Episode 153: Richard Rorty: There Is No Mind-Body Problem

0:00 Mark: I want to announce the release of our partially examined life 2017 wall calendar, which would make a great gift, this time featuring the art of Corey Mohler, the mind behind the very popular existential comics. Check out existentialcomics.com so it's got great philosopher pictures, quotes, informations about the figures, philosopher birthdays, holidays, real and otherwise. You can order it right now at partiallyexaminedlife.com calendar. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 153 is something like, why is the mind body problem so perennially perplexing? And we read Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Part 1, Our Glassy Essence, published in 1979. To get the reading and more information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer with all my C fibers firing in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:02 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:05 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, distinctively universal, in particular in Middleton, Wisconsin.

1:10 Stephen: This is Stephen Metcalfe in Ghent, New York.

1:13 Mark: Welcome back, Stephen.

1:14 Stephen: Thank you so much. I'm very psyched to be here, very psyched to talk about this book.

1:19 Mark: We planned this shortly after we recorded the one on Nozick with youh. That was a couple years ago now, in our normal way of taking a long time to get around to things. But this is a synthesizing work, so it's kind of good that we covered, say, Quine. You might want to go listen to that episode, not necessarily before this part one on Rorty. This is just kind of the introduction, but we plan on doing a little more to get at the meat of the book. We'll see how it goes today. It's kind of a big book. It was a little difficult to get through a lot of it.

1:50 Dylan: I really enjoyed reading it so far. I had read a ton of Rorty when I was in undergrad, but I hadn't read this book. I read Consequences of Pragmatism, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, and those books. I read a ton of his stuff, and it was fun to read this one. In fact, I sort of wished I had read it back then because it made clear some things about the way he thinks about the history of philosophy. They're just more spelled out in this book.

2:20 Mark: So this is his first book, and then he went on to write a lot of things about politics. So, Stephen, I know you actually took classes from him, right?

2:27 Stephen: That's Correct. I started graduate school at UVA, University of Virginia in 1989 and got to know him a little bit personally, but also just as a lecturer and seminar leader. And he was of magnificent eminence on campus. And also I got to know him through his kind of middle work, Consequences of Pragmatism on up through contingency and solidarity, and then followed his career. I moved on from uva, but, you know, just read everything he published. And it was only later that I read this book, which I think is a masterpiece. I think very quickly what I would say by way of introduction to it is that I think he became a philosophical celebrity after having done the brushwork and the clearing work that gave him permission to be a more general reader friendly philosopher.

And this is the brushwork. This is the sort of hard work that he did to understand, you know, human mentality and the mind body problem and gave him permission, going forward to think of truth as consensual and not representational and do away really with epistemology as a part of his thinking.

3:27 Dylan: I would be interested, given that you knew him more than like meeting him one time, what he was like upon having interacted with him several times. I met him one time at Michigan State. He came to give a lecture at a conference that my advisor was running. And it was a little bit like meeting your celebrity when you've been reading all these books and talking about them. And I was studying physics at the time. I was just really interested in just talking to him and hearing him talk a little bit more about science and science as literature and what he thought of the challenges or problems in that and the virtues in it. Because for me, the experience of studying philosophy and physics in the late 80s was in sort of the midst of deconstructionism. Actually, Sokal's Hoax wasn't too far away.

4:15 Mark: Just say what that is. If you're gonna name, drop it.

4:17 Dylan: Sokal's Hoax.

4:18 Mark: It's a paper that somebody put out that alleged to be something in postmodern philosophy, but it was purposeful gibberish and managed to get it published just to show how low the quality of scholarship was, how nobody understands each other's work.

4:32 Dylan: Yeah, Alan Sokal published an article in like the Journal of Social Sciences or something like that called towards the Hermeneutics of Gravitation. And as far as he was concerned, it was complete gibberish. This was sort of rife in the late 80s. So when I introduced myself to him, it was a very negative experience for me, mainly because he just was completely unforthcoming and uninterested in having a conversation with an undergraduate. And if anything, he came across as just kind of frankly nervous or self conscious. And I feel that way more in retrospect that it was that way.

And for me, that whole experience was contrasted with talking to a couple other attendees who just were incredibly gregarious and just interested in, you know, if you were interested in something, they were interested, they wanted to talk about it. So it was particularly negative just because I felt like this guy who wrote so much about conversation and being a conversationalist and the power of conversation from my one experience, was utterly not a conversationalist in any way.

5:38 Stephen: Yeah, I would totally agree with that characterization. He was utterly not a conversationalist. He was cripplingly shy. It came off as intellectual arrogance. If you didn't know him, I think there's an undercurrent of real generosity and charity. Do his work in a way.

5:55 Mark: So it is surprising that Rorty is one of the most sort of celebrated philosophers of the late 20th century. One of the most famous, one of the most influential. And yet it sounds like he was not capable of sort of politicking for himself. Or he's not one of these kind of guys like Peter Singer, who is so famous because he will speak to anyone anytime and like put himself out there in the public forum in a very social kind of way.

6:19 Stephen: Yeah, no, I think that that's right. I mean, I think Rorty was very good at writing general interest books. He writes, I think, real lucidity and care and is not off putting. I mean, this book can be a little thorny, but even it, I think, is plausibly readable by the general reader. But face to face, I don't think that that was really his strong suit. He was a very good lecturer, I thought, a tremendously good lecturer. If you approached the podium after he was done, he was very reluctant to talk.

6:44 Mark: Well, I noticed there was an entitled Opinions, another podcast that was a radio show out of Stanford that actually has a 2005 interview with him where he talks a little bit about this book. So if people want to hear his abrupt, short kind of style, then they can go hear that for themselves. All right, so we've said some things about how readable he seems to be. Even I know, I said it's a difficult book. It's difficult because he's summarizing quite a bit of other. Not even summarizing, reacting to it. It's a book that's at A very high level in terms of dealing with the history of certain trends in philosophy.

So he name drops like hell and there are lots of footnotes. So it's not hard necessarily to understand what point he's trying to make. It's hard to judge whether it is legitimate point because, like, well, I don't know these two articles that he says he's pulling from or that he's responding to. So I feel like even with all the reading we've done that only about half of the stuff that he's reacting to or putting forward is either something that I remember freshly or even have any idea about at all. Well, Wes, why don't you give us your introduction, which I think is a little less positive than some of what we've heard so far.

How did you feel when you read it? Did you feel icky?

7:56 Wes: Well, on my first reading, the jury's out. I'm going to give this a chance. And I tend to be unconvinced by reducing philosophical problems to language games and saying they're dissolved in that way. So that's my existing prejudice against this sort of thing. But what we've read for today, it's not enough to help me evaluate yet. What we get today is sort of a small piece of a much larger argument.

8:19 Mark: All right, well, let's try to summarize what it is that we read for today. What is the point? Chapter one is called the Invention of the Mind, and we read the preface and the introduction to Chapter one. Chapter two is also about. And I did read that, but we decided that we would not try to. There's a lot of argument packed into there. So we're focusing on chapter one here.

8:37 Wes: Let's talk about the introduction first, because we can lay out what the project of the whole book is, which he calls in the introduction a survey of recent developments in analytic philosophy from the point of view of an anti Cartesian and anti Kantian revolution. And what does he mean by that? Well, he's sort of challenging the traditional view of philosophy basically as a theory of representation, sort of as an uber science that arbitrates the knowledge claims of other fields, whether it's science or morality or art or religion.

9:14 Dylan: Part of that challenge involves just claiming and then going through the history of it to try to demonstrate that the notion of philosophy as being that underlying justification for not just all thinking but all articulations about the world is basically historical. That comes about with Descartes and Locke and Kant. He doesn't spend a lot of time trying to show you that well, that's just not the way philosophy was for the ancient Greeks. But he does spend a lot of time trying to wedge us into the mind body problem as being one of the salient moments when that notion of philosophy as justifying the world comes in.

9:58 Wes: Well, yeah, the mind body problem is particularly relevant because the idea that philosophy can sort of ground other ways of knowing rests on this idea that there is this fundamental ontological divide between the mental and the physical. And that we have a certain kind of access to the mental so that we can sort of examine our own framework or in Kantian terms do our critique of our own reason. Right. So we sort of the lens through which we view the world, we can look at that, establish what it is, polish it, and by doing that, maybe obtain some sort of neutral viewpoint from which we can judge other knowledge claims or say what can count as knowledge and what can't count as knowledge and so on. This idea of the role of philosophy in culture critically rests upon a way of thinking about the relationship between the mind and the body.

10:51 Dylan: At the beginning of the introduction he has a nice sort of summary of it, of what sort of the canonical understanding of philosophy is it's self understanding. At the bottom of the third page. To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind. So to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representations. Philosophy's central concern is to be a general theory of representation. A theory which will divide culture up into areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all, despite their pretense for doing so.

11:27 Stephen: Yep.

11:28 Mark: And the real problem that has resulted from this, he thinks, is it's not an accident that philosophy is something that average people no longer seem to have a use for. That philosophers following Kant gives an example of Husserl, for instance, and the groundwork. Just anybody that uses the term groundwork for anything that they're trying to engage in this large scale justificatory project and the things they're trying to justify, like science, like the scientists don't care about it, they don't need that, they just do what they do. Philosophy of art, artists don't need that.

So just the fact that he's located, he says. By the early 20th century, the scientists had become as remote for most intellectuals as had the theologians, poets and novelists had taken the place of both preachers and philosop as the moral teachers of the youth. The result was that the more scientific and rigorous philosophy became, the less it had to do with the rest of culture and the more absurd its traditional pretensions seemed. Philosophy as a whole was shrugged off by those who wanted an ideology or a self image. So you could say that the ancient philosophy was not really distinguished from other kinds of inquiry.

And it did address, it did address the same things that religion and that science do. Now, just as things have become more specialized, philosophy has gotten very weird.

12:40 Stephen: Right. He draws out this connection between Descartes, the professionalization of philosophy and skepticism. So that when Descartes tries to establish indubitability, as Rorty puts it, of inner representations as a basis upon which to build up knowledge, Descartes assigns, going forward the role to all philosophers which is to establish this foundational given in our ability to represent ideas to ourselves or to understand how sense impressions are accurate internal representations of the world. And among the things I really love about this is in historicizing it, he's showing you, I think, how several different kinds of mentality or non physicality get run together into a sort of single concept and that they're for him quite separable.

So not only, you know, Kantian reason, Cartesian mentality or Lockean ideation, but more than that, he's talking about a kind of moral intuition about human dignity resting in our subjective nature got handed over to the same canons of proof that you would use to determine, for example, whether sense data was accurate. And therefore your ability to defend a notion of personhood based on dignity was something that you needed to first prove something about how we know before you could prove something about what we are. And what I like about him going back and saying these don't have to be the same question.

