Some Replies to Objectivists

“Could you please tell me what ‘abstraction’ is in the Objectivist canon?” (An Objectivist)

“Abstraction” (or “abstracting”) is, for Rand, a volitional activity performed by a conscious mind in relation to existents (e.g., entities, attributes of entities, actions of entities, relations between entities, etc.) which it observes in reality. More specifically, it is a process wherein a mind “selectively” focuses upon, and mentally “isolates,” an existent present within a particular context, “omitting” (or regarding as “unspecified”) observed differences as being different from what is being “isolated,” and ”grasping” observed similarities as being similar to what is being mentally “isolated.” Abstraction is an essential phase of Rand’s account of concept formation, and it is intertwined with what Rand calls “measurement” and its subsidiary aspects (e.g., “unit” “measurement omission,” “commensurable characteristics,” etc.) 

“An ‘attribute’ is a mentally isolated element of the structure of an entity.” (An Objectivist)

“‘Attributes’ are not extant ‘things’. They are epistemological abstractions.” (An Objectivist)

This is totally mistaken. Attributes are not entities (or “things”), rather they are existent characteristics or properties of entities. For Rand, attributes and entities are types of existents. (Cf. “The building-block of man’s knowledge is the concept of an “existent”—of something that exists, be it a thing, an attribute or an action.”) Thus, Rand holds that attributes (e.g., the color of a particular book) and entities (e.g., the book which has that particular color) are existents. Although attributes and entities are both extant, only entities are self-subsistent and self-contained existents—attributes are neither self-subsistent nor self-contained existents. 

Although an attribute cannot exist independently of the entity which possesses it, it is nevertheless metaphysically distinct from the entity which possesses it. As evidenced on page 277 of ITOE, Rand makes it clear that attributes of entities are not “epistemological abstractions”—they are not products resulting from our measuring(s) or abstracting(s) from entities. On the contrary, she states that an attribute (e.g., the length of a stick, the shape of a book, the color of a flower, etc.) “does exist in reality, only it doesn’t exist by itself. It is not separable from an entity, but it certainly exists in reality….And therefore if to say it is epistemological rather than metaphysical is to say it exists only in relation to your grasp of it, or it requires your grasp of it in order to acquire existence—it doesn’t. Surely, if anything is metaphysical, attributes are.” 

In a similar vein, the referent of the concept of a particular attribute (e.g., the concept of “red,” the concept of “length,” the concept of “shape,” etc.) is not itself epistemological; on the contrary, the referent of the concept of a particular attribute is the attribute itself (i.e., the referent is the particular attribute possessed by all the entities which happen to possess that attribute). Rand states that although the concept of a particular attribute is the result of an act of “mental isolation” and “abstraction,” the referents of the concept are themselves metaphysical: they exist in reality and constitute the identities of the entities which possess them. The referents of the concept of a particular attribute are not themselves “epistemological abstractions.” As Rand says, on pg. 98 of ITOE, each of an entity’s characteristics (i.e., each of an entity’s attributes) “has the same metaphysical status: each constitutes a part of the entity’s identity”.

“Rand is saying that the attributes yes do exist, but not as a metaphysically distinct thing.” (An Objectivist)

A particular attribute of an entity is not metaphysically separable from the entity which possesses that particular attribute; however, that does not mean that the particular attribute and the entity in question are not metaphysically distinct. On the contrary, a particular attribute of an entity is clearly metaphysically distinct from the entity which possesses that particular attribute. Indeed, if a particular attribute of an entity was not metaphysically distinct (i.e., different) from the entity which possessed it, then the entity in question would be identical to that particular attribute which it possessed—and this is something which Rand rejects (Cf. “An attribute is something which is not the entity itself.” (ITOE, 276)). While Rand holds that an entity is not metaphysically distinct from the totality of its attributes, she holds that the entity is nevertheless metaphysically distinct from anything less than the totality of its attributes. (Cf. “No one attribute constitutes the whole entity, but all of them together are the entity—not “possessed by” but “are” the entity.” (ITOE, 276)) 

Furthermore, absurd contradictions would follow if a particular attribute of an entity was not metaphysically distinct (i.e., different) from the entity which possessed it. To reiterate, if a particular attribute of an entity was not metaphysically distinct (i.e., different) from the entity which possessed it, then the entity in question would be identical to that particular attribute which it possessed. The contradiction can be illustrated with the help of an example. Take, for instance, a book. This book is an entity, and it has many attributes; e.g., a particular shape, a particular color, a particular texture, a particular odor, etc.). If the book’s color (i.e., one of the book’s attributes) was not metaphysically distinct (i.e., different) from the book itself, then the book and the book’s color would be identical—and this is contradictory. Furthermore, if the book’s odor (i.e., one of the book’s attributes) was not metaphysically distinct (i.e., different) from the book itself, then the book and the book’s odor would be identical—and this is also contradictory. However, another contradiction would arise. Since identity is transitive (e.g., If A = B, and B = C, then A = C) it follows that if the book’s color was identical to the book, and the book was identical to the book’s odor, then the book’s color would be identical to the book’s odor—and this is absurd.

