Mind and Cosmos: Nagel's Unprincipled Principles, Part 2. Who's Afraid of Dualism?

In my previous blog, I mentioned the mysteriousness of the photon-electron interaction. It is an example of a purely physical interaction, and thus deemed to be "unproblematic" by a material monist. As we will see, this material monist view is unwarranted.

Last time we ended with this graphic.

That graph shows a purely physical interaction. It depicts a physical electron ("e") interacting with a physical photon (wavy line) -- matter interacting with matter. It would seem there are no difficulties there, right? Nothing like that mysterious mind-matter interaction "problem?" Wrong! Merely saying this is matter interacting with matter is a mere linguistic swindle of the material monist. As we have mentioned, modern material monism is attributive monism -- all of this matter "stuff" is not as similar as calling it all matter seems to imply. The many fields of quantum field theory (QFT) all have varying and differing attributes (charge, spin, mass, etc.) -- hence the term attributive monism. It's a jungle out there! The vocabulary of modern physics speaks of particle species and the particle zoo.

In the "innocent era" of pre-quantum theory, people viewed matter as all that "hard" stuff. Material interaction is no more mysterious than the collision of billiard balls -- what's so hard about that? Well, that simplistic picture which still seems to infect the thinking of the naive material monist isn't what is going on.

Even this simplistic and "common sense" view of causality was roundly criticized by Hume, who correctly noted that one could not observe such causation but only the "constant conjunction" of events.  That conditions of "such and such" were invariably followed by "such and such."

But there is more. Physics says nothing about why there is such an interaction between electrons and light or what is going on at that vertex. In fact, it doesn't even say when such an interaction takes place -- it only computes probabilities that such particle events transpire.¹ Yet, the basic interactions are mediated by something far less "solid." The basic ontology of the physical universe is the fields! And these fields are everywhere and "in contact" at every point (provided they mutually interact; more on this below.) These fields are not what one would call solid and impenetrable. Every school kid has experience with fields -- case in point, iron filings being moved about by magnetic fields! Stuff like that "spooky" magnetic field is what the physical universe is. So the universe is more spirit-like than matter-like than most believe -- more ethereal than solid.

In spite of the modern field theoretic view of the material universe, as mentioned above, proponents of material monism seem to entertain  an antiquated and superficial muddle-minded notion of material causation. This is the old atomistic and mechanistic physics where causation is something similar to the collision of billiard balls -- solid things impacting solid things and recoiling along with attendant conservation laws of energy and momentum. Causal interaction through contact.² This false perception is, no doubt, encouraged by the observations of particles -- they being viewed as tiny solid granular bodies.

Examples of such muddle-mindedness in regard to physical causation are evident in the writings of (dare I say all?) most modern atheist philosophers of mind.

In addition to Nagel, another example is Jaegwon Kim, who wrote: "For substance dualism, it is, at bottom, the extreme heterogeneity of minds and bodies that makes causal relations between them prima facie problematic." (emph. added)³ There are a lot of unwarranted assumptions and question begging in such an assertion. It certainly betrays an ignorance of modern physics. The assumption that matter itself is "homogeneous" in kind is certainly false. Matter is not homogeneous in spite of the fact that it is called matter, and it is not a pure monism in spite of being called material monism.  Contra Kim and others, matter too is extremely heterogeneous. To elaborate, I return to our figure of my prior blog. This figure is supposed to be credible to the monist. But it shows two heterogeneous types of matter interacting - a photon (a massless, neutral, spin one boson) and an electron (a massive, electrically charged, spin 1/2 fermion).

