The Concept of Mind
by Gilbert Ryle(Oxford 1949)
A Whitehead light experience
While I agree that mind is a word that covers a process of some sort, that point does not mean that something or other has been called into (false) existence by the invocation of a name. It is as if Ryle is saying that the word river results from a category mistake because one never steps into the same river twice. The fact that the word river covers a process does not exclude that word from covering a phenomenon that we have all learned to agree – because meaningful to us – as existing [BV38].
Ryle's theory here echoes an important point made by the pragmatists: truths are relative [sb81][YT29]. With this I can agree, to a point. One can imagine, say, an intelligent aquatic lifeform that spends all its time underwater. The concept of river would not exist for it. Even so, to adopt the pragmatist credo that "pragmatism implies that every truth is relative" results in the following: The statement that "pragmatism implies that every truth is relative" is only relatively, not absolutely, true. Hence that statement is not true from every viewpoint. Hence that statement is not true. Hence that statement is inconsistent.
Be that as it may, Russell's view of physicalism may be gathered from this statement in his book The Analysis of Matter: "It is obvious that a man who can see can see things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not part of physics." [2ee]
Morris Weitz goes on to note Russell's observation that the quantum behavior of the electron and its implications for causality "interposes a veto upon materialistic dogmatism." This is quite a shrewd point, considering that quantum theory had not yet been put in proper order by Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Dirac. Even now, scientists avert their gaze from a related point made by Russell that the possibility exists that "the minute phenomena of the brain which make all the difference to mental phenomena belong to the region where physical laws no longer determine definitely what must happen." This remark came several years before Schroedinger proposed his cat-in-the-box thought experiment. [2e]
Physics, and its usual correlate, naive realism [kaa1] (things are what they seem to be "out there") leads to a contradiction, Russell points out. "Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false."[zzz15]
A materialist form of monism was favored by J.B.S. Haldane, one of the originators of the modern synthesis that was said to have reconciled the Darwinian natural selection model of evolution with the Mendelian theory of heritable traits. The noted British socialist and atheist was opposed to simplistic materialism as a basis for the understanding of the world. In his The Causes of Evolution (Longmans, Green 1932) he wrote that his "main prejudice is in favor of monism," although he believed that an updated materialism, along with absolute idealism and Russell's neutral monism, was monistic. Haldane quotes Lenin to argue that updated versions of materialism had become "distinctly idealistic."
Haldane thought that scientific advances had shown that plainly physical phenomena could be interpreted as mind-like phenomena – thus, his monism. He wrote that "monism has the advantage that if it is wrong it will ultimately lead to self-contradiction, whereas dualistic systems, which purport to give a less complete account of the world, are therefore less susceptible to disproof." Whether Haldane really meant monism as opposed to monadism is not clear to me.
Another biology-minded thinker and atheist, Thomas Nagel, sees a form of neutral monism, yet to be developed, as a way out of the contradictions evident to him in the standard materialist worldview. [2xz] Nagel has expressed skepticism that natural selection accounts for the human mind.
In any case, the latter-day neutral monists were picking up on a theme laid down by Epicurus, much of whose philosophy is reflected in modern atheistical views. Epicurus taught that the world and everything in it, including gods, were material objects composed of colliding atoms. Further, human bodies are composed of heavy atoms, whereas lighter, swifter atoms account for sensation and thinking – thus his idea that humans are motivated by the pleasure principle, rather than by divine light.
[zzm1]
My view is that what Russell and others are suggesting is that we think of a multiplex coding of the stuff of existence. That is to say, the stuff's information is encrypted and susceptible to being decoded with two distinct codes (analogous to Epicurus's two types of atoms). Code A will yield information in a clearly physical sense, Code B in an obviously mental sense. How this would relate to the quantum measurement problem is something for monists to come to terms with.
Neither Russell nor Whitehead were the first to propose such a multiplex view. Decades earlier Schopenhauer had advocated a similar idea. "I say that between the act of will and the bodily action there is no causal connection whatever; on the contrary, the two are directly one and the same thing perceived in a double way, namely in self-consciousness or the inner sense as an act of will, and simultaneously in external brain-perception as bodily action." [zw3]
Incidentally, Russell's view of Hegel as an idealist who thought that everything "is in the mind'" was in error, says Robert Solomon. In "an ironic twist," Russell mischaracterized Hegel's view, which held for a "dual-aspect" theory of consciousness, not unlike Russell's own theory. [zw4], [zw9]
Russell however makes no such error in his late-career Wisdom of the West, which contains an acute discussion of Hegel's merits and demerits.[zt2]
And yet, we shall see that Ryle makes a very serious "category mistake" (a term he made popular [1xx] by having an infirm grasp of the notions of mechanism, determinism and free will.
Well then, what is the Cartesian category mistake? Ryle uses Gibbon's Decline and Fall for an illustration. Even granting that Gibbon assiduously followed the rules of English grammar in the composition of this work, those rules did not ordain what he would write about. Two different sorts of causes may coexist. Similarly, argues Ryle, "The discoveries of physical science no more rule out life, sentience, purpose or intelligence from presence in the world than do the rules of grammar say anything about style or logic." If Ryle were writing today, he might say that the basic physical causes within the brain do not mean we cannot talk of higher-level causes, as today's cognitive experts do in fact talk.
