Thou hast well said ...

Thomas Reid
(1710-1796)

'After the Peripatetic system had reigned above a thousand years in the schools of Europe, almost without a rival, it sunk before that of Des Cartes ... The characteristic of Plato's genius was sublimity, that of Aristotle's subtlety: but Des Cartes far excelled both in perspicuity, and bequeathed this spirit to his successors. The system which is now generally received, with regard to the mind and its operations, derives not only its spirit from Des Cartes, but its fundamental principles; and, after all the improvements made by Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, may still be called the Cartesian system.'

— 'An Inquiry,' in Inquiry and Essays, pp. 108-9; Reid's emphasis.

I'm reading Reid for the first time. So far, so good. His manner is that of an (almost Climacusian) existentialist, dismissive of all unliveable metaphysical dicta (ergo dismissive of modernism generally, from Descartes to Locke to Hume). Yes, there are the standard calumnies against mediæval philosophy—e.g. on page six it is 'dust and rubbish'—but Reid makes up for it by saying that post-mediæval philosophy 'can have no other tendency than to shew the acuteness of the sophist, at the expense of disgracing reason and human nature, and making mankind Yahoos' (ibid., p. 10).

Well - kept false paths ...

'Teaching philosophy involves the same immense difficulties as instructions in geography would if the pupil brought with him a mass of false and falsely simplified ideas about the course and connections of rivers and mountains.
     'People are deeply embedded in philosophical, i.e. grammatical, confusions. And to free them from these presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in. One must, so to speak, regroup their entire language ...
     'Language contains the same traps for everyone; the immense network of well-kept false paths. And thus we see one person after another walking the same paths, and we know already where he will make a turn, where he will keep on going straight ahead without noticing the turn, etc., etc. Therefore wherever false paths branch off I should put up signs which help one get buy the dangerous places.'

—Wittgenstein, 'Big Typescript,' p. 423.

Gogolian brains ...

'The physicist says: I find everywhere bodies and the motions of bodies only, no sensations; sensations, therefore, must be something entirely different from the physical objects I deal with. The psychologist accepts the second portion of this declaration. For him, as is proper, sensations are the primary data. But to these there corresponds a mysterious physical something which, conformably with the prepossession, must be quite different from sensations. But what is it that is really the mysterious thing? Is it the Physis or the Psyche? Or perhaps both? It would almost appear so, as it is now the one and now the other that appears unattainable and involved in impenetrable obscurity. Or are we here being led around in a circle by some evil spirit?'
—Ernst Mach (The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, p. 45)

Energumen Mach

Cartesianism never lasts long qua dualism. The qualitative-quantitative conjuct is too unhappy for that. But qua monism, breaking up into an either/or disjunct, it can be more longevous. So if you're a Cartesian, a concretizer of abstractions, it's better to be single than in a relationship. But why be a Cartesian at all? Why let oneself be led around in circles by that spirit which so troubled Mssr. Descartes? Consider Herr Mach, who wrote that coming to terms with the qualia-quanta duoverse was his greatest intellectual struggle. For all his struggling, he could not altogether dispossess himself of the dualising spirit. And in the end his was a species of half-Cartesian monism, privileging the qualitative half of Descartes' dualism, for (within Cartesianism) the quantaverse supervenes on the qualiaverse. Thus Mach: 'For me [psychologico-experiential phenomena] are immediately and indubitably given, and for me they can never be volitalized away by considerations which ultimately are always based on their existence' (ibid.). Just so. Contrariwise, today's neuroscientists privilege the quantitative half of Descartes' dualism. They accept materiality as defined by Descartes and reject mentality as defined by Descartes. They're a species of half-Cartesian monist, then, though they apply Descartes' dualistic grammar to their monism. That is, whereas Descartes had two substances and a logical grammar built therefor, today's neuroscientists have one of Descartes' two substances to which they apply his built-for-two grammar. (What could possibly go wrong?)

Remember that for whole-Cartesian dualists (and for half-Cartesian monists of the qualitative-experiential division) the mind is the primary subject of experience, and thus experience is solipsistically privatized. But for half-Cartesian monists of the quantitative-nonexperiential division the brain is the primary subject of experience, and thus, again, experience is solipsistically privatized (being inskulled). Ostensibly, half-Cartesians eliminate the interaction problem. However, in the logical grammar of contemporary neuroscience the brain is a substance (or is at least substantial). And so whereas past generations of neuroscientists had a mind-body dualism, the present generation has a brain-body dualism.

A brain called Crick, hiding behind a face

Ascribing psychologico-experiential concepts (thinking, knowing, learning, feeling, trusting, believing, remembering, understanding, reasoning, interpreting, hypothesizing ……) to the brain (and even to parts thereof) is everywhere in the literature, from academic journals of neuroscience to pop-science presentations. For example, Colin Blakemore tells us that 'neurons have knowledge,' that they 'present arguments to the brain … on which the brain constructs its hypothesis' (Mechanics of the Mind, p. 91); Joseph LeDoux tells us that it's 'possible for your brain to know that something is good or bad before it knows exactly what it is' (The Emotional Brain, p. 69); and Francis Crick tells us that:

'What you see is not what is really there, it is what your brain believes there … Your brain makes the best interpretation it can according to its previous experience and the limited and ambiguous information provided by your eyes … The brain combines the information provided by many distinct features of the visual scene (aspects of shape, colour, movement, etc.) and settles on the most plausible interpretation of all these various clues taken together …' (The Astonishing Hypothesis, pp. 30, 32.)

An independent individual

Etc., etc. However, a brain is an organ, not an organism. It is a part of an animal, not the whole thereof. And the proper subjects of experience are whole animate beings, not their organs or parts: totum est partibus suis prius. It is the mouse that runs from the cat, not the murine brain that runs from the feline brain. (Logically, how can that which has no legs run?) To be sure, when a cat sees, hears, and otherwise perceives a mouse, there are micro-happenings happening intercranially. And it's the neuroscientist's job to investigate these, to find efficient-causal correlates of perception (e.g.), which (as such) are empirico-inductive 'symptoms' thereof, not logico-conceptual criteria therefor. Without brains in their skulls, cats couldn't perceive mice. (Without brains, they'd be dead.) But it is not their brains that perceive. In Gogol's fantastical story The Nose, a nose leaves its faceplace and cavorts about Petersburg in civil-service uniform, disdainful of the man, Major Kovalyov, whose nose he was.

