Materialism and Idealism

Materialism and Idealism

Perhaps the most basic distinction among philosophical approaches to the mind-body problem is the one that divided materialists and idealists. The materialist position is that everything is ultimately reducible to matter. From this standpoint, the thought does not really exist. Its existence is illusory; the mind is really an aspect (or function) of matter.

At the other extreme, the idealist contends that only the mind really exists (for us, at least). For all the apparent substantiality of matter, the “things” we see, touch, and hear are really nothing other than products of our mental processes (i.e., they are actually perceptual images). We can never reach beyond the envelope of conscious awareness and demonstrate the existence of any thing independent of our mind's perceptual images. So, from this standpoint, the concrete thing may not really exist, or at least it, too belongs inside the “thought bubble”.

Although these positions both appear logically tenable, the idealist position has fallen out of favor. This seems to be due to the vagaries of intellectual fashion more than anything else. Within cognitive science today, just about everyone is a materialist. But materialists come in different shapes and sizes.

Monism and Dualism

The dichotomy between monism and dualism is perhaps just as fundamental as the one between materialism and idealism, and is easily confused with it. According to the monist position, we are made of only one kind of “stuff”. In other words, mind and matter (which appear to be two things) are really reducible to one and the same thing. This might seem to be identical to the materialist position just described (and the two arguments do normally go together), but the monist position does not actually state that the singular stuff we are made of is matter. A monist could just as well claim that we really consist only of mind (thereby embracing an idealist position) or even that we are actually made of some other kind of stuff, as yet undefined, which is neither mind nor matter. In the monist position, all that counts is that the apparent distinction between mind and matter dissolves into a common something.

The dualist view – closely associated with the name of René Descartes – simply states the opposite: We are divided in our essence and are made of two kinds of stuff. Matter and mind (or body and soul) are quite irreducible to one another. Like idealism, dualism is very unfashionable nowadays. Most cognitive scientists, therefore, are materialist monists: they believe that mind and brain are ultimately reducible to a single kind of stuff, and that that stuff is physical – specifically, some property of neurons (or an aggregate of subset of neurons).

The mind can be regarded as a higher level of organization of neurons, just as water is a higher level of organization of its constituent atoms. Photo by Elena.

Reductionism, Interactionism, Other Strange Things

Materialist monism defines the relationship between two types of stuff. On this view, one type of stuff (brain tissue) is more fundamental, even more real, than the other (conscious awareness). As Dr. Crick said once “you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells” - “you” are reduced to nerve cells. The essence of Crick's reductionism resides in these words: “in fact, no more than.” Reductionism reduces one thing to another (in this case, mind to brain) and thereby explains it away. However, not all materialists are reductive.

Dualists are, by definition, nonreductive. The crux of their position is that mind and brain cannot be reduced to one another. What, then, is the nature of the relationship between two? A dualist's answer to this question determines what kind of dualist he or she is. Most dualists describe the relationship between mind and body in interactionist terms; they assert that physical events have mental effects, and vice versa. The interactionist view, then, is simply that body, and mind interact with each other. This seems perfectly plausible and appears easy to demonstrate empirically: plummeting blood sugar causes loss of consciousness (physical event causes mental event); freely deciding to move your hand causes it to move (mental event causes physical event). But when the logical underpinnings of the dualist position are spelled out, it seems less plausible: the interactionist actually claims that bodily stuff and mental stuff interact with each other. This way of putting it immediately reveals the pitfalls of almost any dualist position. How, exactly, does a thought (which has no physical properties whatever) cause the physical stuff of neurons to start firing? This violates all the known laws of physics.

Other varieties of dualism fare no better. One such well-known variety is called psychophysical parallelism. This position avoids some problems of interactionism by claiming that mental and physical events do not have a causal relationship; the two classes of event simply co-occur – they are correlated with one another. Whenever something specific happens in the brain, something equally specific happens in the mind, and vice versa. The two things occur together, in unison. If the basis of this correlation still seems mysterious, that's because it is. The parallelist does not not feel obliged to explain this linkage.

Emergence

We said above that not all materialists are reductionists. Many cognitive scientists today hold the view that the mind is an emergent property of the brain. According to this view, mind and brain are equally real, but they exist at different levels of complexity. Just as water (wet and flowing, at room temperature) emerges from a particular combination of hydrogen and oxygen and has distinctive properties of its own (properties that do not characterize hydrogen or oxygen alone), so, too, mental phenomena emerge when the neurons of the human brain are connected or activated in a particular way.

The Brain and the Inner World, Introduction to Basic Concepts. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull.

It is possible to find some merit in all of different philosophical positions. It is also possible, with a little effort, to make all of them look ridiculous. Photograph by Elena.

Tactile Vision

Tactile Vision Experiments

In 1969, “Nature”, Europe's premier science journal, published a short article that had a distinctly sci-fi feel about it. Its lead author, Paul Bach-y-Rita, was both a basic scientist and a rehabilitation physician – a rare combination. The described a device that enabled people who had been blind from birth to see. All had damaged retinas and had been considered completely untreatable.

