The Mind-Brain Problem Construed Scholastic

Having an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical framework, the “mind-body problem” is not really so much a problem. Once you grant that things have telos, then there is no special problem in saying that a thing displays intentionality. After all, stones fall to the ground, and the brain thinks through to thoughts, etc. The mind is just a specific instance of final cause, and it’s only a problem for those metaphysical frameworks which are based on the rejection of final cause, e.g. modernist, mechanical materialism. This is also why, when explaining final cause, such types also think that you are attributing mental properties to non-mental things, because they (implicitly) only recognize finality in the mind.

For scholastic types, on the other hand, the paradox really only seems to be this; things which are understood especially in terms of their final cause also display other ends which aren’t their definitive ends. For instance, a stone falls to the ground, and that’s all a stone is at bottom; just something that falls. But animals also fall to the ground, but this is not the final cause that makes them what they are. That they fall is just because they are animated bodies expressed in matter, but that isn’t in virtue of their animation, but something incidental. The matter is just in order that their life might be expressed, as it were, like a written word is to its meaning.

Likewise, the brain is in order for the mind to be “embodied,” or to have expression in the world, to be made present, to be made real, etc. Not really a special problem deep down, only a sort of paradox. Why do things need to be expressed materially at all? After all, if there exist immaterial forms (e.g. angels), and we even want to say that the mind is partly immaterial (in order to be said to have a real interaction with immaterial thought; more on this later), then it seems the only reason for material embodiment is in order to express it materially. But this doesn’t answer why it should be expressed materially in the first place!

Well, actually, I can think of some sort of answer. All material things are changing; matter is the principle of change, after all, so there must be something peculiar to human minds that we would want them to be changing. Change is necessary for growth, and growth seems a justification to this; so we must conclude that the mind-brain problem, construed scholastically, comes to this sort of answer: we are material in order to grow, and we grow because that is a necessary element of our attaining our end.

Really seems to put oomph into the words of Keats that “The world is a vale of soul-building.”

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Meaning and the Immateriality of Mind

It is generally understood that meaning is infinitely flexible; that is, if anything can mean anything, this implies that there are a potentially infinite amount of things which can be meant.

But it is the essence of the mind to be able to mean things. This implies that there is something about the mind which is infinitely flexible.

The materiality of the mind is not what offers this infinite flexibility, for being material introduces certain finite limitations of space and time. Further, there are some truths that cannot be perceived from a particular material body, for being a particular material body introduces certain limits of perception and passion.

Ordinarily, one might think to abandon the thesis that the human mind should be a considered a mind as such, but I think that this is simply to deny that there is anything essential to what it is to be a mind, which has the opposite effect of de-limiting what is possible for humans anyway.

Thus I propose something within possibility that still maintains there is something definite to what it is to be a mind. It just so happens that “being a mind” includes the potential to understand anything which might be possible, up to and including “what it is like” to be certain other minds and have their experiences, and so on. Since the material aspect of our being is not sufficient to provide this potentiality, this potentiality must be supplied by an immaterial aspect of the mind.

And if the mind is partly immaterial, this opens up the possibility of the immortality of the soul, completely immaterial minds (i.e. God and angels), and so on.

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Consideration of the “Homunculus”

This is a response to Luke Muelhauser (is that how you spell his name? Damn that’s a confusing last name), aka the Common Sense Atheist. He does deny that his atheism is precisely “common sense,” especially as evidenced in this post, where he denies that any I exists; in other words, there is no you, there is no me, there is, in fact, not even a Luke who said the things in that post! That is clearly contrary to common sense, because common sense tells us that I am, in fact, an “I,” a “center” of all my senses, from which those decisions that are made by me stem, that constitutes my ontological being as the human being known as Bryce Laliberte.

Now Luke can really only get away with the argument he makes for two reasons;

1. He hedges his terms.

He doesn’t give it its common name. The “it” here is, of course, the “I,” the phenomenological center of senses, the individual me, my mind (not my brain). Instead, he calls it the “homunculus,” and then doesn’t go on to explain that by “homunculus” he is referring to the I.

2. He refers to that big bad bogeyman, “Western religion.”

He refers to this “homunculus” as if it were something only religionists were concerned about, or that religionists even fail to defend.

Here is my defense of my having an I, or “homunculus” as Luke dismissively terms it.

I have a hand. Here is another hand. They are both mine.

See that? I have two hands. Who has two hands? I do. To all my senses, there is a central I to whom these hands belong.

If I must deny this most primordial sense (in fact, is anything even a sense if there isn’t this phenomenological I to receive it?), then mustn’t I deny all other things which are received to me via this sense? And, if everything I sense is sensed through this I, then mustn’t I deny everything I sense?

If I must deny my I, then I must deny whatever I sense, since my possessing of an I is an “illusion.”

Even the fact that it must be described as an “illusion” is mystifying, for illusions are only illusions when they are perpetrated against someone. The idea that there is no I is absurd, since it can only be said that this sensation of an I is an illusion to me; an illusion precisely to what? If there is no I in the first place to sense the illusion of my being an I, then how is any sense of illusion garnered in the first place?

If my argument isn’t attacking Luke’s argument, then fine, at least it is established that I exist. But then my question is, what exactly is Luke attacking?

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God and the Elves of Middle-Earth

A well versed Tolkien admirer will be quick to say “You shouldn’t say God, but Eru, because that is the God of Arda.” I’ll grant that is true, but let’s just use the word God as is commonly understood, alright?