'How am I to approach him?' thought Kovalyov. One can see by everything—from his uniform, from his hat—that he is a civil councillor. The devil only knows how to do it!'
     He began by coughing at his side; but the nose never changed his position for a minute.
     'Sir,' said Kovalyov, inwardly forcing himself to speak confidently. 'Sir …'
     'What do you want?' answered the nose, turning round.
'It seems … strange to me, sir … You ought to know your proper place, and all at once I find you, where? … You will admit …'
     'Excuse me, I cannot understand what you are talking about. Explain …'
     'How am I to explain to him?' thought Kovalyov, and plucking up his courage he began: 'Of course I … I am a major, by the way. For me to go about without a nose you must admit is improper. An old woman selling peeled oranges on Voskresensky Bridge may sit there without a nose; but having prospects of obtaining … and being besides acquainted with a great many ladies in the families of Tchehtarev the civil councillor and others … You can judge for yourself … I don't know, sir (at this point Major Kovalyov shrugged his shoulders) … excuse me … if you look at the matter in accordance with the principles of duty and honour … you can understand of yourself …'
     'I don't understand a word,' said the nose. 'Explain it more satisfactorily.'
     'Sir,' said Kovalyov, with a sense of his own dignity, 'I don't know how to understand your words. The matter appears to me perfectly obvious … either you wish … Why, you are my own nose!'
     The nose looked at the major and his eyebrows slightly quivered.
     'You are mistaken, sir, I am an independent individual. Moreover, there can be no sort of close relations between us. I see, sir, from the buttons of your uniform, you must be serving in a different department.' Saying this the nose turned away.

Here an organ (of smell) becomes an organism, a component part becomes a standalone whole. (Cf. Krzhizhanovsky's story The Runaway Fingers.) The miswandered nose speaks, locomotes, wears a plumed hat and chamois-leather breeches. If brains were like Gogolian noses—speaking, locomoting, wearing hats and breeches—then we could say that brains see, hear, speak, think; but, no, brains aren't like that. We know what it means to say that a man dressed for the weather, went for a walk, smiled warmly at passersby, stopped at a coffee shop. But what does it mean to say that a brain dressed for the weather, went for a walk, smiled warmly at passersby, stopped at a coffee shop? If taken literally, these are nonsensical forms of words that say nothing. So, then, are neuroscientists speaking not qua scientists but qua poets, using metonymy, synecdoche, and suchlike? (Is 'my brain perceives …' a metonymical expression like 'my ears hear …'?) Or are all of the psychologico-experiential terms that they use no more than homonyms, such that when they say the brain (e.g.) believes, they mean that the brain '☆#✂✗◉'? Alas, the literature will not support either exegesis. Contextually, it is patent that the propounded explanations presuppose the standard meanings of the non-technical terms in question, meanings determined by rule-governed use.

Another independent individual

Reading neuroscientific texts can be a laborious exercise. For there are so many metaphors to deliteralise, abstractions to deconcretise, misdescriptions to redescribe, misascriptions to reascribe, misconceptions to reconceive, and so on. The scientific data are interred somewhere beneath all of this, and who knows if it will be worth the labour to disinter them. (Will there be anything left over?) Take some examples on hemispheric commissurotomy, referring to well-known work on the subject by Roger Sperry (1913-1994) and Michael Gazzaniga (1939-present). We'll start with The Journal of Neuroscience (2000, Vol. 20):

'Gazzaniga and Metcalfe et al have hypothesized the existence of an interpreter that plays the role of trying to make sense out of the information that it confronts, in other words, generating causal hypotheses. Using split-brain patients, Gazzaniga provided evidence that this interpreter is located in the left hemisphere in most individuals. The simultaneous concept test provides an example of the function of the interpreter. In this task, a split-brain patient is shown a picture exclusively to the left hemisphere (e.g., a chicken) and another picture exclusively to the right hemisphere (e.g., a snow scene). The patient is then given an array of pictures and asked to point to a picture associated with the presented pictures. In the above example, the left hemisphere chose a chicken claw, and the right hemisphere chose a shovel. When asked to explain the choices, the patient responded, "Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed." The right hemisphere is unable to produce speech, so it cannot explain its selection. The left hemisphere is unaware of the picture that the right hemisphere is responding to (i.e., the snow scene), so it must generate its own interpretation of why the left hand pointed to a shovel. The left hemisphere, observing the actions of the left hand and right brain, interprets those actions within the context of what it knows (i.e., a chicken claw) and generates an explanation for the shovel that is consistent with its knowledge.'

In the Brain Research Bulletin (1999, Vol. 50):

'Through past millennia, and for half of the present century, the existence of the two huge cerebral hemispheres in man passed with only an occasional puzzle as to what might transpire with each individually, and the nature of the interchange between them, if any … With the guiding genius of Sperry, studies on the ensuing series of patients has forever changed the way the mind is viewed as a product of the brain; indeed, two brains, the two hemispheres, each endowed with human thought and emotion, separable, but normally uncannily intertwined via the dense network of callosal fibers, negotiating the interplay between them. Hemispherectomy confirms the humanity of each, and neuroimaging now shows that in normal life each hemisphere is a lively participant concurrently in most mental processes so far examined. Deep questions still far outpace the answers … Recognition of the fact that the two human hemispheres are, potentially, two separable mental entities will reverberate at all levels of society across the coming centuries, redefining the nature of humanity, and humanity’s relation with nature.'

And as for Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis, p. 170):

'When the callosum is cut, the left hemisphere sees only the right half of the visual field … Both hemispheres can hear what is being said … One half of the brain appears to be almost totally ignorant of what the other half saw.'

My, my. Were you counting? One, two, three subjects of experience, three independent Gogolian individuals: the patient, the left hemisphere, and the right hemisphere. Whence the surplus? We had only one subject to begin with. Ah, but Gazzaniga had written that right hemispheres 'are able to make judgments of grammaticality'—[aside] would that Gazzaniga were able to make judgements of grammaticality—that left hemispheres 'possesses a uniquely human capacity to interpret behaviour and to construct theories about the relationships between perceived events and feelings' (Neuron, 1995, Vol. 14). And our one was thrice multiplied. (And why stop at three? Neurons have knowledge, too, and scientists say there are 100,000,000,000 of them in a brain. We're all Legion.)

Yes, split-brain experiments gives us pause, insofar as contradictory criteria are present (cf. blindsight phenomena), but there's no need whatsoever to describe the experiments in the style of H.C. Andersen. And, again, the fallacies here are philosophical, not scientific; they're logico-conceptual, not empirico-factual. That brains have a 'capacity to acquire knowledge, to abstract and to construct ideals' (Semir Zeki, 'Splendours and Miseries of the Brain,' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, p. 2054) is a proposition that scientists qua scientists can neither confirm nor disconfirm. For it's not possibly true or false as a matter of fact; it's a nonsensical, category-mistaken pseudo-sentence (and an example of what P.M.S. Hacker calls the mereological fallacy).

We are long overdue for a metaphysical regime change. Meantime, so long as we are beholden to Descartes, our confusion, bafflement, and mystification will persist. So long as we are beholden, it will perforce be the case that:

Tyndall

'The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from the one phenomenon to the other. They appear together but we do not know why. Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened and illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain, were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be, and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem. How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness? The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable.' (John Tyndall, 'Mathematics and Physics', 1868).

PS: Cf. Herr Kant (himself too much a modernsky): 'A well-grounded critical objection can be made against the common doctrinal opinion of physical influence. The sort of community that is claimed to occur between two species of substances, thinking and extended, is grounded on a crude dualism, and makes the latter substances, which are nothing but mere representations of the thinking subject, into things subsisting for themselves ... Thus if one separates out everything imaginary, the notorious question about the community between what thinks and what is extended would merely come to this: How is outer intuition - namely, that of space (the filling of it: by shape and motion) - possible at all in a thinking subject? But it is not possible for any human being to find an answer to this question, and no one will ever fill this gap in our knowledge, but rather only indicate it, by ascribing outer appearances to a transcendental object that is the cause of this species of representations, with which cause, however, we have no acquaintance at all, nor will we ever get a concept of it.' (Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 437-438 in the Cambridge ed.)

