Daniel Dennett's Latest

Thomas Nagel reviews Daniel Dennett's latest book here in the New York Review of Books. I've read most of what Dennett has written and this book doesn't seem to break much new ground, so I don't think I'll plunk down the $15 for it.

Dennett references Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image", which correspond to the everyday view of the world and the scientific view of the world. Nagel quotes Dennett describing the manifest image as:

full of other people, plants, and animals, furniture and houses and cars…and colors and rainbows and sunsets, and voices and haircuts, and home runs and dollars, and problems and opportunities and mistakes, among many other such things. These are the myriad “things” that are easy for us to recognize, point to, love or hate, and, in many cases, manipulate or even create…. It’s the world according to us.

while the scientific image is:

is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else (dark energy, strings? branes?).

According to Dennett, the scientific image describes what the world is really like, while the manifest image is just how the world appears to us, a set of "user illusions" evolution has equipped us with to get on with the world. Nagel doesn't mention him but Kant is lurking behind here, as he always is with Dennett.

As is typical with Dennett, what is most important is not what he says but what he leaves out. In his description of the manifest image, in particular, we can include not just homeruns and haircuts, but also telescopes, microscopes, voltmeters, scientific conferences and the scientific method. In other words, it's only through the manifest image that the scientific image is even possible or has meaning. The relationship between them is not that of equals, but of priority: The manifest image is prior to the scientific image both logically and temporally. Thinking you can undermine the manifest image with the scientific image is like thinking you can observe real bacteria with a fake microscope.

Method and Dialectic

In the comments section of this post on atheistic teleology over at Edward Feser's blog,  I had an extended discussion with an intelligent non-Aristotelian regarding the nature of final causes. As often happens in these cases, my interlocutor demanded in one of his comments that I present and defend a method for investigating final causes as a necessary prerequisite to continuing the discussion. As he put it, how could we know we are tracking the truth and not merely indulging in wishful thinking without an established method up front? I resisted, for I well knew that the insistence on an a priori establishment of method involves a host of philosophical assumptions (and mistakes, in my view) that pretty much give the store away to Enlightenment style thinking vs an Aristotelian approach. As an alternative, I proposed dialectic, which my interlocutor interpreted as a form of method (naturally, as he thinks thought must begin with method), and a poor one at that. Well, he was right to the extent that dialectic is a pretty shabby thing if it is interpreted as a degenerate form of the modern methodical approach. But it isn't such a degenerate form; it is a genuine intellectual alternative to method and is necessarily distorted if it is interpreted under the category of method. In fact, it is more accurate to conceive of the modern insistence on method as itself a degenerate form of dialectic.

We can see this through two people, one at the beginning of modern thought and the other a contemporary modern thinker. The first is Descartes, who it may be argued was the foundational thinker of modern thought by establishing the insistence on method as an intellectual first principle. The other is Daniel Dennett, a champion of method in contemporary thought and the supposed scourge of Cartesianism in the philosophy of mind. But as I argue in this post, Dennett is mistaken in seeing dualism as a foundational principle of Cartesianism; it is method that is the foundational principle and it is the insistence on method that has the consequence of dualism. This is why the contemporary philosophy of mind is so haunted by Cartesianism and why thinkers like Dennett, the more they struggle to free themselves of Descartes through method, only find themselves more tightly bound to him.

The problem with insisting on method as primary in thought is that it isn't. It isn't personally, as we all explore and come to know the world as youth without an a priori method in hand. It isn't historically, as there was an undeniable body of knowledge accrued through cultural accumulation over millenia. Nor was it even true of the seventeenth century philosophers who began to insist on the primacy of method. Descartes begins his Discourse on Method not with a method, but with an extended justification of his insistence on method in terms of his historical views and personal experience. He dismisses the philosophical tradition with this comment:

I will say nothing of philosophy except that it has been studied for many centuries by the most outstanding minds without having produced anything which is not in dispute and consequently doubtful and uncertain. (Discourse on Method, First Part)

He then goes on in the Second Part to describe the rules of his method and later, in the Fourth Part, summarizes the method thusly:

... I thought that I should take a course precisely contrary, and reject as absolutely false anything of which I could have the least doubt, in order to see whether anything would be left after this procedure which could be called wholly certain.

When he began implementing his method, Descartes doubted many things, but not everything.  He certainly didn't doubt his original historical assessment of philosophy as doubtful and uncertain, his main justification for method in the first place. If he had, he might have considered points like this: If the mere fact of disputation is sufficient to condemn something as uncertain, then uncertainty is a self-fulfilling prophecy, for we can render something uncertain merely by disputing it. And this, in a just historical irony, is exactly what later happened to Descartes and his method.

