Mind, Music, and Language

Adam Croom edits a journal, which looks interesting:

Mind, Music, and Language is a new academic journal devoted to empirical and theoretical research on mind, music, and language. The journal is fully peer-reviewed by experts and all accepted articles will be published Open Access. This means that authors retain the copyright to their work and that all journal content remains freely accessible to readers.

Mind, Music, and Language publishes original research articles, book reviews, as well as entries for the new Encyclopedia of Mind, Music, and Language. Theoretically creative and empirically informed submissions on mind, music, and language are warmly encouraged and will receive the careful consideration of our experienced editorial team.

The horror, the horror

Why do people enjoy being scared? It surely is not the case that scary movies are not really scary, nor that the pleasure comes from the relief when the fear stops. It seems at least possible that people enjoy scary films for the same kind of reasons that they enjoy sad movies, songs, and stories. And why is that? The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" suggests a kind of answer: "I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me. Yeah." If you're feeling sad you're likely to want to have your feelings articulated, and recognized. Not necessarily shared, that is, but acknowledged as something that people do experience. It's a kind of validation, as well as sympathy. Fear might also need to be articulated and validated. For instance, if it is usually only very vaguely felt, or if attempts to articulate it are quickly censored because they sound crazy or evil. If this is right then popular movies might be very revealing of a society's psychological state. And that sounds plausible anyway.

Last night I watched two horror films: Nosferatu and [REC] 3 Genesis. Both are kind of silly, but in different ways. Nosferatu is, not surprisingly, very dated, and the acting seems terrible. On the other hand, even now the images (some of them, anyway) are powerfully striking and, appropriately, haunting. [REC] 3 (the "rec" is for the letters used to indicate that a camcorder is recording: think The Blair Witch Project) is much more forgettable, and the weakest of the [REC] series, though still, to my mind, worth seeing. When the bride picks up a chainsaw to fight off the zombies you know you are in Japan being catered to by crowd-pleasers.

Nosferatu reminded me of the links between the plague and legends of vampires. It also seems portentous to watch an angry German mob run through a town after a scapegoat. Creepy. But what could the contemporary fascination with zombies mean? Perhaps nothing, of course, but my pet theory is that we are afraid that our own society is being taken over by people who are dead on the inside, and that this internal death is contagious. That we are already succumbing to it. This might be thought of as part of the death of God (freedom and immortality die along with him, and so we become mere things), or as the death of the Overman. The disenchantment of the world means, among other things, the disenchantment of human beings. Free will might be thought of as something like a compliment that we cannot help but pay to each other, but it isn't so hard to deny the compliment to those we don't really interact with (Descartes's hats and coats below in the street, "the they"), and these seem to be increasing in number and influence (see here, for instance). And much the same goes for consciousness. (Doesn't it? I haven't thought this anything like all the way through.)

We can, and perhaps cannot but, have an attitude toward a soul when it comes to people we really live with. But all those others out there, and people we live only virtually with, can't really be treated the same way. What kind of attitude can I have toward someone on the other end of an internet connection? I realize that means most of the people who will read this, i.e. the ones I will never meet, and I don't mean to be rude. But we cannot literally see eye to eye like this, or make any use of facial expression or bodily posture. I can only have an attitude toward you in a limited sense of the word. And what about people who are not themselves even in person, only representatives of some corporate position, say, or speakers of jargon? I am not of the opinion that they have souls, to misquote Wittgenstein. And then Schopenhauer's argument against solipsism comes up: you can't prove that you are fundamentally different from everyone else, but you would have to be crazy to think that you are. This goes two ways. It's a kind of argument against zombies, but also an argument against one's own non-zombie-ness. That is, if they are all zombies, and I must be the same as them, then I must be a zombie too. Just being surrounded by them, even if you are still human, is bad enough. And however incredible that idea might be, it's still scary.

Could I be a zombie?

One way to think about the possibility of zombies that I think might be interesting would be to ask whether you might be a zombie yourself. Do you know that you aren't one? If so, how? In what sense is there something going on inside you? How do you know this counts as what others mean by 'something'?