THE Philosopher ...

Descartes

In the later mediæval period, Aristotle was the philosopher.* His four-cause, act-potency metaphysic was that on which all major thinkers of the time erected their systems. For hundreds of years philosophers were Aristotelian as a matter of course. Their disagreements were intra-Aristotelian disagreements (which is not to trivialise them). And as contrary as, say, Aquinas and Occam were, they were both students of their master, Aristoteles. But from the early modern period onward, Descartes has mastered philosophy. He is for us the philosopher, not Aristotle. (And we're so Cartesian that, save by special training, we can't even read Aristotle without reading Descartes into him.) Descartes has set the terms of the debate, from mid-seventeenth century to present day. His qualia-quanta duoverse is that in which philosophers and scientists move. Our disagreements are intra-Cartesian disagreements. But whereas Peripateticism was explicit in mediæval philosophy, Cartesianism nowadays is almost always implicit. Today's neuroscientists, for example, are by and large Cartesian. Their logico-conceptual grammar is Descartes'. Etc. Yet they're generally unaware of this. Thirteenth-century academics in debate would quote Aristotle back and forth (as their auctor), but if neuroscientists speak the name of Descartes aloud, they don't do so with deference, for he's a superseded historical curiosity to them. Still, a crypto-Cartesian metaphysic is no less Cartesian for the prefix.

To see just how radically dissimilar the Aristotelian and Cartesian metaphysics are, consider their philosophies of psychology. For an Aristotelian, body and soul as such are but abstractæ. They are matter (hyle) and form (morphe), withal potentia and actus, which in materio-formal composition are a single concrete substance (ousia). You are not your matter, not your material cause; and you are not your form, not your formal cause; you are informed matter, ensouled body. Peripatetics further spoke of vegetative, animal, and rational souls, which bespeak powers (dynameis). Rational, animal, and vegetable souls are so ordered that the former comprehend the latter, as a quadrangle comprehends a triangle and a straight line (Aristotle, De anima, II.3). Plants have only vegetative powers (e.g. nutrition and reproduction); brute animals have vegetative powers and sensitive powers moreover (e.g. appetition and locomotion); human animals have vegetative and sensitive powers and rational powers moreover (e.g. intellection and will). Thus, soul (psuchē) is a term for the defining powers (capacities, abilities, aptitudes) of a living thing.

For a Cartesian, body (now machine) and soul (now mind) are independent, mutually exclusive concretiones in causal interaction. The mind-machine distinction is not abstract and conceptual (as above) but concrete and actual. The mind is a res cogitans, a substance the essence of which is thinking; the machine is a res extensa, a substance the essence of which is extension. That which is bodily-mechanical (material, physical, natural) is that which is quantitative. That which is soulish-mental (immaterial, nonphysical, supernatural) is that which is qualitative. And as for you, human, you just are a mind within the qualiaverse, a mind that's contingently connected to a dysteleological machine within the quantaverse. There are neither vegetative souls nor sensitive souls; there are only rational souls (i.e. minds), the modes of which (e.g. percepts) are 'thoughts' in Descartes' idiolect (Principles of Philosophy, I.9). Thus, for Descartes, the proper and primary subject of experience is the mind (whereas for Aristotle it is the animate being in toto); it is the mind to which psychological concepts literally apply. And hereby experience is solipsistically privatized, inasmuch as other minds are not directly accessible.

Sherrington

The locus of mind-machine interaction for Descartes was the pineal gland situated between the hemispheres of the brain. For Thomas Willis (a few years later) the locus was the cortex, specifically the corpus callosum. And in this way the intra-Cartesian debate continued, mutatis mutandis, into the twentieth century. Previously we talked about Alan Turing and his Cartesius-dimidius premises. In Turing's time, the most formidable name in (what we now call) neuroscience was C.S. Sherrington (1857-1952), and Sherrington kept his Cartesianism intact.

'In all those types of organism in which the physical and the psychical coexist, each of the two achieves its aims only by reason of a contact utile between them. And this liaison can rank as the final and supreme integration completing its individual. But the problem of how the liaison is effected remains unsolved ... [Scientists] place the soul in the body and attach it to the body without trying in addition to determine the reason why, or the condition of the body under which such attachment is produced. This, however, seems to be the real question.' (The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, p. xxiii).

In other words, given the supposition that soul-body interaction happens, the real question is not so much where it happens but how, and no answers are ever forthcoming.† Sherrington himself conceded defeat: 'I would submit that we have to accept the correlation, and to view it as interaction ... The theoretically impossible happens' (Man on his Nature, p. 248). Note that for an Aristotelian (like Aquinas or Scotus) there is no soul-body interaction problem, no impossibility to overcome, for there is no soul-body interaction at all. Soul and body are both abstracted from a single unified substantia, and abstractions qua abstractions do not causally interact with each other. That would be a form of nonsense. But never mind. Onwards.

Eccles

John Eccles (1903-97), who studied under and later worked with Sherrington, kept his Cartesianism intact also. In what he called the 'dualist-interactionist hypothesis,' Eccles argued that the loci of interaction were in the pyramidal cells of the motor cortex (Human Mystery, p. 217). For Eccles' research had suggested to him that 'only a specialized zone of the cerebral hemispheres is in liaison with the self-conscious mind. The term liaison brain denotes all those areas of the cerebral cortex that potentially are capable of being in direct liaison with the self-conscious mind' (ibid., p. 358). Thus Eccles, too, presupposed that, did his utmost to answer where, and was silent as to how.

Penfield

Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), also a Sherrington protege, tried to be at least a methodological Cartesius dimidius, but it wouldn't last. 

'After years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain-action alone, I have come to the conclusion that it is simpler (and far easier to be logical) if one adopts the hypothesis that our being does consist of two fundamental elements ... It seems to me certain that it will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain ... I am forced to choose the proposition that our being is to be explained on the basis of two fundamental elements' (The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, p. 80).

Aristotle could reasonably interject, 'What about my proposition?' But, excuse us, Descartes is our philosopher. And one may have any metaphysic one likes, so long as it's either whole-Cartesianism or half-Cartesianism retaining the dialectic of whole-Cartesianism. (Who could ask for anything more?) The latter super-folly is today's received wisdom. Penfield had rightly argued that a whole-Descartes is 'not so improbable' as a half-Descartes, for it would be absurd to say 'that the highest brain mechanism should itself understand, and reason, and direct voluntary action' (ibid., p. 82). Yet that was back in ye olden dayes of 1975. We have stronger stomachs for absurdity in 2017. But before moving ahead to contemporary neuroscientists, note that Sherrington, Eccles, and Penfield all followed Descartes in understanding mind and body to be independent substances that causally interact, and in understanding the mind to be the proper and primary subject of experience, to be that to which psychological concepts literally apply.

To be continued.

