The Concept of Mind
by Gilbert Ryle(Oxford 1949)
A matter of vital importance
Ryle may have been misled by a philosophical movement known as organicism, which tried to overcome "unscientific" vitalism and bothersome scientific physico-chemical reductionism by appealing to holistic behaviors.Vitalism, says Whitehead, was meant as a compromise between the materialst doctrine that the body is sole initiator of the mind's content and the denial of that claim. "For if the volition affects the state of the body, then the molecules in the body do not blindly run. If the volition does not affect the state of the body, the mind is left in its uncomfortable position." [5] To evade that paradox, the vitalists permit random motion within inert matter but limit such randomness in living matter. Whitehead rejects that solution, and substitutes his own rather arcane process ideas.
The philosopher C.D. Broad points out that the term mechanism is saddled with a confusion of meanings, but then proposes the idea of emergent vitalism in order to attack the machine paradigm while, up to a point, preserving physical determinism. Broad notes that mechanism tended to loose usage. [1x]
The former engineering student believed that his emergent vitalism trumps biological mechanism but realized that this vitalism, whereby elemental living matter emerges from non-living matter, seems to imply the existence of a deity – though he thought of himself as neither religious nor anti-religious.
In retirement the philosopher wrote that his interest in psychic phenomena stemmed from the fact that "I feel in my bones that the orthodox scientific account of man as an undesigned calculating-machine, and of non-human nature as a wider mechanism which turns out such machines among its other products is fantastic nonsense, which no one in his senses could believe unless he kept it in a water-tight compartment away from all his other experiences and activities and beliefs. [1xyaa]
Ludwig Bertalanffy [2x] , a founder of general systems theory, favored the holistic approach to systems, whereby their overall behaviors result from the constraints on physico-chemical interactions. In fact, he found a differential equation that can be applied to systems.
During the 1940s, Bertalanffy's insight was sometimes viewed as bolstering organicism. The biophysicist Joseph Needham [2xx] wrote that Bertalanffy was a "technically well-informed" luminary in a "great movement of modern thought which sought to base a philosophical world view on ideas originating from biology rather than from the classical physics." Needham continued:
It fused once again what Descartes had put asunder. It was Descartes, as [Joseph] Woodger acutely said, who introduced the practice of calling organisms machines, with the unfortunate consequence that transcendent mechanics had to be invented to drive them. Organicism, if not obscurantist, was bound to be the death of "vitalism" as well as of "mechanism." It was likely to be the death of animism [spirit pervades all] too...
Holism advocate Whitehead of course did not have in mind the brand of organicism that came to be known as systems theory, but it is noteworthy that Ryle used a somewhat vague concept of organism to justify dispensing with the notion of man as mechanism.[fdx1] The parallel with Whitehead is evident (though it must be conceded that at several points Whitehead refers to his system as organic mechanism, as opposed to materialistic mechanism).
Whitehead, in his onslaught against "scientific materialism," laments that Newtonian physics, while highly laudable, had "ruined philosophy" by dividing it into three camps. "There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind." [zzz4]
Whitehead's philosophy of organism, also known as process philosophy or panpsychism, replaces mind-matter dualism with a single cosmic process such that mind and body are interrelated. So mind and "external reality" run together, each influencing the other as integral parts of a universal whole, in some ways similar, he says, to the monads of Leibniz and the monistic substance of Spinoza. [zzz5 and zzz6] Whitehead's ideas do correspond with substantial aspects of systems theory, though he believed that living organisms hold the truth about reality.
In his philosophy of science, Whitehead says, organism takes the place of matter as the unifying concept.
For this purpose, the mind involved in the materialist theory dissolves into a function of organism. The psychological field then exhibits what an event is in itself. Our bodily event is an unusually complex type of organism and consequently includes cognition. Further, space and time, in their most concrete signification, become the locus of events. An organism is the realisation of a definite shape of value. The emergence of some actual value depends on limitation which excludes neutralising cross-lights. Thus an event is a matter of fact which by reason of its limitation is a value for itself; but by reason of its very nature it also requires the whole universe in order to be itself.
Importance depends on endurance. Endurance is the retention through time of an achievement of value. What endures is identity of pattern, self-inherited. Endurance requires the favourable environment. The whole of science revolves around this question of enduring organisms. [zzz5 and zzz6]
The doctrine of minds, as independent substances, leads directly not merely to private worlds of experience, but also to private worlds of morals [dh97]. The moral intuitions can be held to apply only to the strictly private world of psychological experience. Accordingly, self-respect, and the making the most of your own individual opportunities, together constituted the efficient morality of the leaders among the industrialists of [recent times]. The western world is now suffering from the limited moral outlook of the three previous generations. [zzz5]
On Whitehead's process philosophy
https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/The_Philosophy_of_Organism
See the footnote [wu1] for another remark by Whitehead.
