A NON-THEORY OF NON-MIND
Jud Evans

As an eliminative materialist I do not of course accept the existence of either ‘mind’ or ‘mental states.’ That is not to say that I do not recognise, respect, and appreciate the important contribution provided by the visceral theories mentioned in the question as significant stages in the furtherance of the understanding of ourselves as thinking beings.

As an eliminative materialist I do not of course accept the existence of either ‘mind’ or ‘mental states.’ That is not to say that I do not recognise, respect, and appreciate the important contribution provided by the visceral theories mentioned in the question as significant stages in the furtherance of the understanding of ourselves as thinking beings.

My personal position holds that the brain exists, but the mind does not, but the body of this essay will not be polarized into a conflicting negation of claims and counter claims, nor will I provide a detailed uncalled-for account of my own eliminativist, anti-theoretical views. The essay is an attempt to examine the opinions of others objectively and compare and identify what features of the different theories of mind benefit us most.


    In my conclusion I will offer an eliminativist observation on the matters in hand.

We all behave – that is we all do things with our bodies and with our brains – behaving is what living things do. Analytical behaviorism encourages the scientific analysis of behavior on the basis of the central claim, that talking about mental states is equivalent to talking about literal and potential examples of behaviour, or tendencies to behave in certain ways.


For the analytical behaviourist to witness William saying: ‘I have decided to visit London,’ is to say that it is highly likely that his behaviour will lead to an eventual trip to the capital. To report that his wife Shirley is angry because of William’s stated intention, is to say that she is acting in a behavioural manner characteristic of annoyance.

A cynic might observe that Shirley’s behaviour could be a clever act, and that her aggravation is pretended. Could not the possibility of Shirley’s pretence show that behaviourism is false? The behaviourist claims that is not so. She may really feel that his departure cannot come quickly enough, in order that she might dally with her lover? The behaviourist would argue that in spite of this possible duplicity on Shirley’s behalf, if she is lying, then her feigned anger is simply the behavioural manner in which she is acting out the lie.

There exists a division between analytical behaviourists with notions of generalised social or philosophical behaviorism, and the more rigerous, scientific approach of the psychologistic or methodological behaviourist community. The latter insists that clinical behavioural claims should be restricted to those capable of being defined. All of the paradigms of the harder sciences must be reproduced. The hard behavioural psychologist Hempel (1905–97) a member of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, was anxious to engender an approach to psychology based upon the methodology and paradigms of physics, including quantification, measurement, statistics, independent verification etc. Hempel rejected empirically unverified statements as literally meaningless and destitute of significance. Private statements like those of the lying wife Shirley, accessible only to the utterer, are therefore meaningless. Covert thoughts cannot be checked out by behaviourists or anybody else.

Methodological behaviourism is still influenced by the theories of American psychologists J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner in which only open human conduct is available for objective examination, scientific prognostication and confirmation. Diagnostics based upon introspection or self-contemplation are expunged.
For Skinner, people who employ intentional referents characterized by conscious design or purpose in psychology usher in the existence of a ‘little man in the head’ – a homunculus.
(Maslin 2, section 2.8.3)


Skinner was a radical behaviourist, for whom private events, like thinking and feeling which could not be seen, were taken to be kinds of behaviour subject to the same laws as more public conspicuous behavior. He proposed a form of social engineering or ‘operant conditioning’ which entails the modification of behavior by rewarding or punishing the patients depending upon their behaviour.

For the methodologists only indubitably, confirmable, external, public behaviour is acceptable as data. Even then there are caveats regarding descriptions of actions which could be deliberate, or may be involuntary responses

Here two different modalities of behavioural description are possible which constitute a serious problem of discrimination between intentional and non-intentional behavioural states.

The manifold possibility and realisability of actions and types of bodily behaviour through which a problem could theoretically manifest itself over a long period present more difficulties requiring a lengthy and complex eliminative verification-process.

Our actions do not result from single mental states, but are combinative. The regressive detailing of actions in terms that implicitly refer to mental states are prohibited from inclusion in the behaviourist analysis.

Ryle’s ‘soft’ version of behaviourism included his endeavour destroy the Cartesian invention of the logically private mind. Ryle does not try to represent physical descriptions as mental or vice versa in the style of Hempel.