The point is that Descartes did not doubt everything because he couldn't. However skeptical he wished to become, Descartes remained a man nonetheless, an embodied knower forced to found his thinking in common sense and nowhere else. There is an entire worldview of thought and history buried in the first part of Descartes's Discourse; his insistence on method has the effect of protecting that worldview from criticism (dialectical criticism) or even acknowledgement that it exists. This is why the insistence on primary method can be considered a debased form of dialectic. All it does is hide the non-methodical assumptions from view and protect them from dialectical criticism. It doesn't transcend dialectic or protect itself from the pathologies of a degenerate dialectic, but only provides the illusion of transcending dialectic by assuming dialectical conclusions without argument.

We can see why philosophy has gotten such a bad reputation in the modern world. The reason is that modern philosophers, beholden to method, find it nearly impossible to engage on the issues that really separate them. For those issues involve the pre-methodical views of the world they must have and that inform their selection and establishment of method. In that earlier post I mention John Searle, who in his books on the mind states flatly his assumption that the fundamental particles described by physics are also the metaphysical fundamentals of reality, and that anyone who disagrees with this should be summarily dismissed. Searle, like Descartes, makes an a priori insistence on method in thought, only Searle's method is the method of science rather than the method of universal doubt of Descartes. But in any case, science is a product of the mind, and to insist a priori on the non-negotiability of the metaphysical significance of science is to already cast in concrete certain conclusions about the mind, e.g. that the mind is such that its methodical conclusions are more certain than any other conclusions it might make. Naturally, the view of the mind baked into Searle's assumptions about the metaphysical meaning of science is not indisputable, but disputing it is very difficult, because Searle has made his scientistic assumptions a barrier to entry to conversation (if you don't accept them, you are not worth talking to). Searle is not unusual but typical in this regard. And since not every thinker will make the same pre-methodical assumptions, discussions between modern thinkers have the flavor of circling the real issue in dispute without ever quite getting to it; for the disputants assume that "real thought" can only begin with their preferred approach, and when it becomes clear that the disputant does not share the same pre-methodical assumptions, bad faith or naivete is concluded.

In the dialog in response to the post on Feser's blog, my disputant insisted that I propose a method before we could discuss the metaphysical ordering of final causes. Without that, he asserted, we could be the victims of wishful thinking, psychological bias, and have no way to know whether we were tracking the truth. Now if I were to accept his demand, I would be implicitly agreeing to his views on wishful thinking, psychological bias and the rest as pre-methodical established facts, for those facts would stand in judgment of any method I might propose. But my insistence is that final causes and their ordering are primary facts about nature that stand in judgment of method rather than vice versa. For instance, why are we concerned with wishful thinking at all? Wishful thinking is a form of error, that is, failure to fulfill the final cause of the intellect to know the truth. Methods are to be judged in light of the extent to which they fulfill the final cause of the mind to know truth. But if the final cause of the mind is doubtful, what objective reason is there to prefer truth to error? Moreover, to allow facts like wishful thinking to implicitly stand in judgment of facts like the final cause of the mind is to already concede the case against final causes; for if final causes are not basic facts of nature at least as transparent as facts about wishful thinking, then they are nothing at all, or at best the illusions modern thinkers think they are.

The point is not that the brief analysis I just gave is a knockout argument in favor of final causes, but that the real point of disagreement between us is at a level that can only be resolved dialectically rather than by an a priori assertion of method. Were I to give into his demands for method, I would be conceding the case against final causes at the outset. The discussion would then be a playing out of that logic to its inevitable conclusion against final causes, or dawn in the eventual realization that the real argument is to be found in the category of pre-methodical facts of nature rather than post-methodical conclusions, at which point the original concession would have to be rescinded (perhaps generating an accusation of bad faith).

I brought up Daniel Dennett in the conversation, and he is a good example of how pre-methodical facts are unconsciously assumed in the development of method that is then used to bludgeon all rivals. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett develops a method for exploring consciousness called "heterophenomology." Like Descartes, prior to explaining and deploying his method, he gives reasons for its development. For Descartes, the villain was the endless disputes of philosophers; for Dennett it is "introspection:"

Or perhaps we are fooling ourselves about the high reliability of introspection, our personal powers of self-observation of our own conscious minds. Ever since Descartes and his "cogito ergo sum," this capacity of ours has been seen as somehow immune to error; we have privileged access to our own thoughts and feelings, an access guaranteed to be better than the access of any outsider...