Certainly Ryle had nothing so "occult" as Whitehead's ideas under consideration, though he could well have been under the influence of the systems theory ideas inherent in Whitehead's scenario.
As Whitehead's onetime partner Russell notes tartly: "Mechanism is another of the matters that [Ryle] treats with cavalier dogmatism. When he speaks of it, he seems to be thinking of the old-fashioned billiard-ball mechanism and to think that since physicists have abandoned this, they have abandoned mechanism. He never gives any reason for rejecting mechanism in the modern sense of the word."[zzz17].
A bit before Ryle published Concept, Russell criticized the holistic notion that the organism is the fundamental unit of life, arguing that of course parts usually have no independent existence, but that that did not necessarily imply that at bottom inorganic physical and chemical processes do not account for all the effects – including mental – of the entire system.[zzz21]
It is not obvious whether Ryle was aware that the German idealist Schelling saw "reality as not so much like a machine as like a single great big living organism, and is therefore better understood as a quasi-organic developmental process rather than as something mechanical..." [zw1]
In fact Schelling's idealist predecessor Hegel [ar68] is the one who placed the emphasis on organicism rather than mechanism, as he considered life science to be of a higher form than physics. So for Hegel, mechanical processes were inferior to biological processes. He did not agree with Descartes that all biological processes, except for the human, are mechanical. But, says Robert Solomon [zw4], Hegel's point was that biological processes are essentially teleological (purpose-driven, or characterized by function). The idea is that analysis of the many parts of a living organism fails to capture the Gestalt of the object. (Of course, one could say the same of any machine or even of some natural system, such as a star.)
In any case, we can see how Ryle could have slipped up. Some thought that machines were reducible to standard physical components but that organisms were not, and further that much of nature is more like an organism than a machine, a view that harks back to Aristotle. The errors here stem from the meanings of the words "machine," "organism," "system," "mechanism."
A machine is characterized by the work, a physical measure, that it does. The machine is reducible to its components. In fact, in principle a machine may br broken down into nested subsystems until we reach the level of molecules. If we don't count indeterminacy at the quantum level, all changes within subsystems are determined by physical properties (as quantified in "laws").
A system – whether organic or not – that is "open" and taking in energy is subject to the same entropy limits as a machine that is burning fuel. The same laws of physics hold. If we are viewing the system's output energy, this is equivalent to work, which is not physically different from the work of a machine. A system regulated by negative feedback is either a machine built by someone or a machine built by no one. Still, the mind of an observer is required in order to notice that the presumably accidental machine is converting "diffuse" energy to vectored energy (work). For example, the sun's gravity is doing work on the planets to (so far) keep them in elliptical orbits.
We have linear versus non-linear systems, meaning systems governed by non-feedback or feedback differential or difference equations. A thermostat has negative feedback, and maintains homeostasis. A microphone too close to an amplifier speaker sets up a positive feedback loop with an attractor at infinity (except that physical constraints bar infinite energy). All organisms use negative feedback (they are constrained to survive), but that of itself does not disqualify them from being machines. Moreover, like machines, organisms are composed of nested subsystems that reduce to the molecular level; an organism puts out work in the same sense as does a machine.
By all this, a mechanism is a "machine" or "system" or "organism" for converting energy into work. That mechanism's most interesting properties may be found via differential equations that, for the sake of clarity, smear out the information from the myriads of molecular collisions typical of many systems.
In other words, Descartes did not necessarily err in calling organisms machines [2xy] and further, one cannot be rid of the mechanism and machine concepts by simply appealing to holism, whatever one may think of Whitehead's artful attempt. The issue remains that if apparent free will is a macro-effect of the brain system, we still face the point that the will is not free, but ruled from below. The systems approach, then, can only account – if it does – for the illusion of freedom. Regardless of many attempts, no one has overcome Kant's assessment that if all reality is in fact mechanical, we could not without contradiction claim that the will of the human soul is free and yet "subject to natural necessity – that is, not free" [eCp421].
It should be noted that Whitehead's system was meant to replace the concept of matter – in the form of inert particles aimlessly knocking each other about the cosmos – with the concept of organism, whereby events cannot be reduced to exact points in space and time. I cannot say I quite grasp how the idea of strict determinism is affected by Whitehead's system, in which an electron has a different character in a living organism than outside it. [zzz5] In any case, Ryle's notion of organism was, in comparison with the subtlety of Whitehead, poorly defined.
