The Spectrum of Philosophy of Mind: A Sketch

For my BA Philosophy thesis, I’ve started writing this section as part of my theoretical framework. Any feedback is welcome.

Broadly speaking, philosophers of mind can be placed on a spectrum from pure materialism to pure ‘psychism’.¹ Positing this spectrum has initial phenomenological plausibility, since it is part of human existence that both ‘I’ appear to exist and that ‘things’ appear to exist.² Consciousness and matter, at the very least, appear to exist.

On one end of the spectrum is materialistic or physicalist illusionism (or eliminativism) — that is, all there is, is matter (in the Newtonian sense of ‘mass + force’), and consciousness is only an illusion created by the matter of the brain (so, e.g., Daniel Dennett). However, this position is dissatisfying at the very least, for it would mean that ‘I think’ and ‘I exist’, in their common-sense meanings, are both false. Moreover, it seems inherently contradictory, since there is no ‘I’ anymore to whom this illusion appears. Indeed, phenomenology — very basically, the study of appearing — is precluded, as well as philosophy itself, since there are no more philosophical minds to do the thinking anymore.³ The very subjective dimension of human experience (and thus human experience itself) is eliminated.⁴

Now, on the other side is psychistic illusionism (or eliminativism) — that is, only consciousness and its contents exist, and nothing outside it (cf. George Berkeley). This suffers a similar critique as its counterpart, since it effectually eliminates the other half of human experience, that is, that ‘things’ exist that are in some sense independent of personal consciousness. However, it has a bit more appeal than materialistic illusionism, since the existence of ‘I’ seems more indubitable than that of matter — in other words, it is not totally unthinkable that all things are the contents of a dream or an illusion that appears to consciousness, which would then be the only thing that really exists (and thus there is no concomitant contradictoriness either).⁵

Then, in the very middle of the spectrum is pure dualism, which posits two parallel and non-causally related realities of consciousness and matter (cf. Descartes). ‘I’ exist, and ‘things’ exist, but neither explains the other or can be reduced to the other. However, as David Bentley Hart likes to argue, “[r]eason abhors a dualism”⁶; it is intellectually dissatisfying (and incoherent) to hold an essentially bifocal view of reality, with two ultimate grounds of reality that, like two parallel lines, never meet each other. Causality ultimately reduces to a simple first principle.

Then, between these ‘pure’ extremes of illusionism on either side or dualism in the middle, there are the middle positions. The middle position on the materialistic side of the spectrum acknowledges both consciousness and matter, but sees the latter as more fundamental, and therefore explains the arising of the former in terms of the latter. Here we can include such positions as supervenience and epiphenomenalism.⁷ However, these all suffer from the so-called ‘pleonastic fallacy’, which Hart summarises as “the error of thinking that an infinite qualitative distance can be crossed, or even simply diminished, by a sufficient number of finite quantitative steps.”⁸ In other words, it is fallacious to think that matter as conceived in Newtonian terms — purely matter and force, devoid of ‘qualia’, subjectivity, intentionality, purpose, meaning, abstraction, and freedom⁹ — can somehow explain a phenomenon that is marked by precisely all those things, namely consciousness. (This connects to what David Chalmers called the ‘hard problem of consciousness’.¹⁰)

Now, the middle position on the other side seems more plausible — that is, to explain matter in terms of consciousness, without eliminating the former. This position draws attention to the fact that the ‘Newtonian’ view of matter is relatively recent, and was first introduced as a methodological principle — that is, as a lens through which to investigate reality, one that is accurate in some significant but limited sense and has proven extraordinarily fruitful in the form of modern science and technology, but which should not be taken as a comprehensive explanation of the nature of reality (i.e., a ‘metaphysics’).¹¹ In fact, the scientific method expressly excluded part of reality from its scope from the outset, namely consciousness, focusing solely on ‘matter’. Thus it precluded the possibility of interpreting matter in terms of consciousness. When, however, we set aside this Newtonian lens and consider the nature of matter in, for example, an Aristotelian way (to take one historically popular view) — we may find that matter is far closer to consciousness — that it is in fact marked by ‘forms’ and ‘finality’, and is through and through intelligible — and can indeed be explained in terms of consciousness, or even of an ultimate reality conceived in terms of consciousness.

End notes

1. The latter is a term I coined for the purpose of providing a counterpart to materialism; not to be confused with various forms of panpsychism, for which see below.

2. The terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are too loaded to make this fairly simple point.

3. This is somewhat similar to G.E. Moore’s argument from common sense.

4. Replies that this rebuttal begs the question (by assuming an ‘I’) shows the sheer implausibility of the position; it has to do away with the indubitable datum of ‘I think, therefore I exist’, and construct an almost conspirational view of human experience: ‘we’ are all being misled. (I derive the language of ‘indubitable datum’ from Hart.)

5. Cf. Descartes’ famous argument for the unfalsifiability of the ‘evil demon’ hypothesis, and the more recent ‘brain-in-a-vat’ argument.

6. All Things Are Full of Gods, Day One, V.

7. See idem, Day Three.

8. Idem, Day One, III.

9. Idem, Day Two.

10. See The Conscious Mind.

11. See Hart, passim, and Goff, Galileo’s Error. This can be understood as a broadly pragmatic or ‘extrinsic’ account of science in the sense that science is said to accurately describe the ‘extrinsic’ relations between entities in terms of physical cause and effect, on which science and technology have successfully built (and thus science ‘works’), but not adequately describe their ‘intrinsic’ nature. However, my point does not depend on the extrinsic/intrinsic terminology (for which see Russellian monism); Hart’s talk of a methodological ‘lens’ as opposed to a metaphysics is clearer.