Yet another mind-body hypothesis

An approach towards the mind-body problems, that offers no proofs. Rather, the methodology here is context search, in an attempt to contextualize the conundrum. Unexpectedly, the search led back to a basic onto/logical law.
—Jørn Poulsen

Identity

There are two important senses of identity — ontological and logical — encompassed by this 1st of the 3 classic laws of thought.

Ontological identity simply states that anything that exists is self-identical. Anything given is itself, and not something else (and this does not only apply to objects). This is both self-evident and intuitive, allowing us to talk about and differentiate things, like individuation, and is usually taken to be fundamental.

Logical identity is technically a formalized axiom, a rule that pertains to propositions and reasoning (tautology, x=x, p⇔p), and can be a more linguistic expression of ontological identity. Non-contradiction (the 2nd law) and it’s complement, the excluded middle (the 3rd law), are correlates of identity. Because identity intellectually partitions the world into exactly two parts, like “self” and “other”, it creates a dichotomy wherein the two parts are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Non-contradiction is merely an expression of the mutually exclusive aspect of that dichotomy, and the excluded middle is an expression of its jointly exhaustive aspect.

The two senses of identity are intimately related, and somewhat interchangeable depending on context.

Whatever is, is.
—Bertrand Russell (The Problems of Philosophy, Chapter VII)

Solipsism Exposé

It seems there’s broad agreement that solipsism is neither provable nor disprovable, and likewise for a larger, extra-self world, that we’re part of.

So, it might be more fruitful to try understanding what kinds of worlds engender solipsism. Is the last person alive a solipsist? I suppose, technically, in a way, though they might not otherwise have been, if their parents also were there, for example.

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.
—Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments)

consciousness makes each of us aware only of his own states of mind, that other people, too, possess a consciousness is an inference which we draw by analogy from their observable utterances and actions, in order to make this behavior of theirs intelligible to us
—Sigmund Freud (The Unconscious)

The difficulty with other minds comes about because 1st person experiences are sort of private. Is your red my red? I don’t experience your self-awareness, since, well, I’m not you. In fact, I can’t — even in principle — not without being you, in which case I’d no longer be me, which is nonsense. And, in a phenomenological sense, how would you separate “you” from your experiences, qualia, feelings, awareness, thoughts, etc? Self-awareness is essentially indexical (below), a kind of self-knowledge, and bound by self-identity.

Why is that a problem anyway? Well, because of certainty, problems of induction, Occam’s razor (parsimony), skepticism (doubt), the diallelus perhaps, … Unlike the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, other peoples’ self-awarenesses are like noumena, always just over the horizon, though I can conclude there can be no other solipsists.

Most folk sport some sort of self-awareness. Differentiating introspection and extrospection, cognitive capacity to separate self and other, ability to understand and use a mirror, an inwards awareness of thoughts, feelings, experiences of self, a sense of continuity.

And so, it seems to be logical worlds — or worlds that engender logical thinking at least — that lead to the problem of solipsism, since it’s logic that forms the boundary between (deductive or error-free) certainty and uncertainty in the first place.

Take standard (logical) reasoning:

  • identity, x = x, p ⇔ p   —   in particular
  • non-contradiction, ¬(p ∧ ¬p)
  • the excluded middle, p ∨ ¬p
  • double negation (introduction), p ⇒ ¬¬p
  • modus ponens/tollens, …

Now what can you deduce from a self-identity (like x=x or p⇔p) alone? Not much (apart from what was already presupposed by x or p).

Certainty by deduction is rational, but, as per above, there’s no deductive proof of others’ self-awareness. Self-identity, as mentioned, is characteristic of self-awareness, and that’s (also) to say logical identity. However, given just this identity does not imply much, including the nature or existence of something else.

And so, a sound proof of something extra-self hits mentioned boundary. Thus, solipsism shouldn’t be all that surprising, in fact, we should expect something like that to come up. Our world is such that self-identical, logical thinkers can run up against solipsism, as a matter of “safe” reasoning therein. And some philosophers sure are infatuated (or even obsessed) with certainty.

But Reasoning?

So, what about reasoning then? Useless posturing? No, of course not. It’s not to abandon reasoning, or throw hands in the air in futility, but rather the opposite. It’s to recognize the inherent difficulties involved in knowledge acquisition; something students of history (of science and philosophy in particular) should know all too well. Common sense, heuristics, careful inductive and abductive reasoning are indispensable for learning, and that’s the natural modus operandi of most healthy individuals in any case. We’re un/consciously in training by our environment. (Outside of philosophy, solipsism is largely pathological, reported by doctors and asylums.)

Numerous philosophical branches have been charged with solipsism, including, but not limited to, Cartesian skepticism (obviously), (pure) phenomenology, subjective idealism (and some other idealisms), postmodernism (when applied in metaphysics). It crops up in numerous places, and is occasionally used argumentatively to deny just about anything, i.e. a rhetorical tactic (that I’ll call “argument from solipsism” or “appeal to parsimonious skepticism”).

chatting

But, in the requisite Wittgensteinian tradition, languages sure help. Regardless of whether or not there are private languages, public languages enable sharing of experiences.