Another important point concerns identity. For Rand (and Peikoff), the totality of a thing’s characteristics (attributes) constitutes a thing’s identity because the totality of a thing’s characteristics is the thing’s identity. A thing is identical to the totality of its characteristics (attributes).  Suppose one asks the following question: Why is it the case that an existent apart from its characteristics would be an existent apart from its identity? Rand’s (and Peikoff’s) answer is straightforward and clear: An existent is nothing more than, and nothing less than, the totality of its characteristics. The totality of an existent’s characteristics just is the existent’s identity, and the identity of an existent just is that existent itself. For example:

“Existence and identity are not attributes of existents, they are the existents.” (ITOE, 56)

“Metaphysically, an entity is: all of the things which it is. Each of its characteristics has the same metaphysical status: each constitutes a part of the entity’s identity.” (ITOE, 98)

“A thing is—what it is; its characteristics constitute its identity. An existent apart from its characteristics, would be an existent apart from its identity, which means: a nothing, a non-existent.” (ITOE, 142)

“Now, what is an entity? It is a sum of characteristics. There is no such thing as an entity without its characteristics, and, for that very reason, there is no such thing as a characteristic without an entity….Usually when I write I say the entity is its attributes….The attributes are the entity, or an entity is its attributes.” (ITOE, 266)

“No one attribute constitutes the whole entity, but all of them together are the entity—not “possessed by” but “are” the entity.” (ITOE, 276)

“A thing’s nature is that which it is metaphysically; a thing’s nature is its identity, that which cannot be changed by miracle nor by any wish, whim, or will, God’s or man’s. This is the meaning of “A is A”.” (Letters of Ayn Rand, 528-529)

“A thing is itself; or, in the traditional formula, A is A. The “identity” of an existent means that which it is, the sum of its attributes or characteristics…Ayn Rand offers a new formulation of this axiom: existence is identity. She does not say “existence has identity”—which might suggest that identity is a feature separable from existence (as a coat of paint is separable from the house that has it). The point is that to be is to be something. Existence and identity are indivisible; either implies the other. If something exists, then something exists; and if there is a something, then there is a something. The fundamental fact cannot be broken in two.” (OPAR, 7)

“A thing cannot act apart from its nature, because existence is identity; apart from its nature, a thing is nothing. A thing cannot act against its nature, i.e., in contradiction to its identity, because A is A and contradictions are impossible. In any given set of circumstances, therefore, there is only one action possible to an entity, the action expressive of its identity. This is the action it will take, the action that is caused and necessitated by its nature.” (OPAR, 15)

“The axiom of identity holds that each thing is itself, or, as Rand frequently puts it: “A is A.” The force of this statement is perfectly captured in Bishop Butler’s famous remark, “Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.” “Identity” names the fact that everything that is is something in particular. A given thing’s identity is the sum total of all of its characteristics. Synonyms for something’s “identity” might be its “character” or its “nature,” so long as it is understood that a thing’s identity at any given moment refers to all of its attributes, actions, relations, and so on.” (Blackwell Companion to Rand, 249) 

“The relation of the attributes of an entity to the whole entity; an entity is its attributes and a state of awareness is its aspects.” (Binswanger, How We Know, 57)

Likewise, Rand emphasizes that an existent does not “possess” or “have” the totality of its characteristics because that would imply that the totality of the existent’s characteristics is something distinct or different from the existent “possessive” of said totality of characteristics. It is for this same reason that Rand insists that an existent is identical to its identity, rather than “possess” or “have” its identity. To suppose that an existent “possessed” or “had” its identity would imply that the identity “possessed by” or “had by” the existent was something distinct or different from the existent itself—and this is something which Rand and Peikoff explicitly reject. Indeed, it would be to suppose that an existent was something apart from, distinct from, and different from “itself”—a contradiction. As Rand and Peikoff say: it would be “a nothing, a non-existent.”

Reading Notes: March 27th, 2023

“The basic commitment of empiricism is that all conceptual content derives from experience. The idealism of the empiricists, however, does not follow directly from this principle alone. Among the theses that combined with the empiricists principle to yield idealism are: (1) the myth of the given; (2) the belief that what is given is one’s current mental state; (3) the belief in the atomic, hierarchical, constructivist structure of the mental or conceptual realm; (4) the belief in the fundamental unity of the sensory and the conceptual; and (5) the belief that conceptual content is derived from sensory content by abstraction. How these principles combined to yield forms of idealism in both eighteenth- and twentieth-century empiricism is, in general, clear: The empiricist takes sensory experience not only to be knowledge, but to be the very paradigm of knowledge and the source—via abstraction—of all concepts and meaning. If sensory experience is not only what we know first and best, but also is the only and ultimate source of all conceptual content, from which all our ideas must be derived or constructed, then our concepts and our knowledge are limited to the sensory and constructions therefrom. The sensory is mental, our concepts are mental; thus, there is no way to reach beyond the mental, so the mental must be ontologically and explanatorily prior to any other form of being. This basic reasoning can be found just as much in the twentieth-century phenomenalists as in Berkeley and Hume.” (deVries, Getting Beyond Idealisms, 212-213) 

