Abstract
Regardless of whatever else physicalism requires, nearly all philosophers agree that physicalism cannot be true in a world which contains fundamental mentality. I challenge this widely held attitude, and describe a world which is plausibly all-physical, yet which may contain fundamental mentality. This is a world in which priority monism is true—which is the view that the whole of the cosmos is fundamental, with dependence relations directed from the whole to the parts—and which contains only a single mental system, like a brain or computer. Because some properties of the whole are fundamental under priority monism, it follows that that the mental properties of a cosmos-encompassing brain or computer system may be fundamental in a priority monist world. Yet such a world need not contain anything physically unacceptable: the mental properties of the cosmos-encompassing brain or computer can be characterized in a physicalism-friendly functionalist or identity-theoretic way. Thus, as I see it, physicalism need not be false in such a world. This constitutes a challenge to those who hold the view that physicalism is inconsistent with the existence of fundamental mentality.
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09 November 2020
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02941-4
Notes
For example, Jerry Fodor’s (1990) A Theory of Content tries to build an account of intentional content that uses consistency with physicalism as justification; Derek Parfit (1984) uses inconsistency with physicalism to reject “non-reductionist” accounts of the self in Reasons and Persons; and Derk Pereboom’s (2014) Free Will Skepticism and Meaning in Life points to inconsistency with physicalism to support skepticism about agent-causal accounts of free will.
‘Nothing over and above’ is underspecified as well—typically this is taken to be satisfied by a supervenience relation between low-level and high-level properties, but there are reasons (Wilson 2005) to think that a more specific dependence relationship is called for. Here my focus is mostly on the ‘physical’ in ‘physicalism’, but section one below contains a discussion on the relationship between dependence and supervenience.
For a sample of others who have explicitly discussed Hempel’s dilemma as a serious problem for purely physics-based accounts of the physical, see Crane and Mellor (1990), Papineau (1993), Montero (1999), Loewer (2001a, b), and Crook and Gillett (2001). The two branches of the future physics horn (vague future physics versus true and complete future physics) have the similar issue that future physics might quantify over physically unacceptable entities—e.g. gods or souls—if they exist. However, only the ‘true and complete’ branch forces this conclusion, since a vague future physics might be a human future physics, and perhaps there are limits on human scientific capacities which would prevent us from having a physics of gods or souls.
Notable exceptions are Galen Strawson (2008), who thinks physicalism is identical to panpsychism, and Noam Chomsky (1995), who seems to endorse the horn of Hempel’s dilemma that physicalism is trivially true. I take it that these two are outliers. Philosophers with more mainstream positions on physicalism and who reject a No Fundamental Mentality constraint are Daniel Stoljar (2001), who thinks paradigm physical objects could have fundamental mentality, and Janice Dowell (2006), who explicitly says that physicalism is defined by physics, and physics could end up positing fundamental mentality. See the end of the introduction for more on the relationship between the argument in this paper and the views of Stoljar and Dowell.
Thanks to anonymous Synthese referees for pressing me on this.
One suggestion I have received is to define physically acceptable mentality as mentality which is explicable in entirely non-mental terms (thanks to an anonymous Synthese referee for this). I am suspicious of defining physical acceptability relative to explanation, since it might turn out that mentality is inexplicable, but nonetheless physical. For instance, McGinn (1989) thinks that human cognitive powers may not be up to the task of solving the mind–body problem, and Russellian physicalists (e.g. Montero 2010, 2015) think that phenomenal consciousness is constituted by scientifically inscrutable categorical properties. Regardless of their truth, both of these views seem to be coherent physicalist positions, and both deem some mental properties to be ultimately inexplicable.
However, see Tiehen (2016) for an argument that physicalism requires functionalism.
Specifically, Russellian physicalism posits physically acceptable mental properties which are not of the sort described here, and a view I’ll call “necessitarian dualism” (White 2018) posits physically unacceptable mentality which is consistent with the account I offer.