But perhaps this doctrine of infallibility is just a mistake, however well entrenched. Perhaps even if we are all basically alike in our phenomenology, some observers just get it all wrong when they try to describe it, but since they are so sure they are right, they are relatively invulnerable to correction. (Consciousness Explained, p. 67)

The qualification "some" Dennett puts in front of "observers" may seem inconsequential, but it is crucial to the further development of his project. But more on this in a moment. The idea is that Dennett plans to put the subjective experience of consciousness under suspicion. Rather than accepting at face value what subjects say about their consciousness, Dennett will take a step back and only commit to saying that, when a subject describes his consciousness, we can only strictly conclude that what they are describing is how their consciousness seems to them, not necessarily how their consciousness really is. It may be that how their consciousness really is may coincide with how it seems to them, but then again it may not. Dennett uses the example of anthropologists encountering a primitive tribe. The natives speak of a being called Feenoman, whom the anthropologists gradually figure out is a kind of forest god. The "heterophenomenological fact" here is the fact that the natives are truly and sincerely speaking of Feenoman. But that Feenoman is fictional rather than real is something known to the anthropologists and not the natives; in other words, the anthropologists are able to discern how the native's world seems to them (Feenoman is just as real as anything else) compared to how it really is (Feenoman is fictional). More deeply, the cause of the natives belief in Feenoman is not the existence of the real Feenoman (as the natives think), but some other complex of causes unrelated to an actual Feenoman (since their isn't one).

Dennett's plan is to extend this procedure beyond native beliefs in forest gods to the contents of consciousness in general. His ultimate target is the experience of the unitary "I" itself, which Dennett calls the "Cartesian theater", and he claims in good heterophenomenological fashion to only seem to be real rather than really be real. The procedure is to interview subjects about their experiences of consciousness, and remain objectively neutral as regards their veridical nature until a complete account has been given. The interviewer is happy to grant the subject the authority to define how his conscious experience seems to him, but certainly not how his subjective experiences ultimately relate to reality. This is done later in an analogous manner to the anthropologist described above. And if he finds, like the anthropologist, that there are no objective reasons to believe in the reality of some element of the subject's conscious experience, and he can provide an alternative causal explanation for the subject's seeming to experience it, then the element in question can be reasonably dismissed as illusion. At the end of process, you end up with what is really true about consciousness, results the interview subject should then accept as a generous gift, but usually rebels against because his cherished beliefs in things like the self and gods are shown to be illusions.

Now I mentioned that it is critical that Dennett used the phrase "some observers" in the paragraph quoted above. This is because of the problem of the Prime Interviewer, a problem latent in the heterophenomenological procedure but not acknowledged by Dennett. With respect to subjects who do not meekly submit to heterophenomenological conclusions but have the temerity to question its authority to debunk consciousness, Dennett has this to say:

If you want us to believe everything you say about your phenomenology, you are asking not just to be taken seriously but to be granted papal infallibility, and this asking too much. You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you, and we are giving you total, dictatorial authority over the account of how it seems to you, about what it is like to be you. (p. 96, emphasis in original.)

Well, who has the authority to pronounce on how things really are, and not just how they seem? The interviewer, naturally. But the interviewer is just a man like the subject, and so presumably subject to the same cognitive suspicion as everyone else. He is only authoritative about what things seem like to him, not how things really are. If he is to legitimately serve as a heterophenomenological authority, it stands to reason that he must have already gone through a prior heterophenomenological vetting so that he could know what is real and what is illusion with respect to his own consciousness. No doubt you can see the infinite regress coming, and at some point there must be a Prime Interviewer, an individual whose consciousness is itself not under suspicion so it can serve as the methodical anchor for all other consciousnesses. In the paragraph quoted above, if Dennett had written that "Perhaps even if we are all basically alike in our phenomenology, all observers just get it all wrong when they try to describe it.." rather than just "some" observers, the problem of the Prime Interviewer would have been made explicit. If all observers get it wrong, how can the method get going? No points for guessing who gets the mantle of implicit Prime Interviewer in Consciousness Explained.

The method Dennett describes in Consciousness Explained is really just a way of privileging certain pre-scientific, pre-methodical scientistic assumptions by baking them into the cake of his method, then demanding that all other accounts of consciousness submit to the strictures of his method, which of course means that his pre-methodical account of things must triumph. Dialectic has not been transcended through method; it has merely been avoided through pre-methodical assumptions, and will inevitably reemerge when those assumptions are disputed. Which is why Dennett must order his reader to accept his results.

There are of course cases in which it is appropriate to establish a method and remain suspicious of conclusions not arrived at methodically. But the establishment of method cannot substitute for a dialectical justification of the method itself. And, finally, method cannot be the first thing in thought, for method is not self-evident, otherwise everyone would have it and there would not be disputes about methods. This is one of the many ironies of the modern age. The Enlightenment insistence on method was supposed to put an end to the endless dialectical wranglings of philosophers; instead it just substituted endless wrangling about method, a wrangling that is worse than dialectical because the dialectics were assumed and then forgotten in assumptions about method.