“The myth of the given is a multi-dimensional thesis, in that it has both methodological and substantive sides. The myth of the given is the doctrine that the cognitive states of any cognitive subject include some that are both (1) epistemically basic (independent of the epistemic status of any other cognitive state), and (2) warrant the subject’s non-basic cognitive states. Such basic cognitive states are traditionally taken to be the beginning points of all knowledge and inquiry, as well as “the ultimate court of appeals for all factual claims-particular and general-about the world”….In pre-Kantian thought, it was commonplace to assume that what is given is our own mental state: we know our minds first and best. Methodologically, the belief that one's own mental states are what is given encourages a deliberate naivete about the process of understanding our own minds. We need only direct our thoughts to consciousness itself and we will, perhaps with some practice or training, gain insight into its very nature. The idea that consciousness is somehow immediate and transparent to itself discourages us from recognizing both that theory is called for in order to understand consciousness and the mind, and that the appropriate philosophical theory is distinctively meta. One of the important developments in twentieth-century philosophy, one that Sellars helped solidify, is the realization that philosophical questions about the intrinsic characteristics of the mental fundamentally concern the logic of those dimensions of our conceptual framework that describe, explain, and express our mental or conscious lives….Methodologically, Sellars replaces the enterprise of analyzing the mind or mental states with that of analyzing our concepts of mind and mental states. The difference is not trivial. It is the difference between a philosophy of mind that knows itself to be philosophy and a philosophy of mind that still confuses itself with psychology.” (deVries, Getting Beyond Idealisms, 215-216) 

“Turning to the substantive side, there are at least two distinguishable beliefs associated with the myth that mental states are given. One is the thesis that if x is a mental state, then we are directly conscious of it. This is a very strong claim; it is often weakened to the thesis that if x is a mental state, then we can be directly conscious of it. The mental is always available for our direct awareness or inspection. I'll call this the immediacy of the mental. (IM) X is mental ⟹ x is available to direct consciousness. Conversely, it has also been held that what is available for our direct awareness is the mental. We can call this claim the mentality of the immediate: (MI) X is available to direct consciousness ⟹ x is mental….If something is available to consciousness, it is still an open question how it appears in consciousness, as what it is available to consciousness. In the baldest form of the givenness of the mental, consciousness of a mental state is necessarily of that mental state in propria persona, that is, as the mental state it is. We can therefore distinguish a stronger form of the immediacy of the mental (IMS) X is mental ⟹ x is available to direct consciousness as the mental state it is.” (deVries, Getting Beyond Idealisms, 216-217)

Reading Notes: March 24th, 2023

“Some reductionistic biologists adopt a different position. They hold that consciousness is identical to, that is, the same as, the physiological and physio-chemical actions of the brain. They believe that the reduction of consciousness to the laws of physics will be achieved when every different or unique conscious state or experience is correlated with a particular or unique physio-chemical state of the brain. This position is referred to as a “psycho-neural identity theory.” There are two implications of all psycho-neural identity theories which contradict the principle of reduction. In the first place, it is a blatant contradiction to argue that mental states are identical with physio-chemical states and at the same time to maintain that the two can be correlated. To correlate is to compare the occurrence of, or the association between, two different existents, the causal relationship being unknown or unstated. One cannot, in logic, argue that mental states are identical with physico-chemical states and at the same time claim that one can correlate the two. For example, a particular frequency of discharge of neurons in the optic nerve may be correlated with a particular experience of “brightness.” The frequency of discharge and the experience of brightness are not, however, identical. If they were identical, there would be nothing to correlate! The psycho-neural identity theorist thus faces an insurmountable contradiction: The moment he attempts to establish a correlation he has implicitly acknowledged that the two phenomena are different.” (The Objectivist, 1968, Vol. 7, Issue 62, pg. 12-13) 

“The development of human cognition starts with the ability to perceive things, i.e., entities. Of man’s five cognitive senses, only two provide him with a direct awareness of entities: sight and touch. The other three senses—hearing, taste and smell—give him an awareness of some of an entity’s attributes (or of the consequences produced by an entity): they tell him that something makes sounds, or something tastes sweet, or something smells fresh; but in order to perceive this something, he needs sight and/or touch. The concept of “entity” is (implicitly) the start of man’s conceptual development and the building-block of his entire conceptual structure. It is by perceiving entities that man perceives the universe. And in order to concretize his view of existence, it is by means of concepts (language) or by means of his entity-perceiving senses (sight and touch) that he has to do it.” (The Objectivist, 1971, Vol. 10, Issue 4, pg. 2) 