Robert Kirk (in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) explains that: "Zombies are exactly like us in all physical respects but have no conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie." Do I have conscious experiences? (And have I asked enough rhetorical questions yet?) Like Hume, I have a hard time catching myself when I try to focus on my mental life. It's as if there is an 'I' there, but one that always gets away when I turn my attention in what seems to be the right direction. Mostly I'm conscious of the things around me: books, papers, pictures, a computer, and so on. I'm not conscious of having experiences of these things, just conscious of the things themselves. To have a conscious experience I seem to have to press my thumb into the palm of my hand or pinch myself. (That is, simply seeing what's around me doesn't really feel like what is normally called having an experience.) But then I still feel the thing itself (my thumb pressing, my fingers pinching), not 'a pressing sensation' or anything like that. (Well, maybe it's like that, but that seems like a very unnatural way to describe what I actually experience.) Distant hazy clouds of warmth and mild discomfort float around the edges of my body, but they barely seem to exist until I turn my attention on them, so that doing so seems to distort the evidence. Even my own thoughts are like this. I think (it seems to me, phenomenologically, not philosophically) in propositions, not sentences. They aren't in color or any particular font or accent. I suppose I think in a man's voice, but how could it be either male or female when I don't usually hear it at all. Thinking is more like reading your own mind than hearing yourself talk. (Although it's more like hearing than reading, at least for me.) It's an invisible, insensible process.  

Is there something it is like to be me? Being me, it seems to me, is doing the things I do. So no one else can actually be me because only one person can sit where I am sitting, look like this, be this tall, weigh this much, think these thoughts, feel these emotions and sensations, etc., all at the same time. But you would know exactly what it is like to be me if you lived an exactly similar life, doing exactly the same things (including reacting to things in the same way, taking offense at the same things, being amused by the same things, and so on). 

Is there then something that it is like to be a statue or a mountain? They do things: exist, crumble a bit from time to time, cast shadows, etc. Could I say that being a hill is like being a mountain, and being a mannequin is like being a statue? It doesn't feel the same, because not feeling at all is part of what it is to be a mountain or a statue. I think it doesn't really make sense to talk about what it's like to be a mountain because doing so implies that mountains experience things, are sentient. But this suggests to me that it is no help at all to explain sentience in terms of there being something that it is like to be the sentient thing. It's like defining death in terms of loss of life. What is conscious or sentient is, odd (or tiresomely Wittgensteinian) as it might sound, determined or dictated by grammar. Grammar (patterns of sense, or just language) tells us what is conscious and what is not. At least grammar marks out a kind of space within which it makes sense to call things conscious, and makes some tests of consciousness more plausible, more reasonable, than others. To ask of something that passes these tests, as I do, whether it is really conscious is then either to ask for a stricter test or to make a mistake.

(If this seems like a terrible argument, I apologize. It's not really intended as an argument at all. It's a record of my own train of thought, and where it goes quickly is not where I want to gloss over difficulties but where I raced to the end because the way seemed so clear to me. I make no claim that it is clear in any other sense.)  

  

Great minds

The Wittgenstein conference in Iceland went very well. I didn't hear a paper that wasn't interesting or meet a person I didn't like, and Iceland is a fantastic place, like a cross between Scotland and Arizona.

On the way back I finished Rupert Read's Wittgenstein among the Sciences and was surprised to read these passages on p. 178:

There is no such thing as a perspective from which it can be absolutely asserted that some or other aspect of the way the Universe is made up -- e.g. that we are conscious; or that we talk; or that there is matter and energy, etc. etc. -- is odd.

If anything is odd, 'mysterious', my own intuition runs somewhat differently. I rarely find the fact of consciousness odd any more; the thing that I tend to find 'odd' is that there is any thing -- any such 'thing' as (and in) existence -- at all. 

I was surprised because what Read says here seems very close indeed to what I said here:

The (officially) hard problem of how a body or brain, something like a steak, could be conscious is a) a result of thinking of matter in a certain kind of way, i.e. as mindless, when the most obvious material beings, ourselves, are not mindless, and b) less hard than the body problem, i.e. how so much as a steak can ever be at all? That is, there seems to be a problem of how the physical can interact with the mental because we have construed the (essence of the) physical in a particular kind of way that excludes its mental aspects. But that's a problem with our construal, not with the nature of reality. It doesn't reveal an independent mystery but invites an investigation and reconsideration of our concepts and how (and why) we have formed them as we have. What does seem to be an independent mystery is stuff itself.

Since Read's book was published in April (and since he's honest) he obviously wasn't copying me, but I swear I didn't copy him either. Could we both have been influenced by some third party? It could be Wittgenstein, of course, but I suspect maybe the influence of Peter Hacker is lingering less than fully consciously in our thinking.

The mind-body problem

Reading Braver's Groundless Grounds and this article on LSD made me think again about the mind-body problem. David Cockburn's An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (following Locke, as I recall) argues that there's no special mystery about how one thing can interact causally with a very different kind of thing. A fork, a child, and electricity are all quite different, but there is no official mystery about how a child's sticking a fork in an electric outlet can result in a shock. Or at any rate the only officially mysterious part of such an event is how the (physical) child can experience (conscious) pain. But why is that any more mysterious than electricity causing burns? Or, for that matter, electricity itself? Or gravity? Or matter? Or causation?

