Abstract
In this chapter, I begin by providing a brief history of the mind-body problem, and I argue that the philosophical commitment to dualism stands as a barrier to a thoroughly unified interdisciplinary approach to research and theorizing in the science of emotion. I then explain the significance of David J. Chalmers’ (The Conscious Mind: In Search of A Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) hard problem of consciousness and meta-problem of consciousness (Chalmers Journal of Consciousness Studies 25: 6–61, http://consc.net/papers/metaproblem.pdf, 2018; Journal of Consciousness Studies 27: 201–226, 2020) for interdisciplinary research and theorizing in the science of emotion. Finally, I present and argue in favor of a materialistic solution to Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness, which will also include a solution to the meta-problem of consciousness, over eliminative materialism, eliminativism, and interactionist dualism. In doing so, I provide an additional foundation—semantic dualism—for my proposed framework for interdisciplinary research and theorizing in the science of emotion (meta-semantic pluralism about emotion), as well as the first foundation for my theory of emotion as a sui generis kind of embodied cognition, which I refer to as semantic dualism about emotion (semantic dualisme).
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Notes
- 1.
In the philosophical literature on consciousness, it is typical to speak of “physicalism” rather than “materialism” as a view opposing dualism. Physicalism is a subset of materialism. It not only holds that there is only one kind of fundamental substance—matter—but also that this fundamental substance is that which is defined by the physics of the time. I agree with Strawson (2019) that a physicalist understanding is too restrictive since the current physics of the time is always in flux. So I prefer to speak of “materialism” rather than “physicalism,” and regard such talk as including talk of physicalism as a subset of materialism.
- 2.
I don’t address mysterianism since their response to the mind-body problem is that the problem cannot be solved.
- 3.
Throughout this monograph, I use superscripts (e.g., meta-semantic pluralisme) to indicate the context in which a particular term should be understood (e.g., the context of emotion in which one should understand the principle of meta-semantic pluralism).
- 4.
Although the idea that cognition is an aspect of a whole, living, embodied being as it interacts with the world in which it lives pre-dates the work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch ([Varela et al. 1991] 2016), they are typically recognized as the progenitors of the contemporary 4E movement (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) with which the notion of embodied cognition is typically associated. Semantic dualism accepts that the mind is embodied, embedded, and enactive, but it does not reject representations (versus representationalism) while rejecting that it extends outward beyond the boundaries of a subject’s living body. It does, however, accept the possibility of an artificially integrated, hybrid cognitive system, and therefore a kind of artificially integrated, hybrid cognition.
- 5.
As is typically the case with philosophical writing, the mutually inclusive disjunction (“or”) is used throughout, unless stated otherwise or indicated by the use of the phrase “either, or.”
- 6.
Read Natali 2013, for information regarding the history, state, and function of Aristotle’s school.
- 7.
Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia on May 1646 ( Descartes 1646). Although the exact origin of the English word “emotion” is unknown, Thomas Dixon (2012) traces the introduction of the English word to John Florio’s translation of Michel de Montaigne’s 1603 essays. Lisa Shapiro also translates Descartes’ use of “èmotion” to “emotion” in English (Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes 2007).
- 8.
This first principle should not be confused with his “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), which is found in his Discourse on Method (Descartes [1637] 1980 ).
- 9.
Descartes’ argument for this conclusion, which is presented in “Meditation Two,” can be reconstructed in the following way: (D1) I am, I exist; (D2) If I exist, then I exist as a mind or a body; (D3) Assuming the method of doubt, that is, the reliance on the malicious deceiver, I cannot be a body; (D4) “I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing” (Descartes [1641] 1993 , 20).
- 10.
To further clarify, consider in contrast to Descartes’ distinction between cognitions and the passions—that although both are mental in substance, the first originates and is to be identified with the soul whereas the passions are reflections of bodily movements and are to be identified with the body—David Hume’s distinction between ideas and impressions. For Hume, impressions are the basis of every idea, and to this extent every idea has a bodily basis. Yet, insofar as Hume’s theory allows for emotions without cognitions, it can also be understood as supporting a dualistic distinction between the mind and the body.
- 11.
Cf. this explanation of the import of the mind-body problem with Helm’s (2001) explanation regarding a focus on intentionality, which included an introduction of a cognitive-conative divide that insufficiently explained the relationship between desire and objects of value.
- 12.
That this argument can be regarded as one of the “strongest” arguments given in support of dualism does not imply that the argument is in fact a logically strong argument. In fact, it is a very weak argument. Furthermore, I deny that multiple realizability entails the truth or necessity of the notion of supervenience. For example, human stem cells can be said to “multiply realize” any other kind of cell in the human body, yet such a phenomenon does not necessarily require the notion of supervienience in order to explain stem cell differentiation, and such a notion may in fact stand in the way of developing adequate scientific explanations rather than contributing to their development.
- 13.
If distinct languages are thought to entail different kinds of senses, then one can conclude that mentalistic languages and physicalistic languages are different senses of speaking about the same things, like Gottlob Frege’s (1948) example of “the evening star” and “the morning star,” which share Venus as their referent.
- 14.