Footsies:

*‘There is a tenacious legend that the West learnt its Aristotle from the Arabic, but the fact is that the West turned to Arabic-Latin translations only in default of the more intelligible Greek-Latin ones.’ (Bernard G. Dod, ‘Aristoteles latinus’, in The Cambridge History of Later Mediæval Philosophy, p. 52.)

†And then there is the question of when—i.e. the very o'clock, to the minute-hand if not to the second-hand, at which the soul and the body are conjoined. Behold sixteenth-century medico Jean Fernel (whom Sherrington was enamoured of): 'Made at the beginning by the supreme creator of things, [the soul] migrates in a moment of time into the prepared and equipped body of the infant; this is held to happen in the fourth month, when heart and brain are already brought to completion' (Physiologia, VII.13). That this clock-watching question is a question at all is of course a choice reductio.

Cartesius dimidius ...

Turing

'I don't want to give a definition of thinking, but if I had to I should probably be unable to say anything more about it than that it was a sort of buzzing that went on inside my head.'
—Alan Turing (BBC Third Programme, 14 January, 1952)

As a mathematician, Turing's achievements were of no small consequence. But he's also remembered for his hobbyist philosophising, for his speculative essays and public radio talks on the subject of thinking machines. Whence the more or less synonymous terms 'Turing test' and 'imitation game,' referring to the peculiar means by which he answered the question 'Can machines think?' As Turing rightly says, an answer 'should begin with definitions of the meanings of the terms "machine" and "think." ' ('Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' in Mind, 1950, p. 433). Well-defined terms (i.e. terms which are unequivocal, non-circular, extensionally-sufficient, etc.) are a necessary condition of sound arguments, alongside true premises and valid reasoning. But instead of defining his terms, Turing asks a new stand-in question:

'The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A" ... We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?" (Ibid., pp. 433-434.)

Forget 'Can machines think?' It's 'too meaningless to deserve discussion' (ibid., p. 442). The new and 'more accurate version' (ibid.) of the question is: is it theoretically possible that machines play imitation games? An affirmative answer here is ipso facto an affirmative answer there (meaninglessness notwithstanding).

The logic wants an editor. But let's back up before moving ahead. Remember, Turing was a Cartesius dimidius, a Descartes halved. For Descartes, all matter is mechanical and all organisms are machines (as substantiae extensas), THE MACHINIST (God) super-adds minds (substantiae cogitantes) to some machines, and these divinely arranged marriages are called human beings. Turing accepted that all organisms are machines full-stop, rejecting mindish super-additions thereto. So why, then, ask the thinking-machine question at all? We're machines, and we think; the nervous system is a 'continuous machine' (ibid., p. 451); and so on. OK, then. We'll make the imitation game more exclusive. We'll 'exclude from the machines men born in the usual manner' (ibid., p. 435) and we'll 'only permit digital computers to take part' (ibid., p. 436). No, that's not the point. That thinking is mechanical is built into the bottommost premises. And thus the real work has already been done. Game-like tests à la Turing are unnecessary. If thinking is (and if believing and trusting and loving and grieving are) a micro-mechanical buzzing then it's only a matter of time—'at least 100 years' Turing surmised in 1952 (BBC)—before digital computers likewise buzz.

'If now some particular machine can be described as a brain we have only to programme our digital computer to imitate it and it will also be a brain. If it is accepted that real brains, as found in animals, and in particular in men, are a sort of machine, it will follow that our digital computer suitable programmed, will behave like a brain.' (BBC Third Programme, 15 May, 1951.)

In other words: if Cartesius-dimidius premises then Cartesius-dimidius conclusions. We have been here before, too, centuries ago. For is the seventeenth-century bête-machine not already an imitation gamer? Is it not 'what an engineer would call a "proof of concept," a proof designed to show that an automaton could be made to perform all the required actions in the appropriate circumstances'? (Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes, p. 17; cf. p. 98 ff. and p. 107 ff. And note that forcing the issue to the advantage of mechanicism necessitates a Cartesius-totum position).

Suppose computers do well at imitation gaming. But further suppose that Cartesianism is not taken for granted. What follows logically? Not much. Concluding that, therefore, these computers are thinkers would be a non sequitur. For logical validation we'd have to conflate thinking and 'thinking' (i.e. a mechanical analogue thereof)—which would be a textbook example of petitio principii—and why would we do that? If we already believe (as Turing did) that thinking is a micro-mechanical process or state inside a machine then Turing tests are superfluous exhibitions. But if we don't believe that thinking is thus then Turing tests are impotent.

In his refutatio Turing presents several possible objections to his thesis. The first is what he calls the theological objection: 'Thinking is a function of man's immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think.' For some reason, Turing believes this to be the traditional religious position, though he includes a footnoted disclaimer ('Computing Machinery,' p, 443): 'Possibly this view is heretical. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, quoted by Bertrand Russell, p. 480) states that God cannot make a man to have no soul. But this may not be a real restriction on His powers, but only, a result of the fact that men's souls are immortal, and therefore indestructible.' The last sentence bespeaks theological ignorance, but that's to be expected of readers who learn their Summa in Russellian summaria. (For a Thomist, God can't make a man to have no soul because a formless form-matter composite is contradictory nonsense. It would be like God making a sphere that had no sphericity.) Needless to say, what Turing puts forward as orthodox is heterodox. And a better name here would be the Cartesian-dualist objection—a most persuasive objection, if you're a Cartesian dualist, but neither you nor I are.

Turing's nemesis

The only objection that Turing thinks is strong is that of paranormal activity: precognition, cryptaesthesia, telepathy, etc. 'These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming' (ibid., p. 453). In this way Descartes' banished res cogitans makes an uncanny return. And all Turing can say is: 'If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up' (ibid., p. 454). Such tightening! But what if we don't want to be Cartesians at all, neither fully nor by halves? Why would we? Turing himself says: 'I have no very convincing arguments of a positive nature to support my views' (ibid.). Thanks Alan.

A mechanics of the soul ...

If the verb is psychologico-experiential (think, know, learn, feel, trust, believe, remember, understand), and if the predication is altogether literal, then can a machine be the subject? 'Does a calculating machine calculate?' (Wittgenstein, RFM, V.§2.). Artificial intelligence (AI) theorists answer yes—but, then, they redefine the terms AI-theoretically. Humans are the primary subjects of these verbs, and humans are organisms, whereas machines are artefacts. AI theory, however, is premised on the mathematico-mechanical (i.e. dysteleologico-nominal) metaphysic, which artefactualises the organic. (Go here for more on that.) How and why these became the standard premises won't be expatiated on now. (See previous posts; or, much better, read this.) Some 400 years ago l'esprit géométrique possessed metaphysics, and all exorcisms thereafter failed. What's the major benefit of the possession? Medico-technological advancement, by which a diminution of human suffering. The major malefit? Inasmuch as the unbelievable dicta are believed—e.g. that qualia are really nothing but 'size, figure, number' (Galileo)—an augmentation of human suffering. As we'd expect, AI theory is fully possessed of the mathematising demon. It's an exercise in reduction and/or elimination, whereby (ad modum Aristotle) formal/final causes are reduced to material/efficient causes and (ad modum Wittgenstein) criteria are reduced to symptoms.

