The Mind-Body Problem and Its Solution (Second Edition)

Carey R Carlson

• Publisher: Go To Publish
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781647490034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

OVER THE LAST CENTURY scientists have made tremendous strides in understanding the physical nature of the universe and the biochemical nature of life. Yet the most salient feature of individual lives—our day-to-day consciousness and experience of the world, or "sentience"—remains stubbornly immune to scientific explanation. This divide is called the "mind-body problem, " and it is centuries old. In this book, author Carey Carlson performs two valuable tasks. First, he lays out the mind-body problem in crystalline common-sense prose. Second, he proposes an intriguing solution based on the work of early-twentieth-century philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. This book will be of interest both to general readers of science and philosophy and to those steeped in the literature. The second edition includes additional arrow diagrams in Chapter 5 that fortify Russell and Whitehead’s view of physics as a causal web of time-ordered events.

Chapter 1

The Presence of Sensory Qualities

An essential aspect of mind is the presence of qualitative sensory characteristics, such as colors, which provide recognizable feeling and experience. The restricted notion of mind as feeling is called “sentience.” The recognizable sense qualities, known by immediate acquaintance, allow us to describe the variety of our directly felt experience. Such description, known as “phenomenology,” is independent of, and prerequisite for, knowledge acquired through the methods of physical science.

An Unsettling Dream

You wake up to the sound of the alarm clock. You get up, get dressed, and eat breakfast. Leaving the house, you pick the newspaper off the doorstep and get into your car. You turn the ignition key… and suddenly you are in bed waking to the sound of the alarm. Sure enough, you’re under the covers and the alarm is ringing. It’s fresh in your memory that you just dreamed of waking up and heading off to work. You turn off the alarm and contemplate the oddity of the dream. You get dressed for work and eat some breakfast. On your way out, you pick the newspaper off the doorstep. You climb into your car. You turn the ignition key and the car starts. You recall that your dream had ended when you turned the ignition key. On the way to work, you’re waiting at a stoplight. Just as it turns green… the alarm rings. You’re back in bed, staring at the ringing alarm. You grab it and throw it against the wall. What if you’re still dreaming? This latest wake-up seems real enough, but no more real than the last one. What if you’re not yet awake? You’re not quite sure.

You get out of bed, feeling shaky. What if you’ve gone insane? You light a cigarette and make some coffee. You phone a friend, confessing to an “anxiety attack.” Your neighbor is reassuring-- he’ll be right over. While waiting for him, you make some frantic observations around the house. You examine yourself in the mirror. You turn on the TV to check what’s being broadcast against the TV guide. Everything checks out. By the time your friend arrives, you’re embarrassed to have called him. A dream, or a series of dreams, has merely confused you. Your neighbor listens to your account of the dream. He tells you that such an experience would upset anyone. He offers to drive you to work. You hesitate but accept. By the time you get to the office, the old confidence is back. You sit down at your desk, and the phone rings. No, it’s the alarm. You’re back in bed, just waking up…

I heard that story in a philosophy class from Professor Keith Gunderson. The story illustrates something about dreams, something about waking life, and what these two have in common.

Regarding dreams, we may say that they can present us with such sights, sounds, tactile impressions, and apparent interactions with other people as to constitute a full-blown but illusory experience, which usually fades rapidly upon waking up.

Regarding waking life, it can be concluded that confidence in the trusty world of waking life rests entirely upon consistency checks. These checks generally secure a practical certainty before doubts even arise. However, to grasp the intent of the story is to understand that these consistency checks guarantee something less than logical certainty.

And what then do dreams and waking life have in common? They both involve a range of sense impressions and qualitative states of mind. Let us call such a state of mind, with its range of sense impressions, whether it falls into the context of a dream or into the context of waking life, a human “sensorium.” You have a sensorium when you are dreaming, and you have a sensorium when you are awake.

We shall use the word “sensorium” to refer to a mind, insofar as a mind consists of sense, sentience, or feeling. Although one discriminates a qualitative variety of feelings within a given moment, “sensorium” conveys the fact that the elements of this variety form a unified whole. A sensorium, over time, is a “stream of consciousness.” I’m merely labeling something that everyone has—something ever-present and taken for granted. Having adopted the peculiar word for the ordinary thing, we can, when we like, avoid more general-purpose terms that have taken on multiple uses and ambiguities.

Why not just use the word “mind” and be done with it? After all, it’s the mind-body problem we are presenting here. For one thing, mind includes unconscious processes, the theory of which is both contentious and tangential to our core subject. We will proceed without unnecessary difficulties by restricting our focus to mind as sentient awareness. With this restriction, to exist mentally—to have a mind—is to be sentient, to feel.

Mind also involves intelligence. Along that line, one can consider “smart machines,” and the “mentality” that might consequently be ascribed to computers. We will find the core of our problem in the consideration of simple “raw feeling,” without exploring the difficulties of higher versus lower mentality.

Finally, mind is the domain of motivation or purpose, as opposed to the mechanistic causation of physical science. We don’t need to grapple with that distinction either, in order to present the paradoxical coexistence of a sensorium and a brain. Once that difficulty is laid bare, we will proceed with its resolution. We will then have course to a natural explanation for the purposeful nature of mind, and the role of such purpose in the physics of cause-and-effect.