The complete (omitting only gravitation) set of fields (and associated particles) is shown in the following diagram found in the Wikipedia entry on the Standard Model. The diagram shows the particle view of a quantum field.  The blue lines show the interactions between the fields/particles.  Fields not connected by a blue line do not interact directly; they can only interact indirectly.  So in particular -- and quite amazingly -- electrons (the "e" within the lepton box) do not interact with other electrons except indirectly by an "exchange of photons."  (Note: There is no blue line that loops from the electron "e" back to itself.) So much for "like stuff" interacting with "like stuff!"   The only fields that have self interactions (other than gravity) are the fields with nonlinear free field equations. These are the gluons, Higgs boson, and weak bosons (indicated by the closed blue loops). One should note: all fields of QFT are "co-located;" they mutually exist at every space-time point (i.e. at every spatial location and for all time).⁴ Yet, amazingly, the leptonic and quark fields though everywhere co-located are oblivious of each other (note: there is no blue line between the leptons and quarks)! That is a rather embarrassing situation for the philosopher who argues for material monism. On the basis of the material monist principle, it would seem the monist should assert that all matter must interact with all other matter. The absence of direct lepton-lepton interactions (for one among others) should be a mystery to them. But such questions seem not to worry their limited epiphenomenal "minds."

[graphic from Wikipedia]

So then, the material monist can no more explain or account for material interaction (and amazingly the absence of interactions between different types of matter) among the various fields than a dualist can explain mind-body interactions. The complaint of Nagel, Kim and all material monists against dualism is superficial and is yet another example of atheist special pleading.⁵ As the saying goes, "That which is a problem for everyone is a problem for no one." So then, the monist's reason for accepting "monism" is based on a false principle that does not support their belief.

In closing, we should note that the diagram represents the "god" of the materialist. For the atheist, this immutable and eternal complex plurality of fields is a brute fact and accounts for all of reality. That is a most fantastic and incredible belief. It claims that human autonomy, rationality and morality are mere accidental configurations of these fields. It should be obvious to all not in the grips of irrational ideology that any such "emergent" properties are determined solely by the dance of these fields. Every future (probabilistic) state of the fields is determined by the current state via partial differential equations. Equations in which the only elements are quantities describing the configurations of the fields, and nothing more enters the equations. So much for human autonomy.

As Christians we know that this intricately plural and elegant unified structure of material reality is designed by God. The material creation does not account for all of reality -- it in no way accounts for the souls, spirits and minds, human rational autonomy, abstract entities and morality. These are things for which no material monist has supplied anything close to intelligible accounts. As detailed here, Nagel's attempt is superficial and fails utterly. In fact, the so called underpinnings of the material monist principles are found to be wanting philosophically and scientifically (engaging in unanalyzed question begging and special pleading).

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1 For example, quantum transition amplitudes typically involve integrals in which the time of the interaction is taken to be any time from the remote past to the remote future. Usually the integration over time is specified using the mathematical fiction of negative infinity to positive infinity.^↩
2 Newtonian gravity and early electromagnetic theories first introduced the rather scandalous concept of unmediated action at a distance. That concept slowly gave way to the concept of physical fields and the first steps towards modern physics. See the Wikipedia entry action at a distance.^↩
3 Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind, Westview 1998, p.133.^↩
4 This feature of the fields is contrary to the old concept of matter as having the property of impenetrability or that which cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In modern physics, the closest property to this idea is the Pauli exclusion principle which only applies to like fermions. Even in this case two electrons can be in the same location as long as their other properties differ (such as one being "spin up" and the other "spin down." From the Wikipedia entry: "This effect is partly responsible for the everyday observation in the macroscopic world that two solid objects cannot be in the same place at the same time." ^↩
5 It is special pleading since material interactions are also mysterious. So the rejection of dualism because it is mysterious applies equally to materialism. The supposed foundation of the entire material monist philosophy is built on a fallacy.^↩

Mind & Cosmos: Nagel's Unprincipled Principles

Having finally read Nagel's Mind and Cosmos -- previously discussed briefly here -- I had planned to write a more thorough and complete analysis of it. Other more important duties have precluded that goal. So instead, I plan to write a few shorter articles covering various problems in Nagel's philosophy. Here, belatedly, is my first installment of the promised analysis.

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Nagel's motivation for his philosophy of neutral monism is that material monism provides no basis for key characteristics of human experience, such as mind and consciousness. With this correct assessment, Christian theists will agree -- although we extend the list of features to include invariant abstract objects (such as mathematics and logic) and absolute moral laws. (Nagel's version of neutral monism¹ provides no metaphysical foundation for these either.)