Ryle wrote in ‘The Concept of Mind’

Nothing can better our first-person authority regarding our awareness of our own mental/brain states – Hence to joke retailed by Maslin on p.125 which goes:

In an effort to establish the falsity of behaviourism Maslin introduces us to the counter-factual world of zombies. He writes:

In the real world in which most behaviourists live, lacking a mental life could arguably be described as not being human at all. If such fictive creatures from B-movies and cheap pulp magazines actually existed in the world, rather than being animalia of the fantasy-world of Caribbean folk-lore, and were indeed: ‘physically just like ordinary human beings,’ then they would they would lie around like helpless cabbages, threats only to the bank-accounts of poor taxpayer and offer no menace whatsoever to the claims of behaviourism or anything else. The case details of Terri Schiavo attest to this. People with no mental life are permanently immobile, doubly incontinent and need to be fed by hand or intravenously.

Analytical behaviourism does have some strengths. There is a neat avoidance of the mind/body interaction problem. The mind is no longer mysterious – it just IS human behaviour, actual and potential. For most behaviourists – THE MIND IS THE BEHAVIOUR.

                   It is time now to turn to a consideration of the mind-brain theory.

The theory is a straightforward one, though not without problems, which I will address shortly. It has no truck with combinative notions of both material and non-material substances or properties, like dualism and property-dualism.
Problems of the mind-body relationship are consubstantially eliminated.

Such claims precise identity statements entailing absolute consubstantiality profess the unique singularity of the phenomenon. Logically it is impossible to differentiate between them or tell them apart. Why then we wonder do the identity theorists go to such lengths to attribute such an impossible, illogical ‘non-dualistic dualism’ or differentiation to a single object? Identity statements may be logically precise or analytically symmetrical (all triangles are three-sided etc.) or can be imprecise and lack symmetry. For example Maslin (2001. p.85) writes:

In view of the fact that scientists continually tell us that no two entities in the universe are EXACTLY the same (otherwise it would be one entity) we may ask just how identical are the mind and brain? There are two versions of identity theory one can support:

Types of mental states are without exception identical to types of brain states. If my mental state for seeing yellow, A, were identical to my brain state B, then whenever I saw yellow I would always have mental state A and therefore brain state B. Following type-type identity theory, my conscious experiences would be arranged into category-types, each with its characteristic mental and brain states.

Some people spot immediate problems with type-type identity theory, because if one area of a brain suffers trauma, the neuronal network creates new pathways and routes around this problem, resulting in two dissimilar brain states for apparently the same mental state. I see no problem here, for the resultant consubstantial mental state will simply mirror the damaged or modified brain state.

Here individual brain states are said to be identical to individual mental states and no allowance is made for inexact categorisation or imprecise differentiation. Problems arise in that there is no explanation for exactly why the existence of physical brain states leads to the co-instantiation of mental states. Why should there exist a systemic relationship between a mental and a physical event?
                                                ‘Why indeed?’ I add.


In introducing Kripke as a bogyman-critic fatal to identity theory, Maslin reminds us that Kripke makes the de re claim that pain is necessarily or essentially physical.
Many would argue to the contrary and say that we would be unaware of physical discomfort and qualia in the absence of the mind which is responsible for one's thoughts and feelings. We are asked to imagine a possible world where water has a different chemical formula: such as XYZ.

     While Maslin rightly concludes with Kripke that such philosophical daydreaming is not actually to imagine water at all - but something else quite different, it is the simulaity and synchronicity of the imagining brain-state and the corresponding imagining mirrored mental state which is critical for the identity theorist. Better I think if we forget about ‘water which is not water,’ pain which is ‘feel-alike pain’ and 'possible worlds' and 'counterfactuals' and seriously address the reality of the thinking brain.

Kripke's essential point is that the imagined water which turns out to be sulphuric acid, and the case of pain, which is described as firing C-fibres things are different. All that is necessary for pain is that it feels like pain, there is no distinction between pain and a pain feel-alike in the way that there is between water and a water look-alike such as sulphuric acid. Many would say that the awareness of pain is both a physical and neurological experience and not just physical.

Curiously he singles out 'look-alike water' but ignores: 'taste-alike-water,' or 'effect-on-the-skin-alike-water.'  He then urges us to imagine a possible world where pains occur in the absence of C-fires firing, and C-fibres fire without accompanying pain and interprets this as meaning that pain is not identical with C-fibres firing, and this means that the identity theory has to be rejected. I suppose that if one flies in the face of all modern science and physiology and commonsense one can claim whatever one likes? We can, with Alexius Meinong, imagine a mountain of the purest crystal, clad with golden trees groaning with the weight of precious jewels in the form of exotic fruits – but that is not to say that such a thing exists.

And now to consider functionalism, which is often seen as a  materialistic option in place of the mind-brain identity theory.

