tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP (T. Moody) (10/04/85)
[] Is the mind a process, a thing, or neither? The question, like most interesting questions in the philosophy of mind, pivots on a polarization of so-called "private" and "public" viewpoints. These viewpoints tempt us to assert incompatible things. The public viewpoint is the one that includes all and only what anybody could observe in another person: physical configurations and behavior. From here, we want to say that the mind is a pro- cess, because a process is what we see. Since the development of computer technology, we also have the powerful hardware/software analogy to make that process more intelligible. To say that the mind is "information" is, I think, to say that the mind is a par- ticular kind of process; namely, a Turing computable one (capable of being simulated by any sufficiently powerful universal Turing machine). The problem of personal identity, from the public viewpoint, be- comes the problem of the reidentification of processes. Since a given process can be instantiated any number of times, in widely different physical systems, the only sense of "sameness" that can be preserved is sameness of functional states -- the *same* kind of sameness that faithful performances of a piece of music share. Thus, what it is to be a particular person is to instantiate a particular process-type (presumably specifiable by a finite Tur- ing machine algorithm). From the private viewpoint, things look somewhat different. One has a sense of being some sort of a unified entity -- a thing. One does not want to deny that one undergoes more or less con- tinuous changes, but there is a strong residual sense of unity and continuity. Being a person seems more like being something than like being something that is happening to something. Are there *reasons* for insisting on the correctness of the private viewpoint? Not really. Certainly, if someone denied having any sense of personal unity, there wouldn't be anything much that one could say to change that person's mind (yow!). On the other hand, it also won't do to *deny* the private viewpoint altogether. It's *there*; it exists at the center of every person's universe. A scientific worldview is one where part of the essence of ex- plaining something is describing it, as much as possible, in pub- lic terms. So, the scientist's task is not to deny the private viewpoint, but to show how a process could exist that would give rise to it. It's not enough to say "the mind is just a bunch of causal interactions -- or causal plus quantum interactions -- in the brain. One has to give an account of those interactions that would require that the system instantiating them be conscious. If this cannot be done, then the proper conclusion is agnosti- cism. "We don't really have a clue how consciousness emerges from a system like this." The materialist protests that this agnosticism is too timid, claiming "The dramatic success of science based on materialistic assumptions warrants a stronger stand than agnosticism." The trouble with this is that consciousness is quite unlike anything else that science studies; it is truly *sui generis*. Therefore, even though materialism is a proper research heuristic, it is not a proper conclusion. Also, it is important to distinguish between two degrees of ma- terialism. (1) Strong Materialism -- The complete scientific ex- planation of consciousness and subjective phenomena will not re- quire any significant conceptual revisions or extensions of current physics. (2) Weak materialism -- not necessarily (1). If one thinks that the principle of nonlocality is essentially involved in consciousness, for example, one is probably a weak materialist, since it is rather likely that our understanding of this principle and its implications is very incomplete. It is interesting that both versions of materialism are con- sistent with the "mystical" worldview of Buddhism. "No-self" is at the heart of Buddhism. According to this notion, the unified self is a fiction to which we become obsessively attached, giving rise to suffering, fear of death, and all that. What makes this tradition (or at least some parts of it) "mystical" is its in- sistence that the notion of the self be shattered by direct in- tuitive experience (in meditation, for example), rather than deductive reasoning. Todd Moody