The Concept of Mind
by Gilbert Ryle(Oxford 1949)
An octet of loaded words
Soul, anima, mind, spirit, psyche, self, nous, logos [ezz]
Soul is apparently derived from an old North European word for sea, based on the notion that the human essence came from and returned to the sea (or lake). English translators of the New Testament used soul for the Greek word psyche, which originally meant breath. Yet the English spirit also originally meant breath. We then see the interplay of the words soul, mind, spirit, psyche. Then we also have the point that self and mind converge over time.
Soul can also be equivalent to the Latin anima, which implies, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "living being, soul, mind, disposition, passion, courage, anger, spirit, feeling." In turn, anima is derived from "to breathe." The dictionary notes, "For sense development in Latin, compare Old Norse andi: "breath, breathing; current of air; aspiration in speech; soul, spirit, spiritual being." (Carl Jung in 1923 popularized the word anima, which he used in a special theoretical sense.)
Mind derives from North European words for memory and thought. The etymological trail points to the Sanskrit manus, meaning purpose and intentionality, which is to say mind. In addition, we have the conjecture that the English man also traces back to manus. One can see the attractiveness of such a possibility, considering how closely the two meanings interleave.
The word self apparently has little in the way of an evolution of ideas behind it, though of course there is a morphological evolution. That is to say, a person intuitively grasps the notion of center of life, which in the context of the social group is then extended to others. The concept seems to be axiomatic to the origin of language. One can see how easily the notions of mind and self became interchanged.
We may notice that in many cases the concepts of mind, self, spirit and soul are not always distinguished [hr39], a theme that is noticeable in the Old Testament.
The people of Judah/Judea, long under Persian and Greek authority, picked up the Grecian-Egyptian concept of soul along with various Zoroastrian and pseudo-Zoriastrian ideas, which were over time woven into Jewish religious thought, amplifying but never quite subsuming their concept of spirit.
As Christianity developed, there emerged the tandem notion that while the spirit animates the body, the soul controls the person's moral life, and is the essence of the person that God looks on. Even so, just as one concept seems to have emerged from the other, later both concepts were – in the minds of many ordinary Christians – fused together.
Christian theology used various Greek concepts as springboards. Christian thinkers – from Jesus onward – impregnated these concepts with new meaning. The soul was something that could perish in the abyss, suffer eternal damnation or enjoy eternal life. How such an entity could be part of a physically deterministic process was indeed a puzzle once the Newtonian paradigm had taken hold.
Of the other fraught words, we find that the Pythagorean psyche is indistinguishable from the Pythagorean soul, except that on transmigration, the soul forgets the details of its previous corporeal existence, although this then implies that the soul is something more fundamental than what we tend to call the mind. As Ryle points out, the term psychology derives from a time in the Newtonian era when thoughtful people assumed the mind could not be governed by Newtonian mechanics and so must be governed by something else, which is to say something "spiritual."
How does the self differ from the mind, if it does? As the self concept has been undergoing a tough revisionist working-over by experts in cognition, there is no clear-cut answer. One might suggest that the conscious I would serve that role – except that Ryle is very skeptical of the notion of consciousness (reflecting the old materialism [cw1] of such thinkers as the Enlightenment's Baron d'Holbach who saw "self-motivation" as a delusion and maintained that if one examines motives for an action closely enough, one will always find that the action was beyond one's control).
We should also take note of the Greek word nous, which, like psyche can be translated mind. In philosophy, the word was used for that which reasons as opposed to the reasoning itself. Thus nous might be viewed as a compartment of psyche. That is to say, nous was regarded as peculiar to man. [1xxb]
Nous certainly seems to imply the intentionality of Franz Brentano. These days, intentionality seems to mean that consciousness implies externalities; consciousness is the focus on something. Is there an intentionality beyond the need for organic homeostasis (which then wouldn't be altogether conscious), as in a soul's thirst for God?
And we have logos, a word used by Greek thinkers for the cosmic organizing principle. Pythagorus and Heraclitus equated logos with nous (or reason).
Ryle has not reported on any of these distinctions and shades of meaning when talking about mind, although he may well have thought that these subtleties were irrelevant to his argument.
These days, monads [zz1] may well be regarded as bits of energy whose bounds are limited by Planck's constant, a physicalist point of view in tune with the history of that term, but somewhat dissimilar to Leibniz's monads [ty1] and Russell's neutral monism [ent1] (see below in this section). The logos, in modern terms, would be described as that which is represented by the set of mathematical relations among such units. At present, rival monads are assumed for quantum theory and relativity theory, but everyone has faith that ultimately the rival monads will vanish as a better, unifying set of relations is discovered [zzz10]. Pluralism is a heresy for Science.
Note the possibility that events in our cosmos can seem unrelated causally – as we have from spacelike separation under relativity theory. Yet, these days we would not regard these two regions of spacetime as monads because we assume some kind of harmony via the presumed four-dimensional spacetime block or via some other topological object, meaning that scientific monism points to something that transcends ordinary causality.
Hardly anyone these days even contemplates that there could be more than one organizing principle for the all of existence. Physicists are dead certain that there must be – even if only in an unattainable Platonic sense – a Theory of Everything, representing a logos that accounts for all change in the cosmos. Underlying this assumption is the notion that the "laws" of physics are constant everywhere in the cosmos.[HPX.23]
In my sense of the term, early Greek monists were not always fully monistic, seeing different laws applying to the earth and the high-sky realm. Similarly, although early non-monists posited a cosmos composed of more than one substance or essence, each of which mingled while marching to different drummers, they did not accept that such an eventuality then implied more than one logos. That is to say, each subset of "elements" of the cosmos would require an organizing principle to give the relations among the elements of the subset. To say differently would mean there is no cohesion among things; that is, all would be without form and void.