“Cognitively, the sensation of color qua color is of no significance because color serves an incomparably more important function: the sensation of color is the central element of the faculty of sight, it is one of the fundamental means of perceiving entities. Color as such (and its physical causes) is not an entity, but an attribute of entities and cannot exist by itself. (The Objectivist, 1971, Vol. 10, Issue 6, pg. 5) 

“What about a square inch of ground? Is that an entity or not? You can, from an epistemological viewpoint, regard any part of an entity as a separate entity in that context. And a square inch of ground  would be just that. The entity would be the whole ground; you delimit it and examine one square inch of it. In the context of your examination, it’s a specific entity, that particular inch, even though metaphysically, in reality, it’s part of many, many other inches like it. The concept of “entity” is an issue of the context in which you define your terms. So that an entity has to be a material object, but what you regard as an entity in any given statement or inquiry depends on your definitions. You can regard part of an entity as a separate entity. And in that sense all the vital organs are entities, and you have a separate science for the brain or the heart or the stomach. And in the context of that science, you study them as separate entities, never dropping the context that they are vital organs of a total entity which is a human being….You distinguish the epistemological aspect from the metaphysical in this sense: you are saying, “I am considering this inch of ground or I am studying this human organ, but I know that metaphysically it’s part of a wider space of ground or of a living human being”.” (ITOE, 269-270)

Reading Notes: March 22nd, 2023

“Spirit, in general, is thought, and by thought man is distinguished from the animal. But we must not imagine that man is on one side thinking and on another side willing, as though he had will in one pocket and thought in another. Such an idea is vain. The distinction between thought and will is only that between a theoretical and a practical relation. They are not two separate faculties. The will is a special way of thinking; it is thought translating itself into reality; it is the impulse of thought to give itself reality. The distinction between thought and will may be expressed in this way. When I think an object, I make of it a thought, and take from it the sensible. Thus, I make of it something which is essentially and directly mine. Only in thought am I self-contained. Conception is the penetration of the object, which is then no longer opposed to me. From it I have taken its own peculiar nature, which it had as an independent object in opposition to me. As Adam said to Eve, “thou art flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,” so says the spirit, “This object is spirit of my spirit, and all alienation has disappeared.” Any idea is a universalizing, and this process belongs to thinking. To make something universal is to think. The “I” is thought and the universal. When I say “I”, I let fall all particularity of character, natural endowment, knowledge, age. The I is empty, a point and simple, but in its simplicity active. The gaily coloured world is before me; I stand opposed to it, and in this relation I cancel and transcend the opposition, and make the content my own. The I is at home in the world, when it knows it, and still more when it has conceived it.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, §4)

“The efficient or motive principle, which is not merely the analysis but the production of the several elements of the universal, I call dialectic. Dialectic is not that process in which an object or proposition, presented, to feeling or the direct consciousness, is analysed, entangled, taken hither and thither, until at last its contrary is derived. Such a merely negative method appears frequently in Plato. It may fix the opposite of any notion, or reveal the contradiction contained in it, as did the ancient scepticism, or it may in a feeble way consider an approximation to truth, or modern half-and-half attainment of it, as its goal. But the higher dialectic of the conception does not merely apprehend any phase as a limit and opposite, but produces out of this negative a positive content and result. Only by such a course is there development and inherent progress. Hence this dialectic is not the external agency of subjective thinking, but the private soul of the content, which unfolds its branches and fruit organically. Thought regards this development of the idea and of the peculiar activity of the reason of the idea as only subjective, but is on its side unable to make any addition. To consider anything rationally is not to bring reason to it from the outside, and work it up in this way, but to count it as itself reasonable. Here it is spirit in its freedom, the summit of self-conscious reason, which gives itself actuality, and produces itself as the existing world. The business of science is simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, §31)

Reading Notes: March 17th, 2023

“With such barren forms of thought, that are always in a world beyond, Philosophy has nothing to do. Its object is always something concrete, and in the highest sense present.” (Hegel, Logic, 150) 

“Never will the stock of human knowledge be increased by meditating & debating on what has been said by others: it is like pouring liquor from one vessel into another. Only the contemplation of things themselves may enrich our store, & this alone is the vivid fountain always ready, & always near. Therefore, it is odd to see how these pretended philosophers are always busy in the first way, entirely neglecting the other, turning, as it were, old vessels over & over again, to see whether there be not some drop left in them, while the vivid fount runs neglected at their feet: by nothing do they so much betray their incapacity, & give the lye to their assumed airs of importance, profoundness & originality. Ego.” (Schopenhauer, Cogitata I, §44)