Experiences and Dichotomies

Consider the following dichotomy, a categorization of experiences:

  • Non-identity: Suppose I have a chat my neighbor. My experiences of my neighbor ≠ my neighbor. (My better half may also experience the neighbor on their own.)
  • Identity: Suppose I have a headache. My experience of the ache = the ache. (My better half don’t have my headaches (I sure hope not anyway).)

It’s reasonably clear that where identity is phenomenological, non-identity is also empirical.

By this categorization,

  • hallucination is mistaking non-identity for identity, and
  • solipsism is mistaking identity for non-identity.

Paraphrasing Searle, if anything significant differentiates perception and hallucination, then it must be the perceived.

Suppose you’ve gotten yourself a headache. No aspirin at hand. Instead you go scan yourself, fMRI or whatever the latest may be, doesn’t really matter. You now have two different angles, the experience of the ache, and a visual overview of your gray matter (need not be visual alone). If only the angles differ, in an ontological sense, then what makes them different? (Does anyone really doubt that feeling hungry (usually) means the body needs replenishment?) Understanding the scan, in this context, would converge on understanding the headache; a straight identity is not readily available, or deducible. The headache itself is part of your self-experience, or, put simpler, just part of yourself — bound by (ontological) self-identity, like self-reference, regardless of any scans or whatever else. Others cannot have your headaches (identity), but others can check out the scans (non-identity).

At a glance, it seems there are a few somewhat related dichotomies, that crop up in various contexts. In terms of solipsism, or parsimonious skepticism, a similar dichotomy could perhaps be expressed as existential certainty versus uncertainty.

Introversal Extroversal
1st person perspective (2nd and) 3rd person perspective
self other
internal external
introspection extrospection
subjective objective
quality quantity
indexical information non-indexical information
mind body
phenomenological empirical
certainty uncertainty

Indexical versus Non-indexical

From linguistics, it has (sort of) become a theorem of information theory that:

  • indexical information cannot be derived from non-indexical information

Some examples in the literature involve a fictional amnesiac, Rudolf Lingens, who is lost in the Stanford Library:

He reads a number of things in the library, including a biography of himself, and a detailed account of the library in which he is lost. He still won’t know who he is, and where he is, no matter how much nonindexical knowledge he piles up. Suppose that Lingens has access to a continuously refreshed database containing the name and location of each person in the Stanford Main Library. Lingens can then know that exactly one person is now in aisle five, floor six of the library, and this person is named “Rudolf Lingens”. Since Lingens is an amnesiac, he does not know any of his distinguishing features, including his name. So knowing that Rudolf Lingens is in aisle five, floor six will not allow him to infer I am in aisle five, floor six. In fact, he will not be able to infer this indexical information from any amount of nonindexical information about the library and its occupants — or, for that matter, from any amount of information about the current location and activities of anyone in the world. Assume that Lingens knows he is in the Stanford Library. In order to determine which of the persons in the database is him, Lingens must link his nonindexical information (e.g. that Rudolf Lingens is in aisle five, floor six) with indexical information. Suppose that, as he walks down the aisle, Lingens notices a map of the library with a red dot indicating “you are here”. This is indexical information, as it refers to the particular spot (aisle five, floor six) by the context (the placement of the map). Lingens can use this indexical information to establish I am in aisle five, floor six of the Stanford Main Library. Joining this to the nonindexical information that Rudolf Lingens is the only person in aisle five, floor six, he can conclude I am Rudolf Lingens.

ideo_locator

A fixed (temporally invariant) ideo locator on a map is an indexical, indicating where the map is located. A nexus, where a map of a territory is located at a specific location in that territory. The value is obvious if one is lost.

It is generally agreed that self-awareness is essentially indexical. Indexical information is information that is indexed to a context: it may be indexed to the person who possesses the information, or to the location or time of the possession (etc.).
—Brie Gertler (Self-Knowledge)

Essential indexicality and identity are uniquely tied.

Mind versus Body

Observations:

  • mind: comes and goes, starts and ends, un/consciousness (anesthetic) — temporal
  • body (of which brain is a part): left to right, top to bottom, front to back — spatial

Evidence:

  • mind without body: no credible examples — “mind moving among bodies”, “free floating minds”, “possessions”, …
  • body without mind: examples abundant — the deceased, rocks, body persists (structurally) throughout mind, …

Reasoning:

All minds are uniquely associated with, and localized to, bodies. Therefore, by abduction, mind is contingent on body, mind is something body can do, and body is “moved” by mind.

  • mind is process-likes that change object-likes
  • body is an object-like doing process-likes

As the old saying goes, you can’t misplace your body, but you can lose your mind.

This may suggest a physicalist characterization, or at least that a physicalist position does not imply a contradiction, however incomplete.

What Then?

Following the above, my red can never be your red (they’re separate occurrences), although they can certainly be sufficiently similar in any sense that matters.

Agreements:

The fly and the chameleon are in agreement about the colors of the environment, when the chameleon sneaks up on the fly and catches it. And, as a spectator, I can understand this little drama; I also agree with the fly and the chameleon about the colors.