James Lovelock's Gaia is sometimes called Earth systems science. One may look at the whole to see that the parts interact with one another in such a way as to make iffy any endeavor to separate cause from effect. So if we reduce Gaia to components, we are getting an incomplete, and even misleading, picture. Nevertheless, all these parts are believed to interact with each other according to physical determinism. Lovelock's idea that Gaia qualifies as a living organism is controversial. Similarly, the idea that non-living matter becomes living as a result of physico-chemical processes is, even today, controversial. The fact that these physical processes might coalesce into systems construed to be alive is dogma today, but that dogma still has serious critics, such as Thomas Nagel [2xz] .
At this juncture, we offer a point that can possibly be counted in Ryle's favor. For me, the problematical nature of Descartes' system may be discerned by his claim that all non-human sentient animals are automatons, clockworks propelled about by purely mechanical actions. This stems from the Cartesian idea that the soul of man, or Reason, is a divine quality unique to humans. Yet, at least some "higher" mammals appear to have problem-solving capacity. In that case, why could not man's problem-solving capacity also be purely mechanistic? – suggesting that the dualistic approach may be not only unsatisfactory to mechanists but to some of their opponents as well.
Hans Reichenbach reminds us of a war of the worlds that has been going on for well over two millennia.
It is well known how the different philosophical systems divide into [the] two groups of "other-world philosophies" and "this-world philosophies," into transcendence and immanence systems. Plato in his allegory of the men in the cave who see the shadows of passers-by on the wall and take them for real beings, has created a poetic image for philosophies of the first group, at the same time giving his doctrine of ideas a far-framed intellectual formulation of transcendentalism; besides his system, religious and rationalistic philosophies of all kinds have expressed in various forms the idea of a supernatural world "behind" the world we live in. The second group is characterized by such names as materialism, empiricism, sensationalism. It is as old and young as the first, and the history of philosophy from the time of the Greeks up to our days represents a constant struggle between these two fundamental conceptions.[JD1]
J.N. Findlay writes that Hegel saw the metaphysics of the Deism of the Enlightenment as equivalent to the metaphysics of religious faith. In the form of Deism, the Enlightenment "gives its phenomenal order the backing of an étre Supreme, concerning whom nothing determinate can be said: this Absolute merely differs in name from the religious Absolute which is likewise "unsearchable in all its ways and unreachable in its being. Alternatively, in the form of Materialism, it sees the backing of all sensuous differences in an invisible, inaudible, tasteless substance called Matter: this Matter is identical with the être Supreme just mentioned, its only difference consisting in the standpoint from which we approach it." [zn1]
Today, those in the physicalist camp doubtless see the Higgs field as the invisible substance of the cosmos, arguing there is more evidence for it than for some omnipotent God, Yet, we could say that that field, along with some cosmic topology, accounts for everything, thus making it equivalent to Robespierre's Deist conception.
'I compute, therefore I think,' I think
Robots might "think" about each other, or about you, for that matter. If they use some theory of mind to assess the probability of what another robot, or you, might do, that might qualify as thinking. When two robots signal each other, one can fairly say – as engineers in fact do say – that they talk to each other. If, however, we grant this, does it not follow that when the robot's CPU is fielding various internal signals and prioritizing them that it talks to itself? Yet such chatter would be difficult to admit as entailing consciousness.John Searle's Chinese room argument makes this point.
A robot may indeed use thought-like routines, as in:
"Priority: get recharged, scan for outlets; target sighted but recharge comes first."
[Here I have used English "code" to represent the bot's internal signals.]
Would you regard the robot as conscious, as opposed to mimicking consciousness? The trickiness of my question possibly justifies some of Ryle's skepticism for the words mind and consciousness, skepticism expressed by Alan Turing, who likewise doubted the existence of a soul, in the religious sense. Does the central processor have periods in which a strong feedback loop (or loops) is being used, say, for an analysis of a difficult problem? Modern AI engineering gives the answer as yes. Yet, could it "spontaneously" look at its exterior casing in a mirror and say, cheerfully, "Hi, Rob"? to itself. [2] [iNd.281] So then, perhaps spirits are unnecessary, and we would be entitled to say they should go the way of the ether. Even so, without more data than given by Ryle or current thinkers, such an assertion is essentially a statement of faith.