You separate out literature as an exploration of personhood or the condition of being human from a kind of quasi scientific discourse about the nature of accurate representations.

14:14 Wes: Yeah. So the direction in which he wants to move, I think is broadly pragmatist. Right. So he talks about moving towards a Deweyan conception of knowledge where quote, unquote, quote, justification is a social phenomenon rather than a transaction between a knowing subject and reality. I think this is like broadly the way to think about what he's going to move towards as far as a kind of theory of knowledge, even though he's saying he doesn't have one. We're moving in the sort of pragmatist direction. And I think the final thing to say about this is when we ask the question, why is the book called the Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature?

I think there's a good quotation towards the end of the introduction and I'm going to read it now. It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror containing various representations, some accurate, some not, and capable of being studied by pure non empirical methods. Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself, unquote.

15:24 Mark: Let's just reflect on how bizarre this seems. This is supposed to be very counterintuitive. It seems like, of course, knowledge is about accurately representing reality. Right. That's why when we know that something that we say is true or not is if we say snow is white, that is true if and only if you look out at the world and snow actually is white. So it really seems like language and beliefs and all this stuff is represented in actually this way. So why would I even want to start doubting that?

15:53 Stephen: It's important to remember he didn't introduce doubt into philosophy. He's addressing himself to a 200, 300 year history of doubt being the foundation for the authority of the philosopher. Right. It's Descartes who introduces the doubt, that you can't know an external reality. And that gets built upon up through Kant and beyond. And I think, in fact he's moving in the direction of why would you doubt it? There's a totally established convention of treating snow as white. It's as consensual as anything in human experience could possibly be. What additional information do you need in order to treat snow as white? He's asking where the doubt came in in the first place.

16:29 Dylan: Yeah. And so if you had a case like you look in the river and the stick is in the river and the stick looks bent, you'd say, oh, wow, it looks bent. And then in a perfectly understandable way, you go look at it more closely and you see, well, that's not really what's going on. And that statement, that's not really what's going on, isn't overloaded with a need to have some kind of deep correspondence with reality. It's that, well, you looked at it more closely and you found that there was more to it than that and that what you were seeing had a lot to do with the context of what you were seeing in. And you can articulate what that is.

17:05 Wes: Here's one way to think about this. It's really difficult to make sense of the idea of representation when you're talking about knowledge. So, for instance, recalling our William James episode where there's a critique of previous epistemology. So representation, you know, presupposes some sort of relationship between the representation and reality. So, for instance, if it's resemblance, how could you ever justify representations resembling some external reality when the representation is your only access? There's no superior point of view from which you can verify that the representation resembles something, so it ceases to make sense.

And this, by the way, is not just something William James is worried about. Kant worries about this in his Prolegomena. In fact, he thinks he's addressing this problem with his system. Berkeley worried about it. When you think about that problem, you're actually tempted in the direction of idealism. Kant brings us down that path, and pragmatism actually comes out of that ideal of, you know, tradition and Dewey himself, right? It's pivoting off of his fondness of Hegel in particular. So if we knew more about pragmatism, we could explain, you know, in more detail how that differs from idealism.

But it's always been a problem for me. And this is one of the things, you know, I'm sure Rorty has been accused many times of being a relativist, and he mentions that sort of accusation here. And that's a kind of a perennial problem for pragmatism. And I said this on a previous podcast, which is it's sort of vulnerable to charges of either collapsing into relativism or idealism. And it's unclear how it's distinguished, how it has its own terrain. At least to me it is. But regardless of all that, I think these fundamental problems around this model of knowledge as representation, which would tempt you

18:45 Stephen: in other directions, is justification is a social phenomenon. Is that a theory of knowledge or isn't it? In other words, does that have some of the foundational properties that Rorty says philosophy ought to mature away from? Why isn't imagining consensual results of conversations or social utility or custom? Why do descriptions of those not constitute a theory of knowledge vulnerable in all of the same ways a neutral framework or an ocular metaphor are vulnerable? And then do you think, Because I'm never sure I really believe that he does away with the quote unquote ontological gap?

What I find totally powerful and original about the book is that it's going after both Ryle and Dennett. So Ryle is the ultra behaviorist who sends one branch of philosophy of mind in the direction of a completely unrepentant behaviorism in Other words, everything we know about mentality is manifested in perspicuous behavior.

19:47 Mark: So just to clarify that the ontological gap is the gap between mind and the physical and the mental. And you're saying behaviorism is one of the solutions to that, which is just to deny the mental altogether, that whenever we make mental claims, we're actually talking about people's behaviors, observable stuff that science can get ahold of.

20:03 Stephen: And Gilbert Ryle, a British philosopher in the 1940s, late 40s, publishes a book called Concept of Mind, which is a classic of modern philosophy, in which he takes the ultra behaviorist. Mentality is a completely false construct. It's the ghost in the machine. And he believes that everything, all mentality, can be explained, as it were, from a third person point of view, as behavioristic. Then the other extreme would be Berkeley pure idealism. But everyone is kind of working their way between these two distinct ontological realms, right? Two different modes of being, one which everything is reducible to physical cause and effect, and one in which somewhere within that there's this thing called mentality, which doesn't itself have substance, it doesn't enact itself in space or time in exactly the same way.

And it has to therefore be a different realm of being and ontologically distinct. And Rorty says, well, they're just one thing under two separate descriptions is different from two separate ontological realms separated by an unbridgeable gap. And what I like about his argument is he really does seem to want to move completely beyond some form of dualism, some form of monism, some form of, like, announcement of the mystery. He wants to seem to get beyond completely all of that. And he seems to have convinced himself that he's done it. And sometimes, as I'm reading it, I think that he's done it.

And then at other moments, I think the raw first person experience of qualia, just that thing of being inside yourself, isn't that ontologically separate? I can't quite bring myself. So those are my two sticking points. Like, I still come out closer to John Searle in feeling as though, according to our current canons of explanation, these are two ontologically distinct realms. And then the second is, I'm never quite sure that describing truth as consensual isn't itself a theory of knowledge.

21:49 Mark: So let's just connect the two topics here. So we said we're going to mostly talk about the mind today, but the introduction was larger and the book as a whole is more about knowledge. And just to make this really explicit, the connection between those is, you know, I was asking, why should we doubt this? What we've called another podcast, the correspondence theory of truth. That's one of the aspects of the epistemological problem. And we've had whole other episodes. And he mentions Dewey, he mentions Heidegger, he mentions Wittgenstein, where we've had whole episodes that try to argue.

Like the James one that Wes just brought up, that try to argue that the correspondence theory is somehow too problematic. It seems very common sense. Rorty, at least in what we've read so far, doesn't really go into. I don't even recall him using the term correspondence theory of truth versus, you know, the coherence theory or these other theories of truth that we've talked about. But he does make the shift quickly. He thinks that mind is a good way to introduce this, because the key, as I think we've tried to say to describing the epistemological problem is because the only thing we can be certain about is the contents of our own minds.

And so we have these representations. When you're talking about a correspondence theory of truth, you're talking about the correspondence between something in the mind and something in the world. So, of course, the immediate thing is like, well, what is the mental? What is something in the mind? Why do we even think that there is a mind? Why do we distinguish that from the brain or from the world and insist that it has some other ontological realm? And I think he's very suspicious even of the notion of ontology, of metaphysics itself, that he characterizes near the beginning of this chapter one, that, yeah, you know, modern dualists, like we had David Chalmers on the podcast.

He's one of these guys. This seems to be at least something Wes has expressed a lot of sympathy for in the past. Just like that article that we were just referring to. What is it like to be a Steven? What is it like to be a bat? There seems to be a feel. There seems to be something central about consciousness. That is the qualia that Stephen was referring to. One of the first points he makes is that this is very common sense. Like, of course, there's this notion of the feel of pain that seems very distinct from something c fibers in the brain firing.

But these philosophers, they feel kind of guilty about drawing ontological or metaphysical conclusions from that. And that's kind of getting at Rorty's whole problem in philosophy with these enterprises that are seemingly based on a priori rules that as if there's some way of justifying Whether something is a distinct ontological category or when it's not, as opposed to in chess, what counts as a legal move in chess, like, well, that's defined by the particular social practice. So philosophy he's described as an escape from history, that we're trying to come up with these criteria for deciding important things that are somehow not based in any prior social practice, that are just read off of the world itself, read

24:33 Wes: off of the mind's incorrigible access to itself. Because the way you get at these a priori standards is through that Cartesian reflection.

24:40 Dylan: And once you are able to give the foundation so that you see how the activity of the mind links up with the world, then you know what's true and what's not true. To me it makes the connection why you would put your stake in the ground at doubt with Descartes, where you start with the point of view of saying, well, I just don't believe anything in the world because you're just starting with things that aren't as they appear. And Descartes activity of working his way back to starting, well, I'm just going to doubt everything until I find something that I can't doubt at all.

And in a really important way. For Rorty, that's basically the start of this whole problem. And in fact he'll say that philosophy ends up recasting its own history. Even before Descartes, as always, obsessed with this exact question. And again, he doesn't go into detail about this, but I think he just seems to consider it kind of a false self history. It's a little bit like particle physicists reaching back to Democritus and saying, well, Democritus was doing particle physics.

25:44 Wes: You know, I think one thing to keep in mind with these attempts at grounding what we call grounding. So for Kant, it's not as if, you know, he's wondering, well, you know, is there such a thing as science? Do we have knowledge of the world? That is actually not the question. The premise of the whole enterprise is that there is science and that we have knowledge of the world. What you do is you try and figure out in Kant's language what the grounds for the possibility of those things are. What else has to be true if we have knowledge, if we have objective experiences of the world.

And the same thing with Descartes, it's not as if he's actually worried about the existence of the world. When we talk about skepticism, you know, with Descartes we're talking about a method, not an actual Concern about actual doubt. And the same thing with Kant. You're really making a fundamental assumption and then trying to do some a priori conceptual work. Rorty is objecting to that whole enterprise.

26:36 Stephen: And also you could add that actually the anxiety is the opposite. Descartes doesn't think that the world doesn't exist. It's in fact how worried they are in the 17th century about science basically establishing a law, obedient, non mental realm that doesn't seem to have any place for vestigial notions of free will or human dignity. I mean, the real anxiety is can you subsume human beings under empirical science? And Kant is explicitly responding to Newton in that regard. And so it's really more the worry that you're going to lose your humanity to law obedient causality that makes mentality suddenly an important refuge.