So one category mistake, we are left to infer, is the assumption that non-physical process is required for mental activity. But then we have this: "Men are not machines, not even ghost-ridden machines. They are men – a tautology worth remembering." When Ryle "solves" the mind-body dualism by proclaiming that man is not a machine – is not some sort of Newtonian clockwork – we quickly see that he has not properly defined the word "machine." A broad interpretation of the term, I suggest, is that of a dynamical system that maintains homeostasis for a period of time using various negative feedback "control" subsystems. Of course such terminology was rare in his day; still, he did not come up with an equivalent definition. If, as is supposed, a man comes into existence and lives only as a result of physical forces, his body – including his brain – is fairly defined as belonging to the class called "machine." The brain in this conception is what today we would describe as an onboard computer directing actions of the body's subsystems [cP28].
Even the name of Ryle's book, The Concept of Mind, holds in it some questions. First, he is saying that mind is a concept but that what that concept represents is something that does not, properly, exist. Ryle doubtless would not like it to subsist either, though he was too much of a Realist to have much regard for that nice distinction.
So a primary question is, what is a concept?
He has not given a rigorous or even a somewhat usable definition of that word. Yet most of us reflexively construe the word concept as something that a mind entertains. It is not the thing, but what the mind uses to represent the thing. Of course, idealists argue that this is incorrect, that (in modern terms), there exists a feedback loop between a mental concept and a thing. Ryle, however, was having none of that. Idealism was as dead as a doornail as far as he was concerned.
I suppose he might answer that a concept is a specific memory, which may be deployed as a thought, and that a concept is simply part of the process of behavior. And I can agree with him that if we are not careful with definitions, we may easily become muddled.
But we need more than tight definitions. We also need a relatively coherent theory, if we can get it. And if not, we must frankly admit that our efforts fall short. I don't see that Ryle has achieved cohesion or given a basis for developing a coherent theory. In fact, his work was already undermined by Alan Turing, whose 1936 paper outlined philosophically and mathematically the existence, in principle, of all of what are now called computer software programs. Though a program guides a process, it is assuredly a thing – though usually not an easily observable thing. Some would object to calling a computer program a mind, and for good reason. Still, we have the Gestalt effect whereby the whole assuredly exceeds the sum of its parts. Likewise, there is a Gestalt effect for the brain's activity. Most of us find the word mind covers that concept. On the other hand, it is true that the word carries a great deal of baggage, ancient and modern. We might try to, say, capitalize Mind and assign it a scientifically strict sense. The trouble with that proposal is that there is even now no agreement on what the brain actually does.
And if Ryle is wrong on this point (although in a time before most academics had even heard of computers or "electronic brains"), why should we consider the remainder of his argument trustworthy – as he lays out for us something that nearly everyone but he took to be a form of behaviorism? [AT20]
The debt owed by Ryle to the behaviorist school of psychology is apparent in the words of John B. Watson: [zzw1]
Moreover,
Similarly, B.F. Skinner argued in a 1953 book:
Much of Ryle's philosophy is strongly prefigured by Russell, who incorporated James's and Watson's views into his 1921 treatise on the concept of mind.
[zu1]
Indeed, Ryle's theory has come to fall under such rubrics as logical, analytical or conceptual behaviorism. Yet, we may ask whether we may really safely ignore what goes on between the ears. Notes one text: "Ryle's behaviorism presumes that we can explain everything there is about mental events by looking solely at sensory input and behavioral output." Hoping to himself avoid falling into a category mistake, the text says, "Ryle ignores everything that takes place between the input and output." [1xya]
Thomas Nagel sums up Ryle (and others) thus:
Bryan Magee, who knew Ryle, writes, "Gilbert Ryle was a person of life-enhancing intellectual brilliance, but he had no inner life worth speaking of," adding that this deficit "was a standing joke among his friends."
[zw1]
At one point in an interview by Magee, Ryle bristled: "What I want to do is to throw a brick at you for saying 'inside'." So-called "inner life" is no different from "exterior life," Ryle insisted. Things that one says internally, for example, can just as well be said aloud. Here is where we see Ryle attempting to abolish any mystery by insisting that purported inner life is just another worldly phenomenon.
When Pythagorus was working on the Pythagorean theorem, he was in fact talking to himself, with such sentences as, "The square on this side plus the square on that side would not equal the square on this third side." Ryle argued, "We hanker to say that besides, the noises, the words, phrases etc. that he produces... there is something else that Pythagorus is doing as well," such as trying to solve a problem.[zw7] But, if Pythagorus stopped verbalizing to himself, he would no longer be working on the problem, which will have vanished. One wonders, however, what goes on between sentences that prods the thinker to go from one sentence/idea to the next. Seemingly that part of thinking must be non-verbal.
Be that as it may, let us attempt to be charitable, and grant that Ryle meant that physics involves more than billiard balls or, that is to say, more than gravity plus Newton's laws of motion. We can surmise that Ryle objected to Hobbes's mechanistic view of man on grounds that Hobbes saw a human as a Newtonian clockwork. Yet, there is more to the cosmos than Newtonian (really, Laplacian) clockworks. Most of the universe, in Ryle's view, is composed of non-machine, non-clockwork systems, such as the systems of organic life.
Agreed. This is certainly so – especially if we mean that Newtonian clockworks do not include the electrodynamics of Faraday and Maxwell (to say nothing of 20th Century physics).