The “Nature” article was reported in “The New York Times”, “Newsweek”, and “Life”, but perhaps because the claim seemed so implausible, the device and its inventor soon slipped into relative obscurity.

Accompanying the article was a picture of a bizarre-looking machine – a large old dentist's chair with a vibrating back, a tangle of wires, and bulky computers. The whole contraption, made of castaway parts combined with 1960s electronics, weighed four hundred pounds.

A congenitally blind person – someone who had never had any experience of sight – sat in the chaire, behind a large camera the size of those used in television studios at the time. He “scanned” a scene in front of him by turning hand cranks to move the camera, which sent electrical signals of the image to a computer that processed them. Then the electrical signals were conveyed to four hundred vibrating stimulators, arranged in rows on a metal plate attached to the inside of the chair back, so the stimulators rested against the blind subject's skin. The stimulators functioned like pixels vibrating for the dark part of a scene and holding still for the brighter shades.

The power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility. Mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff... Straddles the gap between science and self-help... Illustration by Elena.

This “tactile-vision device,” as it was called, enabled blinded subjects to read, make out faces and shadows, and distinguish which objects were closer and which father away. It allowed them to discover perspective and observe how objects seem to change shape depending upon the angle from which they were viewed. The six subjects of the experiment learned to recognize such objects as a telephone, even when it was partially obscured by a vase. This being the 1960s, they even learned to recognize a picture of the anorexic supermodel Twiggy.

Everyone who used the relatively clunky tactile-vision device had a remarkable perceptual experience, as they wen from having tactile sensations to “seeing” people and objects.

With a little practice, the blind subjects began to experience the space in from of them as three-dimensional, even though the information entered from the two-dimensional array on their backs. If someone threw a ball toward the camera, the subject would automatically jump back to duck it. If the plate of vibrating stimulators was moved from their backs to their abdomens, subjects still accurately perceived the scene as happening in front of the camera. It tickled near the stimulators, they didn't confuse the tickle with a visual stimulus. Their mental perceptual experience took place not on the skin surface but in the world. And their perceptions were complex. With practice, subjects could move the camera around ans say things like “That's Betty; she is wearing her hair down today and does not have her glasses on; her mouth is open, and she is moving her right hand from her left side to the back of her head.”

True, the resolution was often poor, but as Bach-y-Rita would explain, vision doesn't have to be perfect to be vision. “When we walk down a foggy street and see the outline of a buildings,” he would ask, “are we seeing it any less for the lack of resolution? When we see something in black and white, are we not seeing it for lack of color?”

(The Brain that Changes Itself, Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science), by Norman Doidge, M.D.)

“When we walk down a foggy street and see the outline of a buildings, are we seeing it any less for the lack of resolution?". Illustration by Elena.

Epic Myth

Epic Myth

In the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generations of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form the planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth.

Congealing and warming, it released the ammonia, methane, water and hydrogen gases that had been trapped within, forming the primitive atmosphere and the oceans.

Starlight from the Sun bathed and warmed the primeval Earth, drove storms, generated lightning and thunder. Volcanoes overflowed with lava. These processes disrupted molecules of the atmosphere; the fragments fell back together again into more and more complex forms, which dissolved in the early oceans.

After a time the seas achieved the consistency of a warm, dilute soup. Molecules were organized, and complex chemical reactions driven, on the surface of clays. And one day a molecule arose that was able to make crude copies of itself out of the other molecules in the broth.

As time passed, more elaborate self-replicating molecules arose. Those combinations best suited to further replication were favored by the sieve of natural selection. Those that copied better produced more copies. And the primitive oceanic broth gradually grew thin as it was consumed by and transformed into complex condensations of self-replicating organic molecules. Gradually, imperceptibly, life had begun.

Single-celled plants evolved, and life began to generate its own food. Photosynthesis transformed the atmosphere. Sex was invented. Once free-living forms banded together to make a complex cell with specialized functions. Chemical receptors evolved, and the Cosmos could taste and smell.

One-celled organisms evolved into multicellular colonies, elaborating their various parts into specialized organ systems. Eyes and ears evolved, and now the Cosmos could see and hear. Plants and animals discovered that the land could support life.

Organisms buzzed, crawled, scuttled, lumbered, glided, flapped, shimmied, climbed and soared. Colossal beasts thundered through the steaming jungles. Small creatures emerged, born life instead of in hard-shelled containers, with a fluid like the early oceans coursing through their veins. They survived by swiftness and cunning. And then some small arboreal animals scampered down from the trees. They become upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At en ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years or more of cosmic evolution.

It has the sound of epic myth, and rightly. But it is simply a description of cosmic evolution as revealed by the science of our time. We are difficult to come by and a danger to ourselves. But any account of cosmic evolution makes it clear that all the creatures of the Earth, the latest manufactures of the galactic hydrogen industry, are beings to be cherished. Elsewhere there may be other equally astonishing transmutations of matter, so wistfully we listen for a humming in the sky.

By Carl Sagan.