I say “metaphysical dependence” to distinguish the relation I am interested in from other sorts of dependence relations, such as causal or conceptual dependence. Metaphysical dependence, unlike causal dependence, is a synchronic relation; and unlike conceptual dependence, metaphysical dependence is mind-independent. Note that not everyone accepts the distinction between metaphysical dependence and causal dependence—for instance, Bennett (2017) argues causal relations are a species of metaphysical dependence relations. However, most philosophers accept this distinction.
For instance, Davidson (1970, p. 88), who is generally credited with introducing supervenience to philosophy of mind, says: “Although the position I describe denies there are psychophysical laws, it is consistent with the view that mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics.” Clearly he is taking supervenience and metaphysical dependence to be interchangeable.
I am frankly suspicious that a metaphysics of grounding can provide the “something more” to distinguish dependence from necessitation, and largely agree with Jessica Wilson’s (2014) assessment that a more fine-grained dependence relation than mere grounding is required to do the work—at least in the context of defining physicalism. But this issue does not matter for my purposes: all I need is that necessitation and dependence are not identical.
Note that compositional mentality is consistent with the existence of phenomenal intentionality (see Pitt 2004). Phenomenal intentionality consists of representational mental states or properties grounded in phenomenal mental states or properties. Since this view prioritizes phenomenology as prior to representation, and non-physicalists are often keen on phenomenology, it is often tied to non-physicalist accounts of the mind. However, nothing prevents e.g. an identity theorist from endorsing phenomenal intentionality, and asserting that representations depend on neural properties which are identical to phenomenal properties.
This is not a bizarre or unpopular metaphysical position: it is consistent with such views as dispositional essentialism (Shoemaker 1980; Mumford 2004; Bird 2007), which says that all intrinsic properties of concrete particulars are essentially dispositional; and I believe is consistent with the the powerful qualities view of Martin and Heil (1998, 1999), which says that the intrinsic properties of concrete particulars are simultaneously dispositional and non-dispositional. The alternative to this view is Russellian physicalism (sometimes also called “quidditism”), which says that dispositional and structural properties depend on even more fundamental non-dispositional and non-structural properties. In my view, Russellian physicalism is just a version of identity theory which denies dispositional essentialism. Russellian physicalism is inconsistent with compositional mentality, but this is not a problem for my argument; more on this below.
I leave out representationalism in order to avoid some funniness: if representational mental properties require mind-external contents, as under popular externalist views (e.g. Putnam 1975; Devitt 1990), then the relational properties of the parts of a system by themselves are insufficient to necessitate mental properties: at minimum, some mind-external represented object is required. However, if a mental system can represent itself, as under a higher-order thought view (e.g. Rosenthal 2005), or if there can be self-representing properties (e.g. Kriegel 2009), then representational properties too can be necessitated by the relational properties of the parts of a system. Further, if externalism is interpreted as a proto-extended-mind view (as later developed by Clark and Chalmers 1998), and brain-external represented things really are in the mind, then there is no issue, since a mind which represents everything in a world includes all of those represented objects as parts of its mind (though this is a rather odd view, in my eyes).
Karen Bennett (2008) thinks that necessitarian dualism is incoherent. If she is right, then I need not worry about the issues this view presents for my argument. That said, it seems best to err on the side of caution, and assume that necessitarian dualism is coherent.
As pointed out by an anonymous Synthese referee, perhaps necessitarian dualism can be distinguished from compositional mentality by attending to the sort of necessitation that is required by necessitarian dualism. Plausibly, necessitarian dualism requires psychophysical laws which connect physical to mental properties. Compositional mentality might thus be defined as relations-dependent mentality which requires no psychophysical laws. However, I am not sure what distinguishes psychophysical laws from e.g. grounding or other synchronic dependence laws which may be endorsed by a physicalist. A physicalist could say that necessitation is brute, but it is at least coherent to be a physicalist who posits synchronic dependence laws. I am open to the idea that psychophysical laws are mentality specific, whereas physically acceptable synchronic laws are not, but see Alter and Coleman (forthcoming) for an argument that mentality-specific grounding relations are physically acceptable.