So, to be fair, one may be rid of the "bogy" of (Hobbesian) mechanics by observing that humans are not ruled by mechanics. Yet they do follow some organic model of physical law. If this sounds suspect, you are on your toes. True, Ryle does not use the phrase "organic model of physical law," but that is certainly what he means. So we now are faced with one of those mysterious "occult" processes he detests so much. But that is not all. Ryle would have us realize that most phenomena in the cosmos are non-mechanical and aperiodic. I take it that he means that aperiodic systems are perforce non-mechanical. So what he really means is the syllogism: nonlinear systems are not machines, a human is a nonlinear system, therefore a human is not a machine. (The word physicalism is irrelevant here, as Ryle does not resort to it in Concept.)
Hence we are left to assume that as there is no machine, there is no need for a ghostly pilot.
Ryle is taken to task in a book by the philosopher Karl Popper.[q2]
"Materialists have welcomed [Concept] as expounding their creed," Popper writes. "Yet Ryle is decidedly not a materialist (in the sense of the principle of physicalism). Of course, he is no dualist, but he is definitely not a physicalist or a monist." How so? Popper spotlights this assertion by Ryle: "Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to being a ghost in the machine ... There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man."
So then, Popper remarks, "The quesion arises, what does Ryle wish to deny when he says that man is not a 'ghost in a machine'? If his intention is to deny the view of Homer according to whom the psyche – a shade resembling the body – survives the body, one could not object. But Descartes was the one who most clearly rejected this semi-materialist view of human consciousness; and Ryle calls the myth which he rejects the 'Cartesian myth'."
In a footnote, Popper writes, "The myth, as others have also remarked, is hardly to be ascribed to Descartes. It is, if anything, a popular ancient legend, rather than a philosophical and 'fairly new fangled legend,' as Ryle ... calls it."
Popper goes on to argue that though apparently Ryle attempted to outlaw consciousness, he hadn't succeeded because he let slip in references to "my" sensations and feelings.
Russell sharply criticized Ryle for his scientific ignorance.
Ryle defended himself by arguing that he didn't necessarily need scientific knowledge in order to do philosophy. For example, anyone has experience of perception and needn't know about rods and cones in the eye to talk intelligently about perception. That is to say, "I don't need to know things that I don't in fact know about rods and cones in order to know things about, e.g., overlooking misprints, which is an optical thing that I often do; or misjudging the speed of cars, which is another optical thing that I often do; or misrecognizing people's faces, which is another optical thing that I very seldom do. The facts of perception with which I was occupied are facts about which I know and you know pretty well everything we need to know." [zw7]
Agreed that one can have a discussion about perception without being a neurologist. Yet, one would expect that the philosopher would have found worthwhile the pursuit of some of the developments in cognitive sciences. The lack of scientific comprehension means that Ryle could not even understand many of his philosophy contemporaries, such as Russell, Whitehead, Popper, Ayer etc. In turn, that means he could not examine or justify his background metaphysics, that gray area of assumptions about the nature of "the real world."
Ryle exemplifies what Bryan Magee calls the "Oxford Philosophy" which dominated the school during the mid-Twentieth Century. Magee expends a substantial sum of energy denouncing as being a minor blind alley this mode of philosophizing, which put much emphasis on "ordinary language." The plain language philosophers were in general uninformed about science, Magee notes. [zw7]
Herewith a statement that casts some light on the professor's scientific knowledge:
"The old error of treating the term Force as denoting an occult force-exerting agency has been given up in the physical sciences, but its relatives survive in many theories of mind and are perhaps only moribund in biology."
Presumably, the sage is referring to the Minkowski-Einstein spacetime continuum, whereby gravity is considered a field disturbance with waves traveling at a finite speed, rather than being thought of as Newton's action at a distance, which was believed to occur instantaneously. Yet Ryle was unaware that in his day "spooky action at a distance" was bedeviling quantum mechanics, as it still does. To suggest that "action at a distance" has been cast out without mentioning the quantum entanglement controversy – instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" – implies that his knowledge was limited.
Granted, there is a bare possibility that he was referring to the use of energy equations that replace the notion of force with another occult notion, energy, but the result is the same: lack of awareness of the occult – sometimes called "weird" – properties of quantum theory.
Ryle's implication here of course is that biologists should keep pace with physics and reject any need for an "occult" non-physical cause, such as an animating spirit. That point of view is today, and was before the sage's birth, widely believed among scientists and intellectuals. This belief, however, is simply a belief, an article of faith, if you will. These days some believe artificial intelligence will soon give strong support to Ryle's vision [DSp.893 ] – but an assertion that sentience needs nothing non-physical is not a proof. (Obviously, the notion that sentience does require something non-physical has been widely believed but no consensus exists on that claim either.)
In any case, one might contend that by rejecting mechanism, Ryle has embraced physicalism. Ryle does not use this word [1a] that refers to a successor concept for 19th Century materialism and, from what I can gather, has been commonly used to mean 20th Century materialism, whereby matter and energy are equivalent and we take into account developments in electromagnetic theory. Physicalism, in this sense, doesn't replace the machine paradigm for mental activity; what we have is simply an admission that clocks can have electronic circuits. Whether we say mechanism, materialism or physicalism, we mean that mental activities are all ordained by physical causes. All three approaches converge on the requirement of a black box somewhere between physical causes and mind or mental action.
The idea of mechanism strongly correlates with the older form of materialism, whereby bits of dead matter were flung about after collisions. In the new materialism, subatomic energy is held to be equivalent to a bit of matter; that is to say, energy held some sort of existence of its own; it became an entity, like matter. Replacing the force/matter paradigm was the energy paradigm. So the tendency would have been to ditch a mechanistic theory of mind, in the Cartesian sense, and usher in a physicalist theory based on energetics. Ryle, however, has not done this, having been evidently ignorant on the finer points of physics.