“The explanation of mind, as the product of material forces, is, moreover, necessarily stated in terms and by means of concepts essentially mental. We are confronted, therefore, with this anomaly, that the mind is accounted for by an idea, namely, the idea of universal causation, which idea must have been itself constructed by the mind which it purports to explain. There is here evidently a ‘weak arguing and a fallacious drift’….We know nothing of matter pure and simple, only of matter as it is perceived and translated into the terms of conscious experience.” (Hibben, The Problems of Philosophy, 44-50) 

“As for the difference which Keeling finds between McTaggart and Russell on the role of science in metaphysical enquiry, the important point lies in McTaggart’s claim that the “The phrase ‘ultimate nature’ distinguishes philosophy from science, which systematically studies the nature of reality, and not its ultimate nature”….With this Keeling points out that what Passmore called the central teaching of the Neo-Hegelians, that existents gain their characteristics in part through being members of a whole, is present in McTaggart and distinguishes him from Russell. This notion of a rational system in which members gain qualities through being related to the whole of which they are a part we found in Green, but it is an idea which has been lost since the advent of analytical philosophy, atomism, positivism, and the resurgence of empiricism.” (Kernaghan, A Treatment of McTaggart’s Rejection of Time, 18-19)

Reading Notes: March 9th, 2023

“That which sees all is not to be seen; that which hears all is not to be heard; that which knows all is not to be known; that which discerns all is not to be discerned.” (Oupnek’hat, Vol. I, 202) 

“He sees, but he can’t be seen, he hears, but he can’t be heard; he thinks, but he can’t be thought of; he perceives, but he can’t be perceived.” (The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, 3.7.23) 

“Just as one’s eyes are not a part of one’s visual field (Wittgenstein, Tractatus), so is one’s brain (without the aid of an autocerebroscope) not part of the world perceived” (Feigl, Some Crucial Issues of Mind-Body Monism, 306) [The italics are mine] 

“The doctrine which I defend, then, may be encapsulated in the slogan: mental processes are nothing but a certain sort of physical process in the brain.” (Armstrong, Epistemological Foundations for a Materialist Theory of the Mind, 180) 

“Direct Realism answers that the immediate object of awareness is never anything but a physical existent, which exists independently of the awareness of it.” (Armstrong, Perception and the Physical World, xi) 

“Objects have an indefinite number of characteristics….It is a logically necessary truth that if a physical object exists it is determinate in all its characteristics….The objects and properties of objects that are immediately perceived have an existence logically independent of their being perceived. There are objects and properties of objects that are never perceived, although it would always be logically possible for such unperceived things to be perceived.” (Armstrong, Perception and the Physical World, 25, 60, 192) 

“Perception is a causal affair. If somebody perceives something, then it is involved in the perception; it is even involved in the concept of perception: that the thing perceived acts upon the perceiver, causing the perception of the object.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays, 62) 

“‘Objection-perception’ statements are statements like, “Jones saw a (the) fox.” Their general form is “A perceives O.” But the object perceived need not be an object in any narrow sense of the word. “The child saw the march-past” counts as an object-perception statement, although the march-past would be normally classed as an event or happening, not as an object. It is an essential feature of object-perception statements that they entail that the object perceived has existence. If Jones saw a fox, then, of necessity, there was a fox there to see. “A perceived O” entails “O existed”….But although object-perception statements entail that the thing perceived exists, they do not entail that the perceiver knows, or truly believes or even has the thought that the object perceived exists. Nor need the object perceptually appear to him to be the object that it in fact is….The fact is that object-perception statements are hardly cognitive idioms at all. This is connected with the fact that the argument-form: (1) A perceives O, (2) O = P, ∴ (3) A perceives P is a valid form. If A sees a table, and the table is a cloud of fundamental particles, then A sees a cloud of fundamental particles, although A be the most ignorant peasant in the world.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays, 62) 

“It is necessary first to consider more deeply the nature of object-perception statements. It is widely, and I believe correctly, accepted among contemporary philosophers that such statements entail that O is the cause of those perceptions of A that constitute his perceiving of O.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays, 126) 

“The Functionalist agrees with the Identity Theorist that every individual mental state/event (every mental “token,” as we say) is identical with some physiological state/event token; but she/he denies the Identity Theorist’s implication that for every type of mental state/event, there is a corresponding physiological type of state/event.” (Lycan, The Identity Theory and Functionalism, 3) 

“There is no scientific evidence for the existence of an immortal soul, in either our own species or any other species. There is, on the other hand, a growing body of scientific data which indicates that all animals, including ourselves, can for most, and perhaps even all, purposes be regarded as organic machines, devoid of anything mystical.” (Cotterill, No Ghost in the Machine, 7) 

“There is no field of experience which cannot, in principle, be brought under some form of scientific law, and no type of speculative knowledge about the world which it is, in principle, beyond the power of science to give. We have already gone some way to substantiate this proposition by demolishing metaphysics; and we shall justify it to the full in the course of this book. With this we complete the overthrow of speculative philosophy. We are now in a position to see that the function of philosophy is wholly critical.” (Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 47) 