Modern functionalism can be traced back to Aristotle's theory of soul, which contrary to Plato, argued that the psuch¯e is inseparable from the body and is the natural form of organised human corporeal material. satisfying the function that defines it as the kind of thing it is. (De Anima Bk. II, Ch. 1)

Hobbes's thought of the mind as a ‘calculating machine,’ which provides an interesting analogue with the modern functionalist concerns with artificial intelligence.
‘The function of a thing - i.e. what job it performs;
what set of arrangements enables the thing to discharge its function.’ (Maslin p.131)


For the Functionalist, mental states, desires, pain, anger – mind depends not on its internal make-up, but exclusively on its function, or the role it plays, in the neuro-physical system of which it is a part.. Such unequivocal references to a mental state's causal relations with sensorial stimulations, behavior, and one another are called by the functionalist – ‘topic-neutral.’

For example ‘topic neutral’ pain is often accompanied by anxiety, pulling a face, groaning and crying out loud. Only beings that match these phenomena or maintain these roles, are tractable to suffering pain. To the chagrin of the materialist however, non-physical states are also accepted as capable of effecting stimulative functions, rendering the theory simpatico with the dualism.

Functionalists believe that similar qualia could be detected by some animals with C-fibres or similar variants, silicon-based hypothetical robots with C-fibre equivalents, and even certain aliens with different metabolisms might also be so sensorially enabled.

The variety of arrangements which empower a function are multiply realizable. The function of the monarchy would continue if the queen died and Prince Charles took her place etc. There is a variant called metaphysical functionalism in which the mind is a black box, arbitrating between inputs and outputs – it works all right, but how it works is unknown. In a originative paper published in 1950, A. M. Turing proposed the question, “Can machines think?” He devised a procedure for measuring artificial intelligence called the Turing Test. In a conversation limited to a text-only channel if a concealed robot can fool a human into thinking it was human it passes the test.

M. Turing's ‘machine state’ theories of the nineteen fifties, were later successfully developed by Hilary Putnam who played an important part in the early development of the doctrine.

The awkward ontological intrusion of the reification ‘functionality’ into a dualistic abstraction is deftly brushed under the carpet by Maslin, who simply advises that we: ‘desist from thinking’ about it.

‘But if the function is not physical in nature, does this mean it is non-physical after the manner of the Cartesian soul? Is it like a ghostly soul-substance? I suggest we desist from thinking of functions in this manner, lest we overpopulate the universe with abstract entities and also generate the pseudo-problem of how functions relate to, and interact with, physical things.’
( Maslin. P.)

Of the three competing theories of mind I favour: ‘Mind– Brain Identity Theory’ as the most progressive, consubstantial theory, though I am attracted to certain features of the computational paradigms of functionalism.

I lack sympathy with the reification of ‘behaviour’ in general and ‘functionalism’ in particular into quasi-entia. As an eliminative determinist such terms are expedient, but neither of the two useful gerundial fictions actually exist – they are descriptions of HOW the entia ‘that which behaves’ and ‘that which functions’ exist. The words behavioural and functional should therefore be used adjectivally. In my ontology it is ‘the behaving person’ that exists, not his or her behavior. In the case of functionalism it is ‘the functioning human brain’ that exists – not the modal ’function’ of the brain.

In the case of both theories neither mental states, behavioural states nor functional states exist as objects or as anything else. I do not accept Skinner’s claims that physical bodily behaviour is the same as neuro-physical cognition. Subject and predicate are NOT reflectant existential mirror images of each other. Whilst misguided functionalists believe they are actually describing an non-existent abstraction called ‘function’ – what they are unknowingly addressing describes the functioning human holism - the realia or concreta of the soma.

Monarchs and thermostats? Yes they exist. There is a functioning thermostat that controls the central-heating circulation-pump in the cupboard under the stairs. And yes again, Britain as a physical island of rock with all the natural objects and its monarch Queen Elizabeth that can be found in that particular spatio-temporal location exist.

But the functions of constitutional monarchy and thermostatic functions do not. It is the queen and the central-heating household ironmongery that exist together with the material human attributors and not their abstractional attributees.


                                                                   REFERENCES
Aristotle. De Anima (On the Soul) c. 350 BC. by J. A. Smith. The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon ed., New York: Random House (1941)

Churchland. Patricia. ‘Neurophilosophy. Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain.’ 2001. Eds. Jerome. A. Feldman, Patrick. J. Hayes, David E Rumelhart. MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts – London, England.

Hempel, C.G. 1949. The logical analysis of psychology. In Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. H. Feigl and W. Sellars. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Maslin. K.T. 2001. ‘An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind.’ Blackwell Publishers Inc.
350 Main Street, Malden. MA 02148,USA.

Ryle, G. ‘The Concept of Mind. ’ London: Penguin Books, 1990

Turing. ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence – The Turing Test.’ 1950.
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/turing.htm (accessed 18.03.2007.)