And is this right? The (officially) hard problem of how a body or brain, something like a steak, could be conscious is a) a result of thinking of matter in a certain kind of way, i.e. as mindless, when the most obvious material beings, ourselves, are not mindless, and b) less hard than the body problem, i.e. how so much as a steak can ever be at all? That is, there seems to be a problem of how the physical can interact with the mental because we have construed the (essence of the) physical in a particular kind of way that excludes its mental aspects. But that's a problem with our construal, not with the nature of reality. It doesn't reveal an independent mystery but invites an investigation and reconsideration of our concepts and how (and why) we have formed them as we have. What does seem to be an independent mystery is stuff itself. We might be able to explain, say, force in terms of other elements of physics, or even take the concept out of physics completely, but whatever concepts we use there is still stuff that we try to explain or describe. The existence of stuff is not really a problem though. It's just there, buzzing away as mass-energy or vibrations or whatever. You can't ask why it's there as if anything else could explain it because then both that other thing and how it is supposed to explain anything would have to be explained. You're just left with the buzz.

The LSD essay also reminded me of Bill Hicks. This is pretty well known, but if you haven't seen it it's worth watching, partly just because it's well known and often quoted, so if you don't know it you'll miss those references. But as popular philosophy it's not bad. And it's funny that he made a living as a strand-up comedian when a lot of what he did, as far as I can tell, was more like preaching. It (I don't mean this particular clip, but his material generally) almost is a kind of philosophy, albeit a sloppy kind with few if any arguments.

Kafka and Wittgenstein

Perhaps because they were both brilliant, roughly contemporaneous, German-speaking, central Europeans of Jewish descent it is hard not to see connections between Kafka and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's "picture theory" was supposedly inspired by a report he read of a traffic accident in Paris. Kafka wrote a description of a traffic accident in Paris. Coincidence? Well, yes, presumably. Especially since the report Wittgenstein read was from 1914, and concerned a court case, while Kafka's description is from 1911 and describes the accident itself. But the coincidences pile up. Just now when I searched online for details of each case I found the passage I have linked to above, which takes Kafka's accident description as notably filmic, in contrast to his previous writing. And that reminds me of Alfred Nordmann on the Tractatus and its oddly static, decidedly non-filmic, treatment of language and the world, as if time were unreal. 

Then there's "Metamorphosis," which has been written about in relation to Wittgenstein by at least Rebecca Schuman and Stephen Mulhall. Presumably Kafka's story means what it says, so that reading it as a straightforward allegory would be wrong, but in his diaries Kafka uses the image of a cockroach to express both his own self-loathing and the attitude of anti-Semites toward Jewish people, i.e. the former see the latter as (being like) cockroaches. It would be (a little too) obvious to read "Metamorphosis" as being about Antisemitism, and, following Mulhall's suggestion in connection with this, to make a further link to Wittgenstein's beetle in the box. I don't think that Wittgenstein had Antisemitism in mind at all when he wrote about the beetle, but I am interested in exploring the application of his thought-experiment (can I call it that?) to the kind of phenomenon that Sartre describes in Anti-Semite and Jew. I mention Sartre partly because I'd much rather discuss anti-English prejudice (which he mentions) than Antisemitism, which has a history too dark for this kind of playing with ideas. But it's hard to avoid touching on darkness when dealing with this subject, and talk about Limeys or Rosbifs just seems silly.  

Here's Wittgenstein:

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. –Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. –But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language? –If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. –No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. 

Instead of a box, imagine that we are talking about human bodies, and instead of a beetle, imagine that we are talking about a "soul". Each body's "soul" might be something quite different. Some might change constantly. And some bodies might even be empty, having no soul. But suppose the word "soul" has a use nonetheless? Then it is not used to designate something inside the body (even though, ex hypothesi, "soul" is what we call the thing in the body--presumably calling something something need not involve designating an object, perhaps just as naming a baby or pet is not designating an object). Saying that someone had, or did not have, a soul would then not state a certain, dispassionate kind of fact about that person but would perhaps express an attitude or be a Davidsonian metaphor or something along those lines.

Then what would it mean to say that someone had become a cockroach or beetle? In Kafka's story the inside or soul remains much the same, but the container or body is transformed. I won't interpret this, but it suggests something about people who are regarded as cockroaches, etc. They are treated or thought of or looked at differently than other people, while the dispassionate facts about them are no different from the facts about other people. They still belong to the species homo sapiens, they still bleed when pricked (although that is already starting to shade into a different kind of facts--Shylock is not a mere biologist, which is why the argument from analogy for the existence of other minds seems to work despite also seeming to be an instance of induction from just one case), and so on. Appeal to dispassionate facts won't persuade anyone that a body has a soul attached to it. We cannot shake the box and hear the beetle. This says something, something about facts and imagination and feelings, about the kind of task that Shylock faces in trying to get others to see him as a fellow human being, and about the kind of work that is involved in ethical argument (for instance about the status of animals, or fetuses, or immigrants, or the environment, etc.).