Early monism was countered by Democratesian atomistic pluralism, which aimed to resolve the conflict between the Parmenidean and Heraclitian viewpoints. Of course, atomism might be said to be monistic in the sense that the particles follow uniform laws that constitute a unifying principle. [JH.36]
Properly, monism says that the cosmos is constituted by a single elementary substance. Thus, Cartesian dualism refers to the two cosmos-pervading substances of inert matter and thought. Strictly, though Leibniz is often viewed as a monist, Leibniz's "Monadology" gives a pluralistic system, as each monad is fundamentally different, not interacting with the others (of course one could say that their pre-established harmony set by God implies a higher monism). An example of a true monist is Spinoza, who posits a single all-pervading substance unifying Nature (or, equivalently for him, God).
The pluralist Democritus believed in the atomic theory, whereby all things are composed of basic particles suspended in a void. Yet how are they composed? The coherence required by his theory implies an organizing principle, but that was not obvious at the time. "Spacetime" and mass-energy equivalence were of course unfamiliar ideas. The enigma of human experience, as brought out by Parmenides and ably demonstrated by Zeno, implies a logos, or transcendent organizing principle, to reconcile the fundamental paradoxes of existence. These paradoxes are not resolved by pluralism because a structured world cannot dispense with the idea of coherence.
Let us say we have two independent logoses. That case would mean the two are not subdivisions of a higher logos. So then, the intersection of the sets associated with each logos would not only be null, but there would be no relations controlling interactions between the two different types of elements (or monads). That is to say, if a Type 1 element encounters a Type 2 element, no rule exists as to how they must interact. Hence, they must be essentially invisible to each other. They simply never interact, or, if they do, their interaction must be utterly random, meaning that we would have a tough time with such chaos or that such chaotic interactions are at such a low level or so rare that they are undetectable. So then two such sets would in effect represent non-interacting "parallel universes." As far as a human observer is concerned, the other universe is irrelevant. She or he always must assume a logos. In other words, for a human being, monism is required, though possibly some theologies may say otherwise. Leibniz dealt with this issue by saying that his "windowless" monads had been synchronized in advance by God.
We may safely say that a great many of the major philosophers have sought the nexus point between what the Greeks saw as an opposition of The One versus The Many. The cosmic dichotmomy has also been characterized as Being versus Becoming and Monism versus Pluralism (including Dualism). This hunt, as pursued by Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, Russell, and a legion of others, has never been successful, at least not to the point of consensus. Even Descartes sought the nexus point – in the pineal gland!
In Hegel's view, "If objects are regarded only as self-enclosed totalities, they cannot act on one another. Regarded in this way, they are the same as the monads, which, precisely for that reason, were thought of as having no influence on each other. But the concept of a monad is for just this reason a deficient reflection." [zw11]
As for Descartes' mind-body theory, that also implies what is regarded as an unacceptable dualism. Yet, the duality is even so subsumed by a greater monism, whereby Descartes' God is the logos who hides the relations that must exist between the laws of inert, but motive matter, and the soul, or mind. In any case, if we regard monads as bits of stuff, then we may well fall into the contradiction described above. Moreover, from the perspective of a modern observer, because any relations between the phenomenal world and a purported spirit world are hidden, the the two universes may be taken to be de facto non-intersecting; i.e., assumption of a spirit realm becomes vulnerable to the charge of irrelevancy.
On the other hand – perhaps in hope of evading the spirit-connoting cosmological anthropic principle – a number of scientists are quite open to the possibilities of non-interacting "bubble" universes or of a fantastic continual unrolling of some gigantic number of universes in accord with the Everett-De Witt interpretation of quantum theory. That is to say, these scientists are open to the existence of such entities, even though their existence is essentially irrelevant, the idea being that there is no provable interaction between this sub-cosmos and some other. Yet, a very acceptable course for theory-guided experimentalists would be to try to seek at least clues of interactions with another sub-cosmos, even though for historical and cultural reasons scientists see as very bad form the seeking of clues of existence of a veiled spirit sub-cosmos.
At this juncture we should consider Kant's idea (and Plato's) of the phenomenal versus the noumenal worlds. Because of how our brains process input data into perceptions, we are only familiar, via our senses, with the world of appearances. We can never fully know the "thing in itself" behind its appearance. Moreover, although modern technology and theory may draw the curtain back a tad here and there, there still must always be a medium between one's mind and the "thing in itself." I would go further and argue that we don't even know whether an apparent thing is one-to-one with some noumenal "thing" – although some sort of noumenal realm is surely implied by our existential necessities. Think of the characters in the film The Matrix not knowing that they were actually living out computer-controlled lucid dreams.
The phenomenal and noumenal worlds represent two sets that do intersect, although we dare not claim they are in one-to-one correspondence. Yet, even now science has made little progress in discovering the set of relations between these two worlds, although the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and "quantum weirdness" have opened some eyes to such an intersection of worlds. Some thinkers hypothesize that the phenomenal world is a projection from some "higher plane" of existence. Even so, both worlds must be two sides of the same coin and thus a single logos is required.
Parts of my analysis here are open to the challenge that in general the logos of the monists implied final cause (purpose) and a great intelligence of some sort. Yet such a logos was not construed by the Greek thinkers as implying a God who intervenes in human affairs. Thus, from a human perspective, it is a matter of indifference whether this logos is physical, expressing a mindless natural order, or whether it is a great mind that transcends nature. So then, I believe we are justified in asserting that our world requires a logos, whatever its ultimate essence.