Can a machine think? Firstly, what's a machine? In l'esprit géométrique we're all machines, but in l'esprit tradition we're animals. Animals are sentient organisms; machines are inanimate artefacts. To speak in the tongue of the tradition, organisms qua organisms have intrinsic teleologies and substantial forms; artefacts qua artefacts do not. A wooden bed (e.g.) is an artefact. Its form is accidental; its teleology is extrinsic. Wood qua wood is not directed toward bedness. Bedness must be forced upon it from without. Wood 'wants' to be woody, to be treelike, not bedlike. Thus Aristotle: 'If you planted a bed and the rotting wood acquired the power of sending up a shoot, it would not be a bed that would come up' (Phys., II.193a).

Artefacts contra organisms

Secondly, what's thinking? Like all psychologico-experiential concepts, thinking is both polygenic and polyspecific. 'To think,' 'To think of,' 'To think that,' 'To think through,' 'To think with,' 'To think for,' 'To φ thoughtfully,' 'To φ with aforethought,' 'To φ without thinking.' Etc., etc. Note, also, that cogitative verbs (like 'To think') can't be dissociated from cognitive, conative, and affective verbs. If a cogitative verb is logically predicable, an affective verb is too (like 'To grieve'). If it makes sense to predicate cogitation then it also makes sense to predicate affectivity. (And if it doesn't, it doesn't.) Hence Wittgenstein: 'What a lot of things a man must do in order for us to say he thinks' (RPP, §563; unless otherwise noted, all quotes hereafter from the L.W. corpus). Thinking, knowing, learning, believing, trusting, understanding, befriending, forgiving—these are potentiæ (powers, aptitudes, abilities) of animate beings in normative contexts. We can't literally apply them to machines, for machines are not alive; they couldn't possibly satisfy the criteria for literal application. And it's not as if they could think, in a futuristic tomorrowland; it's that 'machines can think' has no sense. ('Machines can't think' is not comparable to 'Dodo birds can't fly.') So why do AI experts tell us that machines can (and do) think?

'We compare "I think" with the wrong paradigm, e.g. with "I eat" ... We know in general what [digestion] means, we want to be given a detailed account of what goes on when this process which we understand in a rough way occurs: we want more detail, the detailed working of the mechanism. "What is thinking?" is similar in verbal form to "What is digestion?" The answer is a matter of X-rays, clinical tests, etc., a matter of experimental procedure. Is this so with "What is thinking?" ' (LPP, pp. 48, 236).

AI theorists believe that machines can think because they also believe that thinking can be explained mechanically. They take 'What is a thought? What is it to think?' to be like 'What is a sewing machine? How does it work?' (Cf. PG, V.§63 ). (And if they're right, the real question is: can humans think?) The basic problem is that AI's vocabulary is delimited by (a reductive version of) efficient causation. If it speaks at all, it speaks efficient-causally. Why can't a percept be both all-over red and all-over green? Come, let's ask efficient causation.

'Because the central tendency of activity in a cortical mapping of reflectance spectra cannot simultaneously lie on both sides of an anatomical axis of the mapping, the axis that divides the spectra judged red from the spectra judged green' (C.R. Gallistel).

Thanks. [Exit efficient causation] See? Logico-conceptual question, efficient-causal answer. But these categories of explanation are independent. And when it comes to that which is psychologico-experiential, 'we are not in the realm of causal explanations, and every such explanation sounds trivial for our purposes' (PG, V.§63). Yet for AI, thinking just is a unitized micro-mechanical process, a causal nexus the locus of which (for a human) is the brain. That's right, thoughts are literally in the brain, just as the brain is in the skull. (O Lord, deliver us from the men of excellent intention.) Likewise, today's neuroscientists speak (in l'esprit géométrique) of 'the human head within which we have no doubt that thoughts occur' (Edelman and Tonini, Consciousness, p. 200). Beg pardon, a brain can be removed from a skull, or halfway removed, or half a brain halfway removed. Yet a thought can't be removed from a brain, nor halfway removed, nor half a thought halfway removed. But never mind that. Say 'I have a brain in my head' and 'I have a thought in my head,' or 'I have a timbit in my mouth' and 'I have a pain in my mouth,' then say there's no syllepsis. Now you're talking like a real AI theorist! 

'In the consideration of our problems one of the most dangerous ideas is that we think with, or in, our heads ... "Thinking takes place in the head" really only means "The head is connected with thinking." Of course, one says also "I think with my pen" and this localisation is at least as good.' (PG, V.§64).

Compare Schrödinger:

'We have got used to localizing the conscious personality inside a person's head—l should say an inch or two behind the midpoint of the eyes ... It is very difficult for us to take stock of the fact that the localization of the personality, of the conscious mind, inside the body is only symbolic.' ('Mind and Matter,' in What is Life, pp. 122-123) 

[So where does thinking happen? Try: in the library, at the study hall, on the commuter train, up the walkway—places in which we earthlings find ourselves in the circumstances of life.]

AI theorists follow their overlord Mssr. Descartes in understanding observable behaviour to be no more than correlatively suggestive of (or as Herr Wittgenstein would say 'symptomatic' of) antecedent unobservable activity. Inner brain states and processes cause outer behaviour, which behaviour is but kinematic motion. The inner-outer connection (which is already a literalised metaphor) is contingent, arbitrary, and severable. All is au fond Cartésien. (Cf. posts here and here.) What we're left with—public macro-mechanical movement here and secret micro-mechanical movement there—is not what we started with. We started with thinking. And 'in order to find the real artichoke, we divested it of its leaves' (PI, §64). Thinking just is a unitized micro-mechanical process? But (arbitrarily limiting ourselves to ratiocinative thinking) there are no efficient-causal connections in a logical inference or an arithmetic calculation. (Aristotle: 'In the field of what is unmoved there cannot be this kind of cause, which is why in mathematics nothing is proved by its means' [Met., II.995a].) Premises do not cause conclusions to follow, as A causes B in contact mechanics. And 'when we say "This proposition follows from that one" ... "to follow" is being used non-temporally' (RFM, I.§103). But on AI theory 'if p then q' means 'if p at time¹ then q at time².' That which was logical becomes causal. A logical mistake (which wants correcting) becomes a mechanical malfunction (which wants repairing). And the question 'How did you come to that conclusion?' can only be answered efficient-causally: 'A caused B, after that B caused C, after that ...' [And now there's the amusing question: where did you come to that conclusion—i.e. what are the intracranial coordinates, ye latitude and longitude?] But here we're not looking for causes; we're looking for reasons (for becauses). We don't say that so-and-so calculated because an efficient-causal A→B→C happened in his brain. It's only in a context of normativity that we can literally predicate calculation of him, elsewise there'd be no justification. And a machine, an inanimate artefact with an accidental form and an extrinsic teleology, can't (logically can't) behave normatively. A computer can be reprogrammed but not reproved. (Even the concept of mechanical malfunction [that it is thus] is borrowed from normativity!)

