The Living Mind A Thesis SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY ...

258 Pages·2017·1.93 MB·English

The Living Mind

A Thesis
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Patrick O Laine

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Peter Hanks, Naomi Scheman

January, 2017
© Patrick O Laine 2017
Acknowledgements

I want to thank my advisors, Peter Hanks and Naomi Scheman, for their constant support
and thorough feedback on each chapter. To have two of the kindest and smartest people
in my corner has been of more value than I could ever say. I also want to thank my friend
Tom Soderholm, for his reassurance that what I am writing isn’t complete rubbish. And I
would be remiss not to mention Alan Love and John Wallace, whose insights and ideas
have not only stimulated my thinking, but inspired me to pursue this philosophy thing
with passion.
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Dedication

For my mother. You’re still the best philosopher I know.
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Abstract
This thesis revisits the question of what kind of thing a mind is, and seeks to show that
this question contains an important assumption about the nature of the mental domain,
namely, that it is its own domain, or more simply, its own thing. What if, instead of
asking what the mind is, and doggedly pursuing an answer that will satisfy us, we inquire
into the nature of the mind without a commitment to there being a distinct and discrete
explanandum, a delineable entity that awaits our delineation? This thesis follows up on
this thought, by exploring an alternative conception of mind that treats it as no thing, but
not as nothing. Starting with the idea that minds aren’t clearly bounded realms that
contain thoughts and feelings and so forth, but the embodied performances of subjects-
persons-organisms (SPOs), this thesis goes on to explore how this reorientation in our
understanding of the mental yields a radical, powerful, and explanatorily fruitful
approach to solving, or dissolving, thorny philosophical problems, and specifically,
problems in epistemology.
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Table of Contents

0: Introduction…………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1: Insulationism……………………………………………………………..18
Chapter 2: Rich Relationality and Adverbial Metaphysics…………………….......67
Chapter 3: The Reconciliation Problem……………………………………………..86
Chapter 4: The Inter-reactive Mind…………………………………………………112
Chapter 5: In Touch: Why We Aren’t (and Couldn’t Be) Brains in Vats………...177
Chapter 6: Talk it Out: Remarks on the Bias Paradox…………………………….191
Chapter 7: The Generality Problem…………………………………………………223
Chapter 8: Concluding Remarks…………………………………………………….245
References……………………………………………………………………………..246
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0
INTRODUCTION

0.1 Can i ask you a question? ¤ 0.2 I promise it’s not supernatural—it’s super natural!
¤ 0.3 Methodological movement: Now this way, now that way! ¤ 0.4 Theoretical
movement: the living mind is a mind in matter in motion ¤ 0.5 Meta-theoretical
movement: LMA will do… for now

And if it is real philosophy all its labour lies merely in trying to put that question clearly.