This distinction is made the more obscure by the term "quantum mechanics," which came into vogue in the 1920s and which has little similarity to the macro-mechanics of Newton.
Strictly speaking, physicalism is a notion introduced by Carnap [1aa] and like-minded members of the Vienna Circle. It was a name for an updated philosophical language of science. For Carnap, physicalism proposed a function between the sentences of psychology and the sentences of physics. [zzz7] That is to say, psychology is simply a disguised form of physics. Later in his career Carnap appeared to have toned down that conceptualization, according to A.J. Ayer, a fellow logical positivist. [zzz8]
By 1940, Russell challenges Carnap's thesis, arguing that the word or corresponds to psychological states but is not used in the basic propositions of physics. Yet, "it is an observable fact that people sometimes believe disjunctions." The same holds for the "second-order" logic words not, some and all, which do not appear in the "object language." Hence, "we cannot accept one possible interpretation of the thesis which Carnap calls physicalism, which maintains that all science can be expressed in the language of physics." Moreover, "we must bear in mind that, prima facie logical words, though not necessary in describing physical facts, are indispensable for the description of certain mental facts.[zzz15]
The attack on 19th century materialism was launched early in the 20th century by A.N. Whitehead, who was dissatisfied with the philosophic and mathematical basis of Laplacian materialism. [zzz5] (Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a trailblazing work of mathematical logic.)
Calculus may be useful for calculation, according to Whitehead, but its assumptions are not a good ground for philosophy. One should not think of an occurrence as implying a mechanistic chain of frozen points (as in the contiguous points on a line). That picture may serve well enough for scientific needs, but it does not accurately capture the reality – which is, that the cosmos is composed of events that are part of some organic whole. That whole includes human experience, such as poetical feeling, as in the suffuse experience of a sunset or of a wondrous bit of literature. Bare scientific analysis is insufficient to capture these organic parcels of reality. [1xaaa],[zzz5]
In any case, we might infer that Ryle was what has come to be known as a functionalist, but that suggestion is another red herring; it also tends to befuddle rather than clarify.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes functionalism as "the theory that mental states are more like mouse traps than they are like diamonds. That is, what makes something a mental state is more a matter of what it does, not what it is made of. This distinguishes functionalism from traditional mind-body dualism, such as that of René Descartes, according to which minds are made of a special kind of substance, the res cogitans (the thinking substance)."
To this writer, functionalism relates closely to "emergent behavior" metaphors, such as the gas law or the differential equation giving minimum population prior to species extinction. Functionalism, as generally understood, requires physicalism. Both, some would argue, are based on a doctrine disparagingly known as "scientism" [zq0].
Be that as it may, surely when Ryle asserts that men are not machines, he does not mean to say that a Designer is implied. When he condemns "the bogy of mechanism," he is not trying to toss out determinism; yet precisely what sort of determinism he is implying is open to question. Regardless of the fact that many these days prefer to describe the world statistically – correlation, not causation – we have to deal with determinism, or its lack. Here are the options.
The world has been thought to be governed by any one of options 1 or 3 but these days we have quantum mechanics requiring 1 and 2. We cannot be sure that all three options might not be necessary, even though option 3 (non-physical causation) is often dismissed as "unscientific." (An entire essay can be written on the question of whether science is scientific.)
Despite Ryle's attempts throughout his book at better definitions, he has missed important definitions concerning the three options above. So he has not succeeded in resolving the mind-body problem by barring the concept of machine, as he implicitly defines the word.
I suppose he might have argued that the posited duality is false because mind and body are facets of a whole, although direct holism is not specified, nor any sort of Gestalt effect, nor an emergent quality; he does, however, expend much effort on what he regards as potentially misleading characterizations of mind that lend credence to the notion of ghost (spirit or soul). In fact, I would say that Ryle's discussion is sorely troubled by a lack of depth on the issues of causation and perception. Thus, he does not see that he is being "occult" – to use his term – where he waves his hands to get past the little gap in his theory.
It is noteworthy that Ryle was hardly the first to attempt to cast out the bogey of mind/self. Hume denied the existence of the self, espousing I suppose a sort of functionalism.
In other words, if the self is that which perceives, why are we so often unconscious of it in the midst of perception?
While I agree that mind is a word that covers a process of some sort, that point does not mean that something or other has been called into (false) existence by the invocation of a name. It is as if Ryle is saying that the word river results from a category mistake because one never steps into the same river twice. The fact that the word river covers a process does not exclude that word from covering a phenomenon that we have all learned to agree – because meaningful to us – as existing [BV38].
Ryle's theory here echoes an important point made by the pragmatists: truths are relative [sb81][YT29]. With this I can agree, to a point. One can imagine, say, an intelligent aquatic lifeform that spends all its time underwater. The concept of river would not exist for it. Even so, to adopt the pragmatist credo that "pragmatism implies that every truth is relative" results in the following: The statement that "pragmatism implies that every truth is relative" is only relatively, not absolutely, true. Hence that statement is not true from every viewpoint. Hence that statement is not true. Hence that statement is inconsistent.