Yet in 1914, a skeptical Russell took a jaundiced view of "neutral monism," [NK1] applied a term he applied to William James's theory [NK2] that consciousness only exists as a process, not an entity. This meant that "mind" and "matter" were two sides of the same coin, the coin being a single "primal stuff" called "pure experience." The Russell of 1914 saw this as an unacceptable "neutral monism" in contrast to the monism of the idealists.[gg1]
Interestingly, Russell's idealist rival, F.H. Bradley, was highly critical of the 19th Century philosopher Alexander Bain, who had proposed what Russell later dubbed neutral monism. Bain wrote that the arguments favoring the dualism of two substances – mind and body – had "lost their validity; they are no longer compatible with ascertained science and clear thinking. The one substance with two sets of properties, two sides, the physical and the mental – a double-faced unity – would appear to comply with all the exigencies of the case... The mind is destined to be a double study – to conjoin the mental philosopher with the physical philosopher." [Wn53]
In Russell's somewhat garbled transitional view, monism [Rn96] implies the existence of monads, though, as said, monads are self-contained essential entities of some sort that hence imply pluralism. [Azz1]
In any case, near the end of his paper, James says,
In other words, one might see that statement as a promoting a form of monadism, and certainly James is reaffirming his belief in pluralism over against monism. Of course, a difficulty with pluralism [hg1] is that, as F.H. Bradley [NK3] points out, if aspects of the cosmos have no relation to each other, then the "foreign" aspects are essentially nonexistent insofar as any earthly philosopher is concerned (see above).
In 1914, Russell said he believed that "there are no propositions of which the 'universe' is the subject; in other words, that there is no such thing as the universe." Further
Yet, by the 1920s, Russell could not avoid facing up to the point that the mind-body problem could not, seemingly, be resolved in dualistic or pluralistic conceptions of existence. There was nothing for it but to accept that the mind-body problem implied some sort of a unified system of existence. Thus: neutral monism. His later distaste for that term was most likely not a disavowal of the need for unity in existence, but a rejection of any imputation of religious associations the term might prompt. Still, we must note a 1931 relapse into pluralism (discussed below), which has all the earmarks of a (possibly dishonest) propaganda maneuver in a book written as an answer to scientist "mystics."
In any case, the Russell of 1921 concedes that "old-fashioned materialism" is debunked by Einstein's general theory of relativity. In fact, says Russell, physics does not assume the existence of matter (hard little objects). "The view that seems to me to reconcile the materialistic tendency of [behaviorist] psychology is the view of William James and the American new realists, according to which the 'stuff' of the world is neither mental nor material, but a 'neutral stuff,' out of which both are constructed."[zu1],[ztt2] (Despite this nod to James, Russell was to carry out a long-term feud with the philosophy of James, who died in 1910 [bg1], and other pragmatists.[prw1] ,[ne34] )
Previously, in a 1918 book, Russell shows that he was halt between two opinions concerning monism.
Yet, despite neutral monism's lure, the Russell of 1914 and 1918 found it wanting.
That is to say, Russell revised his previous belief that the monist trend in philosophy originates with religious mystics who wish to systematize their intuitions of oneness with all, a trend which Russell opposed on ground that in philosophy intuition is inferior to reasoning.
[zu1a]
In support of Russell's view, we note that the British Hegelian J.M.E. McTaggart, in a discussion of the definition of "God," underscored the monist position of religiously oriented philosophers.[zt1]
From the atheist McTaggart's remarks, one can see the basis for the oft-repeated claim that Spinoza and Hegel were de facto atheists. J.N. Findlay, for example, says that despite cloaking himself in "orthodox-sounding language," Hegel saw theism "in all its forms as an imaginative distortion of final truth."
[zn1]
As late as 1918, Russell, inspired by his former student Ludwig Wittgenstein, favored an approach to philosophy that was "atomistic, as opposed to the monistic logic of the people who more or less follow Hegel." Specifically, "When I say that my logic is atomistic, I mean that I share the common-sense belief that there are many separate things; I do not regard the apparent multiplicity of the world as consisting merely in phases and unreal divisions of a single indivisible Reality." [zu2]
James, like the younger Russell [kr76], was a foe of monism, preferring a pluralistic universe. James's pluralism was so "radical" it lacked coherence, being a "turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility." [zzz2]
By 1931, seemingly, Russell had reverted to a Jamesian pluralism. I am not altogether certain whether there was an inconsistency in his thinking or whether he had consciously ditched his monism – but see below; evidently Russell's intention was to refute the pro-Deist conclusions of the philosopher-scientists Arthur Eddington and James Jeans. Noteworthy is that Whitehead once quipped that Russell was a Platonic dialog with himself.[zzz13]
In The Scientific Outlook, Russell writes,
In that same 1931 book, Russell denounces the use of what today is called quantum weirdness to justify theological notions, taking particular aim at Eddington and Jeans, whom he accused of harking back to old philosophical ideas – implying the scientists were outside their specialty. The book, written for educated laymen, drops a hint of Russell's "neutral monism" without using that phrase.
In addition, the philosopher argued, this intermediate region is composed of mind/matter events somewhat akin to the idea of Whitehead, from whom he obtained that perspective.
Three decades later, Russell, like Whitehead, still speaks of reality as being composed of events, as opposed to the spatial points and temporal instants of standard physics. Also like Whitehead, Russell relates events to perception.
Three key ideas, he says, summarize his stance:
Following a lengthy discourse, Russell claims that "the stuff of the world consists of things like whiteness, rather than objects having the property of being white," and adds that this conclusion requires the "rejection of minds and bits of matter as the stuff out of which the world is built."
[zzz14]
In that 1959 book, Russell outlines "the theory which is called 'Neutral Monism' – as if he is distancing himself from the term he had used in The Analysis of Matter, while sticking to the theory's essentials. If one discards the "subject" and "consciousness," but only views things functionally, it "becomes possible to regard both a mind and a piece of matter as logical constructions formed out of materials not differing vitally and sometimes actually identical." Russell adds, "It became possible to think that what the physiologist regards as matter in the brain is actually composed of thoughts and feelings, and that the difference between mind and matter is merely one of arrangement."
