COGNITION AND DUALISM

Are Nato and I converging? Probably not, but I was interested to hear him mention that "it's true thoughts are immaterial." What? I thought Tom and Nato were both materialists, and that materialism rules out anything immaterial. The attempt to abolish metaphysics was part of what seemed so naive. If Nato is willing to believe in immaterial entities of some sort, the gulf between us may be narrower than I thought-- though the concession of "logical entities" falls short of the affirmation of a whole parallel universe of ideas and souls and God and right and wrong and beauty that I advocate.

We have arrived so far, I think, at the idea that ideas can be mapped on to, or written in, "reflected in," "instantiated in," etc., the physical world, whether this be in abacuses or computers or sound waves (bearing words) or books or blogs or vocal cords or nerves and neurons. I never the less insisted that none of these instantiations are ideas, anymore than a scientific tome exhaustively describing the microphysical properties of a Whopper is a Whopper. Nato asks:

It still means physical processes execute our thoughts. We don't experience our thoughts as physical processes, of course, but why would we think our thoughts would seem physically intantiated to us? One can define "thought" in an essentialist manner so as to rule out any 'reductionist' account, but what's the motivation?

One point to make is Nato's use of the word "seem" here, as opposed to the straightforward affirmative "physical processes execute our thoughts." What is the difference between seeming and being? What evidence do we have of things' being other than their seeming? I sense here a willingness, on Nato's part, to attribute reality to physical nature but not to mental experience, which is probably unwarranted.

But my main task is to give the "motivation" for defining "thought" in an "essentialist" manner. In the first place, it's a question of epistemology. Any belief I may form about thoughts as electrical signals in the brain must be a result of a tremendous chain of deduction and induction, starting with patterns in the sensory world, object constancy, the existence of other people, communication and language, the reliability of information from other people (and which ones), and so on; for beliefs I form from my own mental experience of ideas, the epistemological chain is much shorter, and therefore (it would seem) more manageable and reliable.

But more to the point, I take issue with Nato's claim that "physical processes execute our thoughts"-- and let us add "all our thoughts" which I presume Nato means, and which points to why this claim is problematic.

It's not that I necessarily disbelieve the claim. It is a plausible one, in my opinion. We may begin by looking at the example of less arcane instantiations of thoughts, e.g. writing. Writing is used, first of all, for communication between different people. But it might also be used by a single person, to help herself organize her thoughts, or remember something, to sustain a chain of reasoning longer than she is able to keep track of mentally, and so on. There are certain math problems which I can solve with a pencil and paper, but would not be able to solve merely in my head. Though calculation is an essentially mental process, it is useful to use implements external to the mind, and I thereby make my thinking more effective. There are many other examples where we use the instantiation of ideas in the physical world not to communicate but strictly as an aid to our own individual thinking. You may keep a journal, which you don't plan for anyone else to read. You may count on your fingers-- and at this point we are no longer using instruments external to the body, though certainly external to the mind. Another case is talking to yourself. There is a cultural prejudice among us that talking to yourself is a mark of insanity, but I think it may be quite reasonable. People think it's crazy because they believe talking is only useful to communicate ideas to others, and that if you talk to yourself it's as if you imagine someone else is there. But if you are struggling through a difficult concept, it is sometimes useful to say words aloud. It's as if they slip away too quickly if you just think them; say them aloud, and the physical shock to your ears gives them more of an impact. And if you're excited about an idea or a phrase, it's fun to say it. When I was thinking of the argument I am writing now, I was walking around the streets of DC, talking to myself-- that is, not vocalizing, but moving my lips. I do it a lot, actually. Such visible instantiations of ideas in the physical world are not necessary for all our thoughts; for some problems I need a pen and paper, but others I can solve just by thinking about them. However, it seems plausible that while the mind can sometimes do its thinking without the assistance of mumbling or finger-counting or scribbling on a notepad, it always requires some physical instantiation. Perhaps the mind can't think a thought without "jotting it down" in the neurons.

On the other hand, the opposite position (that some thoughts have no physical instantiation at all) seems plausible, too. Some of my thoughts cause movements in my body; others do not. Might it not be the same within the brain: some of the mind's thoughts trigger neural movements, others do not? And there is a weighty point in favor of this view, namely that physical instantiations of ideas are always, or at any rate usually, imperfect and inadequate in varying degrees. Picture your favorite scene in the whole world. Now try to put it into words and describe it for a friend. Will he or she be able to imagine it as vividly as you do? It depends, in part, on your powers of description, and on their powers of imagination: if you are a clumsy verbalist and they are a dolt, hardly any of the beauty will be conveyed, whereas if you are a brilliant poet, and they an ardent aesthete, you may inspire a sense of wonder a bit nearer to your own. But in any case they will certainly never be able to reconstruct, based on your words, the full experience of what the scene looked like and how it affected you. It seems that the same may apply to the brain. Just as we can never convert our thoughts perfectly or fully into words, or gestures, numbers, abacuses, paintings, etc., brittle and finite neural networks can perhaps never adequately instantiate in the physical world the infinitudes of man's imagination.

What does seem clear is that the statement that "all our thoughts are executed by physical processes" could never be proven. Part of the problem is that science is based on induction, and the information that emerges from induction is constrained in certain ways, namely that 1) it is at best probabilistic, and 2) it is dependent on the belief in an underlying order (which I denote "faith.") But a more serious problem is that any such proof would seem to involve 1) a comprehensive description of the movements of ideas in the mind, arrived at through introspection, and only then 2) a complete mapping of these movements of ideas onto the neural networks of the brain. But (1) is more than all the philosophers since the dawn of time have been able to accomplish!

So as to the link between thoughts and physical processes, we will have to remain agnostic, unless we adopt the materialist worldview on a dogmatic basis. But we can still study mind and thought directly, through thinking about thinking. It therefore seems worthwhile to be rigorous in defending the distinction between thoughts and ideas as we know them through mental experiences, and the physical instantiations of thoughts in the world, of whose extent of embodying our thoughts materially we cannot know.