Be that as it may, Russell's view of physicalism may be gathered from this statement in his book The Analysis of Matter: "It is obvious that a man who can see can see things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not part of physics." [2ee]
Morris Weitz goes on to note Russell's observation that the quantum behavior of the electron and its implications for causality "interposes a veto upon materialistic dogmatism." This is quite a shrewd point, considering that quantum theory had not yet been put in proper order by Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Dirac. Even now, scientists avert their gaze from a related point made by Russell that the possibility exists that "the minute phenomena of the brain which make all the difference to mental phenomena belong to the region where physical laws no longer determine definitely what must happen." This remark came several years before Schroedinger proposed his cat-in-the-box thought experiment. [2e]
Physics, and its usual correlate, naive realism [kaa1] (things are what they seem to be "out there") leads to a contradiction, Russell points out. "Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false."[zzz15]
A materialist form of monism was favored by J.B.S. Haldane, one of the originators of the modern synthesis that was said to have reconciled the Darwinian natural selection model of evolution with the Mendelian theory of heritable traits. The noted British socialist and atheist was opposed to simplistic materialism as a basis for the understanding of the world. In his The Causes of Evolution (Longmans, Green 1932) he wrote that his "main prejudice is in favor of monism," although he believed that an updated materialism, along with absolute idealism and Russell's neutral monism, was monistic. Haldane quotes Lenin to argue that updated versions of materialism had become "distinctly idealistic."
Haldane thought that scientific advances had shown that plainly physical phenomena could be interpreted as mind-like phenomena – thus, his monism. He wrote that "monism has the advantage that if it is wrong it will ultimately lead to self-contradiction, whereas dualistic systems, which purport to give a less complete account of the world, are therefore less susceptible to disproof." Whether Haldane really meant monism as opposed to monadism is not clear to me.
Another biology-minded thinker and atheist, Thomas Nagel, sees a form of neutral monism, yet to be developed, as a way out of the contradictions evident to him in the standard materialist worldview. [2xz] Nagel has expressed skepticism that natural selection accounts for the human mind.
Why not take the development of the human intellect as a probable counterexample to the law that natural selection explains everything, instead of forcing it under the law with improbable speculations unsupported by evidence? ...
What, I will be asked, is my alternative? Creationism? The answer is I don't have one, and I don't need one in order to reject all existing proposals as improbable. One should not assume that the truth about this matter has already been conceived of – or hold onto a view just because no one can come up with a better alternative. Belief isn't like action. One doesn't have to believe anything, and to believe nothing is not to believe something. [QW1]
My view is that what Russell and others are suggesting is that we think of a multiplex coding of the stuff of existence. That is to say, the stuff's information is encrypted and susceptible to being decoded with two distinct codes (analogous to Epicurus's two types of atoms). Code A will yield information in a clearly physical sense, Code B in an obviously mental sense. How this would relate to the quantum measurement problem is something for monists to come to terms with.
Neither Russell nor Whitehead were the first to propose such a multiplex view. Decades earlier Schopenhauer had advocated a similar idea. "I say that between the act of will and the bodily action there is no causal connection whatever; on the contrary, the two are directly one and the same thing perceived in a double way, namely in self-consciousness or the inner sense as an act of will, and simultaneously in external brain-perception as bodily action." [zw3]
Incidentally, Russell's view of Hegel as an idealist who thought that everything "is in the mind'" was in error, says Robert Solomon. In "an ironic twist," Russell mischaracterized Hegel's view, which held for a "dual-aspect" theory of consciousness, not unlike Russell's own theory. [zw4], [zw9]
Russell however makes no such error in his late-career Wisdom of the West, which contains an acute discussion of Hegel's merits and demerits.[zt2]
Mind your mindless mind
Now the question is, how does Ryle go about debunking the myth of the ghost in the machine? People who believe in something called a mind are making a category mistake, as in asking which member of a rugby team covers "team spirit." Team spirit is not a thing, but a word that tells about a process that emerges from the various members.[zxv1]And yet, we shall see that Ryle makes a very serious "category mistake" (a term he made popular [1xx] by having an infirm grasp of the notions of mechanism, determinism and free will.
At this point, we digress briefly for a technicality: Philosophical systems have traditionally been broken down into categories, which are the highest, most inclusive classes of areas of contemplation. The idea that such systematization is realistic has become controversial, as described here:
On categories
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/categories/
By category, Ryle seems to mean simply class or set, though one might agree that the concepts he addresses tend to fall under the general notion of philosophical category. At one point, the journalist Bryan Magee asked Ryle what his categories were, but Ryle's answer focused on the importance of what he meant by category error while not giving any particular categories.[zw7]
So one category mistake, we are left to infer, is the assumption that non-physical process is required for mental activity. But then we have this: "Men are not machines, not even ghost-ridden machines. They are men – a tautology worth remembering." When Ryle "solves" the mind-body dualism by proclaiming that man is not a machine – is not some sort of Newtonian clockwork – we quickly see that he has not properly defined the word "machine." A broad interpretation of the term, I suggest, is that of a dynamical system that maintains homeostasis for a period of time using various negative feedback "control" subsystems. Of course such terminology was rare in his day; still, he did not come up with an equivalent definition. If, as is supposed, a man comes into existence and lives only as a result of physical forces, his body – including his brain – is fairly defined as belonging to the class called "machine." The brain in this conception is what today we would describe as an onboard computer directing actions of the body's subsystems [cP28].
Even the name of Ryle's book, The Concept of Mind, holds in it some questions. First, he is saying that mind is a concept but that what that concept represents is something that does not, properly, exist. Ryle doubtless would not like it to subsist either, though he was too much of a Realist to have much regard for that nice distinction.
So a primary question is, what is a concept?
