In Our Time - The Mind/Body Problem

Episode Date: January 13, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mind/body problem in philosophy. At the start of René Descartes' Sixth Meditation he writes: "there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and mind is entirely indivisible. For when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish many parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete. Although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, I recognize that if a foot or an arm or any other part of the body is cut off nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind".This thinking is the basis of what's known as 'Cartesian dualism', Descartes' attempt to address one of the central questions in philosophy, the mind/body problem: is the mind part of the body, or the body part of the mind? If they are distinct, then how do they interact? And which of the two is in charge?With Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine; Sue James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, at the start of René Descartes' Six meditation, he writes, there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible,

and mind is entirely indivisible. For when I consider the mind or myself, insofar as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish many parts within myself. I understand myself to be something quite single and complete. Although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, I recognize that if a foot or an arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind.

This thinking is the basis of what's known as Cartesian dualism. Descartes' attempt to address one of the central questions in philosophy, the mind-body problem, Is the mind part of the body or the body part of the mind? If they are distinct, then how do they interact? And which of the two is in charge? With me to discuss the mind-body problem is Anthony Grayling, reader in philosophy at Birkbeck London University,

Julian Baggini, editor of the Philosopher's magazine, and Sue James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, London University. Anthony Grayling, as with so many questions in philosophy, we go back to the Greeks. So could you tell us what Plato had to say about this first? Plato is committed to the view that the soul is immortal and that it is composed of three parts, reason, spirit and appetite. In fact, he has a marvellous analogy for this in a dialogue called the Fiedrus. He likens the soul to a charioteer trying to drive two horses, one of which is a very noble beast with an arched neck and a handsome face.

It's white and it's got beautiful wings. And it's trying to fly up to heaven where the eternal truths it will be found. And the other one is a black, shag-hared beast with molting wings, which wants to drag the chariot back down to earth, because it's of the same nature as the earth and mud and hair and all the nasty things, all the appetitive things. And the chariot here, as reason, is struggling to cope with these two horses. So he has this complex view of the soul, of these three parts,

but essentially for him, the soul is immortal, and it is utterly different from body, from earthly things. Does he equate the soul with the mind? Is that equation something that starts there, as it were? Well, insofar as an important part of the soul is reason or noose. Yes, the distinction between soul and mind is a vague one all through the tradition of debate about these things. People really only begin to use the word mind and preference to soul in the mind-body problem much later on. So through a good 1,500 years of philosophical debate, sometimes the two terms are used interchangeable.

And did he develop this because you've given us the kernel? Did he round that out in any way, that basic notion, the two horses as it were, the sole body? Well, of course, the chariot here analogy just is an analogy. And at various points in his dialogues, Plato uses myths, legends, analogies, to try to explain points that are in themselves tremendously complex. And the important point for him really was a rather different question, the question of knowledge. for him, things that you can truly be said to know have to be utterly true, true forever,

unchanging and perfect of their kind. And he believed that in our ordinary earthbound existence using just our senses and our finite reason, we couldn't possibly come to know the great eternal truths, for example, of mathematics or of ethics. And that therefore it's a necessity that we have an immortal soul, which, when separated from the body,

is able to encounter these eternal and unchanging truths directly. So the idea of an immortal soul of a part of us which is quite different from our embodied aspects was a central part of his theory of knowledge. And therefore it's a kind of byproduct of it. He wasn't really addressing the mind-body problem front on. Julian and Virginia, how did Aristotle differ from Plato? Well, Aristotle's approach was very different, I think, in the whole way he came to the

problem. Plato is a very unworldly philosopher for him, ultimate reality, was mental. It was the realm of ideas or the forms, as he called them. So, your, body was always kind of inferior and not really the true core of reality. Now, Aristotle was much more worldly. He was much more concerned in looking at the world. More as a modern scientist would, considering sort of nature and body as being part of nature, and mind is not necessarily as something a distinct kind of substance. So his approach was to try and as it were see mind as part of the natural world almost. How did he set about defining that?