An abacus learning to calculate,
while a child watches—that is,
while a brain watches

Does an abacus calculate? No. Does a nineteenth-century comptometer calculate? No. Does a present-day computer calculate? No (introduction of electrical circuitry notwithstanding). Will a next-generation computer calculate? No. Consider that—

—'One could readily build a computer from a very large toy railway-set with a huge number of switch points and storage depots for different types of carriages to be shunted into until called upon for further operations (i.e. a "computer memory"). This computer would be cumbersomely large and slow, but in essence its operations would not differ from the latest gadgetry on the computer-market. Would anyone say, as hundreds of trains rush through complex networks of on/off points according to a prearranged timetable (a programme), depositing trucks in sidings or depots and collecting others, "Now the railway-set is calculating," "Now it is inferring," "Now it is thinking"? Does it make any difference if the railway-set is miniscule and the "trains" move at the speed of electric current?' (P. Hacker, Meaning and Mind, pp. 78-79).

Before AI can so much as begin, it has to reduce its analysanda to the efficient-causal. But the analysanda are irreducible. In the would-be reduction they're eliminated; they're replaced by the efficient-causal. (Just as qualia are not reducible to quanta, just as they are eliminated in the reduction, replaced by quanta.) And in so doing thinking (e.g.) is eliminated. 

Note that the mistakes here are not scientific, but philosophical. AI theory isn't bad science (inasmuch as it is science); it's bad philosophy, grounded in behaviourism (i.e. in Cartesianism minus cogitantes substantiae). The problem is the mathematico-mechanical metaphysic on which AI theory is premised, a metaphysic that lost its tenability a long time ago and has now degenerated into adhockery and meaninglessness. 'What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?' (Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p.21). If we're to arrest and reverse the degeneration, we'll have to put the question marks deeper down.

PS: When today's thinkers do put the question marks deeper down, they're publicly arraigned, as if they were impugning science itself. Look at Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, 'the most despised science book of 2012' (The Guardian), which criticised the defunct premises. How did the academy react? Like an angry zealot denouncing a heretic. Mind and Cosmos was: 'The shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker' (Steven Pinker of Harvard U); 'Absurd ... If you want arrogance and dogmatism you have to look to the [...] Nagel’s of the world. They’re the ones claiming, on the basis of some asinine armchair cogitation, that they have refuted an enormously successful scientific paradigm' (Jason Rosenhouse of James Madison U); 'Disturbing' (Jerry Coyne of U of Chicago). Etc. Such was the obloquy. Alright, these professors acknowledged that they hadn't read the book. But who needs to read books? Publisher's blurbs are more than enough—for social media (Pinker), newspaper articles (Rosenhouse), and blog posts (Coyne). (To be fair, Coyne did say that he was going to read it later. And later: 'I never got around to reading Mind and Cosmos ... I'm glad I didn't.') Sigh.

PPS: Meantime at Chapters bookstore ...

'Whatever I was told I would reject ... not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation.'

Cause and effect ...

Recently I reread Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), in which is much of his sceptical writing on cause and effect. After closing the book, what's one to say but: Hume's premises, Hume's conclusions. For all his artful encomia to scepticism, he's never sceptical about his premises. They're uncritically presupposed (presupposing uncritical readers). And when these premises direct him to absurdities, Hume doesn't disabuse himself of their direction. (Therefore it can be said that he's modern philosopher.)

Hume (leaning on Malebranche?)

Where did Hume live qua philosopher? In the qualia-quanta duoverse created by the early-moderns, of course. And his causation conundra are species of a genus peculiar thereto. Remember that causal powers or forces (qua powers and forces) can't exist in the quantaverse. Their homeworld is the qualiaverse. But how, then, are the worlds to interact? Direct interaction is precluded (on pain of nonsense). The answer is: God. He's the intermediary. Hence occasionalism (most famously that of Malebranche, but cf. Al-Ghazali and Ockham), wherein there are no natural causes at all. We'd say that A causes B, but really God causes B when A (the 'occasion') is present. We'd say that the noonday sun wilts the grass, but the sun hasn't active power, nor the grass passivity to be acted upon. God wilts the grass (or 'wilts' the 'grass'). A sunburn is really a Godburn. Etc. (Note that the quantaverse is now a superfluous appendix; it's understandable that Berkeley had it removed.) Thus, as the universe became a duoverse, cause and causatum came to mean miracle¹ and miracle²; as techne drove out physis (see post on Chomsky), the miraculous drove out the natural. But to introduce God in this way (qua Deus ex machina) is to forego explanation. And Hume has at the occasionalists accordingly (e.g. Enquiry, pp. 65-66, Cambridge UP), yet he's committed to the same metaphysical premises (e.g. the same dysteleo-nominalism) that necessitated their calling upon God as explanans. (He also borrowed from T. Taylor's translation of Malebranche so liberally for his Enquiry that 'if Hume were a modern academic, he would not escape the charge of plagiarism.' [S. Buckle, Hume's Enlightenment Tract, p. 191.]) The saying goes: Hume is occasionalism minus God. That's not a bad way of putting it. He follows the occasionalists almost all the way, stopping just short of their miraculous solution, and his stop-short conclusion is: causation is 'entirely arbitrary' (Enquiry, p. 32); cause and effect are 'entirely loose and separate,' words 'absolutely without any meaning' (ibid., p. 68).

To save the causal phenomena, Humeans have retreated to regularity theories. But regularity theories (like counterfactual analyses) do not look at causation per se. To specify a regularity is not eo ipso to specify a cause. (For example, whenever bricks smash windows there are window-smashing sounds, but these are not the causes.) The analysanda here may or mayn't be causally efficacious, but if they are, they're not so qua regularities. And if we ask why there are these regularities, we're not answered.

By contrast, consider the later mediæval philosophies of causation, predicated on Aristotle's act-potency, four-cause metaphysic. Here actus and potentia are a complete division of all that is or can be. 'Potency and act divide being and every kind of being' (Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.77.1). And the famous four (be)causes—formal, material, final, efficient—are four categories of explanation which, all together, are to deliver a complete understanding of the phenomenon. (But don't put the phenomenon in the wrong drawer!) Causal principles are then built up on these foundations. For example, that nothing can go from potency to act save by that which is in act—i.e. a potency qua potency (active or passive) can't actualise itself—and that cause and effect must be proportionate (for nemo dat quod non habet, you can't give what haven't got).

Now, modern philosophers (Hume among them) proceed with a reductive efficiency-only understanding of causation. For an Aristotelian, this is no more intelligible than a reductive one-dimensional understanding of four-dimensional spaces. Moreover, efficient causes are logically late, they'd say. Actio sequitur esse, action follows being (logically). For example, an efficient cause is that which actualises a potency, but a potency is a potency for an actuality. Thus efficiency presupposes finality, and finality presupposes efficiency.

'The [final cause] is not the cause of that which is the efficient cause, but it is the cause of the efficient cause being an efficient cause' (Aquinas, De principiis naturae, 4.29).