And what I think is really astute about Rorty is he's saying, well, the problem with that is then you bind human dignity up with this glassy essence that you both can't prove, but have to prove. You can't prove it, because if you prove it, you prove it according to the canons of science, but if you don't prove it, you've left human dignity dangling in space. Right? It has no point of connection to the world. So he's sort of, as an act of therapy, he's trying to go back and say, well, what sorts of odd preoccupations did we have right around the 17th century that made us go down this lane?

And if we separate it out, you can get human dignity without proof, which is where you're gonna have to find it anyway. And that's how you get the rest of his career. Right. He says that essentially a liberal is someone who doesn't countenance cruelty in any form whatsoever. But I have no way to prove that. That puts me on a different moral basis from anybody else.

28:11 Wes: So, Stephen, you're reminding me now that I was kind of not entirely correctly representing Kant, because in a way, he's not worried about grounding the science in the sense of proving there is such a thing as science or verifying that the claims of science are veridical or something like that. But he's worried about the status of philosophy and why there's endless disputes within philosophy. And he is worried about sort of the separation between the domains of science and philosophy, which I think is related to your talk about human dignity. So in a way, he's trying to keep philosophy and science's hands off each other.

He's trying to keep them from creeping into each other's domains. And because you get what he calls the antinomies, you get all these sorts of contradictions. If we think that souls are sort of like the same sorts of things as physical things in the empirical world, we get all sorts of contradictions. We can't treat metaphysical objects as real in the sense of physical objects, the same sort of thing. If we treat philosophy as an arbiter of scientific truth, right?

29:11 Stephen: A human being is not an object in the world among objects in the world. Or else you could treat a human being instrumentally at no cost to its dignity or your dignity. But I think what the Rortyan response to that is, is that we're really working back from the moral intuition. The moral intuition is the thing that we're really sure of and we're backfilling and reverse engineering from it.

29:31 Mark: One of the things that he considers just continuing a little in the summer vein, section three in here is called the Diversity of Mind Body Problems. It might seem strange that we're blaming this intuition about the mind on these 17th century people, on Descartes, on Kant. Isn't this something that has just been around perennially and certainly concerns about how we differ from the animals, how reason elevates us about human dignity. Those are much, much older than 17th century problems. And so one of the things he's trying to do is give a little historical account of how the takes on, you know, he says in the preface, he used to think philosophy was a series of alternative solutions to the same problems and learned that no, it's actually, it covers quite different sets of problems.

Right? The fact that there's some similar words involved and a gradual change in meanings confuses this for us. So this is why we're in such a horrible state today with these perennial problems that will just never go away. It's in part because of these particular interpretations that Descartes and Kant gave have taken over, have become affixed to these, what you might call perennial existential concerns. Why should we even exist? What makes us worthy of existing? That he might have problems with those too, but certainly he wants to help us see how those are separate.

How this particular metaphor of the glassy essence that is our mind is not necessarily connected to all notions of thoughts of immortality or dignity or anything like that.

31:02 Stephen: Can I read from one section? It's always struck me as interestingly critical or central to the argument. On page 35 of my edition of the book, he says, here are some, though hardly all, of the features which philosophers have at one time or another taken as marks of the mental. The ability to know itself incorrigibly or privileged access. The ability to exist separately from the body. Non spatiality, having a non spatial part or element. The ability to grasp universals. The ability to sustain relations to the inexistent. The ability to use language, the ability to act freely.

The ability to form part of our social group. Inability to be identified with any object in the world. And then he goes on and he says, this is a long list and it could easily be lengthened. But it's important to go through these various suggestions about what it is to have a mind for each of them has helped philosophers to insist on an unbridgeable dualism between mind and body. Philosophers have constantly seized upon some distinctive feature of human life. In order to give our intuition of our uniqueness a quote unquote firm philosophical basis.

32:03 Dylan: He goes through grouping those points into sort of a summary of how he's going to talk about them. And at the end of that section, by sticking to the three topics of grasping universals, separation from the body and non spatiality. I shall move toward my conclusion that if we hold these last three historically distinct notions apart, then we shall no longer be tempted by the notion that knowledge is made possible by a special glassy essence which enables human beings to mirror nature. Thus, we shall not be tempted to think that the possession of inner life, a stream of consciousness, is relevant to reason. Then once consciousness and reason are separated out in this way, then personhood can be seen for what I claim it is a matter of decision rather than knowledge. And acceptance of another being into fellowship rather than a recognition of a common essence.

32:54 Stephen: I think that's lovely, but I'm not sure I 100% agree with it.

32:56 Dylan: The question would be what is the difference between accepting into fellowship rather than recognizing as a common essence? We've talked many times about the way in which we recognize ourselves in others by seeing other people. I mean, that would be one aspect of it. But both those statements sound a lot like just understanding how I am like another person.

33:20 Wes: Yeah, Stephen, Why? What was your objection to that?

33:23 Stephen: I see how separating out reason from consciousness allows you to think of reason as sociable and establish through acts of cooperation or conversation. And that you don't otherwise need to test it. You know, it has a utility among human beings to agree that certain things are true or however you want to think of reason as disconnected from the ability to confirm your inner representations accurately depict the world outside of your body or even perception. Having done That I don't see how you don't still have some connection between our notion of others as like us precisely because we don't have privileged access to their inner lives and therefore social sympathy.

Reason I can see as external and sociable and conversational. But sympathy, I have a hard time moving beyond a kind of quasi religious apprehension, beyond proof that other people also have irreducible subjectivity. And I know that because I can't know it. Right? I know it because I can't see it. Therefore I have to bridge it only sympathetically and kind of absurdly. It's almost Kierkegaardian.

34:41 Wes: I mean, this is an existentialist move. He's making this emphasis on a matter of decision rather than knowledge. He's challenging, you know, the traditional connection between virtue and knowing something and between someone's personhood and knowing something. Ultimately, it's not someone's essence, something we know in their essence, that demands our respect. But it's a sort of radical existentialist

35:06 Stephen: decision because it has to be right. It has to be a leap of faith that other people experience the world as I experience it, because I do have privileged access to my own inner life. Right. That metaphor is not quite Rortyan enough, and even I see that. But at some level I have irreducibly subjective and privileged access to my own self. Therefore I can't possibly know that you have the same thing. But I have to make a leap of faith to believe that you do. And that allows for the kind of social sympathy rooted in personhood that I think he likes, but doesn't want to have be dependent upon self inspection of one's own subjectivity?

35:46 Dylan: You sounded like exactly what he was saying for a second there. But am I right that you want to root that understanding of the move to accept other beings into fellowship as being rooted in our radical inner subjectivity? And he doesn't want to found it in that. He would deny that as being sort of the cause of it.

36:08 Stephen: Right. He finds a way. This is where I don't follow also the technical aspect of his argument, and maybe someone can help me, but he finds a way to neither be a behaviorist nor deny subjectivity. And I'm never sure I'm totally comfortable with it.

36:23 Mark: A key part to his thesis here is you were saying that certainly I have privileged access. I have indubitable access to some aspect of myself. He thinks that you can pull apart a lot of these conceptual pieces. So there's the. I have qualia. I have. There is a feel to My experience there is something it is like to be a bat, something it is like to be Steven, that's one thing. And then there's a question, is that knowledge? Do you want to describe that as I have knowledge of myself? This is exactly the mistake he thinks that Descartes is making, that there's nothing we know better than ourselves.

Well, let's pound into that. What does that mean? Like, if I'm talking about my motives, do I necessarily know my own motives? Well, no, that's not what it means. It has to be something like what my motives seem. Or if we talk about pains, you could see a pain as just. It's a message that my stomach is upset, that there's something wrong in my stomach, I ate something bad or something like that. And so if you look at it as a knowledge thing, like maybe my pain is wrong, but we seem to think that that's not possible. That's not the way the word pain works.

You are correct in that you have a pain, that there's some thing, the pain, that is an entity that you know without any possibility of being wrong. That's what he has.

37:38 Dylan: The problem with saying that you have pain or the experience of it would be the indubitable part. But assigning any kind of meaning to that or interpreting that in any way requires all sorts of other things. So the idea that there is a raw feel that has any kind of knowledge associated with it, he's denying that that's possible. There's no such thing as something indubitable in the sense that it has any truth value at all. Pain doesn't have truth value, for instance,

38:05 Mark: other than it is a fact that I am in pain. That is the sentence that is relevant. But having a pain is not grasping the sentence, I have a pain. That's not what a pain is. Hopefully it's not, unless you're very weird.

38:17 Wes: And more broadly, his idea is that personhood does not require this sort of self knowledge, which I was trying to

38:23 Mark: pull those apart, which the obvious thing is these concerns about artificial intelligence. So let's say you have something that passes the Turing test. You have these androids running among us, demanding their personhood, having intelligent conversations with us, but yet if you're John Searle or somebody like that, you're going to deny that they actually have qualia, that they have inner lives, that it's a simulation, that's all that can be done, that there's something special about brain tissue or something, you know, in that complexity. So there is a fact of the matter beyond.

38:54 Wes: Not the complexity for Searle, because he's antifunctionalist in this sense, but a property, a biological property in the brain that accounts for consciousness.

39:03 Mark: Yeah. Putting aside the fact that I don't understand that, or maybe he's just pointing at what can't be understood. In any case, it is conceivable that you might want to admit these androids into the social world. It's just. It would make sense to do that because they will wage war on you if you don't. Like, they act like people. If you just said all the people coming from Asia here, they're not really people, we're going to deny them that. Well, then eventually they're going to kick your ass, like, for saying that, so.

39:33 Dylan: Or they could be great friends and lovers.

39:35 Stephen: Right.

39:36 Mark: You're missing.

39:37 Wes: Yes.

39:37 Mark: You're missing out on some in quotation marks.

39:40 Wes: They can be. You're reminding me of Westworld now.

39:45 Mark: The pragmatic reasons for allowing someone into the social world. You're right. It doesn't seem like it is derived from this sympathetic identification. It seems like the sympathetic identification is something that comes with it. But it's a very Wittgensteinian approach that he's giving here. It's always a problem when things come together, to really say, can they conceptually come apart like. Or to judge these borderline cases of creatures that exhibit some of them but not others.

40:11 Dylan: Or for that matter, when is it that a human being. At what level of functionality do they maintain being a human being? Right, because there's all kinds of states of a human being that are only recognizably human in that they have a biological form that you can point to and say, oh, that looks like a human being. We'll insist, we'll have all kinds of lawsuits regarding that person and the dignity of their life when there's nothing about what they're doing that has any reflection on or is not in any way recognizable as human other than that they are a flesh shaped entity that looks like a human being.

40:47 Mark: Dylan, you're so flesh shaped.

