hope by now are obvious. They will leave out the subjectivity of mental content. By way of technical objections there will be counterexamples, such as the disjunction cases, and the coun- terexamples will be met with gimmicks—nomological rela- tions, and counterfactuals, or so I would predict—but the most you could hope from the gimmicks, even if they were success- ful in blocking the counterexamples, would be a parallelism between the output of the gimmick and intuitions about men- tal content. You still would not get at the essence of mental content.
I do not know if anyone has yet made the obvious common- sense objection to the project of naturalizing intentional con- tent, but I hope it is clear from the entire discussion what it will be. In case no one has done it yet, here goes: Any attempt to reduce intentionality to something nonmental will always fail because it leaves out intentionality. Suppose for example that you had a perfect causal externalist account of the belief that water is wet. This account is given by stating a set of causal relations in which a system stands to water and to wet- ness and these relations are entirely specified without any mental component. The problem is obvious: a system could have all of these relations and still not believe that water is wet. This is just an extension of the Chinese room argument, but the moral it points to is general: You cannot reduce intentional content (or pains or "qualia") to something else, because if you could they would be something else, and they are not some- thing else. The opposite of my view is stated very succinctly by Fodor: "If aboutness is real, it must really be something else" (1987, p. 97). On the contrary, aboutness (i.e., intentional- ity) is real, and it is not something else.
A symptom that something is radically wrong with the pro- ject is that the intentional notions are inherently normative. They set standards of truth, rationality, consistency, etc., and there is no way that these standards can be intrinsic to a sys- tem consisting entirely of brute, blind, nonintentional causal relations. There is no normative component to billiard ball cau- sation. Darwinian biological attempts at naturalizing content try to avoid this problem by appealing to what they suppose is the inherently teleological, normative character of biological evolution. But this is a very deep mistake. There is nothing normative or teleological about Darwinian evolution. Indeed, Darwin's major contribution was precisely to remove purpose and teleology from evolution, and substitute for it purely natural forms of selection. Darwin's account shows that the apparent teleology of biological processes is an illusion.
It is a simple extension of this insight to point out that notions such as "purpose" are never intrinsic to biological organisms, (unless of course those organisms themselves have
conscious intentional states and processes). And even notions like "biological function" are always made relative to an observer who assigns a normative value to the causal processes. There is no factual difference about the heart that corresponds to the difference between saying
1. The heart causes the pumping of blood. and saying,
2. The function of the heart is to p u m p blood.
But 2 assigns a normative status to the sheer brute causal facts about the heart, and it does this because of our interest in the relation of this fact to a whole lot of other facts, such as our interest in survival. In short, the Darwinian mechanisms and even biological functions themselves are entirely devoid of purpose or teleology. All of the teleological features are entirely in the mind of the observer.11
IX. The Moral So Far
My aim so far in this chapter has been to illustrate a recurring pattern in the history of materialism. This pattern is made graphic in table 2.1. I have been concerned not so much to defend or refute materialism as to examine its vicissitudes in the face of certain commonsense facts about the mind, such as the fact that most of us are, for most of our lives, conscious. What we find in the history of materialism is a recurring ten- sion between the urge to give an account of reality that leaves out any reference to the special features of the mental, such as consciousness and subjectivity, and at the same time account for our "intuitions" about the mind. It is, of course, impossible to do these two things. So there are a series of attempts, almost neurotic in character, to cover over the fact that some crucial element about mental states is being left out. And when it is pointed out that some obvious truth is being denied by the materialist philosophy, the upholders of this view almost invariably resort to certain rhetorical strategies
Table 2.1
The general pattern exhibited by recent materialism
Theory Logical behaviorism Type identity theory Token identity theory Black box functionalism Strong AI (Turing machine functionalism) Eliminative materialism (rejection of folk psychology) Common-sense objections
Leaves out the mind: superspartan / super- actor objections
Leaves out the mind: or else it leads to property dualism
Leaves out the mind: absent qualia
Leaves out the mind: absent qualia and spectrum inversion Leaves out the mind: Chinese room
Denies the existence of the mind: unfair to folk psychology
Technical objections 1. Circular; needs desires to explain beliefs, and conversely 2. Can't do the conditionals
3. Leaves out causation 1. Neural chauvinism 2. Leibniz's law 3. Can't account for mental properties 4. Modal arguments Can't identify the mental features of mental content Relation of structure and function is unexplained Human cognition is nonrepresentational and therefore noncomputational Defense of folk psychology Naturalizing intentionality Leaves out intentionality Disjunction problem
designed to show that materialism must be right, and that the philosopher who objects to materialism must be endorsing some version of dualism, mysticism, mysteriousness, or gen- eral antiscientific bias. But the unconscious motivation for all of this, the motivation that never somehow manages to sur- face, is the assumption that materialism is necessarily incon- sistent with the reality and causal efficacy of consciousness, subjectivity, etc. That is, the basic assumption behind material- ism is essentially the Cartesian assumption that materialism implies antimentalism and mentalism implies antimaterialism.