Kafka also suggests a more Sartrean point, that we are what other people see us as being. We are also, Sartre thinks (as I understand him), what we make ourselves through the choices we make. But there is a sense in which we are entirely determined by others. (Perhaps we could say that Sartre believes we are all duck-rabbits, with the duck produced by completely free choices and the rabbit produced completely by forces beyond our control, the views of others. But seeing a duck-rabbit as first a duck and then a rabbit is much easier than seeing yourself as others see you, or seeing someone else as they see themselves. And I imagine Sartre knew this.)

Anyway, as I say, I think it would be a mistake to read too much into the beetle in the box example (although if you want to then see also the entertaining novel Boxer Beetle by Ned Beauman, about a gay Jewish boxer named Roach and fascists who collect beetles). But there is quite a bit already there, not about Antisemitism, but about the relations between mind (or soul) and body, the individual and society, and the subtleties of language. Kafka's story also helps bring these things out, whether he had them in mind or not. 

Wittgenstein: mind and soul

I'm not very happy with this, but here's what I have for now:

His observations about private language do not, as has been alleged, make Wittgenstein a behaviorist. He does not deny the existence of sensations or experiences. Pains, tickles, itches, etc. are all part of human life, of course. At Philosophical Investigations Sect. 293 Wittgenstein says that “if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and name’, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.” This suggests not that pains and so on are irrelevant but that we should not construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’. If we want to understand a concept such as pain we should not think of a pain as a private object referred to somehow by the public word “pain.” A pain is not “a something,” just as love, democracy and strength are not things, but it is no more “a nothing” than they are either (see Philosophical Investigations Sect. 304). Saying this is hardly satisfactory, but there is no simple answer to the question “What is pain?” Wittgenstein offers not an answer but a kind of philosophical ‘therapy’ intended to clear away what can seem bafflingly obscure. The required clarity is (supposedly) achieved not by looking in at one’s own pain but by looking outward at the use we make of the word ‘pain.’ This is not because there is nothing there when we talk about pain, nor because we are really talking about behavior rather than a sensation or feeling when we do so. A boy who complains of toothache is not telling us about his behavior but about how he feels. To understand him and what he means we need to understand the point of his words, not investigate something inside him that is accessible to him alone.

This puts Wittgenstein at odds with all the best known theories in the philosophy of mind. He opposes the Cartesian idea that a pain (or a belief, memory, etc.) is something in the soul. He opposes the idea that a pain is something in the brain. He opposes the idea that a pain is a something defined by its functional role. And he opposes the eliminativist idea that we should abandon concepts such as ‘pain’ altogether. Instead of proposing any kind of theory about the mind or mental states, he suggests that we already understand them well enough and merely need to be reminded, or to remind ourselves, of what we already know. Most people interested in increasing or improving our understanding of the mind and its states, therefore, find little of interest in Wittgenstein’s work. They would agree with him, however, in rejecting Descartes’s idea that the mind is the soul.

Wittgenstein says in proposition 6.4312 of the Tractatus that there can be no guarantee of the immortality of the soul, if any such thing exists. Within space and time, or just time, one is dealing with phenomena or contingencies. So there can never be a guarantee (or necessity) that something will last for any specific length of time, including all time. More to the point, it is not more life but better that one needs, so such immortality is beside the point as Wittgenstein sees it. And value (whatever might determine what is better) lies outside this contingent world. Wittgenstein is not denying that the soul exists, nor that it is immortal. What he says is that the soul as it is conceived by some psychologists does not exist.

In the Philosophical Investigations §422, he writes that the belief that people have souls gives us a certain picture, but its sense, that is its application, is distant from us or hard to see. The picture of the soul comes up again in section iv of “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment” (previously known as Part II of the Investigations). Wittgenstein there contrasts the idea of someone’s being an automaton with the idea of his having a soul. Neither makes sense as an opinion or belief, he says. Rather it is a question of attitude. Words and paintings can equally present a picture of the human being as “having a soul.” What this means though depends on how one uses the picture, on what one does with it. This is very complex, since it is a question of how one lives with other people, including one’s thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions. The best picture of the human soul, he says, is the human body. Therefore not, presumably, the brain alone, or some non-physical object somehow linked with it.