In "A Coffehouse Conversation" in The Mind's I [2a] Douglas Hofstadter has a character say this:
The way I see it, consciousness has got to come from a precise pattern or organization – one that we haven't yet figured out how to describe in any detailed way. But I believe we will gradually come to understand it. In my view consciousness requires a certain way of mirroring the external universe internally, and the ability to respond to that external reality on the basis of the internally represented model. And then in addition, what's really crucial for a conscious machine is that it should incorporate a well-developed and flexible self-model. And it's there that all existent programs, including the best chess-playing ones, fall down.
Yet, let us note that what we have here is not science, but a creed.
- Consciousness is a consequence of some unknown, but physical (as understood by physicists) process.
- All will be revealed some day.
A big question is why consciousness? Why should a smart car not drive you safely about without being conscious? And, really, a souped-up smart-bot could have multiple competing goals that support some primary goal, so as to appear to a human as terribly cunning, if not intelligent. Why would it need consciousness? Why assume it will emerge from the bot's internal architecture? No need for it.
At this point, it seems appropriate to mention Noam Chomsky's theories of a universal grammar hardwired into the brain. Chomsky's original idea was to draw a close parallel between his theory and computer processing. If valid, such a parallel would tend to support the materialist/physicalist view that consciousness is a product of physical processes. In fact, cognitive and computer scientists welcomed his foray into their region. But, even today, there are philosophers like Thomas Nagel, an atheist who has grave reservations about materialism, seeing it as resting on a shaky foundation. [MAs.118]
I hasten to concede that a serious fallacy or two does not mean Ryle's book has no value (Plato's Socratic dialogs are riddled with examples of fallacious logic). Yet even so, one must have nagging doubts about a book – in which definitions of terms are held to be of crucial importance – that contains definitions that show little comprehension of the scientific matters that are at the very heart of the subject at hand.
Ryle's approach is known as "the philosophy of ordinary language," a subject I have not delved into in this critique. Yet I would say that, though an attempt to craft careful definitions of terms is laudable, that attempt is vitiated when key definitions – as for machine and mechanism – are fuzzy.
Though ordinary language philosophy had been energized by Russell's contributions to logic, says John Shosky [zzz16], Russell was distinctly averse to it.
After a very careful study of The Concept of Mind, Russell in 1958 reviewed it [zzz17] and found it wanting, notes Shosky.
Saying he was "somewhat surprised" by Ryle's emphasis on Cartesian dualism, Russell points out that this notion was rejected by Malebranche, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hegel and William James. "I cannot think of any philosophers of repute who accept it in the present day, except Marxists and Catholic theologians, who are compelled to be old-fashioned by the rigidities of their respective creeds."
Ryle's denial that there are mental happenings makes Russell bristle. Ryle, he says, "never explains, or seems to think it necessary to explain, what is the difference between brittle and intelligent that makes the latter mental and the former not," adding: "A plain man would say that brittle denotes a disposition of bodies and intelligent denotes a disposition of minds – in fact, that the two adjectives apply to different kinds of 'stuff.' But it is not open to Professor Ryle to say this, and I do not quite know what he would say. Professor Ryle backs up his rejection of all mental 'stuff' by denying that, in principle, there is anything that a man can know about himself which another cannot know unless he is told."
Russell skewers Ryle on that claim, calling it an "astonishingly slap-dash" assertion that is refuted by the case of dreaming. "Except in the Book of Exodus, it is generally accepted that one man cannot know what another dreams unless he is told. But Professor Ryle has nothing to say about dreams."
Similarly, Russell tasks Ryle on imagined objects. "If I shut my eyes and imagine a horse, there is no horse in the room. But it is one thing to imagine a horse and another to imagine a hippopotamus. Something happens when I imagine the one, and something else happens when I imagine the other. What can it be that is happening in these two cases? Professor Ryle states explicitly (page 161) that there are no such things as mental happenings. Where perception is concerned, he contents himself with naive realism: I perceive a horse, and the horse is out there. It is not a 'mental' horse. But when I imagine a horse, it is not out there, and yet the occurrence is not the same as imagining a hippopotamus. I should have thought it as obvious as anything can be that something is happening in me and cannot be known to anybody else unless I do something overt to let it be known what it is that I am imagining." [See Ryle's answer in Modern British Philosophy. [ zw7 ] ]
Some months later, Ryle, as editor of Mind, refused to have Ernest Gellner's book Words and Things[zzz18] reviewed in the journal on grounds that Gellner's criticisms were "abusive." Russell, who had written the preface to that book, defended Gellner in a letter to The Times of London, sparking a furious spate of letters on the role of philosophy and editorial judgment.[zzz16]
In general, Russell strongly disagrees with Ryle's school of ordinary language philosophers, who claim that "common speech is good enough, not only for daily life, but also for philosophy."