In another book published in 1959, Russell writes that William James "did not go on to work out the full implications of his theory" against consciousness, "but those who followed his suggestion came to replace the old dualistic theories by a 'neutral monism,' which states that there is only one kind of basic stuff in the world." Russell does not draw attention to his own period as a neutral monist.[zt2]
Russell went on to explore the ramifications of this, to use my term, multiplex view in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.[zzz15]
Russell distinguishes four main types of theory pertaining to truth or some equivalent idea. They are, in turn, the theory that:
This last item, Russell divides into two forms, the "epistemological theory," which rejects the absolute law of the excluded middle (the traditional rule that says that no middle truth value such as indeterminate is permitted), and the "logical theory," which accepts that rule. So, when Russell was writing in 1938, a Brouwerian-style "epistemological theory" says that the assertion There is a mountain on the dark side of the moon has no truth value, as, at that time, there was no way to determine the truth of that proposition. The non-Brouwerian "logical theory" would say that, regardless of verifiability, the statement was either true or false. (The "logical theory" was so named because logicians tend to accept the exclusion law axiomatically, not because the "epistemological theory" was less worthy of metaphysical consideration. A noted proponent of the "epistomological theory" was L.E.J. Brouwer, the intuitionist philosopher of mathematics.)
After a lengthy analysis, Russell comes out in favor of the logical theory, not on ground that it could be definitively established, but on ground that, to him, it seemed the most inherently reasonable. After all, he says, no one really believes pure empiricism.
It may be wondered whether Russell, by adopting the logical theory, hasn't committed himself to a logos and its associated monism. In various logic-based formal systems, the theory is based on a set of axioms (which I would say is equivalent to the logos) which is permitted no contradictions in derived statements. As Russell well knows, one contradiction springing from axioms falsifies the theory. Thus, a physical theory of the cosmos must be coherent. Further, should we not assume that Russell's percepto-physical theory of existence must be coherent, with undecidable assertions still holding a Platonic truth value "laid up in heaven"? In other words, to my mind, a pluralistic universe should obey the Brouwerian notion of rejection of the law of excluded middle.
To be clear, we note that by his term coherence theory of truth, Russell [gg2] is referring to those who advocate some formal system that only requires consistency, as opposed to its terms having a basis in perceived facts, where facts is an axiomatic term that covers bits of reality and formal logical assertions. The correspondence theory requires truths to correspond to facts – but does it require universe-wide formal consistency? Russell is unclear on this point, and yet, as we have noted, one can imagine two or more "fact-based" monistic systems, though how they could relate is hard to conceive.[q1]
Even so, Russell's diffidence on neutral monism, I suggest, might be justified by his observation that entropy, as bolstered by quantum indeterminacy, pushes the arrow of time in one direction. [zzz14] That is to say, if causality/determinism is not complete, then the cosmos might lack full coherence and so be pluralistic.
The puzzle of Russell's shifts may have to do with the philosopher's singular notion of substance. The universal substance is not matter, the monist Russell argues, but small events, whereby a point on a relativistic spacetime diagram represents an event (though Russell says his system requires an event to have a minimum finite size). Yet on reviewing Russell's chapter "Neutral Monism and Physics, [2ee] I come away uncertain as to what precisely the philosopher means by monism. In another chapter, in fact, he says that for him substance need not be indestructible [2ee] , an idea that does indeed suggest a non-absolute monism, leaving him free to argue for pluralism in "mental" relations, whereby Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason need not hold: brute isolated truths are possible. (Elsewhere he sees the notion of substance as outdated.)[zt3]
After "fruitful" discussions with Rudolph Carnap in 1938-1939, Russell notes that he was "as regards to method, more in sympathy with the logical positivists than with any other existing school," adding: "I differ from them, however, in attaching more importance than they do to the work of Berkeley and Hume."[zzz15]
Despite this nod to civility, Russell counters Carnap on the underlying ideas behind his concept of verifiability.[FTE1] "Verification confirms the more doubtful by means of the less doubtful, and is therefore inapplicable to the least doubtful, viz. judgments of perception."[zzz15]
Even on so basic a notion as thing, Russell counters Carnap:
Interestingly, Ryle's attack on dualism mirrors James's 1904 assault on the concept of consciousness (which Ryle treats as equivalent, or nearly so, to mind).
Pragmatist James threw down the gauntlet and urged that the concept of consciousness be discarded, on grounds that at bottom it implied a mere ghost. Thoughts, on the other hand, do exist but the word consciousness does not stand for an entity but rather for a function. Yet, we should recognize that James's resolution of the dualism problem (not to be confused with Jamesian pluralism [hp35] ) went farther than Ryle's reinterpretation of basic notions of philosophy. [zzv1]
"My thesis is," James says, "that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known."
Moreover, James emphasizes, "Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition." Russell picked up on James's ideas, which he placed under the umbrella term neutral monism. (It is quite evident that James's 1904 solution of the dualism problem appears to contradict his radical anti-monism views, which in 1908 James said he had held for two decades.[mnb1])
Soul, anima, mind, spirit, psyche, self, nous, logos [ezz]
Soul is apparently derived from an old North European word for sea, based on the notion that the human essence came from and returned to the sea (or lake). English translators of the New Testament used soul for the Greek word psyche, which originally meant breath. Yet the English spirit also originally meant breath. We then see the interplay of the words soul, mind, spirit, psyche. Then we also have the point that self and mind converge over time.
Soul can also be equivalent to the Latin anima, which implies, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "living being, soul, mind, disposition, passion, courage, anger, spirit, feeling." In turn, anima is derived from "to breathe." The dictionary notes, "For sense development in Latin, compare Old Norse andi: "breath, breathing; current of air; aspiration in speech; soul, spirit, spiritual being." (Carl Jung in 1923 popularized the word anima, which he used in a special theoretical sense.)