He has not given a rigorous or even a somewhat usable definition of that word. Yet most of us reflexively construe the word concept as something that a mind entertains. It is not the thing, but what the mind uses to represent the thing. Of course, idealists argue that this is incorrect, that (in modern terms), there exists a feedback loop between a mental concept and a thing. Ryle, however, was having none of that. Idealism was as dead as a doornail as far as he was concerned.
I suppose he might answer that a concept is a specific memory, which may be deployed as a thought, and that a concept is simply part of the process of behavior. And I can agree with him that if we are not careful with definitions, we may easily become muddled.
But we need more than tight definitions. We also need a relatively coherent theory, if we can get it. And if not, we must frankly admit that our efforts fall short. I don't see that Ryle has achieved cohesion or given a basis for developing a coherent theory. In fact, his work was already undermined by Alan Turing, whose 1936 paper outlined philosophically and mathematically the existence, in principle, of all of what are now called computer software programs. Though a program guides a process, it is assuredly a thing – though usually not an easily observable thing. Some would object to calling a computer program a mind, and for good reason. Still, we have the Gestalt effect whereby the whole assuredly exceeds the sum of its parts. Likewise, there is a Gestalt effect for the brain's activity. Most of us find the word mind covers that concept. On the other hand, it is true that the word carries a great deal of baggage, ancient and modern. We might try to, say, capitalize Mind and assign it a scientifically strict sense. The trouble with that proposal is that there is even now no agreement on what the brain actually does.
And if Ryle is wrong on this point (although in a time before most academics had even heard of computers or "electronic brains"), why should we consider the remainder of his argument trustworthy – as he lays out for us something that nearly everyone but he took to be a form of behaviorism? [AT20]
The debt owed by Ryle to the behaviorist school of psychology is apparent in the words of John B. Watson: [zzw1]
The Freudians have made more or less of a "metaphysical entity" out of the censor. They suppose that when wishes are repressed they are repressed into the "unconscious," and that this mysterious censor stands at the trapdoor lying between the conscious and the unconscious. Many of us do not believe in a world of the unconscious (a few of us even have grave doubts about the usefulness of the term consciousness), hence we try to explain censorship along ordinary biological lines. We believe that one group of habits can "down'" another group of habits – or instincts. In this case our ordinary system of habits – those we call expressive of our '"real selves'" – inhibit or quench (keep inactive or partially inactive) those habits and instinctive tendencies which belong largely in the past.
It is among these frustrated impulses that I would find the biological basis of the unfulfilled wish. Such 'wishes' need never have been 'conscious,' and need never have been suppressed into Freud's realm of the unconscious. It may be inferred from this that there is no particular reason for applying the term 'wish' to such tendencies.
Similarly, B.F. Skinner argued in a 1953 book:
The commonest inner causes have no specific dimensions at all, either neurological or psychic. When we say that a man eats because he is hungry, smokes a great deal because he has the tobacco habit, fights because of the instinct of pugnacity, behaves brilliantly because of his intelligence, or plays the piano well because of his musical ability, we seem to be referring to causes. But on analysis these phrases prove to be merely redundant descriptions.
The practice of looking inside the organism for an explanation of behavior has tended to obscure the variables which are immediately available for a scientific analysis. These variables lie outside the organism, in its immediate environment and in its environmental history … such terms as “hunger,” “habit,” and “intelligence” convert what are essentially the properties of a process or relation into what appear to be things. Thus we are unprepared for the properties eventually to be discovered in the behavior itself and continue to look for something which may not exist … [dgh.754]
Indeed, Ryle's theory has come to fall under such rubrics as logical, analytical or conceptual behaviorism. Yet, we may ask whether we may really safely ignore what goes on between the ears. Notes one text: "Ryle's behaviorism presumes that we can explain everything there is about mental events by looking solely at sensory input and behavioral output." Hoping to himself avoid falling into a category mistake, the text says, "Ryle ignores everything that takes place between the input and output." [1xya]
Thomas Nagel sums up Ryle (and others) thus:
One strategy for putting the mental into the physical world picture is conceptual behaviorism, offered as an analysis of the real nature of mental concepts. This was tried in several versions. Mental phenomena were identified variously with behavior, behavioral dispositions, or forms of behavioral organization. In another version, associated with Ryle and inspired by Wittgenstein, mental phenomena were not identified with anything, either physical or nonphysical; the names of mental states and processes were said not to be referring expressions. Instead, mental concepts were explained in terms of their observable behavioral conditions of application – behavioral criteria or assertability conditions rather than behavioral truth conditions. [2xz]
At one point in an interview by Magee, Ryle bristled: "What I want to do is to throw a brick at you for saying 'inside'." So-called "inner life" is no different from "exterior life," Ryle insisted. Things that one says internally, for example, can just as well be said aloud. Here is where we see Ryle attempting to abolish any mystery by insisting that purported inner life is just another worldly phenomenon.
When Pythagorus was working on the Pythagorean theorem, he was in fact talking to himself, with such sentences as, "The square on this side plus the square on that side would not equal the square on this third side." Ryle argued, "We hanker to say that besides, the noises, the words, phrases etc. that he produces... there is something else that Pythagorus is doing as well," such as trying to solve a problem.[zw7] But, if Pythagorus stopped verbalizing to himself, he would no longer be working on the problem, which will have vanished. One wonders, however, what goes on between sentences that prods the thinker to go from one sentence/idea to the next. Seemingly that part of thinking must be non-verbal.