Well, the key here is his idea of function and form as opposed to substance. The way he looked at mind was not to see it as some kind of soul-like spirit which hovered around and intermingled with body in some way, but to see it as somehow being in the form and structure of matter and substance. And that's actually in lots of ways a very modern way of looking at the mind-body problem. But it's is confusing. When you look at Aristotle, his book, Dianema, on the soul, it's a little bit misleading in the title.

Because when he talked about soul, he was really talking about what we might call principle of life in general. And to see that in terms of a kind of stuff, a kind of spirit is not entirely accurate. So if I have to say to you, Aristotle thought that the mind was an extension of the body and integrated with the body, would that be a long way from the truth? No, it wouldn't be a long way from the truth. I think, I mean, in some ways, I mean, Anthony's told us how Plato was very concerned with the immortality of the soul.

Aristotle doesn't really discuss that a great deal. And I think scholars would disagree about how much Aristotle thought the soul was or was not immortal. It just isn't a central question in Deanna. For him, he's just looking at human beings, human nature, and the whole of biological life as it presents itself to him. and he sees that our capacities for reason, imagination, so on, our capacities we have. And he's just trying to work out how it is that we have them. Is there anything that Aristotle wrote, which takes specific issue with what Plato said? Well, I mean, Aristotle's method is to, he often begins his text by reviewing, as it were, what has come before.

So he does look back on those things. But he does agree with various aspects of Plato. And in particular, he kind of has a similar kind of division of the soul into different parts. He talks about there being that part of the soul to do with nutrition and growth, which we have in common with plants and animals, and there being a part of the soul concerned with perception, which we have only in common with animals, and then intellect being unique to humans.

And I think that's his point of real agreement with Plato. For both of them, what's distinctive about human beings is this capacity to reason, and this is what makes us superior to other things. And that's been a platform for West. and thought behaviour for two and a half thousand years. How influential were Aristotle's ideas on the Christian church? Well, the Christian church sort of went through different periods and of adopting the Greeks to suit them.

And in the Middle Ages, Aristotle did kind of become the adopted philosopher of Christianity. Through Thomas Aquinas. Yeah, exactly. But the extent to which they were accurately taking out of those views and the way in which they were appropriating them, I think it is a matter of big debate. But actually, but the way that Christianity, entered into the argument was very important then, wasn't it?

Because we have something arriving on the scene, which is very, very clear, much clearer. I suggest Anthony I'm going to go to Sue now, much clearer than Plato's distinction, even much more emphatic anyway, that there was a soul that went so much specific. Well, it's an extension. Is it, Sue James,

do you think it's just an extension of Plato, the idea of the Christian soul? Well, the platonic strand is very important there, I think, but so also is this set of Aristotelian ideas that Julian's been talking about. In one strand of Christianity, the one that's called scholastic Aristotelianism, the idea that there is this kind of three-tiered soul, which is to be understood as a kind of form that inheres in the matter of the body, so that a living thing is a mixture of this soul-like form

with three different sets of capacities, mixed up with the matter of the body, that idea is incredibly influential, but also rather problematic for Christian philosophers who want to rescue and think it's terribly important to have, the immortality of the soul. So in Aquinas, for example, you get another argument which says

it's true that a thing can only be alive when form and matter are mingled, when the soul is mingled with the body, but there's this kind of thing. kind of exception, which is the human soul, the intellectual bit of the human soul, and that can be free of the body and still continue to be a living thing. So that's how you can continue to be you after death, after separation from your body. And that was both a very influential view and also a big problem for 17th century philosophers grappling with this tradition, particularly

for Descartes. So how did Descartes find it a problem, and then how did he address it, sir? Well, he found it a problem because he thought that the metaphysics of Aristotle, this whole idea of a substantial form in hearing in matter, was absolutely unintelligible. He says things like, you know, people talk about these forms and they posit them to explain all sorts of properties and operations in nature. But really, they have no idea what they're talking about, which is a strange view because people have been talking about it quite happily for hundreds of years. But so that's the problem in the metaphysics, and Descartes is going to offer a completely different account of what there basically is. And then he also thinks that this termistic solution