On the contrary, Russell argues that "common speech is full of vagueness and inaccuracy, and that any attempt to be precise and accurate requires modification of common speech both as regards vocabulary and as regards syntax. Everybody admits that physics and chemistry and medicine each require a language which is not that of everyday life. I fail to see why philosophy, alone, should be forbidden to make a similar approach towards precision and accuracy."[zzz14]
Ryle countered [zw7] that technical terms tend to degrade over a few years, after which their influence in philosophy is bad. When couched in technical terms, a philosopher's arguments tend to go astray, Ryle maintained. The use of technical terms serves as a smokescreen [think Hegel], making for difficulty in catching a philosopher's errors, Ryle said.
Moreover, Russell was antagonistic to Wittgenstein, whose later work inspired Ryle and the ordinary language advocates. Russell had come to regard Wittgenstein's early influence on him as not altogether beneficial, and to view Wittgenstein's later work as "completely unintelligible." If Wittgenstein's viewpoint in Philosophical Investigations is true, then "philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and, at worst, an idle tea-table amusement." [zzz19]
The agnostic philosopher Karl Popper, who like Russell scorned the linguistic philosophers, opposed the machine paradigm.
As Joseph Popper-Lynkeus once put it, every time a man dies, a whole universe is destroyed. (One realizes this when one identifies oneself with the man.) Human beings are irreplaceable; and in being irreplaceable they are clearly very different from machines. They are capable of enjoying life, and they are capable of suffering, and of facing death consciously. They are selves; they are ends in themselves, as Kant said.
This view seems to me incompatible with the materialist doctrine that men are machines.[zw6]
It is curious that modern quantum physics lends credence to the Hegelian view of partial determinism. George di Giovanni observes:
According to Hegel’s mature position, the notion that it is possible to determine anything in nature absolutely makes no sense, for the simple reason that things of nature do not perfectly control their own becoming and are therefore susceptible to a potentially infinite number of external influences. Perfect determination is possible only in the ideal realm of the concept. So far as nature is concerned, determination will always be relative and reformable, according to limits which are to be determined by the physical sciences. This, I take it, is what Hegel means by the Ohnmacht der Natur, “the impotence of nature,” in §250 of [Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline]...[zw10]
Being and non-being are the same; therefore it is the same whether this house is or is not, whether these hundred dollars are part of my fortune or not. This inference from, or application of, the proposition completely alters its meaning. The proposition contains the pure abstractions of being and nothing; but the application converts them into a determinate being and a determinate nothing. But as we have said, the question here is not of determinate being...
According to W.T. Stace, Hegel spoke of two modes of mentation appropriate to philosophy: Understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft).
Understanding describes here the activity of standard logic, which includes the rule of the excluded middle. Reason on the other hand merges opposites into a whole, as in thesis implying antithesis and both implying a "higher" synthesis. Reason can see that pure Being and Nothing are identical and that they imply Becoming.[zxd0] [BT36])
Mindless freedom?
Ryle writes extensively about volition, trying to show that there is no such thing as a volitional act – which could imply infinite regress if the so-called volition is itself an act. Plainly, a number of modern writers tend to agree that free will is a delusion [3] , but I suggest that Ryle has been no more successful than many in examining the issue of freedom to act versus being an automaton. By discounting the machine metaphor, presumably the sage means to suggest that a human's "decisions" are not utterly determinate. I gather that he means higher order rules can grant a human something like free will. In order, however, to reach that point, we need something more than provided by the don (although perhaps he does hint at it with his Gibbon analogy). That is to say, higher order rules may emerge, Gestalt-like, from a system. For example, the "macro" behavior of gases and liquids emerges from the statistically characterized behavior of multitudes of atoms.When Ryle denies that a human is a machine, nevertheless the professor is, I believe, accepting the idea that the universe is a dynamical system akin to a machine which, even so, produces organically deterministic humans. He is oblivious that his confusion about determinism implies a "semi-determinism" (for want of a better word), or that is to say, an abridgment of the physical cause-and-effect notion entailed by a Newtonian/Darwinian worldview. Even if higher level rules yield a pseudo "free will," the point remains that, underneath everything, the human is then no more than a very sophisticated robot. Non-Aristotelean cause-and-effect really is a shorthand for empirically based physical "laws." Of course, saying that the universe necessarily obeys such laws is not so easy; perhaps they express a fairly accurate means of predicting human perceptions, but who knows how everything really works?