Kant, Judgment and the Mind

It always seemed to me, when I was taking physics, that I wasn't really being taught physics. Or, at least, that what was really important about physics was a secret art behind it on which you were tested, but about which the instructors maintained a conspiratorial silence. Newton's Three Laws, for instance, are straightforward in statement and not terribly difficult to understand. But understanding Newton's Three Laws is not really what physics courses are about.

Newton's Laws are cast in terms of forces, masses and accelerations. Such things don't appear on physics tests. What you get on physics tests are pulleys, ramps, blocks, rockets, skiers, race cars, trains, planes and automobiles. The secret art behind physics that is necessary for the tests is how to go from the race cars and blocks of real life to the forces, masses and accelerations of Newtonian theory. Once you've made that translation, the application of Newton's laws is straightforward and usually little more than routine. But in my experience, physics instruction stumbled just where it was needed most - a clear, methodical way to make the translation from real beings like blocks and pulleys to the physical abstractions. This isn't to say that such translations weren't extensively practiced; they were, but the practice was an end in itself. You either "got it" from extensive practice and examples of successful solutions, or you didn't. The critical skill involved in performing physics was just the one instructors couldn't say much about.

It wasn't until I read Kant that I understood why this was so. The relevant passage is in the Critique of Pure Reason, The Transcendental Analytic, Second Book, The Analytic Principles, Introduction - On the transcendental power of judgment in general.

If the understanding in general is explained as the faculty of rules, then the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules. i.e. of determining whether something stands under a given rule (casus datae legis) or not. General logic contains no precepts at all for the power of judgment, and moreover cannot contain them. For since it abstracts from all content of cognition, nothing remains to it but the business of analytically dividing the mere form of cognition into concepts, judgments and inferences, and thereby achieving formal rules for all use of the understanding. Now if it wanted to show generally how one ought to subsume under these rules, i.e., distinguish whether something stands under them or not, this could not happen except once again through a rule. But just because this is a rule, it would demand another instruction for the power of judgment, and it becomes clear that although the understanding is certainly capable of being instructed and equipped through rules, the power of judgment is a special talent that cannot be taught but only practiced. Thus this is also what is specific to so-called mother-wit, the lack of which cannot be made good by any school; for, although such a school can provide a limited understanding with plenty of rules borrowed from the insight of others and as it were graft these onto it, nevertheless the faculty of making use of them correctly must belong to the student himself, and in the absence of such a natural gift no rule that one might prescribe to him for this aim is safe from misuse. A physician therefore, a judge, or a statesmen, can have many fine pathological, juridical, or political rules in his head, of which he can even be a thorough teacher, and yet can easily stumble in their application, either because he is lacking in natural power of judgment (though not in understanding), and to be sure understand the universal in abstracto but cannot distinguish whether a case in concreto belongs under it, or also because he has not received adequate training for this judgement through examples and actual business.

The secret art I sensed behind physics is what Kant calls judgment; the faculty of subsuming the concrete particular under general rules. In the case of physics, the general rules are Newton's Three Laws, the concrete particular are the blocks and pulleys of any given problem. Kant explains why instructors can't do much more than provide examples in developing the faculty of judgment. Using an argument to infinity, he notes that were instructors able to formulate a rule to apply the rules, that would only push the difficulty back one step, because it would still require an act of judgment to apply the meta-rule.

Kant recognized the deep mystery behind modern empirical science. That science is so powerful and exact, Kant saw, because it is formulated in terms that the mind itself creates. Chet Raymo notes this in Ch. 1 of Skeptics and True Believers, but he doesn't follow through on its deep implications:

"No scientist will dispute that 'atom' is a made-up concept; however, the concept 'atom' is the most concise way - perhaps the only way - to make sense of our detailed, quantitative experience of the material world."

Raymo doesn't mention the linkage Kant saw in the Critique: "atom" is the most concise way to make sense of experience because it is a "made-up" concept. Kant further saw that because science conducts itself in terms of "made-up" concepts, there will always be an unfathomable mystery at the bottom of both science and the mind that conducts it. On the objective side, that mystery is captured in the distinction between the phenomenal (things as they appear to us through our scientific concepts) and the noumenal (things as they are in themselves.) We know reality through our "made-up" concept of "atom." This is the human mind's "take" on reality; it surely reflects something true about reality, but it is reality filtered through the concepts the mind makes up to make reality intelligible. We can be confident that the concept "atom" reflects something true about reality, and even that it is our best way of getting at that truth, but we have no way of accessing the "pre-filtered" reality (the noumena) prior to its interpretation through the concept "atom."