to the problem of immortality won't really do because it's a fudge. It says, well, you know, okay, let's just rescue this bit of the soul and keep that as immortal, but it's an exception to everything else we believe. So his solution to this set of problems is, first of all, to posit two completely different substances. One of them material, understood as just the whole of the natural material world, a sort of extended substance, as he calls it, with spatial properties and also capable of motion,

which will explain things like billiard balls, bumping into billiard balls, and the way you can lift your hand and things like that. And then, on the other hand, to posit what he calls thinking substance or so, completely immaterial stuff that is just capable of thinking. Now, Descartes, quotation from whom I began this programme, seems to have cemented the argument, the big argument there. So let's talk about him a bit more, Anthony. Sue's given us a very, very good resume and pointed this in that way.

How important was Descartes to others around him in bringing this to the attention of the philosophical and intellectual world in the way he did? Well, in two ways, I think, one is that what's distinctive about Descartes and why he's so significant as what people sometimes call the father of modern philosophy, a bit of one of those labels, is that he cut through an enormous amount of jargon and distinctions and, you know, a tremendous accumulation of logic chopping that the schoolmen had been responsible for. focused attention in a very clear and direct way on a central problem. The central problem was what can be known with certainty. And in his, this famous work of his, which everybody reads when they study philosophy, the meditations, he begins by saying, let me see if I can doubt absolutely everything that's even in the least doubtable, to see what's left behind,

which I can be completely certain about. He finds that he can be certain about his own existence. Even if there were an evil demon who tries to fool him about everything, he can't be fooled that he exists. And then he asked himself this question, what is this thing that I am? What is this thing of the existence of which I can be absolutely certain? Well, it's me, myself, as a thinking thing. I could doubt that I have a body.

I might just dream that I have or be deceived that I have, but I can't doubt that I, as a thinking thing, exist. Now, this very simple seeming, it's actually a very complex argument, but it seems very simple, very direct and powerful, seems to entrench the idea that men, mental stuff, thinking stuff, really is very, very different in its essence from physical stuff. And he goes on, as Sue has said, to characterize mind and body in terms of their essences as essentially thinking stuff, essentially spatial stuff. And that, of course, meant that his contemporaries and immediate successes in the debate were confronted in a very stark and utterly clear way with this sharply drawn distinction between the mental and the physical.

Was there a sense before, that he was taking on Aristotle, that he was sort of, almost clearing the decks for the development of this notion. Well, it was certainly, I say, cementing this dualist of you, which, and the important thing there is that it cements the idea that there are these two substances. It makes the question of what substances there are central to the question of the division between mind and body. And a lot of people would say that was a terrible mistake that we had with Descartes, because Descartes was quite right to insist that whatever mind is, it's not the same as body.

but that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be a different kind of substance. And this was a kind of rejection of the Aristotelian approach, because you could say there that, no, mind is not the same as body, because body is substance and mind is form and function. So with Descartes, we have the idea of there being two different substances, mind and body, placed banging the middle of the debate, and that really set the terms of the debate for the mind-body problem. And some people would say we're still dealing with that legacy now to our detriment.

So was it seen as radical at the time this work, and how was it received and discussed? Well, I think it was very radical, and part of what's so radical about it is that it really changes completely the conception of what the soul or the mind is, because after all, for a good Aristotelian, you needed a soul in order to digest, for example, or in order to perceive, whereas Descartes is saying, no, look, forget about all that. We can explain all those processes like digestion and reproduction, and perception and so forth in a physical way. That's just material.

So what is left in the mind is conscious thinking, as it were, this kind of willing and judging and perception of our own ideas, as he puts it. So that's a completely new view of what the soul is, and thus a new view of how the mind and the rest of the world is divided up. And that's quite interesting about that, in a sense, is that we forget how a lot of people don't realize how much Descartes was also a scientist. And in a way, this retreat from the mind being only concerned with the mental is in part of response to the fact that as understanding of how the body works more, you don't need to have such kind of mysterious accounts of soul to explain body.