Mind derives from North European words for memory and thought. The etymological trail points to the Sanskrit manus, meaning purpose and intentionality, which is to say mind. In addition, we have the conjecture that the English man also traces back to manus. One can see the attractiveness of such a possibility, considering how closely the two meanings interleave.
The word self apparently has little in the way of an evolution of ideas behind it, though of course there is a morphological evolution. That is to say, a person intuitively grasps the notion of center of life, which in the context of the social group is then extended to others. The concept seems to be axiomatic to the origin of language. One can see how easily the notions of mind and self became interchanged.
We may notice that in many cases the concepts of mind, self, spirit and soul are not always distinguished [hr39], a theme that is noticeable in the Old Testament.
The people of Judah/Judea, long under Persian and Greek authority, picked up the Grecian-Egyptian concept of soul along with various Zoroastrian and pseudo-Zoriastrian ideas, which were over time woven into Jewish religious thought, amplifying but never quite subsuming their concept of spirit.
As Christianity developed, there emerged the tandem notion that while the spirit animates the body, the soul controls the person's moral life, and is the essence of the person that God looks on. Even so, just as one concept seems to have emerged from the other, later both concepts were – in the minds of many ordinary Christians – fused together.
Christian theology used various Greek concepts as springboards. Christian thinkers – from Jesus onward – impregnated these concepts with new meaning. The soul was something that could perish in the abyss, suffer eternal damnation or enjoy eternal life. How such an entity could be part of a physically deterministic process was indeed a puzzle once the Newtonian paradigm had taken hold.
Of the other fraught words, we find that the Pythagorean psyche is indistinguishable from the Pythagorean soul, except that on transmigration, the soul forgets the details of its previous corporeal existence, although this then implies that the soul is something more fundamental than what we tend to call the mind. As Ryle points out, the term psychology derives from a time in the Newtonian era when thoughtful people assumed the mind could not be governed by Newtonian mechanics and so must be governed by something else, which is to say something "spiritual."
How does the self differ from the mind, if it does? As the self concept has been undergoing a tough revisionist working-over by experts in cognition, there is no clear-cut answer. One might suggest that the conscious I would serve that role – except that Ryle is very skeptical of the notion of consciousness (reflecting the old materialism [cw1] of such thinkers as the Enlightenment's Baron d'Holbach who saw "self-motivation" as a delusion and maintained that if one examines motives for an action closely enough, one will always find that the action was beyond one's control).
We should also take note of the Greek word nous, which, like psyche can be translated mind. In philosophy, the word was used for that which reasons as opposed to the reasoning itself. Thus nous might be viewed as a compartment of psyche. That is to say, nous was regarded as peculiar to man. [1xxb]
Nous certainly seems to imply the intentionality of Franz Brentano. These days, intentionality seems to mean that consciousness implies externalities; consciousness is the focus on something. Is there an intentionality beyond the need for organic homeostasis (which then wouldn't be altogether conscious), as in a soul's thirst for God?
And we have logos, a word used by Greek thinkers for the cosmic organizing principle. Pythagorus and Heraclitus equated logos with nous (or reason).
Ryle has not reported on any of these distinctions and shades of meaning when talking about mind, although he may well have thought that these subtleties were irrelevant to his argument.
E pluribus unum?
Modern scientists, atheistical or not, are virtually all monists, if we mean by monism a single organizing principle for all that is, whereby all that is is composed of elemental bits of stuff.These days, monads [zz1] may well be regarded as bits of energy whose bounds are limited by Planck's constant, a physicalist point of view in tune with the history of that term, but somewhat dissimilar to Leibniz's monads [ty1] and Russell's neutral monism [ent1] (see below in this section). The logos, in modern terms, would be described as that which is represented by the set of mathematical relations among such units. At present, rival monads are assumed for quantum theory and relativity theory, but everyone has faith that ultimately the rival monads will vanish as a better, unifying set of relations is discovered [zzz10]. Pluralism is a heresy for Science.
Note the possibility that events in our cosmos can seem unrelated causally – as we have from spacelike separation under relativity theory. Yet, these days we would not regard these two regions of spacetime as monads because we assume some kind of harmony via the presumed four-dimensional spacetime block or via some other topological object, meaning that scientific monism points to something that transcends ordinary causality.
Hardly anyone these days even contemplates that there could be more than one organizing principle for the all of existence. Physicists are dead certain that there must be – even if only in an unattainable Platonic sense – a Theory of Everything, representing a logos that accounts for all change in the cosmos. Underlying this assumption is the notion that the "laws" of physics are constant everywhere in the cosmos.[HPX.23]
In my sense of the term, early Greek monists were not always fully monistic, seeing different laws applying to the earth and the high-sky realm. Similarly, although early non-monists posited a cosmos composed of more than one substance or essence, each of which mingled while marching to different drummers, they did not accept that such an eventuality then implied more than one logos. That is to say, each subset of "elements" of the cosmos would require an organizing principle to give the relations among the elements of the subset. To say differently would mean there is no cohesion among things; that is, all would be without form and void.
Early monism was countered by Democratesian atomistic pluralism, which aimed to resolve the conflict between the Parmenidean and Heraclitian viewpoints. Of course, atomism might be said to be monistic in the sense that the particles follow uniform laws that constitute a unifying principle. [JH.36]
Properly, monism says that the cosmos is constituted by a single elementary substance. Thus, Cartesian dualism refers to the two cosmos-pervading substances of inert matter and thought. Strictly, though Leibniz is often viewed as a monist, Leibniz's "Monadology" gives a pluralistic system, as each monad is fundamentally different, not interacting with the others (of course one could say that their pre-established harmony set by God implies a higher monism). An example of a true monist is Spinoza, who posits a single all-pervading substance unifying Nature (or, equivalently for him, God).