Be that as it may, let us attempt to be charitable, and grant that Ryle meant that physics involves more than billiard balls or, that is to say, more than gravity plus Newton's laws of motion. We can surmise that Ryle objected to Hobbes's mechanistic view of man on grounds that Hobbes saw a human as a Newtonian clockwork. Yet, there is more to the cosmos than Newtonian (really, Laplacian) clockworks. Most of the universe, in Ryle's view, is composed of non-machine, non-clockwork systems, such as the systems of organic life.
Agreed. This is certainly so – especially if we mean that Newtonian clockworks do not include the electrodynamics of Faraday and Maxwell (to say nothing of 20th Century physics).
So, to be fair, one may be rid of the "bogy" of (Hobbesian) mechanics by observing that humans are not ruled by mechanics. Yet they do follow some organic model of physical law. If this sounds suspect, you are on your toes. True, Ryle does not use the phrase "organic model of physical law," but that is certainly what he means. So we now are faced with one of those mysterious "occult" processes he detests so much. But that is not all. Ryle would have us realize that most phenomena in the cosmos are non-mechanical and aperiodic. I take it that he means that aperiodic systems are perforce non-mechanical. So what he really means is the syllogism: nonlinear systems are not machines, a human is a nonlinear system, therefore a human is not a machine. (The word physicalism is irrelevant here, as Ryle does not resort to it in Concept.)
Hence we are left to assume that as there is no machine, there is no need for a ghostly pilot.
Ryle is taken to task in a book by the philosopher Karl Popper.[q2]
"Materialists have welcomed [Concept] as expounding their creed," Popper writes. "Yet Ryle is decidedly not a materialist (in the sense of the principle of physicalism). Of course, he is no dualist, but he is definitely not a physicalist or a monist." How so? Popper spotlights this assertion by Ryle: "Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to being a ghost in the machine ... There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man."
So then, Popper remarks, "The quesion arises, what does Ryle wish to deny when he says that man is not a 'ghost in a machine'? If his intention is to deny the view of Homer according to whom the psyche – a shade resembling the body – survives the body, one could not object. But Descartes was the one who most clearly rejected this semi-materialist view of human consciousness; and Ryle calls the myth which he rejects the 'Cartesian myth'."
In a footnote, Popper writes, "The myth, as others have also remarked, is hardly to be ascribed to Descartes. It is, if anything, a popular ancient legend, rather than a philosophical and 'fairly new fangled legend,' as Ryle ... calls it."
Popper goes on to argue that though apparently Ryle attempted to outlaw consciousness, he hadn't succeeded because he let slip in references to "my" sensations and feelings.
Get down and bogy
In other words, Ryle is saying we are not robots – because, one must infer, of non-linearity. Granted, Ryle shows no familiarity with the concept of non-linear dynamics (as in non-linear differential equations) and while it is true that this field of study did not become well known until the chaos craze of the 1970s, Ryle's spurning of routine mathematics and science does him a disservice. Moreover, as would be expected of a non-scientist of that era, his book shows no awareness of the quantum measurement problem.Russell sharply criticized Ryle for his scientific ignorance.
Professor Ryle's attitude to science is curious. He no doubt knows that scientists say things which they believe to be relevant to the problems he is discussing, but he is quite persuaded that the philosopher need pay no attention to science. He seems to believe that a philosopher need not know anything scientific beyond what was known in the time of our ancestors when they dyed themselves with woad. It is this attitude that enables him to think that the philosopher should pay attention to the way in which uneducated people speak and should treat with contempt the sophisticated language of the learned.[zzz17]
Agreed that one can have a discussion about perception without being a neurologist. Yet, one would expect that the philosopher would have found worthwhile the pursuit of some of the developments in cognitive sciences. The lack of scientific comprehension means that Ryle could not even understand many of his philosophy contemporaries, such as Russell, Whitehead, Popper, Ayer etc. In turn, that means he could not examine or justify his background metaphysics, that gray area of assumptions about the nature of "the real world."
Ryle exemplifies what Bryan Magee calls the "Oxford Philosophy" which dominated the school during the mid-Twentieth Century. Magee expends a substantial sum of energy denouncing as being a minor blind alley this mode of philosophizing, which put much emphasis on "ordinary language." The plain language philosophers were in general uninformed about science, Magee notes. [zw7]
Herewith a statement that casts some light on the professor's scientific knowledge:
"The old error of treating the term Force as denoting an occult force-exerting agency has been given up in the physical sciences, but its relatives survive in many theories of mind and are perhaps only moribund in biology."
Presumably, the sage is referring to the Minkowski-Einstein spacetime continuum, whereby gravity is considered a field disturbance with waves traveling at a finite speed, rather than being thought of as Newton's action at a distance, which was believed to occur instantaneously. Yet Ryle was unaware that in his day "spooky action at a distance" was bedeviling quantum mechanics, as it still does. To suggest that "action at a distance" has been cast out without mentioning the quantum entanglement controversy – instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" – implies that his knowledge was limited.
Granted, there is a bare possibility that he was referring to the use of energy equations that replace the notion of force with another occult notion, energy, but the result is the same: lack of awareness of the occult – sometimes called "weird" – properties of quantum theory.
Ryle's implication here of course is that biologists should keep pace with physics and reject any need for an "occult" non-physical cause, such as an animating spirit. That point of view is today, and was before the sage's birth, widely believed among scientists and intellectuals. This belief, however, is simply a belief, an article of faith, if you will. These days some believe artificial intelligence will soon give strong support to Ryle's vision [DSp.893 ] – but an assertion that sentience needs nothing non-physical is not a proof. (Obviously, the notion that sentience does require something non-physical has been widely believed but no consensus exists on that claim either.)