In this chapter we are just trying to whittle our attention down to a person’s mental existence as a sensorium, characterized entirely in terms of feeling or sentient awareness. This restriction, let us note, does not reduce our field of study to scant nothing, since the sensorium includes the feeling of self-awareness, which is generally revered as an intractable mystery when the topic of discussion is “consciousness and the brain.”

...

“Phenomenology” is the descriptive characterization of one’s immediate experience, without venturing beyond what is directly presented. The attitude is taken that appearances are worthy of examination for what they are in themselves. They are not just indicators of a wider realm beyond the field of sentient awareness. Phenomenology describes what is openly disclosed in sentient experience, surveying a qualitative realm of features and patterns. Phenomenology is the study of the sensorium.

Think about what redness is, in itself—that is, without regard to the theoretical entities of physics involved in its causation, such as electromagnetic energy, its absorption and reflection at various surfaces, and subsequent excitations in the eye and brain. The quality red has no description in terms of mass, charge, frequency, or motion. You’re left with redness itself to contemplate. Focus your attention upon redness as an essence. It is both irreducibly simple and strongly identifiable. This essential nature of redness is apparent to your mind when you focus your attention upon redness as the unmediated sensory quality that it is. This is redness as a “phenomenon.” When you adopt the phenomenological attitude toward the directly given features of experience, there occurs a temporary suspension of interest in the wider physical realm believed to underlie the surface of appearances. This wider realm, which is the usual focus of daily living, is said to be “bracketed out” of consideration when you adopt the phenomenological attitude.

As a simple, recognizable characteristic, presented directly and repeatedly to awareness, redness can be termed an “object” of awareness in a general sense. Let us call the act of awareness, within which redness makes its appearance, a “sentient experience.” The act of awareness, and its objects, require one another. To exist as a sentient being is to have specific qualitative feelings. Without some characterizing phenomenon, there is no experience, and sentient mind does not exist. Sensory qualities are the very medium of mental experience.

When any feeling occurs there is sentient experience, and the phenomena that present themselves in that experience form a whole. A moment of sentient experience can be considered a basic type of temporal existence for the purpose of describing the actual world. Sentient experience, and the phenomena presented within it, are investigated in the discipline of phenomenology. This discipline uses an introspective method that is not dependent on the method, or the results, of modern science.

...

Let’s take a time-out. What are we trying to accomplish here? There may be some readers for whom this is too obvious, and others for whom no meaning is accruing whatsoever. It may help to explain that in philosophy, where common sense categories of existence are subjected to uncommon standards of logical rigor, the realm of the mental, which I am trying to define in this chapter for the purpose of subsequent discussion, is questioned or denied by many philosophers. Common sense notions about mind are re-construed in such a way as to allow for the practical usefulness of mental terminology while restricting the ultimate description of reality to the terminology of physics. This involves the denial of sensory qualities, sentience itself, and anything purely mental. Contemporary physics is promoted to a complete theory of all that there is. The mind-body difficulty is solved by the removal or replacement of all things mental.

In 1970 I’d had some college-level background in science, but no courses in philosophy. Someone gave me a copy of Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, which showed me that redness is something in itself. Here is Whitehead again, in Adventures of Ideas.

Gaze at a patch of red. In itself as an object, and apart from other factors of concern, this patch of red, as the mere object of that present act of perception, is silent as to the past or the future. How it originates, how it will vanish, whether indeed there was a past, and whether there will be a future, are not disclosed by its own nature. No material for the interpretation of sensa is provided by the sensa themselves, as they stand starkly, barely, present and immediate. We do interpret them, but no thanks for the feat is due to them. (AI, 180)

Yet redness is not included in the concepts of physics. I had somehow acquired, without being aware of it, an outlook dominated by physics, which overlooked the realm of sensory qualities. These qualities had taken on a subliminal role in my awareness, as mere cues to more substantial objects. I was suddenly struck by the immaterial nature of the color red as though by a paranormal experience. This disruption of my complacent view of the world might never have occurred if I had not happened upon Science and the Modern World. Philosophers who promote a view that denies the existence of mental phenomena can have more success than one might suppose. Modern culture is imbued with respect for the superiority of the scientific view of the world. A person today can acquire a physicalistic view of the world without even knowing it.

Someone involved in the visual arts, whose stock-in-trade is visual form and color and their impact on the human mind, is apt to find the present chapter too obvious for words. The same reader may puzzle at the physicalist view of the world presented in Chapter 2, although that will be equally rudimentary. Each of the first two chapters covers something simple, fundamental, and extremely general. And therein lies the difficulty.

How many people have you met who have wrestled with the mind-body problem? None, perhaps? Literate society in the time of Newton and Descartes were aware of the problem, but it went unsolved for too many centuries. To shield ourselves from a humiliating lack of progress, we now look over, under, around, and through the mind-body distinction, without looking at it. Our view of the world is bifurcated, like the vision of a fish whose two eyes see nothing in common. We must force our isolated intuitions of mental and physical, however incongruous, into a mutual encounter, as Descartes did so well several centuries ago. We will then be in position to ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Synopsis by Chapter
• Introduction—Minds and Bodies
• References
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Acknowledgements