Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays

340 Pages·2017·1.24 MB·English

by  Colin McGinn

Philosophical Provocations
55 Short Essays
Colin McGinn

The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
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Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McGinn, Colin, 1950-author.
Title: Philosophical provocations : 55 short essays / Colin McGinn.
Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046174 | ISBN 9780262036191 (hardcover : alk. paper) eISBN 9780262340083
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BD41 .M34 2017 | DDC 192--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046174
ePub Version 1.0
Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Preface
I Mind
II Language
III Knowledge
IV Metaphysics
V Biology
VI Ethics
VII Religion
Index
Preface
The essays collected here follow a particular pattern and style. They aim to be
pithy, with no padding or extraneous citation. They each address a specific
philosophical issue and try to make progress with it as efficiently as possible.
There is little discussion of particular authors or “the literature”; my aim is to get
down to the issues immediately and state a position. I avoid excessive
qualification or self-protection, leaving it to the reader to fill in gaps. Thus:
short, sharp, and breezy. The style is intended to contrast with the way academic
philosophy tends to be written these days: long, leaden, citation-heavy, and
painful to read. This means that the book can be read by someone not expert in
the fields covered, though I would not deny that some of the essays are quite
demanding—but not I think unnecessarily so. There is room in academic writing
for the style I avoid, but there is something to be gained by the direct and
unencumbered style I adopt here (I have written my fair share of the other kind
of stuff).
A great many topics are covered in the book, and I make no attempt to link
them.1 Each occurred to me independently of the others, though there are
thematic continuities. They often challenge orthodoxy in ways that might seem
shocking and put forward views that may be condemned as eccentric. There is
nothing safe about these essays—though I do help myself to a dose of common
sense when needed. I am self-consciously trying to find new ways to think about
old problems. Maybe not all the suggestions will stand the test of further
reflection, but I hope they stir people to think in fresh ways—or at least to feel
provoked at my audacity.
My ideal over the period of writing these essays (2014 to 2016) was to resolve
a serious philosophical problem in no more than a page. Needless to say, this
ideal was just that—not a realistic prospect. Still, it was a useful guiding
principle, because it forced me to extremes of economy in formulation and
argument. I ruthlessly excluded all preamble and qualification, knowing that
“sophisticated” readers will pounce on certain passages; I tried to get right to the
point and state my view with maximum clarity. Admittedly, I did occasionally
employ arguments, in the standard style, but I tried to keep them short and
sweet. No doubt I’ve sometimes lapsed into prolixity and professionalism, old
sweet. No doubt I’ve sometimes lapsed into prolixity and professionalism, old
habits being what they are, but I regard that as a fault, not a virtue. If an essay
does not raise professional eyebrows at some point, I count it a failure.