On the subjective side, the mystery is reflected in the act of judgment, which is the act of the mind subsuming particular reality under the general rules of science, including general scientific concepts. The act of judgment is prior to science itself, since science only works with its own concepts, and can have nothing to say about how the mind captures reality in the concepts that make science itself possible. Newtonian physics gets rolling with forces, masses and accelerations; these are the only things it "knows." How the mind subsumes reality under Newtonian concepts is a question Newtonian science, or any other science, can say nothing about. This is why physics instructors can provide practice in the act of judgment, but can do no more than that.

An immediate conclusion from Kant's Critique is that a "science of the mind" of the kind being hotly pursued today, is an exercise in futility. The mind that "makes-up" the concepts that make science itself possible will always be invisible to that science, since it is always prior to it. As soon as science starts, it has left behind the mind that made science possible. What the mind can know at this point is only the mind as it appears on the far side of its scientific concepts; in other words, the mind only insofar as the act of scientific judgment has already occurred.

This explains why contemporary scientists and philosophers of the mind seem so often to talk past each other. None of them have really understood Kant and taken him to heart. They all start their philo-scientific investigations the way Kant says they must start, with a pre-scientific rendering of reality under scientific concepts through an act of judgment. This rendering is the most crucial and decisive part of their investigation, but is generally the part least talked about and the most taken for granted. It usually happens in an introduction or a couple of paragraphs, followed by hundreds and hundreds of pages of conclusions from the mind science that results from that initial pre-scientific judgment. Since there is no guarantee that everyone's pre-scientific judgments will be the same, there is no guarantee that all the mind researchers will make the same acts of judgment, and so no guarantee that they will arrive at the same conclusions, or even that they will conduct science in a way that others researchers find legitimate. But there is no recognition that the reason the results are different isn't because the science is different, but because the pre-science is different, and no amount of scientific research can ever resolve the difference.

The acrimony results because every mind researcher senses that his rivals are "stealing a base", but he is at a loss as to say how. Everyone is right that everyone else is stealing a base, of course, because the base stolen is the pre-scientific act of judgment that makes science possible. We've lost the philosophical self-awareness of a great philosopher like Immanuel Kant, who recognized that his own subjective act of judgment is not absolute and is not binding on everyone else. The Critique is truly a philosophical work, because it invites the reader's mind to know itself through itself, relying on its own insight and acts of judgment, not taking Kant's judgments to be absolute. Instead, the mind researcher of today takes his own act of judgment to be absolute, although not self-consciously, and implicitly demands that everyone else submit to it. Of course, all the other researchers want to start their research with their own absolute acts of judgment, and the fight is on.

Daniel Dennett, inadvertently, provides a window into this phenomenon with his concept of "heterophenomenology", his take on how mind science should be conducted, as described in Consciousness Explained. Under heterophenomenology, the mind researcher interviews a subject and gets the subject's account and interpretation of his own experience. He claims to see trees and birds, to experience emotions, feel pain, and even - Dennett's ultimate target - to experience a sense of self. During the interview, the researcher withholds judgment concerning the truth of the subject's experience; although it may seem to the subject that he saw trees or birds, or seem to him that he has a self, this all may in fact be an illusion. This is something that will be decided in the course of the researcher's later scientific investigations of the mind, which will follow on the collection of a set of interviews and lab work.

With his interviews in hand, the researcher begins his investigations. How does he do it? By beginning with acts of pre-scientific judgment of the kind he denied to his interview subjects. He decides that the "mind" or the "self" is something shadowy and possibly unreal, and that the "brain" is a hard, metaphysical fact, the reality of which is unchallengeable. What about the birds and trees the subject claims to have seen? Those may or may not be real, pending the outcome of the investigation, but the investigator's own sense that he was a real interviewer interviewing a real subject is not subject to any doubt, in fact being a prerequisite to get the scientific investigation under way. What has happened is very simple: The investigator has simply assumed that his own act of judgment is absolute with respect to his subject's acts of judgment. This is what separates Dennett, and the general run of mind researchers, from Immanuel Kant, whom they are still way behind even if they think they are miles in front of him.

John Searle's Philosophy of Mind

John Searle's place in the contemporary philosophy of mind is that of someone who accepts the materialistic premises of the mainstream philosophy of mind, but wishes to avoid the reductionist conclusions to which it invariably leads. As he puts it in the Introduction to The Rediscovery of the Mind:

"What I argued for then (Searle 1984b) and repeat here is that one can accept the obvious facts of physics - that the world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force - without denying that among the physical features of the world are biological phenomena such as inner qualitative states of consciousness and intrinsic intentionality."