In any case, one might contend that by rejecting mechanism, Ryle has embraced physicalism. Ryle does not use this word [1a] that refers to a successor concept for 19th Century materialism and, from what I can gather, has been commonly used to mean 20th Century materialism, whereby matter and energy are equivalent and we take into account developments in electromagnetic theory. Physicalism, in this sense, doesn't replace the machine paradigm for mental activity; what we have is simply an admission that clocks can have electronic circuits. Whether we say mechanism, materialism or physicalism, we mean that mental activities are all ordained by physical causes. All three approaches converge on the requirement of a black box somewhere between physical causes and mind or mental action.
The idea of mechanism strongly correlates with the older form of materialism, whereby bits of dead matter were flung about after collisions. In the new materialism, subatomic energy is held to be equivalent to a bit of matter; that is to say, energy held some sort of existence of its own; it became an entity, like matter. Replacing the force/matter paradigm was the energy paradigm. So the tendency would have been to ditch a mechanistic theory of mind, in the Cartesian sense, and usher in a physicalist theory based on energetics. Ryle, however, has not done this, having been evidently ignorant on the finer points of physics.
This distinction is made the more obscure by the term "quantum mechanics," which came into vogue in the 1920s and which has little similarity to the macro-mechanics of Newton.
Strictly speaking, physicalism is a notion introduced by Carnap [1aa] and like-minded members of the Vienna Circle. It was a name for an updated philosophical language of science. For Carnap, physicalism proposed a function between the sentences of psychology and the sentences of physics. [zzz7] That is to say, psychology is simply a disguised form of physics. Later in his career Carnap appeared to have toned down that conceptualization, according to A.J. Ayer, a fellow logical positivist. [zzz8]
By 1940, Russell challenges Carnap's thesis, arguing that the word or corresponds to psychological states but is not used in the basic propositions of physics. Yet, "it is an observable fact that people sometimes believe disjunctions." The same holds for the "second-order" logic words not, some and all, which do not appear in the "object language." Hence, "we cannot accept one possible interpretation of the thesis which Carnap calls physicalism, which maintains that all science can be expressed in the language of physics." Moreover, "we must bear in mind that, prima facie logical words, though not necessary in describing physical facts, are indispensable for the description of certain mental facts.[zzz15]
The attack on 19th century materialism was launched early in the 20th century by A.N. Whitehead, who was dissatisfied with the philosophic and mathematical basis of Laplacian materialism. [zzz5] (Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a trailblazing work of mathematical logic.)
Calculus may be useful for calculation, according to Whitehead, but its assumptions are not a good ground for philosophy. One should not think of an occurrence as implying a mechanistic chain of frozen points (as in the contiguous points on a line). That picture may serve well enough for scientific needs, but it does not accurately capture the reality – which is, that the cosmos is composed of events that are part of some organic whole. That whole includes human experience, such as poetical feeling, as in the suffuse experience of a sunset or of a wondrous bit of literature. Bare scientific analysis is insufficient to capture these organic parcels of reality. [1xaaa],[zzz5]
In any case, we might infer that Ryle was what has come to be known as a functionalist, but that suggestion is another red herring; it also tends to befuddle rather than clarify.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes functionalism as "the theory that mental states are more like mouse traps than they are like diamonds. That is, what makes something a mental state is more a matter of what it does, not what it is made of. This distinguishes functionalism from traditional mind-body dualism, such as that of René Descartes, according to which minds are made of a special kind of substance, the res cogitans (the thinking substance)."
To this writer, functionalism relates closely to "emergent behavior" metaphors, such as the gas law or the differential equation giving minimum population prior to species extinction. Functionalism, as generally understood, requires physicalism. Both, some would argue, are based on a doctrine disparagingly known as "scientism" [zq0].
Be that as it may, surely when Ryle asserts that men are not machines, he does not mean to say that a Designer is implied. When he condemns "the bogy of mechanism," he is not trying to toss out determinism; yet precisely what sort of determinism he is implying is open to question. Regardless of the fact that many these days prefer to describe the world statistically – correlation, not causation – we have to deal with determinism, or its lack. Here are the options.
1. Determinism (Laplacian)a. periodic and fairly predictable2. Randomness (intrinsic randomness in which outcomes are partly acausal)
b. nonlinear, possibly chaotic, and pseudorandom
3. Oracle-ism (Turing)By oracle-ism, we mean "ghostly" origins of thought, word and deed – origins that lack what is regarded as physical cause, such as an "oracle machine" that could, notionally, decide the halting problem.
Despite Ryle's attempts throughout his book at better definitions, he has missed important definitions concerning the three options above. So he has not succeeded in resolving the mind-body problem by barring the concept of machine, as he implicitly defines the word.
I suppose he might have argued that the posited duality is false because mind and body are facets of a whole, although direct holism is not specified, nor any sort of Gestalt effect, nor an emergent quality; he does, however, expend much effort on what he regards as potentially misleading characterizations of mind that lend credence to the notion of ghost (spirit or soul). In fact, I would say that Ryle's discussion is sorely troubled by a lack of depth on the issues of causation and perception. Thus, he does not see that he is being "occult" – to use his term – where he waves his hands to get past the little gap in his theory.
It is noteworthy that Ryle was hardly the first to attempt to cast out the bogey of mind/self. Hume denied the existence of the self, espousing I suppose a sort of functionalism.
There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity...
Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them...
I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. [zw5]
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