The pluralist Democritus believed in the atomic theory, whereby all things are composed of basic particles suspended in a void. Yet how are they composed? The coherence required by his theory implies an organizing principle, but that was not obvious at the time. "Spacetime" and mass-energy equivalence were of course unfamiliar ideas. The enigma of human experience, as brought out by Parmenides and ably demonstrated by Zeno, implies a logos, or transcendent organizing principle, to reconcile the fundamental paradoxes of existence. These paradoxes are not resolved by pluralism because a structured world cannot dispense with the idea of coherence.
Let us say we have two independent logoses. That case would mean the two are not subdivisions of a higher logos. So then, the intersection of the sets associated with each logos would not only be null, but there would be no relations controlling interactions between the two different types of elements (or monads). That is to say, if a Type 1 element encounters a Type 2 element, no rule exists as to how they must interact. Hence, they must be essentially invisible to each other. They simply never interact, or, if they do, their interaction must be utterly random, meaning that we would have a tough time with such chaos or that such chaotic interactions are at such a low level or so rare that they are undetectable. So then two such sets would in effect represent non-interacting "parallel universes." As far as a human observer is concerned, the other universe is irrelevant. She or he always must assume a logos. In other words, for a human being, monism is required, though possibly some theologies may say otherwise. Leibniz dealt with this issue by saying that his "windowless" monads had been synchronized in advance by God.
We may safely say that a great many of the major philosophers have sought the nexus point between what the Greeks saw as an opposition of The One versus The Many. The cosmic dichotmomy has also been characterized as Being versus Becoming and Monism versus Pluralism (including Dualism). This hunt, as pursued by Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, Russell, and a legion of others, has never been successful, at least not to the point of consensus. Even Descartes sought the nexus point – in the pineal gland!
In Hegel's view, "If objects are regarded only as self-enclosed totalities, they cannot act on one another. Regarded in this way, they are the same as the monads, which, precisely for that reason, were thought of as having no influence on each other. But the concept of a monad is for just this reason a deficient reflection." [zw11]
As for Descartes' mind-body theory, that also implies what is regarded as an unacceptable dualism. Yet, the duality is even so subsumed by a greater monism, whereby Descartes' God is the logos who hides the relations that must exist between the laws of inert, but motive matter, and the soul, or mind. In any case, if we regard monads as bits of stuff, then we may well fall into the contradiction described above. Moreover, from the perspective of a modern observer, because any relations between the phenomenal world and a purported spirit world are hidden, the the two universes may be taken to be de facto non-intersecting; i.e., assumption of a spirit realm becomes vulnerable to the charge of irrelevancy.
On the other hand – perhaps in hope of evading the spirit-connoting cosmological anthropic principle – a number of scientists are quite open to the possibilities of non-interacting "bubble" universes or of a fantastic continual unrolling of some gigantic number of universes in accord with the Everett-De Witt interpretation of quantum theory. That is to say, these scientists are open to the existence of such entities, even though their existence is essentially irrelevant, the idea being that there is no provable interaction between this sub-cosmos and some other. Yet, a very acceptable course for theory-guided experimentalists would be to try to seek at least clues of interactions with another sub-cosmos, even though for historical and cultural reasons scientists see as very bad form the seeking of clues of existence of a veiled spirit sub-cosmos.
At this juncture we should consider Kant's idea (and Plato's) of the phenomenal versus the noumenal worlds. Because of how our brains process input data into perceptions, we are only familiar, via our senses, with the world of appearances. We can never fully know the "thing in itself" behind its appearance. Moreover, although modern technology and theory may draw the curtain back a tad here and there, there still must always be a medium between one's mind and the "thing in itself." I would go further and argue that we don't even know whether an apparent thing is one-to-one with some noumenal "thing" – although some sort of noumenal realm is surely implied by our existential necessities. Think of the characters in the film The Matrix not knowing that they were actually living out computer-controlled lucid dreams.
The phenomenal and noumenal worlds represent two sets that do intersect, although we dare not claim they are in one-to-one correspondence. Yet, even now science has made little progress in discovering the set of relations between these two worlds, although the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and "quantum weirdness" have opened some eyes to such an intersection of worlds. Some thinkers hypothesize that the phenomenal world is a projection from some "higher plane" of existence. Even so, both worlds must be two sides of the same coin and thus a single logos is required.
Parts of my analysis here are open to the challenge that in general the logos of the monists implied final cause (purpose) and a great intelligence of some sort. Yet such a logos was not construed by the Greek thinkers as implying a God who intervenes in human affairs. Thus, from a human perspective, it is a matter of indifference whether this logos is physical, expressing a mindless natural order, or whether it is a great mind that transcends nature. So then, I believe we are justified in asserting that our world requires a logos, whatever its ultimate essence.
What's the matter, Bert?
Another non-materialist or pseudo-materialist approach to the mind-body problem is neutral monism. [DRF.31] In his 1921 book, The Analysis of Mind [zu1] , Bertrand Russell adopted this notion after coming to see that his previous dualist philosophy was flawed. Russell's neutral monism says that existence is made up of a single basic essence that is disassembled by perception in a physical sense or, contrarily, in a mental sense. This seems to take care of the need to look inside some black box that shows how molecular interactions are transformed into thoughts. Nevertheless, Russell's "heavily qualified" neutral monism, while a respectable notion, is heavily outvoted by the materialism/physicalism of modern hard scientists, technologists and computer scientists. [2c]Yet in 1914, a skeptical Russell took a jaundiced view of "neutral monism," [NK1] applied a term he applied to William James's theory [NK2] that consciousness only exists as a process, not an entity. This meant that "mind" and "matter" were two sides of the same coin, the coin being a single "primal stuff" called "pure experience." The Russell of 1914 saw this as an unacceptable "neutral monism" in contrast to the monism of the idealists.[gg1]
Interestingly, Russell's idealist rival, F.H. Bradley, was highly critical of the 19th Century philosopher Alexander Bain, who had proposed what Russell later dubbed neutral monism. Bain wrote that the arguments favoring the dualism of two substances – mind and body – had "lost their validity; they are no longer compatible with ascertained science and clear thinking. The one substance with two sets of properties, two sides, the physical and the mental – a double-faced unity – would appear to comply with all the exigencies of the case... The mind is destined to be a double study – to conjoin the mental philosopher with the physical philosopher." [Wn53]
In Russell's somewhat garbled transitional view, monism [Rn96] implies the existence of monads, though, as said, monads are self-contained essential entities of some sort that hence imply pluralism. [Azz1]
In any case, near the end of his paper, James says,
Although for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now to say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: "It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not. Shadworth Hodgson's analysis here leaves nothing to be desired. Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space (and, if you like, for 'being') there appears no universal element of which all things are made.