Science was catching up with our understanding of the body, but still had no way to deal with the mind. So the mind becomes a more isolated problem. What did Nicholas Malabrange add to this? How did he or did he add to this? What was his view on this? Well, one of the big problems with Descartes ever since has been argued about is if you have this distinction between mind and body as two different substance, how on earth do you explain their interaction? It seems that you can understand how one physical object can cause another physical object to move or how a thought can cause another thought. But how can a thought cause a physical thing to move when they're two radically different things? Interestingly enough, Descartes himself didn't seem to be too impressed by that problem.

I mean, he was aware of it. and I think one point that has to be said about Descartes is that although he is presented as this dualist, he well understood that however it is that mind and body are related, it's very intimate. He says the mind does not inhabit the body like a captain does a boat, for example. It's much more intimate than that. But nevertheless, there is this problem of interaction. So now, Malbranche's rather might seem clumsy attempt to explain that was to say, well, in fact, you have to see that God is the cause of everything really.

And so there isn't really any kind of causation between any kind of substances. Rather, it's God who intervenes to make sure that when one thing happens, another thing follows it. So it kind of removes the problem in what we, I think, to most of us would seem an extravagant way, by taking causation out of nature altogether and giving it back to God. It's a very heroic view, this view of Malibranches, and also one which keeps God extremely busy, because every time he sees in the mental realm that there is a pang of hungrizzles. He has to cause in the physical realm the body to move to the cupboard and put the peanut butter on the sandwich.

And then once that's been consumed bodily, he has to cause in the mental realm a feeling of satiety. And since he's doing this, you know, a huge, indefinitely large number of people all the time, he's never addressed, you know, not even on the Sabbath. So Mar Brasch did deny that he held that view that God had to intervene every moment because he thought, you know, surely God was far too clever for that.

His critics charged him with us with overworking God, didn't they? Yes. They did, and it's important because it draws attention to how much these early modern theories are driven by theology. Was Spinoza driven by theology? Did he take the argument on? I mean, he comes as it were next in these pinnacles of thinkers that we're looking at in the early modern period. How did he address this? How did he address Descartes' theory, Suzio?

Well, one of the problems that everybody is grappling with, to some extent, as Julian says, is this problem of how mind and body interact. if what is having to interact is physical material stuff with something that is completely non-spatial immaterial. How can that possibly be? Spinoza, in a way, offers a different solution to this problem than the Cartesian one. He says, look, instead of having two substances,

what there is in the world is just one huge, causally organized, determined substance. But it can be looked at sort of understanding, stood in two ways. You can see it as a complete causal physical system or as a complete causal mental system. And these two ways of seeing it sort of match up. So any causal event in this can be described in a physical way or in a kind of a mental way. Seems a rather implausible view. But it gets you something marvellous about the idea of a person because then a person is a kind of physical body and their mind is the sort of mental correlate of all that physical causal organization that's going on in their body.

So that our thinking is always embodied. This is very problematic for a Christian theologian who believes in the immortality of the soul and gets Spinoza into fantastic trouble. But on the other hand, for us, it's a rather attractive idea, I think, that there isn't, as it was something completely separate. that can be thinking, but that all our thinking is embodied. And how did he get him into such trouble?

Well, you know, some people thought that he was God besotted because he says that everything, that the universe is one thing, and you could call it either God or nature, deos siwa Nutura. And then there are other people, of course, who for the reason that Sue's just given, thought that he must be an atheist or, at any rate, a terrible heretic. He was expelled by his own Jewish community in the Netherlands for that view.

and of course Christians thought him appalling too because here we had this idea that mind and matter are just two of an infinite number of different aspects or attributes that this one substance might have. What's really interesting though is that the idea, the essence of the idea in Spinoza, is picked up and appears in modified form and much later thinking about these things.

So for example, William James, and for a time Bertrand Russell in the early 20th century, had a view that wasn't all that different from Spinoises in this sense that they thought that whatever there is, that there must be just one kind of stuff in the universe. So they call themselves neutral moanists, which didn't mean that they moaned about things. You thought there was just this one stuff.