-Leo Tolstoy

0.1 Can I ask you a question?

In this dissertation I attempt to ask the question: what is a mind? In doing so, I will also
attempt to give an answer to this question, or rather, several answers, but the spirit of the
ensuing discussion will be primarily interrogative. When it comes to asking philosophical
questions about the mind I think the crucial theoretical moment is the act of inquiry itself,
our very asking of the questions we pose when we put on our metaphysician’s cap, and
begin looking for the elusive features of our mental lives. This dissertation is an
invitation for philosophers of mind to step back with me and interrogate our
interrogation.
So, here’s the plan. We will not start with our question—what is a mind?—and
then move forward in search of an answer. Our movement will be in our asking. Also, this
movement will be self-oriented: instead of asking-toward-an-answer, we will ask-toward-
a-question. In only slightly less abstract terms, we will, by immersing ourselves more
deeply in the very act of our asking, try to figure out exactly what we are asking, when
we philosophically inquire into the nature of the mind. When we ask, in that distinctively
philosophical register which I will try to convey using italics—“Yes but what is the mind,
really?”—what sort of investigation are we attempting to initiate? What is the grain and
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tenor of our intellectual anticipation, as we pose the question? At what angle are we
leaning into the topic, and from what perspective? What assumptions, pieces of
reasoning, metaphors, anxieties, certainties, and other intellectually charged items are
already built into the discursive space that our questions about the mind open up, at the
moment we begin exploring this space—that is, at the moment we begin shifting from the
interrogative mode of asking into the assertive mode of arguing and answering.
This approach is admittedly a bit odd. One tends not to think of asking as
something one attempts to do, unless one is talking about a reporter attempting to ask a
question at a news conference or something along those lines. But even in that case, we
think of the reporter as attempting to get a chance to ask a question—the attempting
seems to end when the actual act of asking begins. For whatever reason, it seems strange
to talk about attempting as part of the very asking of questions. Questions are, generally
speaking, attempts to get answers. But we do not attempt to ask the questions; we attempt
to get answers by asking them.
My hunch is that this intuition has its roots in something like the following
‘common sense’ picture of the activities of asking and answering: Questions do not assert
anything to be the case, but answers do. Since questions don’t involve assertion, they
cannot be right or wrong. Now, perhaps our hesitation to identify genuine attempting in
asking qua asking arises because we take this perfectly sensible description of asking and
answering, and tacitly conflate the claim that questions can’t be wrong with the claim that
there is no such thing as asking wrongly. If there’s no such thing as asking wrongly, then
we would be justified in placing asking outside of the domain of attempting: something
that can’t go wrongly can’t be an attempt.
But this is clearly a shoddy piece of reasoning. Questions can’t be wrong, in the
sense that they can’t be false, but surely the act of asking itself can go well or poorly.
Indeed, the ability to ask well—whether that means insightfully or subtly or suggestively
or carefully—is perhaps what we philosophers take the most pride in. And yet, even our
questioning can go awry.
Indeed, I think one such attempt has gone awry, namely, our attempt to ask, in a
‘philosophical register,’ about the fundamental nature of the mind. Is it physical? Can we
understand its workings in naturalistic terms? Can machines have minds? Do mental
phenomena exert a genuine causal influence on the world, or are they merely
epiphenomenal? These questions are all embedded within a larger questions: just what is
the mind? My hope is to show that there is a mistake in our very asking of this larger
question. Our attempts to answer the question are going wrong before the answering even
begins. In a word, we are starting things off on the wrong foot.
Actually this metaphor doesn’t quite capture the severity of our mistake (and I do
mean our mistake—I am not claiming inculpability!). To start things off on the wrong
foot is not necessarily to stray from the correct path. One can start things off on the
wrong foot, continue along in more or less the same direction, and eventually hit one’s
stride. The problem with our attempts to develop philosophically satisfying accounts of
mind is that these attempts aren’t just starting off on the wrong foot, but on the wrong
path! We deviate sharply from the proper course at the very outset of our inquiries; the
fault lies in our very asking of the questions we ask, and not in our subsequent attempts to
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answer them. So, my proposal is that we turn around, retrace our steps, and go back to the
very beginning—back to the act of inquiry, back to the very asking of the question: what
is a mind?1
This dissertation is written primarily for philosophers—and specifically, for
philosophers interested in the basic character of mentality. Some of these philosophers
will agree with me that ‘traditional’ philosophical approaches to understanding the nature
of the mind are traveling down the wrong path. If you are such a philosopher, I hope to
offer some conceptual resources—some terminology, concepts, arguments, etc.—that
might prove useful in your own attempts to theorize off the beaten path. If you are the
kind of philosopher whose theorizing about the mind has been propelled forward by what
I am describing as a flawed asking, I hope to convince you to return to the very beginning
of your inquiry, and re-ask the question such that your interrogative orientation doesn’t
send you down the wrong path again. Actually, I will be happy if I can get you to at least
start glancing back over your shoulder, with a faint worry that perhaps you made a wrong
turn at the very outset of your journey.
So, just what is it about our inquiries that sets them down the wrong path? In
broad strokes, the problem is this: when we philosophically inquire about the mind, we
tacitly assume that what we are inquiring into is a fundamentally discrete and bounded,
or as I prefer to say, ‘insulated’ domain, with a clear boundary that separates the inside
of the domain from an external world. The idea that each of our minds is insulated from
the world enters into theorizing at an early stage, and tends to set the terms of debate,
rather than serve as an object of debate. What I mean is that philosophers tend to assume
that minds are the sorts of things that exist within clearly defined borders, and direct their
attention to the issue of how this border works. Does it function as a metaphysical border,
which seals off the mental domain in its own world, literally—in its own non-physical
dimension. Dualist think it does function this way. Materialists can’t accept that minds
exist within their own dimension—within a special mental domain that we cannot locate
in the physical universe. But, they do accept that minds exist within boundaries, and
frame many important philosophical questions around the idea of mind as an inner space
that is fenced off from an external world.
There are four things I want to accomplish in this dissertation:

1 I want to make a quick observation about this notion of theorizing as the navigation and negotiation of a
path. It seems to suggest that our attempts to understand the mind are oriented toward a destination. I am
not entirely comfortable with this aspect of the metaphor, since I expect our inquiries into the world of
mental phenomena will be an ongoing affair. Like Colin McGinn, I think we will always view our own
mental lives as suffused with a kind of magic and mystery. However, my meta-philosophical perspective on
the project of theorizing about the mind is not nihilistic or pessimistic. I think we can sensibly talk about
philosophical investigations as going in better or worse directions, as taking us closer or farther from the
truth. This “truth” might not be a clear theory of the mind, which dispels all of our puzzlement regarding
things like consciousness and intentionality—however, it is a truth nonetheless worth pursuing.
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1) I want to call attention to a broad conception of the nature of the mind, which
pervades our philosophical thinking, exercising a hegemonic (and often unnoticed)
influence over our theoretical efforts to grasp the most essential features of cognition.
I call this conception insulationism about the mind. The basic idea behind
insulationism is that a mind is fundamentally discrete and bounded entity, with clear
borders that fence it off from an external, objective world.

2) I want to introduce, as an alternative to insulationism, an approach to
understanding the nature of the mind which I call the “Living Mind Approach,” or
just “LMA.” The central tenet of LMA is that the mind is not fundamentally bounded
and discrete, but relational and temporal. I think this basic shift in our thinking can
have profound philosophical consequences.

3) I want to expose the shortcomings of an insulationist approach to understanding
the nature of the mind, by implicating it in several seemingly intractable
epistemological problems. By locating insulationism as the source of such problems, I
intend to show that it is a productive paradigm in the sense that it generates
interesting problems to investigate, but an unproductive paradigm in the sense that it
fails to offer the resources by which to solve these problems.

4) I want to showcase the ‘explanatory fecundity’ of LMA by using it to solve the
very problems that insulationism generates.

As we proceed, it’s crucial to keep in mind that insulationism is a broader view than
dualism, in that it encompasses both dualistic views and the host of materialist views that
began to take hold of analytic philosophy beginning in the 1950s. Dualists circumscribe
the mind within boundaries that separate two entire ontological realms: the mental and
the physical. This is a particularly zealous way of implementing an insulationist program
for understanding the nature of the mind. Philosophers can, however, carry out the
insulationist program less zealously, by drawing boundaries around minds within the
physical domain, as opposed to between the physical realm and the mental realm. Indeed,
if I may offer a fairly sweeping assessment, this is what most contemporary philosophers
of mind seem to do: they jettison dualism but hold onto the more basic idea that minds
are separated from the external world in some pronounced way.
The way in which this separation is achieved varies from view to view, and from
context to context, which makes it hard to pin down what insulationism ultimately
amounts to. Another difficulty involved in articulating what insulationism involves stems
from the fact that insulationist ideas tend to lurk in the background of philosophical
discussions, where they can exercise a particularly deep but generally unnoticed influence
over the course of these discussions. In shining a light on insulationism, one of my aims
is, simply, to draw attention to the fact that it is a view, that is, one way of thinking about
the nature of our minds, to which there are alternatives. By coaxing it out of the
background in this way, I hope to render it a more easily recognizable object of critique.