It occurs to me that the immortality of the elves is a metaphysical power; its explanation cannot be from physics, because it is actually contrary to physics. Such immortality couldn’t emerge, because emergent properties which are in fact contradictory to what they are made of (i.e. a wall that is “blue” even though every particle that composes it is red) are simply prima facie impossible.

As such, if their immortality is through something above the mere physical world, and must’ve been imputed unto them, then the obvious conclusion* is an unchanging Creator; I will note, not a Paleyan designer-“God,” but an actual God, with the classical properties (i.e. omnipotence, omniscience). Tolkien gives us an easy answer for the world of Arda; the elves were created.

However, what occurs to me is that there are obviously present certain things in the world we experience that cannot be explained by appeal to merely physical causes; namely, consciousness. The experience of consciousness without even the knowledge of philosophy has lead nearly all people across history to posit a soul to explain this experience universally held by man, from Greek to Chinese to Native American. Such objects in the world give a clear precedence towards some sort of divine metaphysician that imputed souls into people, just as the immortality of the elves of Middle-Earth give credence to the existence of Eru.

*I’ll grant that God isn’t the “obvious conclusion,” but rather that it would seem to be a pivoting point from which further inroads could be made towards arguing for the existence of God. Just like the Kalam Cosmological Argument doesn’t by itself prove the existence of a God, there are further arguments to be made that this being is anything like the being known as “of which no greater thing can be conceived.”

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Quick and Dirty Argument for the Soul

1) The body is material

2) To be material is to be changing

3) Consciousness is experienced by an unchanging subject (the “I”)

4) Ergo, consciousness must be explained by something immaterial, namely a “soul”

Allow me to note before I go on for the village atheists that this doesn’t establish the sort of “soul” that is the full-fledged immortal, ontologically spiritual morally-responsible soul one thinks of in typical religious literature. I’m using the word “soul” in the classic Aristotelian-Thomistic sense.

The first premise, that the body is material, is uncontroversial.

The second premise is also uncontroversial, but allow me to explain it because it isn’t without its own quirk of logic.

Consider the equation E = mc^2; it essentially sets up the juxtaposition of matter and energy, in which matter and energy are different modes of the same form. In other words, matter and energy are different states of the same substance. Now, energy is motion, and motion is change. If E were 0, then this would require that m = 0, because c is an unchanging constant. If energy were to cease to be in some unit of matter, then that particular matter would go out of existence, because where m = 0 there is simply no matter. However, this can’t happen because of the laws of physics; energy and matter can not be created or destroyed, so matter must always remain and never go out of existence. Now, matter is energy, and neither can go out of existence; they can only be changed into different states; these states require the existence of both matter and energy; there is always energy, so there is always motion; motion is change; ergo, to be material is to be constantly changing from moment to moment (in fact, a “moment” can be defined as the difference between prior and present states of this motion).

Now, if the body is always changing, it cannot also be in some way unchanging. Noting that in my third premise I consider our experience of consciousness, the materialist will be quick to say that they define the mind as the brain, and visa versa. This I realize, but this doesn’t escape the fact that to be material is to be changing, so the brain is not suitable, at least by itself, to be the “originator” of something that is unchanging.

In my third premise, I point to our experience of consciousness as being indivisible and unchanging. This is not to say the experiences themselves are the same, but “what” experiences (verb) experiences (noun) remains the same. This “what” is the “I,” the most primordial experience around which experience is conceived and understood through. (This sentence is worth a book in itself I believe, but let’s let that slide for the purpose of this post, eh?)

For a practical example, let’s think about a mundane task. Right now, I am sitting, typing on my laptop. It is possible that I could get hungry, so I would get up to go to the kitchen and get something to eat. Now, it is simply a common sense notion that, while before I was hungry, and after I would be fully, meaning X was Y, now X is Z, it would be true that I would be the same ontological object, no matter what changes were done to parts that are me. (I will note a distinction between “I” and “me;” the “I” experiences, the “me” is what experiences occur to and facilitates the sense of these experiences to the “I”)

The common sense conclusion is that the “I” doesn’t change, even if the experiences I experiences do. So, consciousness is based off of something that is unchanging.

My conclusion, then, that there must be more than only matter, is because matter changes where the I doesn’t. Something that is essentially change can’t support something that is essentially unchanging, because the properties of change or non-change are reducible to each other in the way that matter and energy are.

There is, therefore, a substantial, immaterial principle of unity that explains the experience of experience, and this is called the “soul.”

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Proposition, Mind, Soul

Propositions are immaterial. We think propositionally. Therefore, our mind must be composed of some immaterial element.

Otherwise, we would be saying that propositions are reducible to compositions of matter; i.e. neuron with such-and-such charge is what we know to be as the idea of “blue.” This is obviously false.

The argument can’t be that the material and immaterial are unable to interact. Since I am a material body as well as my immaterial mind, I am assuming that, somehow, there is a connection between the immaterial and my body.

Materialism cannot account for the fact that there is a real immaterial at all, and attempts to explain away consciousness through deterministic impulses and illusions; however, this is a deceivingly old problem. Democritus, the first Greek philosopher that we know of to propose a world that is atomistic (in very much the same way that science views the world), first understood the heavy burden of this position. Although propositions weren’t referenced, he did speak of senses; how can atoms (for if that’s all there is, that’s all we can be in sum) feel? How is sense explained?

Not being a materialist, I don’t encounter this problem. The problem I do have is to explain how the material and the immaterial interact.

I would say that the particular connection of my material body and my immaterial mind is facilitated through a “prime animating organ,” otherwise known as the soul.

More to come later on this.

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