40:49 Dylan: My point being is that it's not just that, that acceptance into fellowship and that recogn is in those cases. Right. We have. You gave the case of the Android that no matter how much they're functioning as a human being and would be indistinguishable, say they pass the Turing test, like you said, that you might deny that they're a human being because they don't have a particular form of the biology and thereby we deny their glassy essence, and that makes them a human being. And I'm saying that the flip side is true, that we attribute a glassy essence to states of matter that in no way exhibit human behavior, in part

41:28 Stephen: because we've biologized it and we share a biology with someone who may be in a vegetative state.

41:34 Dylan: Exactly.

41:34 Stephen: Just to back up a little bit, I really like the Wittgensteinian idea of sociability that in fact, just as nobody examines inner representations in order to build up to normal common sense knowledge, right? No one begins with radical skepticism and then builds up to common sense knowledge of the world as independent of our own mind. Nobody other than a philosopher, Right? In the same way, nobody really examines their inner qualia or their persistence over time, or their ability to lapse into Proustian reverie, and then chooses human sociability based on the idea that someone else is capable of Proustian reverie. Right? You enter into fraternity with others only by doing it in a way. You draw something from sociability and understand that the only way to draw that from it is to also give similarly to someone else. You don't begin with introspection.

42:27 Wes: What is that sociability based on then? So to say, it's a matter of decision rather than knowledge, right? It's not a matter of that. I know myself as a glassy essence, and then I know the other person has the same glassy essence who gets into the fraternity. How do you make that decision if it's not a matter of some hard and fast criteria of personhood? I think that's very problematic. And you call it a decision. It makes it sound like as if the community can make that decision. Who counts as a person, who doesn't is a matter of agreement rather than essence.

42:58 Stephen: Right? But has it ever been the case that, just to take the example of gay marriage, is it that someone offered a proof of gay personhood and therefore we got gay marriage? Or was it that the dominantly heteronormative culture, as gay people, courageously came out of the closet, socialized more consciously with gay people, saw gay people acting in ways that the heteronormative dominant culture regarded as normal or unthreatening, and through experience, and not through introspection or epistemology, but only really through sociability, discovered that their prior definition of normal was inadequate?

Right. And isn't this just always the function of cosmopolitanism over parochial interests? Right. It really is experience. I think the worst argument is to make biologically rooted racial arguments or IQ based arguments in order to establish equality. Essentialist arguments about equality always seem to me as essentially racist. And really it's the expansion of new ideas of normalcy or achievement into one's expanded experience.

44:02 Wes: And these sound like cases of being immersed in a kind of form of life. To go back to Wittgenstein, it's analogous to saying meaning is use rather than giving some hard and fast criteria for that who is a person sort of emerges out of the game that you're immersed in.

44:20 Mark: Yeah, I find it hard to distinguish between these behaviors that we found normal and identifying with the what was previously regarded as other or potentially subhuman. Like it seems exactly what has convinced a lot of people that I forget which right wing commentator you know, was criticizing the recent spate of movies like Brokeback Mountain is. It's humanizing gay people. Which of course is an absurd way of putting it because of course they're human in the first place. But it's the idea that no, no, they feel something that is recognizably love.

And I think literature like that that is exposing the inner lives insofar as we can get a handle on that through art. You know, it's the same thing that it's racial equivalence, but certainly literature. Reading Richard Wright or one of these other things about the experiences of the black American or whatever the other is. Wow, I can relate to those too. I guess I should really have more like how do I distinguish that kind of being convinced, which I think has been essential to bringing about changes of this sort from changes in behavior? The way you're talking, Stephen, I think

45:23 Stephen: it's a great point. This is what I come up against. I mean, you experience a work of art and that expands your notion of personhood. Isn't that both entering into a new kind of knowledge of the world but also running up against some limit of proof? Right. Again, maybe the distinction is between knowledge and proof. You don't have to prove normalcy on the part of gay people. Nor do you have to prove that they aren't special category of zombie being that doesn't have an interli. You know, you don't have to falsify the idea that a person from a far away place is actually a zombie and not a human being.

46:00 Mark: Well, it seems like it would be more like not that they're. You think they're zombies, but that they're animals or something. That they're two different. Yeah, I think I might have answered my own question, which is I was thinking of literature that has anti heroes in it, you know, you see Breaking Bad, you can understand the main character's point of view. That does not lead because it does not accompany normalizing behavior. Then that's not going to give rise to a, oh, we should legalize drug production or we should legalize honor based murders. And it doesn't lead one to just the fact that you can sympathize with something doesn't lead you to necessarily approve of it and move towards legalization. So yes, the sympathizing must be accompanied by non threatening, normal in quotes behaviors.

46:47 Wes: So ultimately we need to know what we mean by the mental. And it seems obvious at a surface level, but I think he's going to try to show us once we start investigating it, it's not as clear as we think. And so he starts out with a kind of basic intuition about what is mental, involving this criterion of non spatiality. It's just what's not, not physical. And then persistence, as in being able to exist even when the body is destroyed. And the problem here is he's thinking specifically about Neo dualists who have rejected substance dualism or Cartesian dualism, where the mind is just this separate substance. There's matter and then there's mind. There's this mind stuff, which is another basic category of existence. But they want to preserve some kind of dualism. And one strategy is to say that the mental is just two different descriptions of the same thing.

47:43 Mark: For instance, yeah, he talked about it always seems to us when we're doing these things, when we're reading things relevant to this, that, you know, of course there's not like ghost substance wandering around. That can't be right. Like Descartes thought or like traditional religion might think that this spirit stuff somehow gets in our bodies. That seems weird. So what are the alternatives though, to talking about this? It could be that, well, when I talk about my feelings and my brain, I'm really just using two different words for the same thing or another way.

The Spinoza way is to say, well, whenever we're talking about the physical and the mental, we're just talking about two different aspects of the same thing. So it's either two descriptions take the linguistic turn, or two different aspects take a straightforwardly metaphysical turn. Two different kinds of properties of the same underlying stuff. And he thinks both of those are problematic.

48:36 Wes: Well, they're problematic in the sense that they sort of presuppose the ontological gap. They treat it as a presupposition in a sense, he thinks. So he tells us that dualists either must justify that assumption of the ontological gap. Or they must give us a version of dualism that doesn't rely on it. Because he doesn't think that talking about alternative descriptions or properties of the same thing, he doesn't think that really gets rid of the ontological gap. That's just another way of. Of saying there is an ontological gap.

49:04 Dylan: In this whole first section, laying out that problem is in preface to saying, well, in order to understand this, we need to talk about what is the mental, what on earth do we mean by that in the end? To try to convince us that there's no ontological gap to be considered, I guess, or to put it aside, and

49:24 Wes: I honestly, I don't know how. He doesn't really explain why this sort of strategy that they use of two descriptions of the same thing is another version of the ontological gap. If we think he's right about that. The next step in his argument is to look at other examples of ontological gaps. So the finite and the infinite, human and the divine, particular in the universal.

49:44 Dylan: Well, he wants to try to identify what an ontological gap is, and those are the only ones that he immediately

49:48 Wes: can point to, is that it, Is it because he wants to say what an ontological gap is? Is that the reason why he makes that move?

49:55 Dylan: I think so. So on page 19, he summarizes the dilemma. Either neo dualists must construct an epistemological account of how we know a priori, that entities fall under two irreducibly distinct ontological species, or they must find some way of expressing their dualism, which relies on neither the notion of ontological gap nor that of alternative description. But before casting about for ways to resolve the dilemma, we should look more closely at the notion of ontological species or ontological gap. And then he just asks a bunch of questions about what it is. He says, so we know, perhaps, that no empirical inquiry can identify two spatiotemporal entities which have different locations. But that knowledge seems too trivial to be relevant, that, you know, two things can't be in the same place at the same time.

50:44 Mark: So there's an ontological gap between this thing and that thing because they're not in the same place exactly.

50:49 Dylan: But he says that seems too trivial to bear on the it says, what other cases in which we know a priori about natural ontological kinds? The only examples which I can think of are the distinctions between finite and infinite, between human and divine, and between particular and universal. Nothing we intuit could cross those divides. But these examples do not seem Very helpful. We are inclined to say that we do not know what it would be for something infinite to exist if we were to clarify the orthodox notion of the divine. We seem to have either a merely negative conception or else one explicated in terms of the notion of infinity and immateriality. So he goes on, and ultimately he will link up the notion of our mental with bridging the particular and the universal. But yes, Wes, I think that he brings those up because he's just trying to articulate what that is. The ontological gap.

51:43 Wes: Yeah. So he's trying to see if we have, I guess, other examples in which we know an ontological gap a priori. And he's going to conclude that the infinite and the divine, we have these negative concepts. Well, they're both inconceivable, let's put it that way.

51:57 Mark: So are we in the same circumstance with the mental and the physical? We know what the physical is. Is the mental just what's not physical? Is that really all we can say about it?

52:06 Wes: Right. In the case of the infinite and the divine, really what we have is a sort of negative conception, and it may be the case with the immaterial as well. So on page 20, we feel vaguely confident that if the infinite could exist, it, like the universal, could be exemplified by the immaterial. If it makes any sense to speak of the existence of universals, it would seem that they must exist immaterially and that is why they can never be identified with spatiotemporal particulars.

52:33 Mark: So we should explain that for folks that didn't.

52:35 Wes: Yeah, this is the part of the argument I had trouble figuring out what he's trying to do here. I mean, at the end of this, he's basically going to ask the question of whether the mental and the immaterial are synonyms, whether we can make non spatiality or immateriality a criterion of the mental. And he's going to say no. But this, this particular part is less clear to me. Anyone have a good way of explaining it?

52:58 Dylan: Why the existence of universals implies that they must be immaterial?

53:02 Mark: We at least should spell out, because we haven't talked about universals here before today. So we're talking about, you know, my mind versus mind in general, or even more literally, this particular cat versus catness or something. Unless you're Plato. You probably think that that's just something that we've abstracted. You're a nominalist. It's just an idea that we have that is abstracted from individual Things or

53:27 Wes: even the predicate red, even something as simple as that, Any property.

53:32 Dylan: And in that way, it's immaterial. It doesn't exist in the world. It's not made of stuff.

53:37 Mark: Right. It can't be just the case that red is exhausted by this red thing and that red thing and this red thing. There has to be something that makes them all red. What is it? What is it that we are thinking about? You can't just say, well, I think of other red things in the past, but how did you know which of the things in your memory to pick out as red?

53:54 Dylan: What is it that they all have in common that makes them red?