“We have a least a partial experience of our own bodies, but we do not generally perceive our brains at all. It is clear, however, that that is not impossible. It is merely contingent that we do not do so. The following science-fiction thought-experiment makes this plain enough. Suppose that in the future we found it advantageous (perhaps for security reasons) to take our brains out of our bodies, and keep them in a vat of nutrient fluid, connecting them to our body’s nervous system by wi-fi. In such a case it would be possible for me to examine my own brain as it lay sitting before me on the desk. My own brain would become one more among the many other objects within my experience. I could see it, touch it, or smell it, as well as apply to it more sophisticated modes of perceptual extension, such as monitoring its blood flow levels or recording its electro-chemical activity.” (Mander, Idealism, Narrative and the Mind-Brain Relation, 2) 

“Now, seeing the general resemblance between the conception of life and the conception of consciousness, are we not to infer an essential similarity in their origin? Can we associate consciousness with the reactions of any specific material substance, as we associate life with the reactions of protoplasm? We most certainly can. Every modern psychologist agrees that consciousness stands in special relation to the functions of the nervous system. What we call consciousness appears on the objective side as the activity of certain portions of the brain. Specific physico-chemical reactions of nerve-tissue are an invariable aspect of all forms of consciousness. I propose, indeed, to show later that these specific reactions actually are consciousness, in precisely the same way that the specific reactions of protoplasm actually are life.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 101-102) 

“What is a state of consciousness? The untrained mind will, of course, immediately hypostatize it, and call it a thing. Let us, however, call it a process, and instead of regarding it as a thin and shadowy accompaniment of certain cerebral processes, let us boldly identify it with those processes, and say that it is one and the same. Immediately all difficulties vanish. You affirm that you move your arm by an act of will; I affirm that you move it by a cerebral process. We are both right; for the act of will is the cerebral process itself.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 122) 

“It seems to the ordinary observer that nothing can be more remotely and widely separated than some so-called “act of consciousness” and a material object. An act of consciousness or mental process is a thing of which we are immediately and indubitably aware: so much I admit. But that it differs in any sort of way from a material process, that is to say, from the ordinary transformations of matter and energy, is a belief which I very strenuously deny, and which I propose to discuss and elucidate at length in my final chapter.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 143) 

“In passing, I may point out the difference here disclosed between modern scientific materialism and the crude materialism of the ancients. They agree in declaring the uniformity of law; they agree in denying the doctrine of teleology; they agree that all existences are of a material character. But they disagree in their treatment of the alleged spiritual and unseen world. The ancient materialists believed to a certain extent in an unseen world; they believed even in the existence of souls. They asserted their materialism only by the theory that these entities were material in character. Democritus conceived the soul as consisting of smooth, round, material particles. The scientific materialist of to-day does not believe in any separate existence of this kind whatever. He regards what is called soul or mind as identical with certain physical processes passing in a material brain, processes of which the ancient Greeks knew nothing, and, indeed, which are still entirely unknown to all who have not acquired some smattering of physiology.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 144-145)

“Mind is neural activity; matter is associated sensation.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 210) 

“Motion is an effect by which a body either changes, or has a tendency to change, its position: that is to say, by which it successively corresponds with different parts of space, or changes its relative distance to other bodies. It is motion alone that establishes the relation between our senses and exterior or interior beings: it is only by motion that these beings are impressed upon us—that we know their existence—that we judge of their properties—that we distinguish the one from the other—that we distribute them into classes. The beings, the  substances, or the various bodies of which Nature is the assemblage, are themselves effects of certain combinations or causes which become causes in their turn. A cause is a being which puts another in motion, or which produces some change in it. The effect is the change produced in one body, by the motion or presence of another. Each being, by its essence, by its peculiar nature, has the faculty of producing, is capable of receiving, has the power of communicating, a variety of motion Thus some beings are proper to strike our organs; these organs are competent to receiving the impression, are adequate to undergoing changes by their presence. Those which cannot act on any of our organs, either immediately and by themselves, or mediately by the intervention of other bodies, exist not for us; since they can neither move us, nor consequently furnish us with ideas: they can neither be known to us, nor of course be judged by us. To know an object, is to have felt it; to feel it, it is requisite to have been moved by it. To see, is to have been moved, by something acting on the visual organs; to hear, is to have been struck, by something on our auditory nerves. In short, in whatever mode a body may act upon us, whatever impulse we may receive from it, we can have no other knowledge of it than by the change it produces in us.” (Holbach, The System of Nature: Or, The Laws of the Moral and Physical World, 15-16)

