It is widely thought today that by bringing the study of the human mind into the orbit of objective, empirical investigation, cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have taken us to the brink of an epochal scientific breakthrough comparable to those pioneered by Galileo in early modern times and Darwin in the nineteenth century. A loud minority position holds, by contrast, that there are principled limits to the ‘naturalisation’ of the study of the mind, and that it is the task of philosophy to define and police those limits.
The contributors to this volume are critical of scientism in the philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, the book as a whole is not just one more humanistic or conservative critique of scientism, nor does it invoke the supposed authority of philosophy or ordinary language to once and for all put science in its proper place. Rather, it aims to uncover and unsettle certain key assumptions, which underlie and give shape to much of contemporary discourse on naturalism and the mind: assumptions that preclude a clear understanding of the mind by obscuring the role and significance moral issues have in our lives. The essays are not united by a common position. Rather, the unity of the book comes from a certain constellation of questions and interests that reappears, with differing emphases, in all the contributions. In their various ways, the essays investigate the relationship between the problems of mind and moral life. In many of the essays, the character and aims of philosophical questioning itself are also in question. In what follows, we will first provide a more robust description of the constellation of concerns that gives the book its unity. The contents of the individual contributions are described at the end of the Introduction.
1. A Strange Confusion—And a Suggestion
Naturalism becomes an issue because of the felt need that philosophers since Descartes have time and again been transfixed by, namely of ‘finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally and essentially physical’ (Kim, 1998, pp. 4–5), or, of solving what David Chalmers and others have called ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ or, more generally, of fitting our notions of meaning, soul and life into a universe conceived as basically mechanistic and meaningless. There is, however, no consensus on the status of the problem. Some think it has already been solved by science, others believe it will, or may, soon be solved, while yet others consider the problem real but insoluble in principle; finally, some think there never was a problem to solve, only conceptual confusion giving rise to a pseudo-problem (for examples of these positions, see Shear, 1997). Whatever the case, in grappling with the problem philosophers have come up with wildly speculative suggestions, ranging from those who in effect deny that there is mind in nature at all and claim that we are built out of ‘mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, nonrobotic ingredients at all’ (Dennett, 2006, p. 3), to ‘panpsychists’ who hold that nature is nothing but mind (cf. Skrbina, 2009), with most philosophers trying to keep both ‘mind’ and ‘nature’ in play as different but somehow related aspects or realms of reality. There are also many, however, who wonder if it makes any difference whether (we say that) there is or there is not mind; thus, a favourite philosophical thought experiment concerns zombies or living dead that are, supposedly, in every respect indistinguishable from living, conscious human beings, except for the small detail that zombies experience and feel nothing at all.
Why is it that the contemporary discourse of mind gives rise to such wayward suggestions, where the very difference between life and death seems to come undone? And why are the expectations concerning this ‘last mystery of science’ so high? What are we supposed to gain if the riddle—what riddle exactly?—is solved? There are of course legitimate questions about what medical and other practical benefits we might gain from neuroscientific research. But the great excitement around the discourse of mind is not generated by them. Sometimes one gets the impression that the enthusiasm is due to a sense that we are at the brink of uncovering The Truth about the mind. Alas, it is completely unclear what this ‘truth’ is supposed to be about and what it would be like to reach it. Indeed, as we noted, there is not only no consensus about how to settle the issue; there is disagreement about whether there is any issue to be settled.
At stake, then, is not only a disagreement about how to understand a certain concept or how to interpret a given set of data but also the radical questions whether the phenomenon discussed, ‘the mind’, exists at all, and what sense, if any, we can make of the idea of a theory, or theories, of mind. We might think that we have two options: either those accepting the ‘hard problem’ have simply confabulated a story about an imaginary entity, or those who reject it deny the existence of an entity that must be of the highest importance to us. We are, after all, supposed to be discussing the very being also of our own mind, or soul, or spirit! If the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness were solved, whatever that would mean, it would thus lead to a situation where many philosophers and scientists who have expressed opinions on the matter would turn out to have committed a simply outrageous oversight and to have fallen prey to a most serious delusion. It comes as no surprise then, that in the ongoing debates we find distinguished philosophers accusing each other of pursuing illusions or, alternatively, of overlooking the most important aspects of being human. The fervour that accompanies the disagreements in the philosophy of mind should give us pause. Nothing like it occurs in debates about merely intellectual matters. However, such nervous and troubled disagreement is typical in connection with moral and existential issues.
We suggest that progress in the debates about the philosophy of mind may not be possible as long as the ethical dimension of the problems is ignored. This dimension informs the debates and so constantly crops up between the lines, so to speak. By ‘ethics’, we do not mean an external perspective one could impose as an afterthought on a separate field of expert debate identified as ‘philosophy of mind’. Rather, we suggest that moral and theoretical questions about the mind are best seen as intertwined aspects of our understanding of human reality. The central idea of this book, then, is that the problems raised in and by the philosophy of mind are themselves, from the very beginning, articulated within a field that is morally—or ethically or existentially; no distinction is intended—charged.
2. The Attractions of Value Freedom and Technoscience
The idea that moral matters are at play at the most basic level of investigation is bound to seem strange, indeed perverse, as long as one accepts the standard notion that scientific and philosophical method demands that any object, the mind included, should be studied in a way that remains neutral with respect to any moral commitments. A main theme of this book is precisely to show the limits of this approach in philosophical discussions of the mind. As many of the essays bring out, moralistic and ideological distorting influences are pervasive in philosophy and the sciences of mind. Sometimes, such influences are open to view, as when certain views are explicitly declared inadmissible because of their supposedly insidious moral implications, the attitude being: ‘This idea must not be explored, because it would be too terrible if it turned out to be true’. More often, however, the ideological distortions remain implicit, even as ideological commitments are in one sense loudly proclaimed. Thus, many participants in contemporary debates take pride in declaring themselves ‘hard’ naturalists, while others stress that their own stance commits them only to a ‘soft’ or ‘liberal’ form of naturalism, and both sides make their announcements long before it is clear what either position really involves, and indeed whether any coherent position can be formulated.
If one had to choose between ‘value free’ inquiry into how things are or moralistic sermonising and ideological blinkers of this kind, perhaps value freedom, whatever that is supposed to mean, would be the better option. But, as many essays here argue, these are not the real alternatives. Rather, the authors suggest that getting clear about what the issues are in the philosophy of mind is itself a moral task; that is, one that demands ceaseless struggle against wishful and fearful fantasising and other forms of moral confusion. If so, the pretence to ‘value freedom’, far from solving the problem, would be a self-deceptive illusion; the confused idea of being able to set aside moral difficulties by fiat, by simply declaring that one will not take controversial positions but only speak the truth. This, we suggest, would be like presuming to guarantee the humorousness of one’s jokes by declaring that they will be funny. And in fact, as many of our essays bring out, moralistic or ideological distortions tend to proliferate most perniciously precisely where people would deny making any value judgements at all, for instance, when they claim that they are merely reporting scientific findings.
Looking back, most people would agree that in the past the theorising of scientists and philosophers has not been immune to the spectres of wishful thinking and self-deception that distort and corrupt so many other practices too. On the contrary, it seems trivial to say that distorting tendencies have often entered already before theorising officially started, as it were, and have formed and deformed the whole intellectual-emotional-social backgroun...