Not only was Ryle willfully ignorant about physics, he demonstrated little awareness of the field of psychology in spite of the fact that one could argue that his book shows him to be an idiosyncratic psychological theorist. He does in fact refer to behaviorism in a not-unfriendly note while scorning introspectivist psychologists for connecting the dots in any way they like. This explains why he paid almost no heed to unconscious processes that precede supposed volitions.
Further, he claimed, we have a "logical solecism" when we speak of someone's knowing this, or choosing that. "The person himself knows this and chooses that, though the fact that he does so can, if desired, be classified as a mental fact about that person."
This sort of utterance leads one to see Ryle as holding a behaviorist point of view. The holism of mental process and action knock away the need for a cloud-like conscious mind hanging about the head.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett takes what I assess as an emergence view of free will. In his 2013 book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, for example, he argues that there is practical free will. One would assume then there must be some impractical free will, which he doesn't identify. Or is he saying that we must act as if free will exists, even though it doesn't really? But, in that case, if we are compelled by natural forces to "act as if," how have we escaped the problem?
A person, argues Dennett, should be treated as though she has free will and is somewhat responsible for her actions; otherwise that person is likely to believe she can't much help what she does and begin behaving badly [Bn47]. To duck the determinism paradox, Dennett seems to be resorting to Pragmatism, whereby truths are relative. For him, we must pragmatically accept the idea of free will as necessary for good social order, even though a contrary "truth" exists at another level.
This oft-repeated charge that materialist or physicalist determinism implies that we are human automatons who are not responsible for what we do stems from the "rookie mistake" of "confusing the manifest image" with what we might call the "folk ideology of the manifest image." I suppose I would have to reread much of his work to get a handle on what that means. But, in any event, I think Dennett's real charge is that scientists who deny free will are being excessively reductionist.
And here we arrive at the concept of belief. But the full determinist would say that belief arises from physical processes. A response would be that de facto free will stems from higher level rules that emerge from lower-level physical interactions – again using the analogy of gas laws and properties being determined, to a great extent, by collisions of myriads of atoms.
Still, don't we have another creed here?
Physical processes somehow give rise to conscious decisions. One day, all will be revealed.
Dennett, who has written extensively on consciousness, evolution and religion, believes I daresay that he has expunged God from reality as an unscientific hypothesis. Yet he faces the dilemma that both with God and without God, there is a black box that connects physics to free will. The idea that scientists will one day pry open the black box and any nested black boxes within is simply Dennett's article of faith, and nothing more.
If, as Ryle and his forerunners argue, consciousness does not exist as an entity but only as a function, then we can expect that Ryle would have seen the notion of a human faculty for higher Reason as of no account, another ghostly apparition. We may well doubt that he would have accepted such a faculty of immediate insight into moral and mathematical truths, which is not the same as the ability to reckon, as in the solving of a puzzle via a series of observations and logical inferences.
Numerous modern philosophers, including Dennett and Russell, have likewise ignored this old distinction, no doubt on ground that such a faculty tends to imply a non-materialist or non-physicalist – i.e. mystical – concept.
John S. Uebersax makes a a case for not using a single word, reason, to cover both meanings. He suggests Reason and rationality, while noting that the Greek nous and dianoia have tended to acquire meanings that correspond to his proposals.
Higher Reason and Lower Reason
http://john-uebersax.com/plato/pdf/Higher_Reason_and_Lower_Reason.pdf
Similarly, John Dewey sees the relatively new term "intelligence" as a source of confusion. If that word were used as a "synonym for what one important school of past ages called 'reason' or 'pure intellect'," no confusion would arise. "But the word names something very different from what is regarded as the highest organ or 'faculty' for laying hold of ultimate truths. It is a shorthand designation for great and ever-growing methods of observation, experiment and reflective reasoning which have in a very short time revolutionized the physical and, to a considerable extent, the physiological conditions of life, but which have not as yet been worked out for application to what is itself distinctively and basically human. [zzw3]
Robert C. Solomon notes,
Kant had distinguished between "understanding" and "reason" as the two "faculties" of the human mind which deal with concepts: the first is concerned wholly with the application of concepts to experience, the second is involved in an odd collection of tasks, including the formulation of "practical" principles, and the more suspicious tasks of metaphysics and theology. What reason can not do is provide us with knowledge about the phenomenal world, according to Kant, because it has no experiential basis. The distinction [became] the key to German Idealism, and Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all came to champion reason and disparage understanding, since reason contra Kant, is supposed to be the faculty which gives knowledge of the world "in-itself," as understanding does not." [zw4]
The confrontation of "reason" and "understanding" ... is not just a battle of words; it is a basic battle of viewpoints about the nature of reality. Reason is the faculty of synthesis; it sees interconnections, comprehends the place of a thing or of an event in the larger picture, understands purposes; understanding is rather the faculty of analysis, breaking things down to see the interrelation of the parts. Reason is championed by those thinkers who insist on seeing the world as activity... [zw4]
As Anthony Quinton notes:
There is an old distinction, inherited ultimately from Kant, between reason and understanding. Understanding is the method of thought used by scientists, by historians, and even more by ordinary men in their practical dealings with the world around them. But reason is thought of as a higher kind of thinking, and what for the Absolute Idealist [such as Kant and Hegel] is characteristic or definitive of the philosopher is that he employs reason. Now this is a very antquated notion in some ways ... The idea is that the philosopher with his special method of reason can find out the truth about reality, while ordinary men deal only in appearance.[zw8]
Cosmic con game?