Nagel rejects, therefore, materialism but he equally rejects theism. He wants to invent a "middle ground;" though he doesn't get near a putative "middle." Instead, what he posits is just a new version of attributive monism in which all "matter" (with its many usual physical attributes such as mass, charge, spin and so on) is also endowed with mental attributes. This is just as reductionistic as old-fashioned monism. It's a monism differing in degree, not kind.

Nagel asserts that dualism is not a serious option since it posits an inscrutable and a mysterious (at least more so to "naturalists") interaction between mind and body. To this end, then, Nagel resorts to postulating that all material of the cosmos has a property of mind attached. Every piece of stuff in the cosmos is intrinsically "mental" in some sense, in addition to being material.

This theory is tantamount to adding (in physicist terminology) a "psychic" quantum number to every quantum field. Of course such a psychic interaction has never been observed in particle-scattering experiments. Also, Nagel doesn't touch the issue of the quantity of psychic stuff attached to all matter. To be compatible with quantum field theory, there is a multitude of technical and mathematical issues that Nagel doesn't even begin to address. I won't delve into this in anymore detail at this point, but that alone deprives Nagel's theory of any shred of scientific credibility. Nagel, by mere verbal wishful thinking, expands on his "solution." Nagel postulates that though each particle is not conscious, one can hope to produce conscious brains by assembling enough of this psychically endowed stuff in sufficiently complex arrangements. A major defect of this theory is that the "mind" so produced is a composite of psychically endowed fields, and as such, still subject to bottom-up causation. All of the properties and "twitching" of this composite brain are the result of the interactions of the basic fields/particles. Such a mind is still physically determined. Thus, human rational freedom still does not exist. Such a theory is thereby a contradiction of most atheists' assumption of human autonomy. One can easily write the form of the equation that such a brain, and consequently the attached "mind," must satisfy. One does not need to know the exact details of the functional dependence of this composite mind on its constituents to draw the conclusion that such a brain is causally closed with respect to the underlying matter. Such an "emergent" mind is to the brain as pressure is to molecular motion - and, thus, has no causal autonomy. Case closed.

These, in brief, are some of the problems with Nagel's philosophy, but in a following blog I will look at the contradictory nature of Nagel's superficial rejection of dualism and proposing neutral monism. Nagel's principle, mentioned above, is that dualism is too mysterious and "unexplained" and that monism (and in particular his neutral monism that purports to explain "mind" and mental interactions) is not mysterious. But is it? Hardly. For a hint at what is coming, some might want to ask the question regarding the graphics below: "What exactly is going on at this electron-photon interaction?" (The straight red line is an electron of charge "e" and the black wavy line is an emitted (or absorbed) photon. The diagram represents the fundamental interaction of electrons and light.)

Continue to part 2.

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1 Neutral monism asserts that the ultimate constituents of reality are neither material (as in material monism) nor mental (as in idealism) but a neutral third kind of "stuff." For more details see Neutral Monism at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ^↩

Douglas Wilson's Review of Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos"

Wilson wrote:

"Mind & Cosmos is subtitled 'Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.' When a book with this kind of subtitle comes out, written by a philosopher of Nagel’s caliber, and published by Oxford University Press, there should be no astonishment that it caused a stir. I wanted to note two very admirable traits of this book, and then engage at a couple of places where I think engagement could be profitable."

You can read Wilson's full review here.

I think I'll be adding this book to my reading list.  The "almost certainly false" is rather amusing.  Nagel raises the right question concerning the failure of materialism:  inability to account for consciousness, cognitive capacities, values and morals.  So, I'm curious to see what false "hope" he holds out for materialism -- but such qualification is typical of the skepticism of unbelieving professional philosophers  (it certainly keeps the profession going, for what that's worth).

Perusing the "Search Inside" feature at Amazon, I noted that Nagel (p. 4,5) is leaning to "neutral monism,"  a view posited by radical empiricist Ernst Mach.  Neutral monism is, at heart, a mere terminological shift -- it is just another more complicated version of attributive monism.  Some assert that neutral monism is the same as, or a very near kin of, idealism, phenomenalism, or panpsychism.   In any case, none of these can account for actual values and absolute morals (let alone unity/diversity, universals/particulars, individuals, space and time, among many others).

I plan to write on this version of "monism" in a future post. 

Update: The promised follow-up can be found here.