Reading Notes: March 6th, 2023

“McTaggart was one of the least linguistic of philosophers: he adverts to the use of words very little. I am far from thinking that what has been called “the linguistic turn” is always good for the solution of philosophical problems: all too often, the problem supposedly dissolved by an appeal to language replicates itself on the level of language—not surprisingly, because language is part of the world, not something contrasting with the world. For example, we cannot dismiss the problem of universals by saying it is an illusion due to our applying one word to many things; for the relation between the word “sheep” (as we say) and its many utterances is another case of that relation between the Sheep and the many sheep which we were trying to avoid discussing. Again, as we saw, the problem of synthetic incompatibilities cannot be disposed of by the linguistic turn: the same problem arises about incompatible sound-qualities in our utterances. So, upon the whole I think McTaggart’s not going in for language about language did him little harm.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 62) 

“Characteristics enter into perceptions in quite another way. Perception of an individual substance is obviously perception of a substance as having qualities, and as having relations to other substances. And this does not mean merely perception of a substance that has qualities, or that has relations to other substances; it is perception of a substance as having qualitative and relational characteristics. It is fairly clear that you need not perceive all of the characteristics that an individual thing you perceive in fact has….If we see a thing as ABC, that does not mean that all that it is is ABC, and it does not mean that it even has to be ABC at all: we may be misperceiving. To sum up: we perceive a thing, not just naked, but as having characteristics; to affirm that a thing is so perceived neither is entailed by nor entails the proposition that the thing in question actually has those characteristics.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 115-116) 

“To repeat: the supposed relation between consecutive terms in the series, say A and B, is that A is individuated by some relation to B, and this individuating characteristic will itself be a definite characteristic only if the individuation of B is already given. If this relation is supposed to generate an infinite series, A’s individuating characteristics depend for their identity on the individuation of B, and B’s individuating characteristics on the individuation of C, and so on without end: the individuating characteristics for any term in the series thus have a fixed identity only if the series has an end, but ex hypothesi it has none….[Furthermore,] if A’s individuation depended on the characteristic, [being a “perception of A”], but the identity of this characteristic depended on the individuation of A, we should run in a vicious circle.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 52-53) 

“I conclude that we ought to accept McTaggart’s principle of Sufficient Description as a correct inference from the Dissimilarity of the Diverse, and therefore as necessarily true.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 54) 

“I shall instead speak of the Principle of Ontological Determinacy: the adjective is meant to distinguish, but bring together, this principle and another principle we shall come to later, the principle of Perceptual Determinacy. The principle is: Nothing can have a determinable characteristic without having it in a perfectly determinate form. For example, nothing can have shape without having a perfectly determinate shape, or size without having a perfectly determinate size, or colour, without having a perfectly determinate colour. Vagueness and fuzziness can infect only our descriptions, not the actual things we describe.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 54)

Reading Notes: March 3rd, 2023

“If it is asked what is the difference between those brain processes which, in my view, are experiences and those brain processes which are not, I can only reply that it is at present unknown.” (Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes, 65) 

“Men have minds, that is to say, they perceive, they have sensations, emotions, beliefs, thoughts, purposes, and desires…But if we are convinced, on general scientific grounds, that a purely physical account of man is likely to be the true one, then there seems to be no bar to identifying these inner states with purely physical states of the central nervous system. And so consciousness of our own mental state becomes simply the scanning of one part of our central nervous system by another. Consciousness is a self-scanning mechanism in the central nervous system.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, 67-79) 

“In my own paper…I argued that there are certain logical conditions which must be satisfied to enable us to say that a process or event observed in one way is the same process or event that is observed (or inferred from) another set of observations made under quite different conditions. In that paper, I suggested only one logical criterion, namely, that the process or event observed in or inferred from the second set of observations should provide us with an explanation, not of the process or event observed in the first set of observations, but of the very fact that such observations are made…. What is important is that there must be some logical criteria which we use in deciding whether two sets of correlated observations refer to the same event or to two separate but causally related events. The problem of deciding what these criteria are is a logical problem which cannot be decided by experiment in any ordinary sense of the term; and since we cannot be certain that the criteria are satisfied in the case of sensations and brain processes unless we know what the criteria are, the issue is to that extent a philosophical issue. Moreover, even if we agree on the nature of these logical criteria, it is still open to the philosopher to question the logical propriety of applying them in the case of sensations and brain processes.” (Place, Materialism as a Scientific Hypothesis, 83-85) 

“For it is a necessary condition for saying that something is identical with some particular physical object, state, or process that the thing be located in the place where the particular physical object, state, or process is. If it is not there, it cannot be identical with what is there.” (Schaffer, Could Mental States be Brain Processes?, 115-116) 

“If we take the word “mind” to mean “that in which mental processes occur” or “that which has mental states,” then we can put this view briefly and not too misleadingly as: the mind is nothing but the brain. If scientific progress sustains this view, it seems that man is nothing but a material object having none but physical properties….[This book’s] object is to show that there are no good philosophical reasons for denying that mental processes are purely physical processes in the central nervous system and so, by implication, that there are no good philosophical reasons for denying that man is nothing but a materialist object. It does not attempt to prove the physicalist thesis about the mind. The proof must come, if it does come, from science: from neurophysiology in particular. All it attempts to show is that there are no valid philosophical or logical reasons for rejecting the identification of mind and brain.” (Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, 1-2) 

