Physicalism and Idealism Are Both Probably Wrong; Why I'm a Parallelist
Re-evaluating some bad ideas I've endorsed in the past, and also some I haven't
I have to own up to something.
I have, in the past, written favorably about physicalism on this blog. I now think I was wrong. Why was this dumb?
Physicalism is the idea that the fundamental nature of reality is physical, and that anything that seems to not be physical—thoughts, emotional states, mathematical objects, etc.—are somehow dependent upon or logically antecedent to the physical.
I get the impulse behind this view. Personally, it was borne of a desire to avoid letting in the mystical more than anything else. I’ve seen the very weird and (I think) unhealthy things that can happen when people start allowing for the supernatural, trusting their intuition, and, slowly but surely, coming to the conclusion that they shouldn’t vaccinate their kids. Or bathe. This queasiness was paired with my absorption of the anti-dualist fashion of our times, and perhaps, I admit, a hangover from the New Atheist years. Still, I think I was largely on the right track! What I was after was a non-reductionist naturalism, preferably without any spooky stuff. I think that’s still where I’m at, but I have shuffled the furniture in some pretty important ways. The main one is that I think describing my view as physicalist is wrong, for some pretty obvious reasons I should have been more conscious of at the time.
I do consider myself to still be a naturalist, and also a monist. But to claim that the only thing that exists in nature is physical stuff is, when you think about it, obviously pretty crazy. I’m okay with having endorsed it! I write these essays with the knowledge that I’m very ignorant about the world, and to a large extent all I’m doing is cataloging my own thought process. If I couldn’t find any major problems with things I wrote over a year ago, I think that would be a sign of stagnation. In another year, I’ll probably think everything I wrote in this essay was also dumb, and I hope you find that amusing. So, it’s time to correct the record, and explain why I think physicalism is wrong.
For as long as materialist ontologies have been around, they have had to deal with a very obvious problem: the fact that people have minds which have experiences and thoughts. There’s also the question of abstract concepts, but we can set those aside for now. It’s just very obvious that thoughts are not physical. Like, really obvious. Think a thought. What does it weight? What is its texture? What is its electrical charge? These are not properties that pertain to it. It’s just a thought. If you want to say that there’s a bunch of physical stuff happening behind the scenes to create the thought, you can say that, but that doesn’t change the phenomenological nature of the thought itself. You can’t reduce the pink elephant I just summoned into your mind into electrical impulses and grey matter. You “saw” the elephant, and it didn’t look like electricity and brain mush—it looked like a pink elephant.
Does that mean the thought can’t be produced by those things? Well, okay. Maybe. Who knows!? But you’ve already admitted that the actual thought, the thing you just experienced, is not physical. So clearly certain things are not physical.
But maybe they’re just superveniences, or perhaps epiphenomenons. But in either case, we can ask why they exist at all—not to mention how they exist at all. For a long time, I bought the idea of emergentism, largely thanks to the very plausible and scientific-sounding endorsement of Sean Carroll. But while emergent properties are just fine to describe how one physical system can yield another, it seems pretty generous to grant that a mental system can emerge from a physical one. And again, there’s the pesky problem of why the system would emerge, since the physical system already has all the qualities necessary to do the things it does, with or without the spooky, seemingly non-concrete nature of consciousness.
And what do we mean when we say things are “physical,” anyway? Some people think this refers to physical laws. But physical laws, so far as we can tell, are mathematical in nature—at any rate, we can describe them with remarkable accuracy using mathematics—and mathematical objects are not physical. So, is what you mean by “physical” something which is not. . . physical?
I’ll tell you what I think physical stuff is: I think the physical is whatever you can point at. At least, that seems to track with what we all mean. We mean stuff that exists in space! Extended stuff, if we want to be Cartesian about it! Stuff that is, in other words, outside of our consciousness, and impinges on it through our powers of perception.
Here’s where I get to why my eventual rejection of physicalism has not made me into an idealist, someone who believes reality is basically mental. We can point at stuff! This is very important, because it is crucially different from mental stuff, which, whatever else we want to say about it, we can not point at. Both the physicalist and the idealist should dwell upon the fact that when they point at their brains, they are not pointing at their minds. When you think about something, you can be in a room full of people and still have a completely private experience. Indeed, you can’t not have one. Where are the thoughts which furnish this experience? Well, we may be tempted to say they are “in” our brains. But we know exactly what’s in our brains! It’s a bunch of electrified gray mush. That electrified gray mush is, it just so happens, among the most complex things in the known universe (I have no idea if this is actually true, but at any rate here are some seemingly smart and well-qualified people saying it’s the most complex). What it doesn’t contain, however, is my thoughts. You simply won’t find them in there. You will find a physical correlate which clearly bears some relationship to those thoughts. But does this mean they cause the thoughts?