Notice that necessitarian dualism is not the view that dualism is necessary, or that psychophysical laws are necessary, but rather the view that certain physical properties necessitate certain non-physical mental properties. Necessitarian dualism could be true in world A, and false in world B, so long as worlds A and B instantiate different physical properties. Under the plausible assumption that necessitarian dualism requires psychophysical laws, this view says that mentality-necessitating physical properties can only exist in a world which contains those laws—those physical properties are partially defined relative to a set of psychophysical laws. Necessitarian dualism is consistent with the view that psychophysical laws are metaphysically necessary, but does not require this. If necessitarian dualism is true in our world, then it is true in all minimal physical duplicates of our world, but this is irrelevant to the main argument of this paper.
The gist of these arguments follows. Priority partism cannot be true in worlds which are infinitely decomposable, since these worlds contain no smallest entities which would count as fundamental. The well-groundedness principle says that all chains of dependence must terminate in fundamental properties, and the only way to do this in infinitely decomposable worlds is if priority monism is true in them. I discuss quantum entanglement at greater length in the next section, but the idea of this argument is that the properties of quantum entangled systems supervene on the properties of the whole system, and not vice versa. Any worlds which are “massively quantum entangled”, such that everything is entangled with everything else, are worlds which would have the properties of all the parts ultimately dependent on the properties of the whole, and thus the whole should count as fundamental in these worlds.
One might alternatively think of higher-order properties as properties of properties, rather than properties of objects which depend for instantiation on some other property or properties. The usage of ‘higher-order properties’ which describes them as properties of objects with lower-order-property-dependent instantiation conditions perhaps lends itself to functionalism slightly better—since it allows us to say that persons possess pain, rather than saying that brain properties possess pain—but I do not think much in this paper turns on which usage of ‘higher-order properties’ is employed.
Note that grounding theorists who posit metaphysical grounding laws (e.g. Wilsch 2015) need not require this: there could be two worlds indiscernible from one another save that one has priority monist grounding laws, and the other has priority partist grounding laws. Regardless of the plausibility of this sort of metaphysics of grounding, my response to the objection does not rest on the existence of occult grounding laws.
Ishmael and Schaffer (2016) further develop the position that worlds which are massively quantum entangled are worlds in which priority monism is true, arguing that the parts of entangled systems are nonseparable, which means that their states cannot be specified without referring to each other. They think that this forces us to accept that the properties of the parts of such nonseparable systems depend on the properties of the whole system. Calosi (2018) argues that only certain interpretations of quantum mechanics yield priority monism—if this is right, then restrict attention only to worlds in which a priority monism-entailing interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct.
An anonymous Synthese referee has suggested that we ought to replace the No Fundamental Mentality constraint with a No Not-Mentally-Necessitated constraint. The No Not-Mentally-Necessitated constraint says that physicalism is false if there are any mental properties which are necessitated by only other mental properties. This constraint must say “only” in order to avoid being obviously false, since plausibly some low-level mental properties in a human mind—e.g. certain computational properties—necessitate higher-level mental properties—e.g. properties of vision. To see why the No Not-Mentally-Necessitated constraint does not work is a bit complicated. In Brown (2017a), I describe worlds which are infinitely decomposable, but in which there is an infinite descent of physically acceptable mentality realized for every entity at every lower level—think of brains composed of sub-brains composed of sub-sub-brains, and so forth forever downward. Such a brains-all-the-way-down world ought not to make physicalism false, it seems. Now combine the brains-all-the-way-down world with the cosmos-encompassing brain described in this paper (under the assumption that the mentality of the cosmos-brain is fundamental). The cosmos-brain would have mentality which is necessitated by its constituent mental parts, and all of these parts would have mentality. Yet physicalism is plausibly true in such a world, or at least it seems like something more should be required to make physicalism false in that world.
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Brown, C.D. Fundamental mentality in a physical world. Synthese 199, 2841–2860 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02914-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02914-7
Keywords
- Physicalism
- No fundamental mentality
- Via negativa
- Functionalism
- Priority monism