53:56 Mark: Yes, yes. They have redness. They have the universal. And if folks listen to our De Anima episode, there's an interesting sort of side note here on Aristotle and the nous. And that was sort of the mysterious thing about it. This is, you know, pre Cartesian type of epistemology is he's claiming the ancient Greeks did not have this mind as a mirror representing the outside world. If we remember, Aristotle actually felt like your eye, when it grasps red, it actually some part of it turns red. There's like a little fluid in there that turns red. That was more the model of how we interact with the world.

Is that a little, you know, just like when you smell something, it's because a piece of that thing has gotten in your nose, it becomes part of you. Yes, that's the way sight works. And so for us to grasp universals, there must be some special part of us, the nous, the understanding that can become all things. And this is sort of an early version of what might be the mind in more Descartes, in the more recent sense is this thing in us that somehow can become the highest mountain. Whenever we just think of it, it can be, in some sense become all these things.

And for Aristotle, that went very well. You can see why Christian theologians picked up on that as well. That would have to be the soul. That would have to be something that doesn't even exist in our head. How could something in our head become the red, become the mountains, become the number 4? Those concepts exist outside of space and time. And so that part of ourselves, that must be our way of hooking up with the divine. So somewhat, Steven, I feel like we're neglecting you here. What. What in this section was pricking your interest or all of that.

55:39 Stephen: Right. Because he's trying to get us to see how the mind body distinction was modern philosophy grafting on the universal in the particular and that once you accept that there's no way to get from the universal, which by definition is immaterial, back to its material particular instantiation in the world. Platonism collapses. And I think what he's leading to is this conclusion that he comes to on page 30 of my edition. I think it sounds like we're on the same pagination. But if you attempt some kind of new form of dualism, insisting that the mental and the physical are ontologically separate from one another, but as soon as there's an ontological gap, we are no longer talking about states or properties, but about distinct particulars, distinct subjects of predication.

Neo dualist who identifies a pain with how it feels to be in pain, is hypostatizing a property, painfulness, into a special sort of particular, a particular of that special sort whose esse is percipi and whose reality is exhausted in our initial acquaintance with it. The neo dualist is no longer talking about how people feel, but about feelings as little self subsistent entities floating free of people in the way in which universals float free of the instantiation. So you just, you end up with the same problem that you always have when you attempt to understand redness as a relationship to a universal red, as you do when you try to think about pain as something separate from people feeling pain, it becomes free floating and attaches to experience absolutely nowhere, right?

So he has in fact, says Rorty, modeled pains on universals. It is no wonder then that he can intuit that pains can exist separately from the body. For this intuition is simply the intuition that universals can exist independently of particulars, that special sort of subject of predication whose appearance is its reality. Phenomenal pain turns out to be simply the painfulness of the pain abstracted from the person having the pain. It is, in short, the universal painfulness itself. To put it oxymoronically. Mental particulars, unlike mental states of people, turn out to be universals.

57:44 Dylan: And this is why the phenomenal ends up being immaterial.

57:48 Stephen: Yes, exactly.

57:50 Dylan: It's immaterial in the same way universal because it relies on universals.

57:54 Mark: Well, initially, when Wes brought up immateriality, it was the Kantian formation that it is non spatial. Why would we think that the mental is the non spatial? And then what does he think is wrong with that? Sort of. As a first step here you might think that, well, the pain is in my stomach, my stomach hurts, so the pain is in my stomach, but isn't the pain in my brain? So he brings a phantom Limb in particular, if I have a pain in my hand, but my hand has already been cut off, so it's not really in my hand, the pain must be in my head. So that's one of the arguments from skepticism to say that, oh no, the pain is always in your head and then.

Well, where in particular in your head? No, it's just the way we think about pain. The way we think about any of these mental things, according to this picture anyway, is that it's not in any particular space. You know, think of if you imagine something like, well, where is that? It's in my mind's eye. Well, how big is your mind's eye? Like. No, no, bigness is not something that applies to it. It's a non spatial thing.

58:54 Stephen: It's interesting that if you walk into a door, the pain is incorrigible. But if you have a phantom pain or a pain in a phantom limb, it's mental but not incorrigible.

59:05 Wes: It is actually still incorrigible in the sense that you're not deceived, that you're having a pain. What's not incorrigible is whether the belief that the.

59:15 Mark: I guess it was caused by. Yeah, it's cause.

59:19 Wes: I think the contradiction here is the fact that mental states are on one intuition, they're immaterial, they're not located anywhere. On the other hand, they are attached to human beings who are in space. That is the problem.

59:36 Mark: And he's kind of offhand about it. He says, well, Kant and Strawson have given very good arguments that all of these mental facilities have to be owned by a particular person. This is just one of the stylistic things that makes it a little hard to follow him and evaluate him because they'll throw in things like that, like, well, what is the argument? Why do they have to be. Because that's what Berkeley, for instance, believed. In fact, this is just what I was getting at with Aristotle, that there's somehow these universals and there's somehow mind in general, God's mind.

And really. And we're all just little hunks of God's mind or something like that. And so he's just going to go with. In the history of philosophy, some very smart people have shown that that doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's not very satisfying if that was one of your own tendencies to think that no, the mental is a whole realm. In fact, maybe the mental contains the physical or something.

1:00:26 Wes: I think that the general gist here is that once we have this contradiction between the seeming non spatiality of mental states and the fact that they are attached to spatially located persons. Then you have to figure out why you have this spatial entity, a person, and some of their states are mental, and then some of their states are non mental. So then the question becomes, how do you distinguish those different types of states? And then that gets us into this discussion of functional states.

1:00:55 Mark: There's a quote from page 18 that I wanted to make sure we read just about this dual aspect theory, Spinoza's double aspect theory, that it is tempting for the dualist to go linguistic and begin talking about the different vocabularies or alternative description. This jargon suggests that the dualistic intuition in question is merely one of the differences between ways of talking about the same phenomenon, and thus seems to lead one from something like dualism to something like Spinoza's double aspect theory. But the question two descriptions of what makes this a difficult position to hold onto?

To reply, two descriptions of organisms seems alright until we ask, are organisms physical? Or is there more to organisms, even human organisms, than the actual and possible dispositions of their physical parts? It's a similar move to what you were just making in terms of if you say that, oh, somehow all mental states belong to organisms, but what are organisms? And how can organisms have some properties that are spatial and some that are not spatial?

1:01:47 Wes: One way to get at that is to talk like a functionalist and say that, well, mental states, they're immaterial in the sense that they're the functional states of the organism. So for instance, if you're talking about pain, instead of talking about pain in these sort of intrinsic qualities that it has, you talk about its causal relations to the organism as a whole. So you could say it's something that tends to produce the belief that there's something wrong. It produces the desire not to have pain, it might cause anxiety. So you put together this whole causal matrix of what pain does and where it comes from.

That's your functionalist theory of pain. The problem with that is that there are lots of functionalist states of organisms that are actually not not mental. Like for instance, health or fame or beauty. I think he also brings up. So then you're left with a question of what feature then is shared by pains and beliefs that beauty and health doesn't have. So the functional criteria doesn't work here. We still need to say why one thing is mental and one thing is not mental. And that, basically, I think, is the gist of this whole or section one of chapter one, the sustained Argument that we can't make non spatiality a criteria of mental states.

It breaks down every time we try to make that work.

1:02:59 Dylan: Right.

1:02:59 Stephen: He himself gives a good summary of the section on page 31. He says, I've said that the only way to associate the intentional with the immaterial is to identify it with the phenomenal, and that the only way to identify the phenomenal with the immaterial is to hypostatize universals and think of them as particulars rather than abstractions from particulars, thus giving them a non spatiotemporal habitation. It turns out, in other words, a universal particular distinction is the only metaphysical distinction we've got, the only one which moves anything at all outside of space, much less outside of space time. The mental physical distinction then is parasitic on the universal particular distinction rather than conversely.

1:03:37 Wes: So that's the summary at the end of section two.

1:03:39 Stephen: Oh, that's section two, Yeah.

1:03:42 Wes: I had just gotten to the end of section one where he whoops, oh, sorry. He's just arguing that spatiality can't be a criteria of mental states. And then in section two, he's going to go on to talk about this attempt to define the mental as the intentional or the phenomenal. You read his nice summary there of what he's doing with this section.

1:04:03 Mark: So let's make clear what the intentional is and what the phenomenal is. So we're talking about the feel of something that is its phenomenal appearance, whereas intentionality in this sense has to do with directedness. So a lot of people have characterized the mental aspect. It's aboutness, it's a perception. It's a perception of something. But you know, a pain doesn't necessarily seem like it's about something. I mean, you could maybe try to force it into that, like, oh, it's about my stomach that is hurting or something. But that's not really what the contents of the experience of pain is.

1:04:35 Wes: We can have an intentional proposition involving pain, like my foot is in pain, but pain itself is not that. The feeling, the qualia of being in pain is not itself this about thing

1:04:48 Mark: explain how the proposition is intentional.

1:04:51 Wes: Because it's about something, it's directed towards,

1:04:54 Mark: because it's about the state of affairs.

1:04:56 Wes: Yes. It's about something in the world.

1:04:58 Mark: Yes.

1:04:59 Wes: And then, you know, you take beliefs, so that's a belief. And beliefs aren't actually phenomenal. This is something I think Wittgenstein emphasized. You know, when you have a belief, it's not like a qualia. There's not A feel to it. There are these sort of in between cases which you'll get into of mental imagery, the paradigm case. But beliefs themselves are not these raw feels. You can have a belief without having any sort of qualitative experience.

1:05:28 Mark: So that's one of the questions, like what is a belief really? I mean, he talks about beliefs that hover before the mind. It could have a qualitative feel, in other words, when you're thinking about that belief. But clearly, if we want to explain behavior using beliefs, there are lots of things that we believe all the time that we are not thinking of whenever we're exhibiting behaviors that show that we believe it. So in other words, the beliefs are not conscious, they're not part of our qualia, but yet we talk about them as mental.

1:05:56 Wes: Even conscious beliefs are not. So if we sit together and have a conversation and we rattle on sentence after sentence after sentence, in many cases there's not even mental imagery associated with those sentences and the beliefs involved. It's completely non imagistic. Do you see what I'm saying?

1:06:13 Mark: So does having a phenomenal feel and being imagistic, Are those the same thing?

1:06:17 Wes: So he will go on to say in this section that there's some hybrid cases, like you mentioned, having the words, if you take your belief and you focus on the words, or if you actually do focus on mental imagery, you concentrate on something you're saying and some sort of imagery associated with it. Yes, any sort of mental imagery. So mental imagery is a case where the phenomenal and the intentional seem to be combined. So we start out in this section, we distinguish the phenomenal from the intentional. Those are two different things. So then why are they put together in this category of the mental?