In 1914, Russell said he believed that "there are no propositions of which the 'universe' is the subject; in other words, that there is no such thing as the universe." Further
What I do maintain is that there are general propositions which may be asserted of each individual thing, such as the propositions of logic. This does not involve that all the things there are form a whole which could be regarded as another thing and be made the subject of predicates. It involves only the assertion that there are properties which belong to each separate thing, not that there are properties belonging to the whole of things collectively. The philosophy which I wish to advocate may be called logical atomism or absolute pluralism, because, while maintaining that there are many things, it denies that there is a whole composed of those things [kr76].
In any case, the Russell of 1921 concedes that "old-fashioned materialism" is debunked by Einstein's general theory of relativity. In fact, says Russell, physics does not assume the existence of matter (hard little objects). "The view that seems to me to reconcile the materialistic tendency of [behaviorist] psychology is the view of William James and the American new realists, according to which the 'stuff' of the world is neither mental nor material, but a 'neutral stuff,' out of which both are constructed."[zu1],[ztt2] (Despite this nod to James, Russell was to carry out a long-term feud with the philosophy of James, who died in 1910 [bg1], and other pragmatists.[prw1] ,[ne34] )
Previously, in a 1918 book, Russell shows that he was halt between two opinions concerning monism.
I have naturally a bias in favor of the theory of neutral monism because it exemplifies Occam’s razor. I always wish to get on in philosophy with the smallest possible apparatus, partly because it diminishes the risk of error, because it is not necessary to deny the entities you do not assert, and therefore you run less risk of error the fewer entities you assume. The other reason – perhaps a somewhat frivolous one – is that every diminution in the number of entities increases the amount of work for mathematical logic to do in building up things that look like the entities you used to assume. Therefore the whole theory of neutral monism is pleasing to me, but I do find so far very great difficulty in believing it.[ztt1]
I think it is extremely difficult, if you get rid of consciousness altogether, to explain what you mean by such a word as “this,” what it is that makes the absence of impartiality. You would say that in a purely physical world there would be a complete impartiality. All parts of time and all regions of space would seem equally emphatic. But what really happens is that we pick out certain facts, past and future and all that sort of thing; they all radiate out from “this,” and I have not myself seen how one can deal with the notion of “this” on the basis of neutral monism. I do not lay that down dogmatically, only I do not see how it can be done. I shall assume for the rest of this lecture that there are such facts as beliefs and wishes and so forth. It would take me really the whole of my course to go into the question fully. Thus we come back to more purely logical questions from this excursion into psychology, for which I apologize.[ztt1]
The usage [of the term "God"] in philosophy, however, is sometimes different from the usage in theology. In philosophy we have high authority including Spinoza and Hegel for a different practice. God is frequently defined by philosophers as the true reality, of whatever nature that reality may be, provided only that it possesses some sort of unity, and is not a mere chaos. If the word is used in this way, every person, except absolute sceptics or the most extreme pluralists, must be said to believe that a God exists. The question of the existence of God, on this definition, becomes very trivial. The important question is not whether there is a God, but what sort of nature he, or it, possesses.
If the usage of theology and philosophy differ, which ought to give way? It seems to me that it should be philosophy.
As late as 1918, Russell, inspired by his former student Ludwig Wittgenstein, favored an approach to philosophy that was "atomistic, as opposed to the monistic logic of the people who more or less follow Hegel." Specifically, "When I say that my logic is atomistic, I mean that I share the common-sense belief that there are many separate things; I do not regard the apparent multiplicity of the world as consisting merely in phases and unreal divisions of a single indivisible Reality." [zu2]
James, like the younger Russell [kr76], was a foe of monism, preferring a pluralistic universe. James's pluralism was so "radical" it lacked coherence, being a "turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility." [zzz2]
By 1931, seemingly, Russell had reverted to a Jamesian pluralism. I am not altogether certain whether there was an inconsistency in his thinking or whether he had consciously ditched his monism – but see below; evidently Russell's intention was to refute the pro-Deist conclusions of the philosopher-scientists Arthur Eddington and James Jeans. Noteworthy is that Whitehead once quipped that Russell was a Platonic dialog with himself.[zzz13]
In The Scientific Outlook, Russell writes,
Academic philosophers, ever since the time of Parmenides, have believed that the world is a unity. This view has been taken over from them by clergymen and journalists, and its acceptance has been considered the touchstone of wisdom. The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that this is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love. Indeed, there is little but prejudice and habit to be said for the view that there is a world at all.”[zzz12]
The dualism of mind and matter is out of date: matter has become more like mind, and mind has become more like matter, than seemed possible at an earlier stage of science. One is led to suppose that what really exists is something intermediate between the billiard-balls of old-fashioned materialism and the soul of old-fashioned psychology.[zzz20]
Three key ideas, he says, summarize his stance:
The first is that the entities that occur in mathematical physics are not part of the stuff of the world, but are constructions composed of events and taken as units for the convenience of the mathematician. The second is that the whole of what we perceive without inference belongs to our private world. In this respect, I agree with Berkeley. The starry heaven that we know in visual sensation is inside us. The external starry heaven that we believe in is inferred. The third point is that the causal lines that enable us to be aware of a diversity of objects, though there are some lines everywhere, are apt to peter out like rivers in the sand. That is why we do not at all times perceive everything. [zzz14]
In that 1959 book, Russell outlines "the theory which is called 'Neutral Monism' – as if he is distancing himself from the term he had used in The Analysis of Matter, while sticking to the theory's essentials. If one discards the "subject" and "consciousness," but only views things functionally, it "becomes possible to regard both a mind and a piece of matter as logical constructions formed out of materials not differing vitally and sometimes actually identical." Russell adds, "It became possible to think that what the physiologist regards as matter in the brain is actually composed of thoughts and feelings, and that the difference between mind and matter is merely one of arrangement."