Later in Ch. 10 he writes this:

"I see the human brain as an organ like any other, as a biological system. Its special feature, as far as the mind is concerned, the feature in which it differs remarkably from other biological organs, is its capacity to produce and sustain all of the enormous variety of consciousness life."

In the Epilogue to Mind, A Brief Introduction, he writes this:

"I have tried to give an account of the mind that will situate mental phenomena as part of the natural world. Our account of the mind in all of its aspects - consciousness, intentionality, free will, mental causation, perception, intentional action, etc. - is naturalistic in this sense: first, it treats mental phenomena as just a part of nature. We should think of consciousness and intentionality as just as much a part of the natural world as photosynthesis or digestion. Second, the explanatory apparatus that we use to give a causal account of mental phenomena is an apparatus that we need to account for nature generally. The level at which we attempt to account for mental phenomena is biological rather than, say, at the level of subatomic physics. The reason for this is that consciousness and other mental phenomena are biological phenomena; they are created by biological processes and are specific to certain biological organisms."

He then goes on to tell us that "science does not name an ontological domain; it names rather a set of methods for finding out about anything at all that admits of systematic investigation." So the "explanatory apparatus" that we use to account for nature generally, and that we must use to investigate the mind, is that of ordinary empirical science. Searle's distinctive approach to the philosophy of mind is to hold these two principles in tension: 1) That the traditional philosophical features of the mind - e.g. consciousness, free will, intentionality - are real things in the world that require explanation rather than merely being explained away, and 2) The empirical sciences are the only way to systematically explore nature, and so the empirical sciences (specifically, biology) must account for the phenomena referred to in principle #1.

The problem for Searle's philosophy is that the tension of his two principles is fatal. There is consciousness, free will and intentionality in science, but it is all found in the mind of the scientist conducting the science, not in any of the products that result from his science - even if that product is a scientific account of the mind itself. Neuroscientists, for example, spend a lot of time stimulating the brains of subjects in various ways, inducing sensory experiences (seeing colors, hearing sounds), making them feel different things from sadness to religious-like awe, or changing their perception of themselves or the world. These experiences are mapped back onto the brain regions from which they are stimulated. There is no possible freedom on the part of the subjects; they either see the color or they don't. Suppose scientists tried to stimulate a "free act." They stimulate an area of your brain and you raise your right arm. They stimulate the same area again and you raise your left arm. They stimulate it again and you whistle "Dixie." They stimulate it yet again and you recite the Nicene Creed. What would the scientific conclusion be? That they had stimulated a "free act?" No, the only possible scientific conclusion would be that their experiments had not been done with sufficient care and that they were not really stimulating exactly the same brain cells every time.  In fact, your physical brain will not be in exactly the same condition from each experiment to the next, since it is continually changing in minor material ways as a matter of nature. The only possible scientific result is "failed experiment", not "science discovers free will", for the latter is an impossibility. 

Similar points can be made with respect to the other interesting features of the mind. The essential feature of consciousness, for example, is that it is a viewpoint from the center of the world, the "subjective viewpoint." The subjective viewpoint in science is that of the scientist. The subjective viewpoint of the subject is necessarily treated as an objective element in the scientific world of the scientist, with the scientist and not the subject at the center; the subjective viewpoint of the subject therefore appears in the scientific world as something it is not, or rather, it doesn't appear at all. There is consciousness in science, of course - the consciousness of the scientist and no other.

Daniel Dennett is a philosopher who accepts the same principles as Searle, but also accepts the obvious and necessary results. If science is how we know reality, and the subjective features of the mind do not appear for science, then we must conclude that the subjective features of the mind are not real. Searle sums up Dennett's position smartly in Ch. 5 of his Mystery of Consciousness:

"The problem of consciousness in both philosophy and the natural sciences is to explain these subjective feelings. Not all of them are bodily sensations like pain. The stream of conscious thought is not a bodily sensation comparable to feeling pinched and neither are visual experiences; yet both have the quality of ontological subjectivity that I have been talking about. The subjective feelings are the data that a theory of consciousness has to explain... The peculiarity of Daniel Dennett's book can now be stated: he denies the existence of the data. He thinks there are no such things as the second sort of entity, the feeling of pain. He thinks there are not such things as qualia, subjective experiences, first-person phenomena, or any of the rest of it. Dennett agrees that it seems to us that there are such things as qualia, but this is a matter of mistaken judgment we are making about what really happens."

Dennett is exactly right to deny the existence of the data, for the data as Searle describes them are not scientific data. "Subjective experiences" cannot be scientific data, for the only subjective experience that counts in science is the subjective experience of the scientist; the subjective experience of the subject appears in science only as an objective element in the subjective experience of the scientist; in other words, not as a subjective experience at all. Since, for both Dennett and Searle, science determines the nature and extent of the real, subjective experiences can't be real. Searle's two basic principles are in fundamental conflict.