Colin McGinn
Note
1. In fact the essays published here constitute a selection from a larger number of
essays written over the same period (one hundred and thirty in all). I hope to
publish the remaining essays in a later volume.
I Mind
The Mystery of the Unconscious
Introduction
For some time now consciousness has been at the center of discussions of the
mind–body problem. We might say that today the mind–body problem is the
consciousness–brain problem. But it was not always so. Thomas Nagel felt it
necessary to begin his classic 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” with
these words: “Consciousness is what makes the mind–body problem really
intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little
attention or get it obviously wrong.” I introduced my 1989 paper “Can We Solve
the Mind–Body Problem?” as follows: “The specific problem I want to discuss
concerns consciousness, the hard nut of the mind–body problem. How is it
possible for conscious states to depend upon brain states? How can Technicolor
phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter?” David Chalmers has spoken of
consciousness as the “hard problem,” distinguishing it from (relatively) “easy”
problems of the mind, and finding in it a uniquely difficult phenomenon to bring
within a materialist perspective. And many others have felt that the problem of
consciousness is particularly and distinctively deep or profound—as if without it
the mind would be far less intractable, perhaps not intractable at all.
Consciousness is now thought to be the great enigma of the mind.
I think we have all been wrong. I say this not because I believe that
consciousness is tractable after all; it is rather that I think it is not uniquely
intractable. To be more specific, I think that much the same problems that afflict
consciousness also afflict unconsciousness: unconscious mental states are as
problematic as conscious mental states, and for essentially the same reasons. The
emphasis on consciousness is therefore misplaced, even though the authors cited
have been right to discern a deep problem about consciousness. Consciousness is
indeed a mystery, but so is the unconscious (hence my title for this essay).
The plan of the essay is as follows. First I will explain how the standard
arguments against materialism for conscious states carry over to unconscious
states. Next I will offer a diagnosis of why it is harder to see this in the case of
the unconscious than it is for the conscious. Then I will describe the intimate
relations between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, so that we can
see that it is extremely unlikely that the former should be deeply intractable
while the latter is relatively plain sailing. It is the mind in its entirety that poses
an intractably hard problem for materialism, not just the conscious part of it.
Antimaterialist Arguments
It is not difficult to see how the standard arguments transpose to the
unconscious, once the question has been formulated. I will therefore go over this
ground quickly, assuming that the reader is familiar with the arguments in
question. I am going to use what I hope is an uncontroversial example of an
unconscious mental state—not the Freudian or Jungian unconscious or anything
exotic like that. I came to the position to be outlined here in the course of
defending innate ideas in the Cartesian sense: these ideas had to be unconscious,
given that babies are not born consciously thinking about mathematics or
sensible qualities or anything else Descartes took to be innate (rightly, in my
view). But I don’t want to enter this controversial territory now; instead I shall
discuss a straightforward case of experiential memory. Suppose that yesterday I
saw a red bird in my garden and noted its fine plumage. Then I went back to
work and didn’t think any more about it. Today I (consciously) remember seeing
the bird and wonder if I will see it again: I recall seeing its brilliant red plumage,
just as I experienced it yesterday. I have a visual memory of my perceptual
experience. Between these two times, evidently, I stored the experience of the
red bird in my memory, wherein it resided unconsciously. That is, I was not
conscious of the memory between the two times; like most of my memories it
existed in an unconscious form, though it was not difficult to bring it to
consciousness. The unconscious memory was sandwiched between an act of
conscious perception and an act of conscious remembering: but it was not itself
conscious. It existed in the unconscious part of my mind. For brevity, call this
memory “the memory of red.”
Now compare the memory of red with a perceptual experience of red, and
consider the standard arguments. The standard arguments against viewing the
experience of red as a brain state (or a functional state) are as follows: Nagel’s
subjectivity argument, Jackson’s knowledge argument, Kripke’s modal
argument, Putnam’s multiple realization argument, Chalmers’s zombie
argument, Brentano-inspired arguments from intentionality, Block’s inversion
and absence arguments (against functionalism), and the brute primitive intuition
that experiences cannot in their very nature be identified with brain states. Each
of these arguments purports to show that the experience of red cannot be reduced
to a physical state. Thus, Nagel contends, the experience is subjective while the
brain is objective: the man born blind cannot know what a subjective experience
of red is like, having never had such an experience, though he may grasp the
objective nature of the brain states that correlate with that experience. We cannot
know what it is subjectively like to be a bat, though we can know the objective
physiology of a bat’s brain. Jackson’s Mary could know all about color vision
physiology of a bat’s brain. Jackson’s Mary could know all about color vision
and not know what it is to see something as red—as is shown by her learning
something new when she emerges from her black-and-white room and sees
something red for the first time. We can imagine a possible world, Kripke tells
us, in which someone has an experience of red but not the usual brain correlate
found in the actual world, and equally we can imagine the usual brain correlate
associated with a different color experience or no experience at all. Hence there
cannot be an identity between the two, since identity is a necessary relation.
Putnam argues that the experience of red may have a different physical
realization in Martian brains, so it cannot be identified with the brain state
humans happen to use to implement it. Chalmers argues that there is no a priori
entailment between physical descriptions of the subject and descriptions of her
experiences, so that zombies are logically possible, thus refuting the logical
sufficiency of brains for conscious minds. Brentano observes that the experience
of red has an intentional directedness to the color red, which cannot be found in
the physical world. Block conjectures that we can conceive of cases in which an
organism has the same functional characterization as an organism experiencing
red and yet that organism experiences green (“inverted qualia”) or experiences
no color at all (“absent qualia”). And many people instinctively feel that it is just
massively implausible to suppose that an experience of red is nothing but a brain
state of neurons firing, given how different the two things seem.
The question is whether the same arguments can be applied to the memory of
red. Suppose a bat uses its sense of echolocation and has the corresponding
perceptual experience. Then it stores that experience in memory, perhaps for
later use. The memory exists in an unconscious form, but it is an experiential
memory. Can we grasp the nature of that memory? Not if we can’t grasp the
nature of a bat’s experience, since that is what it is a memory of. To grasp it we
would need to occupy the bat’s subjective point of view, as Nagel puts it; but we
don’t, so we can’t. We can know all about a bat’s brain, including the memory
centers, but that will not tell us the nature of a bat’s memory, since that memory
incorporates the bat’s alien sense of echolocation. Yet the memory is
unconscious. Note that I did not say that we are unable to grasp what it is like to
have that memory, since (being unconscious) there is nothing it is like. What we
fail to grasp—because we have no conception of it—is the nature or essence of
the memory. The case is just like a blind person trying to grasp what a memory
of having a red experience is. He does not grasp that concept, any more than he
grasps the concept of a conscious perceptual experience of red. Of course, a
memory of a conscious perceptual experience is precisely that—a memory
whose content refers to a state of consciousness. But it doesn’t follow from this
that it is itself an instance of consciousness. So the memory is problematic