Well, we might look at the possibility family resemblances. So we can find this sort of overlapping case of mental imagery, which is both phenomenal and intentional. And beliefs look like mental imagery and their intentionality, and then our qualia look like mental imagery and their phenomenality. So we lump them all together. That's one theory of why they might have gotten lumped together.

1:07:17 Mark: Or is it just because they're both not physical?

1:07:19 Wes: Well, then the question is, you know, well, we've said what the mental is now in terms of the phenomenal and the intentional. And then, so what do we mean by the physical? Is it just derivatives? Is it just the non mental? Why would we want to say the intentional is non material? And why would we want to say the phenomenal is non material? So the rest of what he does in this section is to Say why we might think those things.

1:07:40 Dylan: Which ends up being rooted in what Stephen read about linking up between the universal particular distinction.

1:07:48 Wes: Well, in the case of the intentional being non material, our intuition there is that you can look at someone's brain, but that doesn't reveal any intentionality.

1:07:57 Stephen: Right.

1:07:57 Wes: You can't just look at the brain matter and see anything that's intentional in there. And his sort of analogy there is. In the same way, when you look at a sentence on a page, if you're reading, there's no intentionality to the typographical properties of those letters. The intentionality only comes when you have a language user who understands the language and can interpret those typographical properties. In other words, there's no semantics inherent in the typography. The semantics has to be provided by the language user. So that will make us think that intentional properties are not physical properties. That's why we want to separate those two things.

1:08:36 Dylan: He gives an example, it's later on in the book but of walking through a giant brain where you could actually watch all of the neurons firing and stuff. And even if you, you could link up a particular mode in which those neurons were firing and you could say that, oh, that's this brain thinking about a car, just seeing them happening, that would not be the same thing as seeing the thought.

1:09:06 Mark: Right. It totally depends on your familiarity with the system.

1:09:09 Dylan: Yeah. You have to interpret it.

1:09:11 Mark: Yeah. So he says if you are a particle physicist and you're really used to looking at complex readouts from your fancy machines, then you're seeing that atoms or you're seeing the physical behavior in a way that somebody who's not a physicist and doesn't even know how to put the example in the correct words like I don't is not seeing those things.

1:09:33 Dylan: There was a great example of this for me just tonight. I was watching this PBS show about the history of recorded music and this section was on the development of multi track recording and how that led and the example they gave and they attributed it to being. The first example was of the Beatles with George Martin recording Revolver and beginning to have music that was literally unperformable. That the studio activity itself was part of the creation of the music as another performer. And the reason I thought about this book and this particular image was you had all these musicians who described.

I heard this album and I the first time on the radio and I pulled off to the side of the road and I was just talking with the other guys and were just blown away. They immediately recognized on Hearing it that something that a hadn't been done before. They were hearing something utterly new. And they also on the one hand, recognized it as utterly new, were confused by it, but knew enough about it to be completely blown away and inspired by it. Whereas they went through the song that John Lennon did, Tomorrow Never Knows or something.

1:10:49 Mark: Tomorrow Never Knows.

1:10:50 Dylan: And you know, there's all these wild sounds in that song. I had no idea that they were completely made up, sliced up tapes backwards and stuff like that.

1:10:59 Mark: You thought they got seagulls in the studio to go wah, wah, wah, wah.

1:11:03 Dylan: Exactly. I mean, I felt very naive about the whole thing. But what was amazing to me about this is just that whole idea of context, being able to recognize it. And the fact that you're so impressed and blown away by it relies on a ton of your own context. And it was just an example of it.

1:11:23 Stephen: If you're walking through Leibniz's brain that's been blown up to the size of a factory, do you really ever cross the syntactical semantical divide? No matter how well trained you are to read neuronal firing and have it correspond to car or red or. Or My wallet was left in Vienna.

1:11:43 Wes: Right.

1:11:43 Dylan: I agree, it doesn't seem like you

1:11:45 Stephen: ever would, but why does that not count as an ontological gap?

1:11:48 Wes: Exactly.

1:11:49 Stephen: But I mean, do you feel like in the grafting that to a universal particular divide and he's sort of saying in the history of philosophy there was this kind of fuck up where people started trying to think about what a pain is as opposed to what it is to have a pain. And that made it go down this universal particular rabbit hole and pain became immaterial and therefore non spatial and therefore quasi ghost in the machine. I still say you're at an ontological gap.

1:12:17 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

1:12:18 Stephen: And you don't bridge semantical and syntactical when you're inside Leibniz's brain.

1:12:23 Wes: Right. He seems to suggest that it's sort of like knowing the language. Like suppose you could read people's brain states as fluently as you could read English. He says something like that. The brain inscriptions, in a way, are no more mysterious than inscriptions in a text. But the difference is, if you can read the brain, that doesn't mean you have the experiences associated with the brain. You can see that someone is having such and such a thought or such and such a feeling, but that doesn't mean you would have the thought or have the feeling. So that's one problem. And the other is you as an observer. You Come to that situation with your semantics, with your dictionary. But, but the brain doesn't have that luxury. There's no built in dictionary. It has to produce meaning purely out of syntax.

1:13:10 Stephen: The brain, in producing experience isn't really, really good at reading syntax and translating it into semantics. It's just semantical.

1:13:18 Wes: Okay, So I mean, strictly speaking, if we think about the brain as a biological entity, it's just a syntactic system, you know, the same way we might think of a computer as a syntactic system. It's just a set of rules and processes and, you know, one neuronal connection affects another. In order for that to actually be a language, we need a semantics. But the reader can bring his semantics to the text, but the brain can't supply itself with the semantics. Unless you think that syntax can somehow be so robust that semantics sort of emerges out of it. So you can call the mind body problem, the semantics problem, syntax problem. It's not clear how any syntactical system can generate its own semantics. That's really another way of restating the mind body problem.

1:14:08 Stephen: The brain doesn't produce experience because it's adept at reading its own neuronal patterns. Right, right. It thinks because it has those neuronal patterns.

1:14:18 Dylan: Well, isn't it thinking those neuronal patterns? It's not like the thinking happens in consequence of the neuronal patterns.

1:14:26 Stephen: Right, but that's my point is that it's not that the person walking through your brain, which is now blown up to the size of the factory, would be able to think your thoughts if you think that they can think your thoughts by being able to read your neuronal patterns. Well, the other absurdity is then thinking that you are able to read them in the first place because you read your own neuronal patterns. Well, and that's not what thinking is. And that's not the relationship between consciousness and the firing of neurons.

1:14:54 Dylan: Yeah. I just want to say, I don't think that Rorty is saying that you should be able to walk through a giant brain blown up to the size of a factory and read off those thoughts. I think, in fact, he uses that specific example to demonstrate that that's not possible.

1:15:12 Mark: Let me read the quote. It's page 26. Why should we be troubled by Leibniz's point that if the brain were blown up to the size of a factory, so that if we stroll through it, we should not see thoughts? If we knew enough neural correlations, we shall indeed see thoughts in the sense that our vision will reveal to us what thoughts the possessor of the brain is having. If we do not, we shall not. But then, if we stroll through any factory without having first learned about its parts and their relations to one another, we shall not see what is going on.

1:15:37 Dylan: Yes. So you have to have the semantics in order to understand it.

1:15:40 Stephen: Right. So he's saying that you can read the thoughts but not have the experience. But he's also saying that the difference between being able to read the thoughts and having the experience is not itself the ontological gap. But he doesn't really tell you why.

1:15:54 Wes: Right.

1:15:55 Mark: We're talking about Searle's Chinese Room argument, which we don't need to re explain in Searle's terms, but this is the context between the semantics and the syntax is exactly what west was just saying. Searle's take on this is that first person access is an epistemological thing, but it's not an ontological thing. So my thoughts are epistemologically subjective. You can't take my point of view somehow and see them that way, but they're ontologically objective, that they are things in the brain. And that's just. There's only one ontological category. But epistemologically we get at them two different ways. Does that solve the problem? I'm not sure I understand. I think Rorty would be mystified by that response. Would say, instead of insisting that there is no ontological gap, that it's merely an epistemological gap, why don't you just stop talking about ontology altogether?

1:16:49 Dylan: Well, he would be in favor of that, right? Mm. He's not trying to argue that we should have a different ontology. It's sort of part and parcel to saying that there isn't an ontological gap, is in the end that the ontological categories end up not doing the work that we want them to. In that way, he's anti metaphysical.

1:17:11 Mark: Yep.

1:17:12 Wes: The whole point of this section is, for this paragraph, he's saying that our intuition about saying, well, the intentional is non material because intentional properties are not physical properties. He's going to say, yes, but they're just non material in the same sense that any functional state is non material. That's really the point of all this. So in the same way that health and beauty are non material, which is another way of saying that it's not evident to everyone who looks at it that it's this kind of relationship to the parts, like health being a relationship to the parts of the body, that if we knew how to read that inscription. If we knew all those relationships, then it would be evident and we wouldn't be so inclined to think of it as non material. Something like that. But go ahead, Stephen.

1:18:04 Stephen: Sorry, there's just a quote later on page 66. He says, Since a man's build, personality, weight, hilarity or charm is not capable of being pinpointed in space, why should his beliefs and desires be right?

1:18:19 Mark: Yep. So being non spatial in that sense is just not that mysterious. It does not call for a different ontological category.

1:18:25 Dylan: Yeah, that's the root of why he's arguing that there isn't an ontological gap. It ought not be any more confusing. And there's no more need for a presence of an ontological gap than there is for those other things that we just normally don't have a problem with the nonlocality of one's fame.

1:18:44 Mark: So there is a gap. There are different types of explanations, but it's not an ontological gap.

1:18:49 Wes: We're not there yet. Okay, we have to talk about the phenomenal. And so after he tries to convince us that, yes, the intentional is non material, but not in the philosophically pregnant sense.

1:18:59 Stephen: Right.

1:18:59 Wes: Just in the functional sense, then we need something else, and he gives us Locke. We need another reason if we're going to think that the intentional is non material. And in the case of Locke, there is another reason to think that meaningfulness depends on it. So whereas for Wittgenstein, meaning is use, let's say, or the way something fits into a larger context, for Locke, there has to be this phenomenal element for us to have a belief, what Locke calls an idea, the meaningfulness of a belief has to be explained in terms of something that is phenomenal. And so it derivatively borrows its immateriality from the phenomenal. That's another way to put it. And so that's the segue into the question of whether the phenomenal is immaterial. So we have to knock that down now.