And that it had two aspects. So it had a physical aspect when looked at or described in one way you would use terms of physical description. Looked in another way, you would use terms of mentalistic description. Russell rather implausibly thought that the best way to do this was to say if you look at things physically, it's as if you were looking at the brain from outside. If you're looking at them mentally, it's like being the subject of experience from within. But what they were groping for was something that would overcome the dualistic,

substance dualistic problems which gave all these problems about interaction and the like. And to do something rather like Spinoza was doing, which is to say no, there's just one thing and it can be looked at or described in different ways. Well, it's not interesting about Spinoza. It's not obvious if it tackles the problem of dualism and interaction or whether it just sort of sidesteps it in a rather clever way. Because as to explain, the theory is that you can look at things as a series of mental causes or you can look at them as a series of physical causes.

But the real problem is how is it that something like a thought can cause something like the moving of my arm or the kicking of a football or something? So it's how the one relates to the other. Now, to say that you can look at the one substance, either as a series of mental events or a series of physical events, actually arguably doesn't tell you how it is the one thing can seem to cause the other. The only way around that seems to be that you're simply flipping between ways of looking for various reasons of convenience, I suppose.

But I think that's why a lot of people consider it to be problematic. Sue, first and then, Anthony. Well, I think that's absolutely right. and one of the things that is striking about Spinoza's theory, and in this way it's like many subsequent theories of the relationship between body and mind, is that it takes it that our everyday way of understanding ourselves, where we assume that our thoughts cause physical events

and physical events cause our thoughts, is vastly misconceived, and that there's a sort of explanation that can be given in mental terms and explanation that can be given in physical terms, but no causal interconnections between them. So this is obviously one of the point. problems of the view if you want to save our intuition. Yes. Well, I mean, certainly it's a problem much mooted and discussed.

And here's a possible defence to it, which it might be alleged in favour of somebody who takes a spinozistic or neutrinomone's kind of view. And that's to say that one shouldn't expect the different vocabularies that one uses to talk about physical and mental things to be such that they can be translated into one another or used to talk about these causal relations. I'll give you an example. I'm speaking you have a physicist and a sociologist standing at the side of the field, observing a set of events unfolding on the field. The physicist does it using the terminology of mass and velocity and frequency of radiation and the rest. The sociologist does it by describing it as a rugby match. Now, in the concepts used by the sociologist where he talks about the ball being

in touch or scoring a try or the captain and so on, you wouldn't expect anything in those conceptual resources, to be usable to explain things that are best explained using the resources of physics. And so the sort of dual aspect theory or a theory that says that there's one stuff with two different ways of looking at it, two different perspectives, might defend itself by saying these two different languages are not mutually intertranslatable. They do different kinds of work for different purposes. And it's a sort of category, a mistake, a muddle, to think that the one is reducible to the other or that the causal connections between the two

can somehow be explained by some bridging link between the two. So that would be a move that somebody could make who wanted to try to defend a vaguely spinozistic view. How did he, how did he address this? I mean, how did he address it? But I was about to say how did he take it on, but perhaps it didn't. Well, I mean, we have to sort of go back a bit,

Berkeley perhaps. But Barclays, in a sense, a return to more platonistic way of looking at things. because again for Barclay, the solution of the two substances problem, as it were, is again that there's only one kind of thing, but for him the one kind of thing, there is is entirely mental. So there is no problem of physical stuff and mental stuff, because all there is is mental stuff.

It's another kind of neat solution, but seems highly implausible. Although the thing about Barclay is that it's actually more credible than it might seem. He was, Johnson, supposedly refuted him by kicking a stone to show the absurdity, of thinking that there were no physical objects. But of course, Barclay thought you could kick stones. All he thought was that when you are kicking a stone, you are having a sensation of touch, and that is of its nature mental and not physical.

Do you want to take up what Anthony was saying about the two different ways of describing the same thing and how that could work its way through? Well, I think this kind of idea of a monistic theory which has two aspects, as Anthony says, has been very influential in 20, 20th century philosophy of mind. Can we just reintroduce listeners to the idea of monistic?