In another book published in 1959, Russell writes that William James "did not go on to work out the full implications of his theory" against consciousness, "but those who followed his suggestion came to replace the old dualistic theories by a 'neutral monism,' which states that there is only one kind of basic stuff in the world." Russell does not draw attention to his own period as a neutral monist.[zt2]
Russell went on to explore the ramifications of this, to use my term, multiplex view in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.[zzz15]
Russell distinguishes four main types of theory pertaining to truth or some equivalent idea. They are, in turn, the theory that:
1. Substitutes warranted assertibility for truth, as favored by John Dewey [rdc1]and the pragmatists.
2. Substitutes probability for truth[ce71], as favored by Hans Reichenbach.
3. Defines truth as coherence, as favored by "Hegelians and certain logical positivists."
4. Is called by Russell the correspondence theory of truth, according to which the truth of basic propositions depends on their relation to some occurrence, and the truth of other propositions depends on their syntactical relations to basic propositions [ug76].
After a lengthy analysis, Russell comes out in favor of the logical theory, not on ground that it could be definitively established, but on ground that, to him, it seemed the most inherently reasonable. After all, he says, no one really believes pure empiricism.
It may be wondered whether Russell, by adopting the logical theory, hasn't committed himself to a logos and its associated monism. In various logic-based formal systems, the theory is based on a set of axioms (which I would say is equivalent to the logos) which is permitted no contradictions in derived statements. As Russell well knows, one contradiction springing from axioms falsifies the theory. Thus, a physical theory of the cosmos must be coherent. Further, should we not assume that Russell's percepto-physical theory of existence must be coherent, with undecidable assertions still holding a Platonic truth value "laid up in heaven"? In other words, to my mind, a pluralistic universe should obey the Brouwerian notion of rejection of the law of excluded middle.
To be clear, we note that by his term coherence theory of truth, Russell [gg2] is referring to those who advocate some formal system that only requires consistency, as opposed to its terms having a basis in perceived facts, where facts is an axiomatic term that covers bits of reality and formal logical assertions. The correspondence theory requires truths to correspond to facts – but does it require universe-wide formal consistency? Russell is unclear on this point, and yet, as we have noted, one can imagine two or more "fact-based" monistic systems, though how they could relate is hard to conceive.[q1]
Even so, Russell's diffidence on neutral monism, I suggest, might be justified by his observation that entropy, as bolstered by quantum indeterminacy, pushes the arrow of time in one direction. [zzz14] That is to say, if causality/determinism is not complete, then the cosmos might lack full coherence and so be pluralistic.
The puzzle of Russell's shifts may have to do with the philosopher's singular notion of substance. The universal substance is not matter, the monist Russell argues, but small events, whereby a point on a relativistic spacetime diagram represents an event (though Russell says his system requires an event to have a minimum finite size). Yet on reviewing Russell's chapter "Neutral Monism and Physics, [2ee] I come away uncertain as to what precisely the philosopher means by monism. In another chapter, in fact, he says that for him substance need not be indestructible [2ee] , an idea that does indeed suggest a non-absolute monism, leaving him free to argue for pluralism in "mental" relations, whereby Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason need not hold: brute isolated truths are possible. (Elsewhere he sees the notion of substance as outdated.)[zt3]
After "fruitful" discussions with Rudolph Carnap in 1938-1939, Russell notes that he was "as regards to method, more in sympathy with the logical positivists than with any other existing school," adding: "I differ from them, however, in attaching more importance than they do to the work of Berkeley and Hume."[zzz15]
Despite this nod to civility, Russell counters Carnap on the underlying ideas behind his concept of verifiability.[FTE1] "Verification confirms the more doubtful by means of the less doubtful, and is therefore inapplicable to the least doubtful, viz. judgments of perception."[zzz15]
Even on so basic a notion as thing, Russell counters Carnap:
It is because I regard single observations as supplying our factual premisses that I cannot admit, in the statement of such premisses, the notion of thing, which involves some degree of persistence, and can, therefore, only be derived from a plurality of observations. The view of Carnap, which allows the concept of thing in the statement of factual premisses, seems to me to ignore Berkeley and Hume, not to say Heraclitus.[zzz15]
Pragmatist James threw down the gauntlet and urged that the concept of consciousness be discarded, on grounds that at bottom it implied a mere ghost. Thoughts, on the other hand, do exist but the word consciousness does not stand for an entity but rather for a function. Yet, we should recognize that James's resolution of the dualism problem (not to be confused with Jamesian pluralism [hp35] ) went farther than Ryle's reinterpretation of basic notions of philosophy. [zzv1]
"My thesis is," James says, "that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known."
Moreover, James emphasizes, "Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition." Russell picked up on James's ideas, which he placed under the umbrella term neutral monism. (It is quite evident that James's 1904 solution of the dualism problem appears to contradict his radical anti-monism views, which in 1908 James said he had held for two decades.[mnb1])
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