We have broadened the circle of those we love. Image : © Megan Jorgensen.

Two Approaches to the Science of the Mind

Two Approaches to the Science of the Mind

The mental life or real human beings is the traditional subject matter of psychoanalysis. We have said that it has recently become a legitimate subject matter for neuroscience too. In other words, we now have two disciplines (perhaps better described as two loose groups of disciplines) studying the same thing. But they approach this shared subject matter from completely different points of view.

The “subjective” approach to mental science (psychoanalysis) split off from the “objective” approach (the neurosciences) just over a hundred years ago. Freud's Studies on Hysteria (1895) or his The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) provide useful milestones in this divergence. Since then, each approach has developed along its own path. The original reasons for the split were complex. Mainly it was a matter of expedience. It was not possible to learn anything useful about the mind – the real mind – using the neuroscientific methods that were available at that time. Neuroscience could not (at that time) penetrate the mysteries of personality, motivation, emotion – the things that make us who we are – and it therefore seemed to Sigmund Freud that the most useful way to study, understand, and treat the disorders of the human subject was from a purely psychological perspective.

We do not wish to be excessively optimistic, but the reason that a book such as this one can be written today is because that situation has changed. We have powerful new methods and technologies in neuroscience that are yielding previously undreamed-of knowledge about the physiological underpinnings of the “inner world.” In short, neuroscience has caught up with – many would say overtaken – psychoanalysis as a science of the human subject, and today it is possible to learn some very important and valuable things about inner experience by studying the physical organ that was damaged.

Attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, tic disorders, panic attacks, an so on are very complicated topics. Photo by Elena.

Reconciling the two approaches

It is essential for us to find some way of bridging this historical divide, and perhaps healing the rift, between these two different approaches to mental science. Neuroscientists – who are grappling with the complexities of human subjectivity for the first time – have much to learn from a century of psychoanalytic inquiry. Psychotherapists, for their part, have an opportunity to benefit from the enormous empirical advances in the neurosciences and, as a result, to make progress in their own disciplines, where scientific progress has become frustratingly slow. Psychoanalysis today is associated with bitter rivalry between opposing camps that apparently have no valid means of deciding between their conflicting standpoints on various theoretical matters. One solution might be to find links links between the disputed theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis and those of the neurosciences.

This seems to be an appropriate way to proceed, but it is quite difficult to put into effect. There are a number of things that have to be done for us to be able to bridge the gulf that separates these two approaches. Each side has (for various reasons) regarded the other with suspicion and disdain for over a hundred years. Typically, neuroscientists have regarded psychoanalysis and related disciplines as “unscientific” (how can a science of subjectivity be objective?” Psychotherapists, for their part, have regarded the neurosciences (including biological psychiatry) as symplistic, to the extent of excluding the psyche. These attitudes have developed for good reasons, and they will not be overcome easily or quickly.

In addition, there are serious scientific problems to grapple with. How can we link these disciplines in a methodologically valid way? To take a concrete question, how do we set about identifying the neurological basis of something like, say, “repression”? How does one go about testing experimentally, from the neurobiological point of view, whether such a thing as repression even exists? Repression – if it exists – is a complicated, elusive, fleeting phenomenon. It is far from easy to capture such things in physiological terms.

If such problems are to be overcome effectively, a good deal of the effort required would have to be put in by members of both of the approaches working together. To do this, we would have to have interdisciplinary dialogues and research about topics of common interest. We would need to collaborate  on clinical material and work together on the same cases, or on examples of the same disorders, to learn from each other's approaches. But first of all, before we can realistically combine them, we need to learn about each other's different perspectives.

The Brain and the Inner World, Introduction to Basic Concepts. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull.

To what extent are the trajectories of our lives predetermined by our genes? Photo by Elena.

Cosmology

Cosmology

Eventually we would discover the nature of other civilizations. There would be many of them, each composed of organisms astonishingly different from anything on the Earth.

Each one of these civilizations would view the surrounding universe somewhat differently. They would be interested in things we never thought of. They would have different social functions and culture.  By comparing our knowledge with theirs, we would grow immeasurably. And with our newly acquired information sorted into a computer memory, we would be able to see which sort of civilization lived where in the Galaxy.

Imagine a huge galactic computer, a repository, more or less up-to-date, of information on the nature and activities of all the civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, a great library of life in the Cosmos. Perhaps among the contents of the Encyclopaedia Galactica will be a set of summaries of such civilizations, the information enigmatic, tantalizing, evocative – even after we succeed in translating it.

Taking as much time as we wished, we would decide to reply. We would transmit some information about ourselves – may be just the basic at first – as the start of a long interstellar dialogue which we would begin but which, because of the vast distances of interstellar space and the finite velocity of light, would be continued by our remote descendants. And someday, on a planet of some far distant star, a being very different from any of us would request a printout from the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica and acquire a little information about the newest society to join the community of galactic civilizations.

Any account of cosmic evolution makes it clear that all the creature of the galaxies, are beings to be cherished. Image © Megan Jorgensen.