Empirically speaking, we don’t know one way or the other yet. My prediction is that we will not be able to find any conclusive evidence that they do. But this should not lead us to claim weird things like “physical things are really mental”. At its worst, this is the most shameless type of metaphysics-of-the-gaps, squeezing in philosophy wherever physics will do the trick. But even in its best forms, it’s functionally incoherent. If we want to say, with Bernardo Kastrup, that people’s bodies are really the appearance of their subjectivity across a “dissociative boundary,” seen through a “sea of mentation” or “universal consciousness,” we of course have to ask what it is the universal consciousness is, well, conscious of. Consciousness, after all, is not self-sufficient—to be conscious is to be experiencing something. Even if we want to grant the world itself has a subjective aspect or attribute—something I’m personally happy to grant—there has to be something for the subject to observe. In other words, any consciousness, even in principle, needs a world to be conscious of. It needs something to point at.
Why? Well, try to define consciousness. Stop me if this definition isn’t at the very least similar in all meaningful aspects to what I give here:
Consciousness is the faculty of experience.
Assuming you’re still with me, I’ll admit that this definition is incomplete. “Experience” is too vague: the whole question we’re getting at here is what it is we’re experiencing. Let’s run with the idealist formulation of Kastrup’s, namely that the world is, in fact “universal consciousness.” Therefore, the only thing there is to experience is consciousness. So our definition becomes:
Consciousness is the faculty of experiencing consciousness.
You see a problem here? Let’s test the definition for content by performing a substitution, and replace the word “consciousness” with “the faculty of experiencing”:
The faculty of experiencing is the faculty of experiencing the faculty of experiencing.
And that means. . . precisely nothing. What are we experiencing? Consciousness. What is consciousness? Experience! We’re experiencing experience!
The problem is that, for this to get up off the ground, we need something for consciousness (a relational property of subjects to objects) to relate to, something for consciousness to experience, and it must be something which is not consciousness itself. The experiences themselves need some content, some external thing for consciousness to latch on to. A universal experiencer which experiences nothing, is nothing. An infinity, multiplied by zero.
Let’s put it this way: say you believe the world itself is a universal experiencer—said experiences being made up of ideas, qualities, mental substance, or whatever—which I think can only be fairly described as a God. What I’m claiming is that, at the very least, God needs a body to point at. And that body, like it or not, is as reasonably described as physical as anything else.
So, What’s Left?
I’ve given some reasons for rejecting both physicalism and idealism. To me, these are compelling problems either view faces. In both cases, the essential reason is that each makes its whole business explaining how, somehow, the obvious existence of the preferred substance of the other is actually a kind of illusion. Basically, if you’re a physicalist, you try really hard to cram ideas into the category of things. If you’re an idealist, you try really hard to cram things into the category of ideas. Both twist themselves in knots trying to accomplish what, from a distance, seems like a very silly task of ignoring the 900lb material-or-mental gorilla in the room.
But what alternatives exist? Cartesian dualism seems wrong, for the classic reasons Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia explained to Descartes himself. You also have to twist yourself into knots to explain how it could be that an immaterial substance could exert causal power over a material substance, or vice versa. Descartes’ very goofy answer was the pineal gland, which philosophers never took very seriously, but which apparently still works for some Hare Krishna cultists, but only if you first decalcify it of all the government flouride buildup. For the modern dualist, presumably the modern day pineal gland is simply the brain. I don’t think this is a very promising solution.
One answer I personally find very elegant and interesting is, (unsurprisingly for readers of the blog), Spinoza’s: this being the parallelism doctrine. This is the idea that both extension and thought are attributes of nature which run parallel to one another—every body has an idea which is its parallel or “the idea of which it is the object”. In truth, there is no difference between the ideas and the bodies; they are simply the same modes of nature expressed through different attributes, much the way the frequency of a string’s vibrations are also musical notes, considered under different senses such that a deaf person can feel sufficiently loud music through vibration alone. When the mind experiences a thought, that thought has a parallel expression in the brain as an electrical impulse, without that electrical impulse having to somehow do double duty as actually being or giving rise to the thought itself. Instead, each object has a corresponding idea, and it is only ideas which cause ideas, and objects which cause objects. A neat and tidy solution, once one gets over the initially unintuitive feel of it.