So all this is to say that a deterministic system, the universe, fathering a partly non-deterministic system, the human, is rather an odd notion. Of course, the quantum wave equation is mathematically precise, predicting exactly where the wave will be. But, as soon as the wave is detected, the wave's function vanishes and we have a particle that lands – within constraints – utterly randomly. Quantum weirdness is even today mind-blowing stuff. Nevertheless, clearly Ryle could have argued that in principle the possibility exists for a deterministic system to produce a non-deterministic subsystem (we are of course ignoring the vexing issue of observer-quantum interaction).Then, we cannot say that Ryle's inadvertent implication that man is part ghost is altogether ludicrous. In this vein, I find curious that some favor a determinate model for the source of all thought when we have an example of a system that cannot be altogether determinate in the Turing sense: the universe – which cannot be modeled as a Turing machine or Boolean circuit. What determines what specific machine, or computation, it is?
Please see my paper
The cosmos cannot be modeled as a Turing machine
To elucidate, let us consider the point that the general Church-Turing thesis says that whatever is in principle computable can be in principle computed by a Turing machine. Now, a physical machine has an input (raw material and fuel) and an output (refined material or vectored energy). The machine's design and settings (instructions) correspond to a Turing algorithm and the output corresponds to a Turing computation. So then, if the universe cannot be modeled as a Turing machine, it cannot in fact be modeled as a machine at all – even though many physicists seem to assume that it can be. In other words, if one then denies that the cosmos is, en toto, a deterministic system, then we have in principle a natural object that is – granting the Church-Turing thesis – no machine. Hence, one may then argue that some natural objects in the universe, whether they be large cosmic entities or men, might not after all be machines.
(By this, physicalists would need to come up with a theory that uses some topological solution, along with proposed field and string theories. That is to say, a topological solution would need at the very least to account for the chicken-or-the-egg causality problem. One can dismiss that problem, but then one is left with neither a machine nor a hyper-machine.)
In fact, if, as James [mh23] and (at times) Russell[jg13] assert, the cosmos is pluralistic, we see the impossibility of conceiving it in machine-like terms. A machine on its own is surely a monistic contraption, in which all components form a unified, functional whole. So pluralism leaves bits of "irrational" acausality. Again, if the cosmos is no machine, why must all its components be machines? There is no clear reason for that assumption.
If we are required to accept that Nature be construed as one vast machine, then the cosmos is super-natural. The contrapositive also holds. If the cosmos is not super-natural, Nature is no machine. In that case, Nature is not monist, but pluralist, meaning the laws of physics are not identical everywhere. So much for the Copernican principle.
We also find that a non-deist monist conception of Nature is correlated with a machine conception of Nature, whereby the laws of physics provide the single organizing logos and, probably, some quantum/relativistic field provides the universal substance. Can a non-deist monist view of Nature be found that conforms with a non-machine view of Nature? This notion seems highly implausible, leaving us the view that the cosmos is – accepting the uniformity of the laws of physics – super-natural. For those who wish to dissociate from the notion of deism – regarding deism as an importation of animism into the natural order – we can say that the universe is hyper-natural rather than supernatural.
A related point: Admittedly, Claude Shannon's groundbreaking work would have been unknown to the Oxford sage, but what excuse is there for the many modern writers who overlook the issue of a human being's complexity in terms of information (bits, that is)?