So the idea being that you haven't got two different kinds of stuff on the one hand mental and on the one hand physical, but you have got two different kinds of properties, as it were. So you've got a property dualism rather than a substance dualism to put it in the kind of jargon of this philosophy. And so you've got on the one hand the use of mental properties to explain some sorts of phenomena as we do in ordinary life. And on the other hand, you've got a highly technical, physical vocabulary

to explain what's going on, for instance, in the brain or at an atomic level in physical events or whatever it might be. There's something attractive about that, the idea that these two sorts of descriptions sit on top of each other. In Spinoza, both these systems are conceived as entirely deterministic because they are matching. And some 20th century philosophers, for instance, Donald Davidson, have thought that that's a problem because it seems as though our mental life isn't entirely deterministic. So he's developed a view called anomalous monism, even more monie, perhaps,

which says that as it were, the mental events sit on top of our other descriptions of the physical events, but they don't behave in the same kind of law-like way as the physical events underlying them. This is rather a rough and ready way to express Davidson's position. But I think that that's a very interesting line of thought, and it suddenly captures something that we seem to want in any solution to the mind-body problem. I think what's happened with the debate in general is that the key problem is, now everybody accepts that somehow the brain, the central nervous system, the physical stuff, is what there is, and that mental phenomena somehow arise.

Now, you see, this is where, if this were television, you would see the hands waving, because absolutely everybody in the debate says, in some way brains give rise to mental phenomena, cause them, or the mental phenomena supervene on them. and this word supervene, like lots of long words in philosophy, like marmalade and corrugated iron, you know, always there to disguise some ignorance that we have about the problem. And I remember once seeing in a Paris window, a great big mathematical formulae,

line after line after line of it, and then right in the middle it said, and then something odd happens here, and then more mathematics is here, and then you get an equal sign. Well, this is the same with this problem. We don't really know how it arises. And so when people say, as I did it earlier,

look, to talk about memory, hope, desire, belief, intention, to use that sort of psychological vocabulary to talk about the mental reality of our lives. And then to talk about how much the brain weighs and what color it is and what it smells like when it's been out of the body for a time or whatever, is to use two quite different bits of language that can't be interpreted one another. Everybody feels that, but of course, there must be mutually interpretable. It must be possible to reduce, to translate the psychological talk into the physical talk because brains give rise to these psychological phenomena.

And that's our tremendous difficulty, even with this double aspect theory or property dualism. Can we say that by the time Darwin comes along, Sue James, the idea of the soul in philosophical discourse is on the retreat. We've lost the soul's association with the mind. I mean, it's still, of course, a great number of Christians and Christian thinkers are still discussing, talking about accepting the soul. But in the terms in which we have been developing this argument, has that slid? How's that slipped away now, and has Darwin sort of nail it? Well, I think it's a long process. It's perfectly true, of course,

that Darwinism is a huge challenge to that kind of theological view, and that caused Darwin himself great angst. Perhaps partly explains the extreme hypochondria that he suffered and the great difficulty that he had in actually producing this theory, sort of really convincing himself that it was true. But I think it's perhaps also the result of a very low long process. And Julian said earlier that Descartes was interested in science, and that's true.

I mean, so the question of how much you can explain in these physical terms have been a continuous preoccupation since at least the mid-17th century. And in a way, the kind of pressure towards some sort of materialism had been growing as the capacity to explain more and more in physical terms developed, and Darwin is a kind of apotheosis of that. Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin's bulldog, took Darwin's notions on and seemed to come make an emphatic entry into this mind-body dispute. Can you tell us what that was, and epiphenomalism, if you can unwrap that. Yeah. Well, I think epiphenomalism is really very interesting. Huxley, there aren't many people

who claim to be followers of Huxley now, and he's not one of the figures perhaps undergraduate, its first go to, but in his sense his ghost kind of haunts contemporary debates about this. Because I think what Huxley was doing was taking on board sort of three facts, which seem to now be undeniable, and go to what seems they're the most obvious but counterintuitive in another way, conclusion. The facts being we are entirely biological organisms. The causal, the physical world has what we call causal closure, which means that any effect in the physical world is caused by something else in the physical world and nothing else. and that the organ of thought is the brain, a physical object.