Why Descartes Haunts the Philosophy of Mind

If there is a premier villain in the modern philosophy of mind, it is Rene Descartes. John Searle calls him a "disaster", Antonio Damasio devotes an entire book to exposing Descartes' Error, and Daniel Dennett has spent his career trying to put a wrecking ball through the "Cartesian Theater." Yet Descartes doesn't seem to go away. His ghost keeps rattling his chains like the Jacob Marley of the philosophy of mind.

The reason is that the modern project of the philosophy of mind is Cartesian through and through. Daniel Dennett, despite his protests, is about as Cartesian as he could possibly be. The modern philosophy of mind, in fact, never seriously challenges Descartes. Philosophers attack Descartes' dualistic conclusions, but authoritatively assert the foundational elements of Cartesian philosophy that drove Descartes to dualism. These same foundational elements set the modern philosophy of mind on a path to dualism, and like a man trying to go to Los Angeles after setting his GPS for New York, modern philosophers spend their efforts trying to avoid the conclusions their first principles dictate they must eventually accept.

In Ch. 2 of Consciousness Explained, for example, Daniel Dennett gives reasons why dualism will never work as a philosophy. The dualist won't be able to explain how the immaterial mind can interact with a physical body anymore than Caspar the Ghost can explain why he can move through walls yet hold up a house when it is about to fall down. Dennett's criticisms hit the mark, but it doesn't address the reasons Descartes became a dualist in the first place. Cartesian dualism follows directly from the methodical first principle of Cartesian philosophy:

"I thought that I should take a course precisely contrary, and reject as absolutely false anything of which I could have the least doubt, in order to see whether anything would be left after this procedure which could be called wholly certain. Thus, as our senses deceive us at times, I was ready to suppose that nothing was at all the way our senses represented them to be... But I soon noticed that while I thus wished to think everything false, it was necessarily true that I who thought so was something. Since this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so firm and assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were unable to shake it, I judged that I could safely accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.

I then examined closely what I was, and saw that I could imagine that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place that I occupied, but that I could not imagine for a moment that I did not exist.... therefore I concluded that I was a thing or substance whose whole essence or nature was only to think, and which, to exist, has no need of space nor of any material thing or body. Thus it followed that this ego, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and is easier to know than the latter, and that even if the body were not, the soul would not cease to be all that it now is." 

The essence of Cartesianism is in the first paragraph, not the second, which is merely a conclusion from Cartesian first principles. Those first principles are 1) The assertion of method as foundational to true philosophy, and 2) The selection of radical doubt as the method of choice. We have become so used to the Cartesian first principles that we tend to see past them and take them as self-evident first principles of thought itself. But they are not self-evident at all; at least they were not for Descartes. He spent the first part of the Discourse on Method justifying his beginning philosophy in method and radical doubt (which, once that doubt is asserted, makes one wonder about the cognitive status of the first part of the Discourse, since it is asserted prior to and without the benefit of the method.) To the extent that we see the basic task of the philosopher as to "doubt things", or think that we need special training in order to philosophize, we have adopted the Cartesian approach to philosophy. For "special training" is nothing other than education in technical method, and that doubt should be a first principle of philosophy is itself open to philosophical doubt.

Daniel Dennett begins Consciousness Explained by introducing the "brain in a vat" thought experiment, which he admits is a modern version of Descartes' Evil Demon. You've no doubt heard this before: How do you know that you are not merely a brain in a vat, with electrodes hooked up to your neurons, making you think reality is something completely different than it truly is? It's easy to see that this is another way of posing the possibility that "nothing at all was the way our senses represented them to be." Dennett rapidly concludes that you are not a brain in a vat, arguing from scientific considerations of the difficulty of pulling off something like the brain in the vat hoax on a real brain. Of course, Dennett's destruction of the vat doesn't really work, because his argument depends on his knowledge of the way the real world really works; in other words, his argument starts with his brain outside the vat in the real world. Like David Copperfield, he only appears to have gotten himself out of the vat. He was already out the whole time.

But that is beside the point. It doesn't matter whether the brain in the vat experiment pans out. The basic Cartesian principle is that the radical falsity of experience is a possibility that must be addressed and overcome at the very outset of philosophy; Descartes himself overcomes this radical doubt, although in a way different than Dennett. The point is that any philosophy that feels it must start with the overcoming of radical doubt is starting on the Cartesian railroad. 