I suggest that the information in a single human being exceeds the information in the observable cosmos minus the human race (along with any other intelligent species that may be out there). Perhaps you counter that chaotic or nearly chaotic dynamical systems, such as large weather systems, have comparable information loads. Yet a further scrutiny of "information" will demonstrate our point. Biologists tell us that the human body is composed of numerous hierarchical subsystems. We can model these roughly as a tree graph. The top system has n major subsystems. Each of these has some other number of subsystems, and so on, down to the molecular level. So if we guess that, on average, each system has 10 subsystems, we find there are 10n systems in a human body. How many hierarchies n there are, I don't know. Let's take a ballpark guess of 50.
This gives 1050 subsystems, each of which has an information load. Let us guess the average information load per subsystem to be a very conservative 1000 bits. Then we have 10(50,000) bits for one human being, a very large number indeed.
An excellent estimate was given by an Australian, Derek Muller, who calculated that the information in the human genetic code is a lowly 1.5 gigabytes of data. When multiplied by 40 trillion cells, we get 60 zetabytes of information. This means, according to a 2014 Daily Mail report, that the entire code – before multiplying – could be stored on a standard DVD, and is the equivalent to around 6,709 books, or 300 pages with 360,000 characters. Simply multiplying the information load in the genome by the number of cells does not, however, really address the hierarchy issue. If we take 1.5 gigabytes as our initial input and scale up, hierarchically, we then get an enormous load – as in perhaps 10(109 x 50), which exceeds 10(1010) bits, a fantastic number.
Please see Daily Mail report
https://archive.vn/F1MhD
I would argue that in spite of the fact that the cosmos has numerous subsystems, none needs the information power of human or animal brains in order to stay alive. A high degree of organization (information) is required for that purpose. If we look to physical law in terms of conservation of energy, a great deal of our world is explainable. Yet "energy," from a mathematical viewpoint, is a relation. It provides a useful way of bypassing Newtonian time/motion calculations. The kinetic energy equation, K = 1/2kmv2, permits us to avoid tedious Newtonian methods. Also, Einstein's
E = mc2 nicely encapsulates a vast swath of modern physics. So, yes, energy explains much – but nothing explains energy. As Richard Feynman said, there's nothing to it, really.
Of course, one might counter that non-material is not the same as non-physical. Non-material forces might exist that are yet part of a physical world. Yet, as we can define neither non-material nor non-physical, we have no way of distinguishing immaterial, but supposedly physical, forces from the now unfashionable vital spirits.
And Zeno strikes again: motion is some sort of fiction. Yet those who agree with Zeno that change itself is an illusion must never hunger. If the brain manufactures the purported material world, would that not suggest – a la Gödel – that the brain cannot on its own know whence it came?
For Descartes the problem was reconciling the new physical paradigm of mechanics with the Christian belief in an incorporeal soul. Ryle, equating mind, soul and psychological self as synonyms, argued that "the mind" is not a specific entity, and hence not a thing that could possess immortality.
"My mind" is not an organ or operative, but an "ability or proneness to do certain things," Ryle argues. In fact, even the word mind makes it possible to make "improper conjunctions, disjunctions and cause-effect propositions."
A number of writers tend to agree that Ryle has clarified and solved the confusion raised by Descartes's dualistic thesis. My response is that Ryle's true legacy is simply his pithy "ghost" aphorism. (Interestingly, in English, the word "ghost" is synonymous with "spirit" but by Ryle's time a certain degree of contempt had attached to the former term.)
Ryle's aphorism was adopted by Arthur Koestler, whose 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine accounted for the ghostliness with a materialist theory of emergence that deployed something he called holons. You may regard Koestler's work as pseudo-science, but then we must also agree that pseudo-science underpins Ryle's curious brand of holistic behaviorism. (Ryle and others dispute that he was a behaviorist, but the dispute is over a word that perhaps is inadequately defined.)
We can see the parallel between Ryle's phrase and the venerable deus ex machina, meaning "god via the machine." In ancient Greece, a crane was used to suspend a god above the stage in order to bring the story to a dramatic conclusion.
In English literature, the phrase represents a plot device whereby something or someone shows up in the nick of time to resolve a difficulty.
John Sergeant, in Solid philosophy Asserted Against the Fancies of the Ideists, commented in 1697:
"Nor is it at all allowable in Philosophy, to bring in a Deus è Machiná at every turn, when our selves are at a loss to give a Reason for our Thesis." [zzz9]
Assuredly Ryle sees the ghost in the machine idea to be an impermissible deus ex machina.
Go to Next Part
https://ghostbust999.blogspot.com/p/part-e-trivial-pursuit.html
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