Now, if you put all those things together, what that seems to imply is that whatever's going on in our minds is just somehow the product of a purely physical process going on in the brain. So if you like, you see humans as a kind of biological machine, and the inner life we have is like just the hum of that machine. Now, the hum of a machine doesn't move the machine. It's just a byproduct of it, an epiphenomenon. And so at Huxley's view was that's what thoughts and stuff are. We have a pain and we go, ow, and we think intuitively that the feeling of pain is what is making us pull away or making us sort of go to do something about it. But the view is, the epiphenomenal view is actually that's not true.

Everything's happening. All the causes are at the purely physical level, the way it feels it just sits on top. Now that is such a dispiriting and distressing conclusion that a lot of people would say that it's kind of like the duty of any decent theory of mind to show that epiphenomalism is false. I mean, Jerry Fodor once said a very well-known contemporary philosopher that if epiphenomalism is true, then that is the end of the world, meaning that the world just isn't how we think of it at all. So you find that epiphenomalism is seen as kind of the terrible thing we have to avoid, and

if you can show that your opponent's view leads to epiphenomalism, some people would take that to be showing that it is inadequate. But what I think is interesting is whether or not epiphenomalism should be taken more seriously. Well, clearly you do, and it is very interesting because it means that the discussion we're having, and a lot of the work you three do and even some what I do, is just the hum, really. It's the bits because of an overactive, over-elaborate structure that's happened to reside in our skull, a lot of which is in terms of happening and of living supernumery, and the hum, the bars will do. What do you make of that?

You're nodding, but you don't seem convinced to. You don't want to be convinced. interesting. Again, we're talking about philosophy being influenced by notions which are sort of outside it, that the body is the disgusting thing, therefore we must leave it, and that we're still back on that, aren't we really? We're saying if it's just the body, it can't be right, because we're much more than the body. There's that little impulse as well, isn't there? Well, there may be, but epiphenomalism also is a kind of challenge to our whole way of understanding ourselves, and I think that's what makes people so shy of it. Because, first of all,

if there is no mental causation I mean if our thoughts can never have any causal impact on the world which I think is what classical epiphenomenalism anyway claimed then our whole notion of ourselves as agents really goes out the window I mean we don't do things because we have certain thoughts and all our notions for example of knowledge the kinds of perceptions that we have of the world and the way that we reason from one belief to another

all that goes out the window as well. So what are we doing here now if epiphenomenalism is true? It's very challenging. Well, it is very challenging indeed. I mean, if our mental lives are just the hum of the machine and were still your tone deaf, you know, what then? But I think one way of responding to it is to say, look, you know, the whole richly textured, deep, terribly significant

moral universe that we occupy, the universe of intentions, hope, desire, love, our response to beauty, all these things are by far more important to us in a way, even in this age of narcissism than how much we weigh and what we look like and, you know, our sort of physical being in the world. And that given the enormous significance that we attribute to it, and therefore to the belief, the assumption that we make that minds influence things, that our thoughts, our beliefs influence things and shape things and are much more. the source of our destinies than our bodily lives. Given that, what one wants to do is to fight very hard to show how they work and why they still matter and to show that epiphenomalism is implausible. Gilbert Ryle in his work seemed, or I've read from when reading for this programme, seemed to be going along with epiphenomalism to some extent Julian.

I mean, was that true? And is there, more important question I want to ask, is there, as this thing from, almost, it can't be like that, we want to be more than that. Is there other very powerful arguments against it? What you've said is that people shy away from it, they don't like to be associated with it. But do you feel there are powerful arguments against it?

Clearly you're intrigued by it. So can you tell us more about what its strength is, and has it been really challenged in your view? Well, I'm not sure it has. It's interesting how very good philosophers actually resort to very simplistic arguments to kind of show that epiphone. normalism is supposedly false. I mean, John Searle, who's done considerable amount of work in philosophy of mind, in discussion and everything, will often say that epiphenomalomalism is false and he can just show it by raising his arm.

