Naturalism and the Mind
On my other blog I have posted a series of attempts to define naturalism, including:
● A Formulation of Naturalism
● Two Thoughts on Naturalism
● Naturalism: Yet Another Formulation, and
● Naturalism and Object Oriented Ontology
I began with the idea that, “Naturalism is on a par with materialism, and philosophically is to be treated as far as possible like materialism,” and went on to suggest that we can characterize naturalism in parsimonious terms, following our initial formulations as far as they will go, and only appealing to anything that transcends these original formulations when that initial formulation breaks down. In this way it makes sense to speak of deflationary naturalism.
But what is that which transcends our materialistic, mechanistic, or quantitative formulations? The answer is this: Mind. Thus we can formulate naturalism as materialism plus whatever is required to account for the mind. This immediately raises the familiar spectre of Cartesian dualism.
If you are an eliminativist materialist, there’s no problem. You simply deny that there is anything in nature that corresponds to mind and there is no need to go beyond materialism since nothing transcends materialism. If, however, you find this denial unsatisfying, you must go farther.
There are, of course, no end of alternative formulations to account for the mind. Searle, for example, calls his formulation biological naturalism. Searle doesn’t want to posit anything beyond the brain and neurological processes, and above all he doesn’t want to posit Cartesian dualism. If there is anything that philosophers today can agree upon it is their common condemnation of Cartesian dualism.
The problem with the attempt to get beyond Cartesian dualism — which did, admittedly, have a stultifying effect on philosophy of mind for some time — is that contemporary philosophers are simply trying to scrap the distinction without recognizing that it is an approximation of an important truth: that a thought is a different kind of thing than a body.
I just read this on the Wetwiring blog:
The mind/body idea was a hack, a kludge. It was a solution (if inelegant) to a series of difficulties that arose out of human thought and the history of ideas (with the waning of religion and the waxing of science proper in the seventeenth century). It should be dispensed with. Not replaced, not finessed, not supplemented. Dropped. With this, some new possibilities appear.
This is what most philosophers of mind today are trying to do, but not very well, in my opinion. The attempt to abandon Cartesian dualism leads to conceptual kluges that are only employed out of a desire to avoid the appearance of a mind-body distinction at any cost.
So when I say that naturalism is materialism plus whatever is required to account for mind, I am not trying to reinstate Cartesian dualism, but I am also not going to go out of my way to avoid a clumsy distinction that nevertheless captures an important truth. So I guess I stand with those who want to supplement the mind-body distinction as a first, rough approximation upon which we can improve.
I suggest that one way that the mind-body distinction can be supplemented is by replacing the distinction with a continuum: the mind-body continuum. If there are degrees of reality that depart from strict materialism, they do not therefore necessarily constitute mind, and, vice versa, if there are degrees of reality that depart from a strict interpretation of mind, they do not therefore necessarily constitute body.
Searle’s biological naturalism seems, to my mind, to have this character. Searle acknowledges that thoughts are different from bodies, but his answer to what thoughts are is that they are neurological processes. Now, neurological processes are not identical with the brain considered merely as an artifact, but they aren’t mind in the traditional sense. Thus I would say that neurological processes, which are not themselves bodies but which transparently supervene upon the brain as body occupy one degree (as it were) away from body on the mind-body continuum.
Searle’s position strikes me as a species of reductivism. While he has recognized that a thought is a different kind of thing than a material body, he instead identifies thoughts with neurological processes. Well, again, a neurological process is a difference kind of a thing than a thought. We experience a neurological process as a scientist studying the brain, whereas we experience a thought as a conscious thinker.
On the other hand, in contradistinction to neurological processes being one degree away from strict materialism, an idea in the Kantian sense (a locution that Husserl often employs to indicate an idea that has nothing corresponding to it in nature) entertained by the mind in thought comes close to exemplifying the extreme “mind end” of the mind-body continuum, but any thought that involves some connection to the empirical world (and thus the vast bulk of our thought in actual fact) departs at least one distinguishable degree from ideal mind and lies along the mind-body continuum between mind and body.
Thus mind and body stand in an important relationship to each other, and this relationship is continuous (as in materialism), but even while there is a continuity between mind and body, the two are still distinguishable.