Correlations:

Light at this-and-that wavelength/frequency correlates uniquely with red qualia, but the format of the experience, “redness”, is not itself derived as such. We can, however, predict when such an experience may occur, and pre-conditions for such an experience.

The terms “identity”, “certainty” and “self” hint at a logical structure, whether as propositional tautology, or ontological (whatever exists is self-identical).

What’s in a Format?

The basic formats we know, we call qualia.

Pilots and gamers are familiar with HUDs. They display various information in whichever format is convenient. Showing lists of scrolling numbers may be much too tedious to be of much use, whereas graphical renditions may be easy to comprehend quickly. What we know as qualia are parts of our awareness (when present), parts of us, and quite efficient.

This leads to the biologically evolutionary angle, which explains qualia in terms of sufficiently survivable perception.

Presumably echo-location of bats is much different from what we know. For us to experience such echo-location, we would need a sufficiently similar makeup.

Introspecting Consciousness

There are already well-known deficiencies of introspection and self-comprehension. There’s simply no such cognitive closure, which would be like a map becoming the territory, like metadata versus data.

self-inspection

Is it possible to fully self-comprehend? To consciously comprehend one’s own consciousness? In analogy, what microstructural things can you learn about a Nikon Eclipse Ni-E optical microscope, when that’s all you have handy?

There’s an inherent information horizon, intrinsic blind spots, a limited scope to introspection. DNA/genes/chromosomes/bloodcells are instrumental in my own makeup, but nature never let me in on that, so now I have to study it all to learn more. We run into various kinds of infinite regress, and psychological patching that fills things in like tricks of stage-magic, and all subject to a kind of self-reference necessitating cognitive non-closure.

1st persons are merely one result of every uniquely positioned body’s processes, physically perspectival bodies, both transforming (introversal) and interacting (extroversal).

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

The Chalmers style mind-body problem derives from a dichotomy:

  • the format of 1st person phenomenological experiences, qualia (introversal)
  • the 2nd/3rd person world of objects, processes, bodies, brains, etc (extroversal)

And the apparent intractability, also known as the explanatory gap:

  • 1st person experiences do not derive others’ self-awarenesses and such, and are thus incomplete — solipsism
  • physicalism (or whatever) does not derive qualia, and is thus considered incomplete — the hard problem of consciousness

So we have a context where solipsism and the hard problem of consciousness comprise yet another dichotomy.

From mind to body:

the leap from the mental process to a somatic innervation — hysterical conversion — which can never be fully comprehensible to us
—Sigmund Freud (Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis)

the puzzling leap from the mental to the physical
—Sigmund Freud (Introduction to Psychoanalysis)

From body to mind:

412. The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come into the consideration of our ordinary life? This idea of a difference in kind is accompanied by slight giddiness — which occurs when we are performing a piece of logical slight-of-hand. (The same giddiness attacks us when we think of certain theorems in set theory.) When does this feeling occur in the present case? It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain! — as it were clutching my forehead.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, Part I)

Substance dualism is out, rather identity itself creates a different sort of apparent dualism.

every physical effect (i.e. caused event) has physical sufficient causes
—Agustin Vincente (On the Causal Completeness of Physics)

The Cartesian cut — res cogitans (thinking substance, mental) versus res extensa (extended substance, material) — is an expression of a duality like the dichotomy above. By substance, Descartes meant an ontologically independent, real thing. In the context here, res cogitans is instead subject to an inwards self-blindness (possibly tending towards “soul” ideation or mysticism), and the identity boundary outwards. This account is thus is compatible with monism of some sort, and there isn’t anything in particular preventing an “artificial” organism from experiencing the world akin to us.

Leap to Hypothesis

Central to these musings is identity, be it as reasoning (logical), or worldly structure (ontological).

Our hypothesis, in brief, can now be expressed as what separates introversal and extroversal is onto/logical identity.

  1. We’re subject to a dichotomizing boundary condition, as a result of identity.
  2. A number of recurring dichotomies are partitioned by similar boundaries, where the halves of each dichotomy does not entail the other.
  3. The mind-body problem (and solipsism) expresses an aspect of said boundary.

As per the hard problem of consciousness, physicalism does not derive qualia, and is thus considered incomplete. Conversely, 1st person experiences do not derive others’ self-awarenesses, and are thus incomplete.

certainty

Anything essentially self-referential, remain introversially stuck.

I surmise one of the ways these conundrums have come up, in philosophy, originally, is the difficulty in grasping how something like one’s own 1st person experiences could come about, from the world of 3rd person perspective. That is, how on Earth can the more introspective world of experiences, thoughts, qualia, etc, come about from the extrospective spatiotemporal world of objects, processes, etc? Mentioned limitations of introspection compounds the difficulty.

If the hypothesis holds (that the “disconnect” or boundary is simply due to basic identity), then we may have to contend with our predicament.

Incidentally, this emphasizes a need for strong epistemic standards, i.e. justification.

Next up: Mary’s Room

Thanks

Too many individuals to list have suggested, poked and prodded this thinking, including several members of:

Other references are included and linked throughout the above.