One place it isn’t all that tidy, however: this doesn’t really explain consciousness in a way I find convincing. The idea would be something along the lines of a sufficiently complex and dynamic object having a corresponding idea which is itself complex and dynamic—the more complex and dynamic the object, the more conscious it is. This is not by itself a satisfactory explanation by any means, although it avoids a lot of pesky problems, such as the hard problem of consciousness, the problem of mind-body interaction, why the brain should be so complex if it’s not the source of consciousness, and why thoughts should exist at all.
But still, why should any degree of complexity in an idea yield subjectivity? If we take a panpsychist route, so that one takes the thought attribute to be basically conscious (such that everything experiences at least rudimentary consciousness), then one could probably better explain human consciousness that way, but it’s not clear that it’s necessary and, at any rate, it’s a big theoretical leap. As it is, I’ll take it and its problems in exchange for certain explanatory inadequacies, which in my opinion are still less worrying than those of any alternative.
Nice! It's an interesting journey. Would wish to contribute some things:
a) It seems to me that your physicalist/idealist distinction is focused on the public/private, but I don't see why see it that way. There's no issue with a public mental realm. This is usually the distinction made by the abstract, but this seems quite arbitrary to me. Why posit a third ontological substance as opposed to just not reducing the mental to the merely private? What we refer to the universals/abstract can be reconciled with the mental without any issue at all.
b) An issue with the pointing aspect is that in my dreams I can point to objects, and even within a seemingly public sphere. In my dreams there are characters and a reality external to my immanent subjectivity. This would not be non-subjective, even if in my dream I can point to things, things can even be atomic, have mass, be forms of energy, and so on within my draem. The physicalist cannot get beyond this without validating the content of dreams as physical or being unduly arbitrary(any category chosen to define the "physical" could apply to the dream world, and so there would need to be an ad hoc characterization of the "physical" so that it excludes the dream).
c) Would referencing thought in such a similar way as you did with consciousness be problematic? What does the intellect think about? Well, the intellect thinks of thoughts or mental objects, but then this would fall into the same circularity you are pointing with the consciousness, but that would not imply that we ought to discard the intellective and a solution in that order can solve the consciousness: consciousness would be self-aware through consciousness objects. This self-relationality need not be an issue, or as many proponents do, the self could in itself be relational(that's the the Trinitarian ontology). Per a Heideggerean account I would point to consciousness being aware of Meaning, and consciousness itself be a form of Meaning but the Meaningful requires to be perceived to be meaningful. So we have a self-perceived Mind that becomes aware of itself through the Meaning of it, even through forms of meaning(that is, after all, what the intellect does: perceives the meaning of things. The essence and the relations). This would lead to a wholeness of the meaningful through the harmonization of all possible meanings within a singular Mind that relates to itself also in these meanings, creating the modes of perception of the immanent, the transcendental and what Heidegger calls Dasein.
d) I think that one cannot get outside subjectivism. We are fundamentally subjects. All your reasoning and knowledge seem to just narratives, way to organize and structure your own mental content. This, of course, does not entail a mere reduction to the immanent subjectivity, but gives rise to the transcendental subjectivity. But the Absolute identity of our own subjectivity would logically entail a "closed system".
Take knowledge as an example. I cannot know "outside" my own self and outside my own faculty for this knowledge. Knowledge is the act of using my inherent faculties to derive a narrative that is validated by other faculties(usually logic) and it's internal to me. This entails that either the ontological substance is fundamentally unknowable(fundamentally an Other to our very core subjectivity) or knowable and so minimally analogical to our subjectivity.
A possible solution to this closed system of utter self-referential subjectivity, is through the analogical. Through the partial and analogical knowledge of the Other through a commonality in the subjective do we experience aspects of the subjective closed to our self-reference. This opens the closed self unto a reality only possible if shared by the Other and entails a larger ontology, but also focused on the subjectivity. Each subjectivity represents their own ontology, but it's not a closed ontology, a communal form of ontology.
Have you considered Husserl/Heidegger? They speak of some of this stuff and it seems that it may be a step forward in your analysis. Ultimately all analysis ends up with a projection of the transcendental through the meaningful, which is already immmersed in the theological. As such, I think all philosophy that is true to itself, deals in religious themes and ends up being coherent only within a theological frame(in a general sense). Themes like incompleteness, transcendence, subjectivity, meaning, perception, immanent, exile, appropriation, value, unfaithfulness, authenticity, essences, and so on, because it all is a form of the subjectivity of relating itself through itself and Beyond itself.
So if the wind blows the leaves of the trees shake and so do the branches. The parallelism argument still seems to imply physicalism.