“If mental processes are states of the person apt for the bringing about of certain sorts of behaviour, and if these starts are in fact physical states of the brain, then introspection itself, which is a mental process, will have to be a physical process in the brain. It will have to be a self-scanning process in the brain. Now it is at once clear that this is always logically possible, at the very least, for such a self-scanning mechanism to yield the wrong result. For any mechanism can fail to operate properly. So if introspective knowledge is incorrigible, as is alleged, then Central-state Materialism is false. Nor is it possible to see how such a self-scanning process could yield a logically privileged access. Again, it is impossible to conceive of a mechanism which logically ensures that all states of the brain that are mental states are scanned.” (Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, 102-103) 

“But now let us consider the mechanical analogue of awareness of our own mental states: the scanning by a mechanism of its own internal states. It is clear here the operation of scanning and the situation scanned must be “distinct existences.” A machine can scan itself only in the same sense that a man can eat himself. There must remain an absolute distinction between the eater and the eaten….Equally, there must be an absolute distinction between the scanner and the scanned….[It] seems clear that the natural view to take is that pain and awareness of pain are “distinct existences.” (Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, 106-107) 

“Because our awareness cannot be an awareness of itself, there must always be ultimate awareness which is not itself an object of awareness. In Materialist terms, although the brain may contain self-scanners which scan the rest of the brain, and scanners which in turn scan the self-scanners, and so on as far as we please, we must come in the end to unscanned scanners….[An] awareness is distinct from the object of awareness…” (Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, 112-113)

Reading Notes: March 1st, 2023

“For in order that something may appear, a being is necessary to whole it appears. This “appearing,” however, has no significance except that of “being experienced.” Now, in order that the cognitive being may experience, sometimes A and sometimes B, it must manifestly pass over from one state, in which it previously was, into another, which previously was not. And we certainly cannot assume that this passing-over is only a variation in the external relations of this being to other beings, but that the being itself would be in no wise affected by such variation. For, in such a case, this being would not really experience anything, but would only appear to a third observer to be experiencing something. This, however, is contrary to the assumption; for we wanted to know, how it is that anything appears to such a being itself, and not how it can seem to a second being as though something were appearing to the first one. From what is said above it follows, therefore, that at least the percipient being must be conceived of as one that undergoes genuine interior changes, in order that the mere appearance of change may originate at all from the changeable relations of other unchangeable beings.” (Lotze, Outlines of Metaphysic, 47-48) 

“The prime motivation behind the identity theory is of course physicalism: one can be driven into some sort of identity theory either because the alternatives are incompatible with thinking in a full blooded way of men and animals as no more than very complex physical mechanisms, or else because (like behaviourism) they are objectionable on other grounds. However it is dangerous to advocate a theory mainly on the grounds of the difficulties in its alternatives. There may well be congenial alternatives which have not been considered.” (Smart, Review of Dennett’s “Content and Consciousness”, 616) 

“In Quine-like fashion Dennett points out that we do not assert the existence of sakes and dints: “for the sake of” and “by dint of” must be taken as unitary expressions which do not therefore imply “there is a dint” or “there is a sake”….As Dennett puts it, we view “sakes” and “voices” as being non-referential: for example we “fuse” the word “sake” in its context “for the sake of” and we fuse “voice” in its various contexts, such as “he has a good tenor voice”. Now this technique will not come as any news to the identity theorist, because he himself employs the technique of fusion. For example, the identity theorist fuses “image” and “sense-datum” in the contexts, “has an image” and “has a sense-datum”, thus avoiding the objection that when we have an after-image which is yellow with greenish and purple spots we do not have anything in our brains which is yellow with greenish and purple spots. Moreover, in denying that sense-data or images, as opposed to the having of them, exist, he makes use of such arguments as those marshalled by Ryle and other contemporary analytic philosophers, who have argued convincingly that sense-data and images are not like ghostly picture postcards.” (Smart, Review of Dennett’s “Content and Consciousness”, 617-618) 

“The so-called “identity theory” may be characterized roughly as the theory that the mind is the brain, or more concretely that mental events, states and processes are brain events, states and processes. This is put forward as a contingent identification: it is not held to be part of (or at least the main part of) the meaning of “mental entity” that it entails “brain entity”. Otherwise the theory would have little plausibility, because quite clearly a materialist can talk quite happily about his aches, pains, itches, desires, emotions, perceptions, images, thoughts, and so on, with someone who does not know anything at all about brains, or who perhaps, like Aristotle, thinks that it is an organ for cooling the blood.” (Smart, Further Thoughts on the Identity Theory, 150)