Side note: The mediæval doctrine of finality was not well understood by early-modern thinkers, whose eisegesis was that it projected conation onto that which had no mind and could not be subject thereto (e.g. onto inanimate substances, like salt). Whereas, in fact, the Schoolmen (who lived in a universe, not a duoverse) had believed that re agentibus naturalibus final causation was non-mentalistic, non-conative. Thus Aquinas: 'It should be understood that, although every agent [...] intends an end, it does not follow that every agent knows or deliberates about the end ... In the case of natural agents, the actions are determined ... [They] intend an end without deliberating about it. And this intending is nothing other than having a natural inclination toward something.' (De principiis naturae, 3.16.) Example: salt (sodium chloride) 'naturally intends' to dissolve in water, in the literal, Latinate senses of the terms nature and to intend. Sodium chloride qua sodium chloride (formality) is in these circumstances directed at this outcome (finality)—that's what it is to be salt.

Hume also presents a (false) disjunction in the Enquiry (which he 'borrowed' from Malebranche): cause and effect are connected either with absolute necessity or with arbitrary contingency. (And they aren't connected with absolute necessity. Therefore, etc.) But causation is neither/nor. The former necessity is too strong and the latter contingency is too weak. Don't forget, actio sequitur esse. It isn't that A must cause B, but that A precisely qua A is directed at or tends toward B, so that A will cause B ceteris paribus.

Hume's arguments are further premised on the belief that cause and effect are discrete events in temporal succession. But disunite cause and effect in this way and you needn't hope to reunite them afterwards. The fateful move has been made, and you're foredoomed to absurdities. The Aristotelians would say that the (proximate) efficient cause has to be simultaneous with its effect. Thus Aquinas: necessarium est causam et causatum simul esse, 'it is necessary that the cause and the caused exist at the same time' (DPN, 5.43). Plus, a cause is not an event. Suppose there's a baker. He's kneading dough (active); dough is being kneaded by him (passive). He moves his hands like this (cause) and the dough is moved like that (effect). These are not (pace Hume) 'entirely loose and separate' successive events. There's but one event (that of kneading) twice told. (Thus Aquinas [in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics]: ‘Action and passion are not two changes but one and the same change, called action in so far as it is caused by an agent, and passion in so far as it takes place in a patient.’) And, besides, not all examples of causation are examples of events. There's causation in books leaning against each other, such that they don't fall over, but this is a state, not an event.

Look at these colourful events!

We could keep going—we could talk about Hume's conflation of concepts and images or about his performative self-contradictions (e.g. 'All knowable propositions concern either relations of ideas or matters of fact')—but enough's enough. The message in all of this isn't that the mediæval philosophers were right. The message is: slow down. (Wittgenstein: 'This is how philosophers should greet each other: "Take your time!" ') Are you lost? Bethink yourself, for maybe you took a wrong turn, or maybe your premises misdirected you. Even Hume says as much, almost writing an epigram upon himself as he animadverts against occasionalism:

'Though the chain of arguments, which conduct to it, were ever so logical, there must arise a strong suspicion, if not an absolute assurance, that it has carried us quite beyond the reach of our faculties, when it leads to conclusions so extraordinary, and so remote from common life and experience. We are got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory.' (Enquiry, p. 67)

Well, well. With fairy-land friends like him, Modernskyism doesn't need enemies.

For Sarah R. ('Too much the daughter of Hume.')

PS: It's amusing that scientistic 'sceptics' nowadays adulate Hume. Had the Humeans their way, science would be done for, and scientism would be an even bigger joke than it already is. (But Daniel Dennett will wear his velvetine headpiece notwithstanding.)

A.N. Whitehead put it this way (in 1926):

'Since the time of Hume, the fashionable scientific philosophy has been as such as to deny the rationality of science. This conclusion lies upon the surface of Hume's philosophy ... If the cause in itself discloses no information as to the effect, so that the first invention of it must be entirely arbitrary, it follows at once that science is impossible, except in the sense of establishing entirely arbitrary connections which are not warranted by anything intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects. Some variant of Hume's philosophy has generally prevailed among men of science. But scientific faith has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the philosophic mountain ... [Therefore science] has remained a predominantly anti-rationalistic movement, based upon a naive faith ... It has never cared to justify its faith or to explain its meanings; and has remained blandly indifferent to its refutation by Hume.' (Science and the Modern World, pp. 4-5, 20.)

Whitehead also propounded an answer to Hume:

'We must recur to the method of the school-divinity as explained by the Italian mediævalists' (Ibid., p. 55).

PPS: Herr Nietzsche understands:

'We reason, "this and that must precede for that to follow"—but we haven't thereby understood anything. The specifically qualitative aspect for example of every chemical process, still appears to be a "miracle," as does every locomotion; no one has "explained" the push. And how could we explain! We are operating only with things that do not exist—with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces. How is explanation to be at all possible when we first turn everything into a picture—our picture!' (The Gay Science, §112.)  

' "Cause and effect." In this mirror—and our intellect is a mirror—something is taking place that exhibits regularity, a certain thing always succeeds another certain thing—this we call, when we perceive it and want to call it something, cause and effect—we fools! As though we had here understood something or other, or could understand it! For we have seen nothing but pictures of "causes and effects"! And it is precisely this pictorialness that makes impossible an insight into a more essential connection than that of mere succession.' (Daybreak, §121.) 

The wrong drawer ...

'Don't put the phenomenon in the wrong drawer. There it looks ghostly, intangible, uncanny. Looking at it rightly, we no more think of its intangibility than we do of time's intangibility when we hear: "It's time for dinner!" (Disquiet from an ill-fitting classification.)'

—Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (Vol. I), § 380.

A forgotten lesson ...

Aristotle

Aristotle (Metaphysics XIII) on the reification of the mathematical:

'It is said that the objects of mathematics—i.e. numbers and lines and the like—are substances,' and some say moreover 'that the mathematical substances are the only substances.' But conclusions contrary to the truth follow, 'if one supposes the objects of mathematics to exist thus as separate entities. For if they exist thus they must be prior to sensible spatial magnitudes, but in truth they must be posterior; for the incomplete spatial magnitude is in the order of generation prior, but in the order of substance posterior, as the lifeless is to the living ...'

'Grant that they are prior in formula. Still not all things which are prior in formula are prior in substance. For those things are prior in substance which when separated from other things surpass them in the power of independent existence, but those arc prior in formula out of whose formulae the formulae of other things are compounded; and these two properties are not coextensive. For if attributes, such as "moving" or "white," do not exist apart from their substances, the white is prior to the white man in formula, but not in substance. For it cannot exist separately, but is always along with the concrete thing; and by the concrete thing I mean the white man. Therefore it is plain that neither is the result of abstraction prior nor that which is produced by adding determinants posterior; for it is by adding a determinant to the white that we speak of the white man.'

Chomsky on today's materialism ...

Chomps

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia UP, 2016) is Noam Chomsky's latest (and perhaps last-est) word on philosophy's big questions. The final chapter of the book is an exercise in what Aristotelians call philosophy of nature, an intermediary discipline between metaphysics and science. There Chomsky argues that the terms material, physical, natural (et al) are basically meaningless nowadays. (And what, then, is it to be a materialist, a physicalist, a naturalist? Cf. the  posts on Galen Strawson here, here, and here.) See, 'we speak of the "physical" world much as we speak of the "real" truth: for emphasis, but adding nothing' (What Kind of Creatures Are We?, p. 105).