The second fundamental principle of Cartesian philosophy is that philosophy can only be conducted in the light of method. The point here is to undermine "folk philosophy" or the naive trading of opinions that was supposed to be characteristic of traditional philosophy. Instead of lolling around the agora engaging in idle conversation, the modern philosopher rolls up his sleeves and gets results. In Descartes' words, the ancient philosopher only argued the truth; the modern philosopher discovers the truth. 

Descartes' method of choice was that of applied universal doubt, but the selection of the particular method is not so important as the decision that philosophy itself can only begin with method. The latter principle is the distinguishing one of Cartesian philosophy. Since Descartes' time, philosophers have tried various experimental combinations of doubt and method; criticizing each other's doubt as not being real doubt, or each other's method as being poorly applied or wrongly selected, but the presumption that philosophy must begin with some form of doubt and method has been more or less tacitly assumed throughout the history of modern philosophy. 

The contemporary philosophy of mind generally begins in straightforward Cartesian terms with the assertion of method, in this case scientific method. There is nothing wrong with referring to scientific results in philosophy, of course, but what distinguishes the approach as Cartesian is that science is brought in through authoritative assertion rather than argument. This is the way John Searle does it in Mind, A Brief Introduction:

"The view implicit in this book, which I know want to make explicit, is that science does not name an ontological domain; it names rather a set of methods for finding out about anything at all that admits of systematic investigation... There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe our situation in it. As far as we know, its most fundamental principles are given by atomic physics and, for that little corner of it that most concerns us, evolutionary biology. The two basic principles on which any such investigation as the one I have been engaging in depends on are, first, the notion that the most fundamental entities in reality are those described by atomic physics; and, second, that we, as biological beasts, are the products of long periods of evolution, perhaps as long as five billion years."

So if we are able to discover anything about the mind systematically, it must be through the methods of science, which has already established atomic physics and Darwinian evolution through the application of method. The interesting Cartesian question is: What is the relationship of the subsequent philosophy of mind to the mind that authoritatively established method and its results in the first place? Can the philosophy of mind call into question the mind that established its foundation in method? It is the same question that can be asked of Descartes, and it brings to light the inevitable tendency of Cartesian thought towards dualism.

In his Discourse on Method, Descartes proclaims his method in Part II after a preamble in both Parts I and the beginning of Part II. The method is supposed to cast all prior notions into doubt so as to find the one indubitable starting point of philosophy. But if the method does this, what happens to the cognitive status of the preamble? Is it not cast into doubt as well? The preamble consists of Descartes' reasons for abandoning the traditional approach to philosophy and inventing a new approach. It involves his views on the historical futility of philosophy and the uselessness of what he learned in school. But if we are to doubt all prior notions, should we not also doubt the uselessness of traditional philosophy and the worthlessness of what Descartes learned in school? Should not Descartes doubt that he ever was in school, or that he ever learned philosophy? Such doubt would, of course, undermine Descartes' justification for his revolution in philosophy. It would bring his project to a standstill. In fact, Descartes does not really doubt everything; he doesn't doubt his own appreciation of the history of philosophy or his confidence in establishing a radically new basis for philosophy. His assertion of the Method merely hides his earlier conclusions, which were not established by the method but are nonetheless beyond all doubt. The mind that established those conclusions, and that authorized and created the Method, is itself also hidden from view. But although it is hidden, it still lurks in the background, and will never go away because it is more certain than the Method itself. This is the ghost that reasserts itself in the form of Cartesian dualism; the Cartesian ghost is the true knower who established and underwrites the Method through which all other beings are granted existence. The Cartesian world is a world of beings who are granted existence through method; but, as Descartes realized, the Thinking Being who conducts the Method is not itself granted existence through Method, for it must already be for the Method to happen at all. So the thinking being is not a body or extensive being in the world like all others, it is an immaterial being transcending the world entirely. Thus we arrive at dualism.

The contemporary philosopher of mind follows the same path as Descartes, with the method of empirical science substituted for the method of empirical doubt. But the result is the same. For John Searle, the true "fundamental entities" populating the world are those established by the methods of atomic physics. What of the scientific mind that creates, establishes, and conducts atomic science, and proclaims in its name the true fundamental entities? This Thinking Being is clearly less dubitable than the atomic particles it proclaims, and it is also beyond the reach of the philosophy of mind, for the philosophy of mind starts with the scientific mind behind it as the authoritative voice of method. But although hidden, the scientific mind is still there, and haunts the contemporary philosophy of mind in the form of the Cartesian Ghost. Daniel Dennett won't find the Cartesian Ghost in his Cartesian Theater; he'll find him in the scientist who establishes the scientific results with which Dennett starts the philosophy of mind.

The only way to exorcise the Cartesian Ghost is to stop repeating the spell that calls him forth from the grave: The insistence on doubt and method as first principles of philosophy.