw that distinction by reference to a difference in constituent sub-personal systems, operations, or mechanisms. These arguments resonate with some central concerns of late-twentieth-century philosophy, and they have been much discussed in recent decades. It would nonetheless be a mistake to take them as indicating that there was some point late in the twentieth century when philosophers discovered that it was impossible to follow Plato in thinking of the part of the mind that is responsible for our intelligence as being a distinct entity. Plato’s writing constantly reminds us that he thought no such thing. Virginia Woolf remarked on this – with unrivalled verve – in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’:

All this flows over the arguments of Plato – laughter and movement; people getting up and going ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART 1 The complexity of intelligence
• PART 2 Temporal orientation
• PART 3 A point of local metaphysics
• PART 4 The perdurance of intelligent thought
• Bibliography
• Index