1:19:48 Mark: So even all the unconscious beliefs, you know, we've got innumerable numbers just walking down the street. And the fact that I don't think my foot is going to fall through the ground, well, okay, that's sort of a belief I had. But those either have to somehow, for Locke, have to be derivable from some actual thoughts that we have had at some point. You know, something, we started out tabula rasa and we learned these things. So of course, you know, we've got all these latent beliefs, but those things either are something that we actually thought were in a current belief before and that is now passive. Or you could say it's something that is logically deduced from one of those current beliefs that we had, et cetera. It all comes down to having an actual idea with a phenomenal feel in your head as a starting point.

1:20:31 Wes: Yeah. Another way of saying that we get our semantics for our beliefs. They're provided by what Locke calls ideas and ideals. Are these phenomenal things? Ideas are phenomena and they have a meaning conferring role in intentionality and belief. So you'll recall when we did the Wittgenstein episode, there is something intuitive about Locke's view. And getting to this idea that meaning is use or embeddedness in a form of life or in some context is actually counterintuitive, where we tend to think intuitively that meaningfulness depends upon sort of the connection of words to images, let's say, or even a rule, even some hard and fast necessary and sufficient conditions.

You know, a definition, something like that, which for Wittgenstein, that's not the case. So then the question is why, you know, why would we think the phenomenal is immaterial? Because we can know all the physical properties of something without knowing what it feels. If it's something that does have feelings, it's kind of similar to the. The intentionality case. But in this case, Mark, he brings up what you brought up about an epistemic versus an ontological gap. Why do we make them move from what we can know about things to what they really are?

Knowing all the physical properties doesn't allow us to get at the feeling. Why does that mean there's this ontological gap? And the answer to that is that we have to say that the feelings themselves, that their only reality is being an appearance. Because then once we've done that, the epistemic collapses into the ontological. That's why he gets into this idea of the reality of feelings being exhausted by their being, appearances by their being pure seemings. That's the only way for us to justify the epistemic gap leading to an

1:22:18 Mark: ontological gap, which of course is just to bring up Searle. Again, folks that listen to our interview with him. He's arguing against the exact same picture from Descartes and Locke that Rorty is, you know, that all we ever know is appearances. And Searle just straightforwardly says, no, we actually know the stuff. We don't have a Cartesian theater. We don't have an inner eye that beholds these appearances that then we know thoroughly and Indubitably. But it's always a question of whether they actually correspond to what's outside. No, no, no.

We're just in touch with the stuff that's outside side. So Rorty in this is not so straightforward as he's much more careful and circumspect than John Searle was in our interview with him. But it's a hypothesis of mine that they're kind of coming down to the same thing that, you know, I wouldn't venture that Searle actually read this book. I don't know.

1:23:12 Wes: I'm not so sure, actually. I don't think so, no.

1:23:15 Mark: Okay.

1:23:16 Wes: Because Searle, I don't think, is actually very much different than the people he thinks he's criticizing. He still has a mediated view of knowledge, but that's another. But, yeah. So the next step here, I mean, we've gotten to these pure seemings, and this is where you get the collapse into substance dualism. Because if feelings, reality feelings, is exhausted by their being appearances, then, you know, something like a pain is no longer a property, but it's actually a kind of particular. It's this mind stuff that you get in substance dualism or Cartesian dualism.

So essentially, you know, this identification of the reality of a phenomenal thing with its appearance ends up being a hypostatization of a property. So you get this feelings of self subsistent, free floating entities and then this idea that they are in fact modeled on universals, that mental particulars are universals, as Stephen mentioned.

1:24:18 Mark: So let's get a little clearer on that last step. I get the idea. Look, it's the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It's hypostatization, as you just said, or reification is another thing to say. My perceiving something as red is perceiving a red something. And I'm not talking about the thing out in the world, but a red perception. That the perception becomes thingified, or the feeling, the feeling of pain becomes thingified, but that's still an individual. So again, why make the last step towards saying this individual pain is somehow my connectivity to the general notion of pain, to a universal. Why? Why say universals are involved in there at all?

1:24:58 Wes: Well, first of all, I think we should say, why is it that once we say something that the reality of feelings are exhausted by their being appearances? That we've hypostasized them to avoid hypostasizing them, you have to say that these things are properties. He thinks that saying their properties of sentient beings is not compatible with their reality being exhausted by the way they feel. I've forgotten why, how he makes that step. So maybe there's a quotation there.

1:25:28 Mark: Yeah. If you focus on just the redness of something, I don't know what that thing is, but I know that it's red. So, okay, I'm sure that it seems red to me. Why does that make redness into a thing? Why does that even that individual redness, not redness in general, but that instance of redness. Why do. No, I'm saying it's a red object I'm looking at. It's just that I'm not saying anything else about the object other than that it is red. I'm not hypothesizing at all.

1:25:58 Dylan: Well, Mark, are you asking that question in criticism of Rorty, or you're wondering what Rorty is saying? Because I think that that move of hypostasizing red happens all the time. And that's Platonic forms. Right. And it seems to me he is saying something like asking that question exactly in the way you're asking it, which is. That's not necessary. That kind of thingness of those universals is unnecessary.

1:26:25 Wes: I was just going to read the quote. Because he thinks this hypostasization is not some arbitrary thing. It follows on the idea that feelings just are appearances. So reading at the bottom of page 29, first of all, in the previous paragraph, why should this epistemic distinction reflect an ontological distinction? And then the beginning of the last paragraph on 29, the answer presumably has to go something like feelings just are appearances. Their reality is exhausted in how they seem. They are pure seemings. Anything that is not a seeming, putting the intentional to one side for the moment, is merely physical.

That is, it is something which can appear other than it is. So this goes back to the incorrigibility thing. The world comes divided into things whose nature is exhausted by how they appear and things whose nature is not. But if a philosopher gives this answer, he is in danger of changing from a neo dualist into a plain old fashioned Cartesian dualist. Mind stuff and all for now. He stopped talking about pains as states of people or properties predicated of people, and started talking about pains as particulars. A special sort of particular whose nature is exhausted by a single property.

So in other words, to say, yeah, well, I can't say it better than that. Of what could such particular be made Save mind stuff. Or to put it another way, what could mind stuff be? Save something out of which such Thin, wispy and translucent things can be made and so on.

1:27:48 Dylan: So yeah, so as long as feeling painful is a property of a person or a brain fiber, there seems no reason for the epistemic difference between reports of how things feel and reports of anything else to produce an ontological gap. But as soon as there is an ontological gap, we are no longer talking about states or properties, but about distinct particulars, distinct subjects of predication. This is. And thats the neo dualist who identifies a pain with how it feels to be in pain, is hypostasizing a property, painfulness, into a special sort of particular. A particular of that special sort whose esse is percipi and whose reality is exhausted in our initial acquaintance with it. Now we've gone back to a quote that we read before.

1:28:36 Mark: So yeah, he's saying that there is kind of this dialectic, this inevitable progression, sort of once you buy into one thing, then not that it will logically entail, Right. The fact that, that conceiving feelings as appearances does not logically entail, they are thingified. But as a matter of when you actually try to hold that belief, you will find that you also thingify it. Yeah, that sounds like what the dialectic is according by Hegel's logic, these things that carry you forward. All right, so where are we? We should kind of get toward wrapping up.

We should get the last couple points out there. Have we exposed the faulty reasoning here, the faulty progression in sentiment, in image? Are you convinced he tries to make it so that any of the standard, you know, if you're trying to ask, well, what is his actual view? Is he a behaviorist? Is he a. He seems to think that all these traditional views like mind, brain, identity theory, it sure sounds like that is what he is. But he says no. And this is again something that Searle said just about verbatim when we talked to him, that once you put it that way, you've admitted that there's an ontological gap that needs to be bridged.

So sort of going back to the introduction, he's talking about how great Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dewey were against this Cartesian Lockean picture. We talked about these people set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines. I say set aside rather than argue against, because their attitude towards the traditional problematic is like the attitude of the 17th century Philosophers toward the scholastic problematic. They glimpsed the possibility of a form of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from 17th century would seem as pointless as the 13th century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment.

They're trying to come up with new maps of the terrain is the whole panorama of human activities which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate.

1:30:37 Stephen: So that's just.

1:30:37 Mark: I'm pointing those out because, yeah, he's not really giving us, as he said, I'm not going to give you my theory of the philosophy of mind because I think the whole idea of a philosophy of mind only results from this faulty picture that we have in the first place. So what judges the choice between pictures? Well, it seems like, and this is. We're getting finally back around to, is he a relativist? We can finally understand. We raised that right at the beginning the podcast, but it wasn't clear to listeners who weren't familiar with this what that could possibly mean.

Well, this is what it means is if it's just a matter of contingent historical fact that we have these images that give rise to all these problems, can we just pick different ones? Will people with different histories have different conceptual schemes, different philosophical problems? In fact, chapter two is largely a thought experiment about the antipodeans, which are people that actually do. They don't say, I have a pain. They say, hey, my C fibers are firing. They actually talk about their neural states. Not that they have, like, eyes that point into their brains and can report on it that way, but somehow they simply don't feel the need to express anything in phenomenal terms.

And they can't understand when you try to explain to them, like, they still say, oh, yeah, pains are bad and they run from pain. They say all the same stuff, except they don't use this language. And he seems to think that this is a conceivable way to be, that these fundamental we think ways that we understand ourselves, our environments, are actually just a matter of historical contingency.

1:32:14 Wes: Yes, that sounds not right to me. He calls this a therapeutic exercise, and I need more therapy before I can be dislodged from my conceptual scheme.

1:32:25 Stephen: I'll give you a reason why I think it sounds right to me, which is that we inherit it enough to feel a kind of mental pain that we can't work out a picture, a satisfying picture of the relationship between ontological objectivity and ontological subjectivity, or, you know, what it is to be a bat or a Steven versus what it is to be a positron or a doorknob. But why, prior to the 17th century, did no one think that raw feels was this huge problem that needed to be accounted for? Why did people not feel as though access to truth was impeded if you couldn't account for qualia.

So in some sense it has to be an historical contingency that certain problems suddenly become urgent. Yeah, right. And surely that must have been the rise of empirical science in the 17th century. You never had anything like empirical, empirical reality as science understood it prior to the 17th century. So you never had a problem of the mind, right, because you never had to try to fit human mentality into something like an objective world, because you'd never taken all of nature and tried to make it law, obedient or predictive in that way. So the mind was never this left out thing.

So you had to come up with a theory of the mind. The question then is, well, how determinative is historical contingency? And why is Richard Rorty in 1979 able suddenly to make a two or three hundred year habit of speaking seem irrelevant by his own theory? It can't be the power of his arguments, right? The engine of obsolescence isn't dialectic according to his own theory. So why is the book relevant? Is it that we have built hard drives and started to map or come up with probabilistic theories of the quanta, therefore empirical reality is kind of collapsing, therefore we don't need this 17th century concept of the mind as an interior theater.