Here I go, I've had the intention to raise my arm, I've just done it. That's an example for you of thoughts causing physical actions. That seems to be a deeply inadequate response to epiphenominalism because the epiphenomalists can explain how that happens. How would the epiphenomomomalists explain how that happened without thought? Well, because the thought is just an illusion that the thought is the cause of that event. Of course the thought is going to go along with the event because that's part of the epiphenomalist thesis, that somehow the mental life, how it seems, is some kind of inevitable byproduct of the great complexity of brain.

It's such a good example. I want to stick with it for a moment or two. You put your arm, I'm putting my arm at now, left arm. Right. I put that up because why did I put that up if I didn't put it up because I thought I'd put it up? Well, because fundamentally, if you analyze it, you are this biological machine. There are things, brain events going on causing this, that and the other. And as this kind of machine in the world, this is what happens.

Now, when you, it is accompanied and slightly preceded by, perhaps a thought. Although, funnily enough, if you look at this introspectively, I think it becomes less plausible because if you think about all the things you do in your life, how often do you actually proceed a physical action with a thought in your head. I mean, philosophers sometimes talk about intentions causing actions, as though this describes the phenomenology of real life. I think that if we were to be honest, if you were to make an honest, introspective view of how we go about in the world,

a lot of our behaviour is actually much more automatic than that. And the thoughts we have kind of go along with our actions. And there isn't an obvious introspective link between the thought of doing something and the actual action as a cause. Julie. I've got to jump in there. There are two points. The first is it's certainly true that we are not self-consciously aware of our intentions, volitions and all the rest of it because we're frightfully practiced. And most of the things we do, like picking up a cup of tea to sip it and so on,

don't require now I intend to drink this cup of tea and I'm now going to move my own towards and so on. So we don't do that. But in a full explanation of why somebody did something, why did somebody go make a cup of tea, it would be, I would argue, impossible to eliminate reference to the intentions and beliefs and desires of that agent. And that if you couldn't reduce those things, intentions, beliefs and so on, to secretions of glands and twitchings of nerve fibers and so on, then you would still need this. That's point number one. But I must get my point number two in first, however, which is this. You accuse Searle and others of being simplistic.

Well, too quack way, okay, because the epiphenomalist violates the principle of economy in nature, which is a principle that the epiphenomelist must himself be committed to, namely that nature doesn't go over the top in doing things unless it's absolutely necessary for its own survival and benefit. And yet here is this, not merely I intend to raise my arm, but a vast complex of sort of intentional occurrences going on. why should there be such a thing unless there were a role for it? Well, I think this is where you move into sort of areas of AI and so on.

People who work in artificial intelligence will often say that, look, the solution to this is that if you look at how complicated a system has to be to do the kind of things that we do, then it has to have these things somehow inevitable. They're kind of inevitable product of it. So it's not something which nature is throwing in gratuitously. You just could not be that complex without having

some kind of self-awareness of what's going on without some kind of feel for the world. Now, whether or not that's plausible and sustainable in the end I'm agnostic about, but I think that's a serious point, a serious challenge. Well, it's a hand wave. Last word from Susan Jane. Well, I think this raises something very deep about all these debates,

which is that people have, as it were, different interests in the kinds of explanations that are offered. And I think one of the things that makes epiphenomalism so unattractive to us, some of us, at least, is that we will. want explanations which, at least for some arenas of events to do with the mind and the brain, where we can recognise ourselves in these and we can make sense of our own experience and fit it on to these more kind of technical or philosophical accounts that we give.

And one of the problems about epiphenomalism and indeed many forms of contemporary materialism seems to be that we just lose that. We're told what's going on is da-da-da-da-da. And there's a sort of sense in which you can see that that's true, but it doesn't tell you what you want to know, because you want to know how does that relate to how this is for me and the fact that I understand myself to be doing something. Susan James, Andy Grinning, Julian McGrini.

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