'[T]he notions of body, material, physical are hardly more than honorific designations for what is more or less understood at some particular moment in time, with flexible boundaries and no guarantee that there will not be radical revision ahead, even at its core' (ibid., p. 102).

'[T]he concept "physical facts" means nothing more than what the best current scientific theory postulates, hence should be seen as a rhetorical device of clarification, adding no substantive content' (ibid., p. 125). 

Whatever happened to the 'substantive content'? As metaphysicians of matter, the early modern revolutionaries were mechanists.* What does that mean? Chomsky understands the mechanical as that which 'an artisan could construct' (ibid., p. 91). This is correct, inasmuch as all that's mechanical is (theoretically) constructible, but it doesn't get to the centre of the question. At the centre is this: the early modern understanding of matter (or of that which is material) was dysteleologico-nominal. What does that mean? It's helpful to look back to the later mediæval metaphysics, against which Kepler, Galileo, Descartes (and so on) positioned themselves. For Aristotelian metaphysicians, such as Aquinas and Scotus, the difference between an organism and an artefact is teleologico-essential. That is to say, an organism (an example of physis) has an intrinsic teleology and a substantial form, and is in this sense autotelic; whereas an artefact (a product of techne) has an extrinsic teleology and an accidental form, and is in this sense exotelic. The bisect that's made here isn't at all trivial. Its consequences are both intensive and extensive. (Take an example: the causation manifest in an organism is both immanent and transient—immanent in that it begins with the organism and terminates in the organism for the sake of the organism, to adapt David Oderberg—whereas that manifest in an artefact is transient simpliciter.) But here's the kicker, these teleologico-essential concepts (themselves the centuries-absent 'substantive content') are irreducibly qualitative, and the early moderns argued that the material world is to be understood in a reductively quantitative way. They therefore rejected these concepts as immaterial, nonphysical, supernatural, etc., necessitating substance dualism. The upshot is that, armed with mathematism, techne drove physis out of the cosmos altogether, and God was demoted from actus purus to artifex maximus, a supersmart artificer-demiurge. (Whence Pascal's criticisms of  Cartesianism qua proto-deism, a philosophy which would've liked to do without God, but 'couldn't help allowing him a flick of the finger to set the world in motion.' Cf. Kierkegaard: 'In scientific distraction people made God into a rather stupid God.') There are inferior man-made machines (e.g. levers and pulleys and cathode-ray tubes) and there are superior God-made machines (e.g. molecules and plants and animals)—that's all.†

[Off-piste addendum: 'History is written by the winners.' We're repeatedly told in the textbooks that scientists (qua scientists) discovered that the world was dysteleologico-nominal. But how could that be? No, that the world is thus-and-so was a conceptual decision, not (per absurdum) an empirical discovery.]

Note that we're still mechanists today, inasmuch as we're still dysteleologico-nominal. The atomistic (or corpuscular) push-pull causation, the Cartesian contact mechanics, and so on, gave place to the conclusions of the Newtonian and quantum-theoretic revolutions. But these are internal revolutions, internal to a subsisting mathematism.

What's frustrating is that the same philosophers who tell us that the terms 'material,' 'physical,' 'natural' are empty husks, e.g. Bertrand Russell, try to feed them to us as good eating nonetheless—an aporia. Chomsky picks up on this, noting that when Russell says 'experience is "part of the material of the physical world," ' this means 'no more than "part of the world" ' (ibid., p. 102). Thus Chomsky suggests 'simply dropping the words "matter" and "physical" ' (ibid., p. 105), and that's a start. What comes next?

In the end Chomps himself retires to a mysterianism, believing that there are probably 'ultimate secrets that will ever remain in obscurity, impenetrable to human intelligence' (ibid., p. 127). For 'if we are biological organisms, not angels, much of what we seek to understand might lie beyond our cognitive limits ... There is no reason to believe that humans can solve every problem they pose or even that they can formulate the right questions; they may simply lack the conceptual tools, just as rats cannot deal with a prime number maze' (ibid., pp.104-5). His position is not unlike Pascal's:

'Let us then realise our limitations. We are something and we are not everything ... Our intelligence occupies the same rank in the order of intellect as our body in the whole range of nature. Limited in every respect, we find this intermediate state between two extremes reflected on all our faculties. Our senses can perceive nothing extreme; too much noise deafens us, too much light dazzles; when we are too far or too close we cannot see properly; an argument is obscured by being too long or too short; too much truth bewilders us ... In a word, extremes are as if they did not exist for us nor we for them; they escape us or we escape them.' 

'Such is our true state. That is what makes us incapable of true knowledge or absolute ignorance. We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks, and the earth opens up into the depth of the abyss.' (Pensée 199)

* 'The label "mechanistic philosophy" or "mechanicism" should be handled with care, as it was not employed by the novatores themselves' (Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, p. 6).

†A difference of degree, not kind; the definition of God-made machines is comparatively compounded (e.g. 'machinam hydraulico-pneumatico-pyriam'). Leibniz: 'An organism is formally nothing other than a mechanism, even if it is more exquisite and divine.' Herr Leibniz would later try to restore full godhead (to the all-too-human demigod of the moderni) by infinitizing the mechanical complexity of God's machines. See, for example, Guido Giglioni's Automata Compared.

Pointer readings ...

Eddington and friends

From Sir Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World:

'Let us then examine the kind of knowledge which is handled by exact science. If we search the examination papers in physics and natural philosophy for the more intelligible questions we may come across one beginning something like this: "An elephant slides down a grassy hillside…" The experienced candidate knows that he need not pay much attention to this; it is only put in to give an impression of realism. He reads on: "The mass of the elephant is two tons." Now we are getting down to business; the elephant fades out of the problem and a mass of two tons takes its place. What exactly is this two tons, the real subject matter of the problem? It refers to some property or condition which we vaguely describe as "ponderosity" occurring in a particular region of the external world. But we shall not get much further that way; the nature of the external world is inscrutable, and we shall only plunge into a quagmire of indescribables. Never mind what the two tons refers to; what is it? How has it actually entered in so definite a way into our experience? Two tons is the reading of a pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing-machine. Let us pass on. "The slope of the hill is 60˚." Now the hillside fades out of the problem and an angle of 60˚ takes its place. What is 60˚? There is no need to struggle with mystical conceptions of direction; 60˚ is the reading of a plumb-line against the divisions of a protractor. Similarly for the other data of the problem. The softly yielding turf on which the elephant slides is replaced by a coefficient of friction, which though perhaps not directly a pointer reading is of kindred nature. No doubt there are more roundabout ways used in practice for determining the weights of elephants and the slopes of hills, but these are justified because it is known that they give the same results as direct pointer readings.' 

'And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left with only pointer readings. If then only pointer readings or their equivalents are put into the machine of scientific calculation, how can we grind out anything but pointer readings? But that is just what we do grind out. The question presumably was to find the time of descent of the elephant, and the answer is a pointer reading on the seconds’ dial of our watch.' 

'The triumph of exact science in the foregoing problem consisted in establishing a numerical connection between the pointer reading on the weighing-machine on one experiment on the elephant and the pointer reading on a watch in another experiment. And when we examine critically other problems of physics we find that this is typical. The whole subject matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications' (p. 127).