I can't say I have an answer to any of these questions. But you do sort of feel as though he's argued you out of it, but he's also argued you out of the belief that he could argue you out of it.

1:34:42 Mark: Just to comment on the historical piece of why this wasn't available before Descartes, there are a bunch of footnotes that do acknowledge the disagreement among cultural historians. So for instance, he says that he's quoting somebody. The picture of human beings having both an inside and outside is so commonplace, so as it may seem to us commonsensical, that we find it hard to realize how strikingly modern it is, but to appreciate its modernity, one need only cast about for statements of it earlier than Descartes. One does find interesting anticipations of it in Augustine, but not much earlier and not much between the time of Augustine and that of Descartes.

This is page 50 to 51. There's like this, just massive footnotes. Footnotes are like taking up half the page at some of these places. Like, well, maybe some of this was in Plato, but then it definitely wasn't in Aristotle. And so Aquinas was picking up on the things from the threads from Aristotle, whereas Augustine was picking up on the threads from Plotinus and Plato, you know, it's so of course it's not that Descartes just invented this.

1:35:38 Stephen: Right? And also you could say, okay, well you could say what else happens in the 17th century, right? Is it the rise of capitalism? Is it the rise of the printing press? Is it the rise of Protestantism, Protestant individualism? I mean there are all kinds of theories. Does any one of them support a meta theory of causality that allows you to say, because you get X, you therefore get theories of Y. It's unclear to me how different historically contingent theories of the rise of forms of knowledge is different from Kantian theories of the necessary preconditions for knowledge. I mean, why is one a satisfying explanation for why modes of thought arise at periods of history and the other isn't?

1:36:19 Mark: Yeah, I was thinking of like, you know, Nietzsche's take on we only became these complex animals because of religion, because of Christianity's secular self inward turn. Absolutely had Augustine in mind here of the need to thingify parts of your, some of your urges, the stain upon your soul, other these elements of your consciousness to create this inner landscape for yourself. Or I'm sure you could see something comparable in the east of the veil of Maya and just these religious coming out of the Vedic tradition through Buddhism, it ended up with something very similar to what Descartes has, is that no, we have the reality which is unknowable, closer to what Kant has, I guess.

And then we've got the phenomena, we've got the appearances and you know, at least in some parts of Buddhism, I know, are very psychological, that these appearances are part of the ego and that need to be treated with a certain amount of contempt or put on hold.

1:37:16 Stephen: He does have this theory of therapy and philosophy is therapy. He has this idea that if you just hear a story in one way, that the work of therapy doesn't happen. Right. If the therapist on first visit says you're terrified that your father's going to castrate you and you want to sleep with your mother, it has zero therapeutic value, even though it may have total truth value. So there's something about telling the story in the right way over the right period of time, under the right circumstances that allows you to liberate yourself from it. That you wouldn't need the glassy essence or the mirror to nature if you go back and retell the history of philosophy to yourself properly.

1:37:56 Wes: Yes, he thinks this historicization and putting things in historical context is the key to getting a Therapeutic effect. So at the point where he's talking about that, Stephen, he says it's not enough to know that we're in error. We have to know why. We have to give this account of why.

1:38:13 Stephen: But why did those why accounts have to have therapeutic power? That's where I get stuck. It's like that's a truth claim, right? That a certain kind of historically contingent Y like this happened in history. Therefore, we believe X has the ability to allow you to transcend the need to repeat that story semi consciously over and over again. But other kinds of knowledge accounts are inherently inadequate or false.

1:38:38 Dylan: That therapy seems to rely on the state of things for a philosopher now, Right. So in some ways it's a therapy for analytical philosopher. He points to a commonality with Dewey and Nietzsche and Heidegger and that they all end up at a place that they didn't start with. And I think you would argue a kind of therapy for their previous philosophical lives. It's not clear to me, but I guess I would think that he would say, well, you could have ended up here, ended up at the same place through a different path and not needing the same kind of therapy.

In some ways he alludes to this, that you could have the disposition, the philosophical mindset of some kind of pre Cartesian that wouldn't worry about this kind of problem, and so therefore you wouldn't need the therapy to get yourself out of it. And then his therapy ends up being a kind of metaphilosophies in the right way. He admits that it's parasitic upon the whole past. And it does prompt the question to me that at least to the extent that it works or requires a kind of intellectual path that you've taken taken that you won't understand the therapy unless you somehow are part of that whole culture and path already.

1:39:54 Wes: I was trying to think of a good example of this therapeutic approach, which is really the genealogical approach. So I'm thinking again of Nietzsche and the genealogy of morals. So what's therapeutic about knowing, for instance, that your beliefs about good and evil really amount to a kind of nihilism and ressentiment? If you can illustrate a genealogy where I wouldn't have these beliefs except for the fact that there are these other forces at work which in a way are in conflict with their manifest content, it has that deflationary effect.

1:40:28 Dylan: Yeah, well, but that's exactly why that activity is highlighting the contradiction in the content. By going through that genealogy, Nietzsche exposes the internal contradictions and also the fact that the claims being made Are not doing the work that they claim to be doing. The very things you thought were not nihilistic are nihilistic. Right. That the very things that you thought were leading to foundation for your living are just rooted in ressentiment.

1:41:02 Stephen: Right. I mean, well, one thought is that the work of therapy isn't completed when you have the right picture in your head. It's not a spectatorial or relationship to truth. It's an experiential relationship with a therapist that may never result in you acknowledging the Oedipus complex or being even especially conscious of it. It's that you've lived it again with the therapist and become healthy. And healthy may not have a pictorial or a kind of inner representation. You may not be able to say the words, I wanted to sleep with my mother. I wanted to kill my father. I was afraid my dad was going to castrate me. And yet you may have achieved health in some way.

1:41:47 Dylan: Why is it a therapy rather than an exercise or any other kind of activity that you're doing? When you call it a therapy, it means that it's just the way you described Steven. And a kind of constant working out that may not even result in the goal that the therapy is oriented to. Right. For instance, it's not curative.

1:42:08 Mark: Well, maybe he means therapy more generally like physical therapy. Not like psychotherapy, necessarily.

1:42:14 Dylan: Well, but even physical therapy is the same kind of thing. Physical therapy is distinct. I would say it's distinct from exercise. Physical therapy is activity aimed at. At either correcting a malfunction or providing enough support so that that malfunction doesn't recur. It's different than an activity directed at flourishing.

1:42:38 Stephen: And also, if you think about it, I mean, this book. I love this book. I think it's a masterpiece. But it is sort of bad therapy. Right? I mean, he's kind of. He's beginning with the premise that you don't need to do it at all. He clearly has to do it. He has to do it obsessively. He has to live through, relive, the era of 300 years of philosophy in order to rid himself of it. But then ultimately, for him, it was successful. Right. He did get rid of it. He never really revisited these problems in this way.

1:43:08 Mark: And just to come full circle, I'm trying to picture this guy with his interpersonal skills as we've described. Being your therapist, like, what a jerk. Bad therapist.

1:43:20 Stephen: Yeah.

1:43:20 Mark: I think he thinks that philosophers have an unhealthy obsession with these particular problems. The cyclical futile thinking. I can definitely See where he's going in using that metaphor?

1:43:34 Dylan: Sounds like a closing.

1:43:35 Mark: Like the problem of other minds he brings up in chapter two. Just that, you know. Yeah, this is something that is sort of. It's a theoretical possibility that nobody else has a mind besides you, or that these particular individuals are just robots or zombies or something like that. But you shouldn't respond to that worry by saying no by definition. So he says Kant and the logical empiricists both sort of made it by definition that. That didn't even make sense. No, it's a real problem, but it's not a problematic problem. It's not anything you should actually worry about.

1:44:13 Stephen: About. It's a problem you can choose not to have.

1:44:17 Mark: It's based on a legitimate observation, but the observation does not make it a problem by itself. You do that.

1:44:26 Wes: Stop.

1:44:26 Mark: Stop that.

1:44:27 Wes: Curious. Sorry.

1:44:35 Mark: Prove to me that you're a person. Who said that, Wes? Prove to me. I'm so curious. I think that we did enough for today. We got a taste. And we'll get some more later after we. So next time we're actually going to take a little diversion because we found when we got into the next chapters of this, that he said, yeah, I'm channeling Quine and Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, and Wilfrid Sellars, we had not done yet. So we're reading his article, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, and then we will come back to some more Rorty. And I don't want to put you on the spot, Stephen, but if you want to go through more of this, you're certainly welcome.

1:45:17 Stephen: You continuing on in Mirror?

1:45:19 Mark: Yes, yes, that's chapters three and four.

1:45:22 Stephen: Fantastic. Tell me when and where. No, I'd love it. What's better than bad therapy?

1:45:26 Mark: When and where. It's non spatial.

1:45:28 Stephen: That's where it is.

1:45:30 Dylan: But is it universal? Universal?

1:45:31 Mark: It's not even temporal. It's eternal. All right, guys, thanks so much to everybody for listening to this.

1:45:38 Dylan: Thanks, Steven. It was great having you on.

1:45:40 Wes: Thanks, Steven.

1:45:41 Stephen: Thanks a lot, guys. It was really, really fun.

1:45:43 Mark: Folks should chime in. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com make a comment on the blog about this episode. Go to our Facebook page. You can like that. You can follow us on Twitter. You can support us with your monies and all that kind of stuff.

1:45:56 Stephen: Stuff.

1:45:57 Mark: And just to make a comment about our closing song, this is again a creation by one of the folks that I interviewed for the Nakedly Examined music podcast. That's nakedly examinedmusic.com the episode was number nine with Roderick Romero. You're about to hear his Seattle psychedelic 90s band Sky Cries Merry. They actually have an album called A Return to the Inner Experience. So I thought that was very fitting for this episode. But this song is from the following album, 1994's this Timeless Turning. The song is called A Wall of Nothingness. So it is sort of like when you return to the inner experience, to the flux, the primordial qualia, you find that it's fundamentally inexpressible.

So you hear this song, though it has vocalizations, does not have words until very far into the song, and even then, not many of them. More just commenting on the lack of features on the Wall of Nothingness. So please go check out my interview with Roderick nakedlyexaminemusic.com that's episode number nine. And I want to remind you about the wall calendar. Go take a Look. Look at partiallyexaminedlife.com calendar or else perhaps you will have a Wall of Nothingness. Thanks and good night.

1:46:56 Wes: Good night.

1:46:56 Dylan: Good night.

1:46:57 Wes: Good night.

1:50:42 Stephen: Nothing.

1:50:42 Wes: I know.

1:50:48 Stephen: Nothing.

1:51:05 Mark: Ram.