I grant that conscious experiences may be necessary for having a phenomenal concept, but such experiences are not sufficient for having a phenomenal concept. It may be possible to have conscious experiences without having any phenomenal concepts; and Frank Jackson’s (1982) Mary, the neuroscientist, does not know what red is not because she does not have the phenomenal concept of RED, but because she lacks the conscious experience of red. As soon as she has the conscious experience of red, she would know what red is as an experience, regardless of whether or not she subsequently forms a phenomenal concept based on her experience. Furthermore, there is nothing about conscious experiences which necessarily entail that a phenomenal concept must have the same qualitative content as the phenomenology of the conscious experience from which the phenomenal concept is derived. A phenomenal concept need not be—and I would go further to say that it is not—identical with the phenomenal experience of that which the phenomenal concept is a concept of. When one remembers, imagines, or dreams that something is red, doing so need not require anything that is qualitatively similar to the experience of seeing something that is red. So an appeal to a phenomenal concept is not only unnecessary to explain why Mary does not know what red is, it is also not sufficient for an explanation of why she does not know what red is. According to a semantic dualist, Mary does not know what red is because, although she has the explanans (e.g., all the materialistic information), she lacks the explanandum (the experience).
- 15.
Some might argue that the mind cannot be material, especially for a unified science, since a materialistic framework is too ontologically impoverished given that it cannot make sense of a variety of physical phenomena (e.g., force). My response is that such a conclusion follows only from a limited understanding of matter. A complete explanation of a kind of matter requires not only an explanation of its material constitution, but also its powers, and something like gravitational force can be conceived as a kind of material power.
- 16.
One should also note that although proponents of both dual-aspect theories and neutral monist theories may argue that their theories are not dualist theories in an interactionist sense, their views may still give rise to the same kind of distortions which I ultimately attribute to the influences of Cartesian dualism, which has taken the form of interactionist dualism in the contemporary literature.
- 17.
One should note that the “science of the mind” should not, as it seems to be done quite often in the contemporary philosophical discourse on the mind, to be synonymous with the science of consciousness. Although consciousness is a very important feature of the mind, to believe that the mind is consciousness is a problematic equivocation. Consciousness only constitutes a very small percentage of the totality of the experiences of the mind, which also includes the experiences (broadly construed) that are unconscious and nonconscious (e.g., blindsight and sub-personal processes).
- 18.
Note that some have questioned the prevalence of problem intuitions (e.g., Sytsma and Machery 2010; Systma and Ozdemir 2019), and although this is an interesting point which deserves further discussion, such a discussion is tangential to the aims of this chapter. Furthermore, for the purpose of this chapter, all one needs to admit is that problem intuitions exist, and that the sheer existence of such intuitions are of significant interest for advancing arguments regarding the mind-body problem within the philosophical discourse.
- 19.
Although I don’t deny that partial explanationism can be justified at the meta-level, I do not want to speak for the partial explanationist.
- 20.
For example, read Chap. 6, on Panksepp’s account of the SEEKING system, although a description of such a system would only constitute an aspect of a complete materialistic explanation of a kind of conscious, emotional experience, according to a semantic dualist.
- 21.
Cf. Humphrey’s (2016) claim that conscious experiences are in the world as “magical” activities.
- 22.
Prinz’s understanding that conscious experiences are “infallible” simply amounts to the suggestion that one has conscious experiences. In so far as conscious experiences are representational, they cannot be infallible in any other sense than that we have them.
- 23.
Interestingly enough, a corollary of this conclusion is that various things in the world can be categorized in accordance with their degree of objectivity, which would amount to their observational profusion, and one might regard such degrees of objectivity as defining degrees of “reality.” For example, two dimensional figures would have less objectivity, and would therefore be less “real,” than three dimensional figures, which would have less objectivity and reality than four dimensional figures. In the most ordinary sense, this would explain the metaphysical difference between fictions and non-fictions, such as the difference between Sherlock Holmes and a plant, and so on. Also cf. this notion of “degrees of reality” with Descartes’ ([1641] 1993) notion of “objective reality.”
- 24.
Cf. this problem with what Kammerer (2016) refers to as the “illusion problem.”
- 25.
Although there are some significant concerns regarding the adequacy of both the criterion of confirmation and the criterion of disconfirmation for any scientific enterprise that have been raised in the philosophy of science (e.g., read works by members of the Vienna circle, including Carnap, Quine, and Popper), both methods are in fact two sides of the same coin, and both are therefore necessary for testing empirical claims; neither one alone can provide the necessary evidence for determining the truth of any empirical claim.
- 26.
One might want to note that Hume’s explanation seems not to account for the fact that the idea of causation, power, and necessary connection often include something beyond the notions of constant correlation or habitual expectation. Yet this fact also speaks in favor of the proposal that the causal relationship between one’s mind and one’s body is an illusion, unlike the causal relationship involved in something like productive causation, as in reproduction.
- 27.
Also read Nisbett and Masuda 2003, regarding the cultural differences in perception and causal attributions.
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Mun, C. (2021). We Are Living in a Material World. In: Interdisciplinary Foundations for the Science of Emotion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71194-8_5
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