There is something immensely depressing about this whole history because it all seems so pointless and unnecessary. It is all based on the false assumption that the view of reality as entirely physical is inconsistent with the view that world really contains subjective ("qualitative," "private/' "touchy-feely," "immaterial," "nonphysical") conscious states such as thoughts and feelings.
The weird feature about this entire discussion is that materi- alism inherits the worst assumption of dualism. In denying the dualist's claim that there are two kinds of substances in the world or in denying the property dualist's claim that there are two kinds of properties in the world, materialism inadver- tently accepts the categories and the vocabulary of dualism. It accepts the terms in which Descartes set the debate. It accepts, in short, the idea that the vocabulary of the mental and the physical, of material and immaterial, of mind and body, is per- fectly adequate as it stands. It accepts the idea that if we think consciousness exists we are accepting dualism. What I believe—as is obvious from this entire discussion—is that the vocabulary, and the accompanying categories, are the source of our deepest philosophical difficulties. As long as we use words like "materialism," we are almost invariably forced to suppose that they imply something inconsistent with naive mentalism. I have been urging that in this case, one can have one's cake and eat it too. One can be a "thoroughgoing materi- alist" and not in any way deny the existence of (subjective, internal, intrinsic, often conscious) mental phenomena. How-
ever, since my use of these terms runs dead counter to over three hundred years of philosophical tradition, it would prob- ably be better to abandon this vocabulary altogether.
If one had to describe the deepest motivation for material- ism, one might say that it is simply a terror of consciousness. But should this be so? Why should materialists have a fear of consciousness? Why don't materialists cheerfully embrace consciousness as just another material property among others? Some, in fact, such as Armstrong and Dennett, claim to do so. But they do this by so redefining "consciousness" as to deny the central feature of consciousness, namely, its subjective quality. The deepest reason for the fear of consciousness is that consciousness has the essentially terrifying feature of sub- jectivity. Materialists are reluctant to accept that feature because they believe that to accept the existence of subjective consciousness would be inconsistent with their conception of what the world must be like. Many think that, given the discoveries of the physical sciences, a conception of reality that denies the existence of subjectivity is the only one that it is pos- sible to have. Again, as with "consciousness," one way to cope is to redefine "subjectivity" so that it no longer means subjec- tivity but means something objective (for an example, see Lycan 1990a).
I believe all of this amounts to a very large mistake, and in chapters 4, 5, and 6,1 will examine in some detail the character and the ontological status of consciousness.
X. The Idols of the Tribe
I said earlier in this chapter that I would explain why a certain natural-sounding question was really incoherent. The ques- tion is: How do unintelligent bits of matter produce intelli- gence? We should first note the form of the question. Why are we not asking the more traditional question: How do uncon- scious bits of matter produce consciousness? That question seems to me perfectly coherent. It is a question about how the brain works to cause conscious mental states even though the
individual neurons (or synapses or receptors) in the brain are not themselves conscious. But in the present era, we are reluctant to ask the question in that form because we lack "objective" criteria of consciousness. Consciousness has an ineliminable subjective ontology, so we think it more scientific to rephrase the question as one about intelligence, because we think that for intelligence we have objective, impersonal cri- teria. But now we immediately encounter a difficulty. If by "intelligence" we mean anything that satisfies the objective third-person criteria of intelligence, then the question contains a false presupposition. Because if intelligence is defined behavioristically, then it is simply not the case that neurons are not intelligent. Neurons, like just about everything else in the world, behave in certain regular, predictable patterns. Furth- ermore, considered in a certain way, neurons do extremely sophisticated "information processing." They take in a rich set of signals from other neurons at their dendritic synapses; they process this information at their somae and send out informa- tion through their axonal synapses to other neurons. If intelli- gence is to be defined behavioralistically, then neurons are pretty intelligent by anybody's standards. In short, if our cri- teria of intelligence are entirely objective and third-person— and the whole point of posing the question in this way was to get something that satisfied those conditions—then the ques- tion contains a presupposition that on its own terms is false. The question falsely presupposes that the bits do not meet the criteria of intelligence.
The answer to the question, not surprisingly, inherits the same ambiguity. There are two different sets of criteria for applying the expression "intelligent behavior." One of these sets consists of third-person or "objective" criteria that are not necessarily of any psychological interest whatever. But the other set of criteria are essentially mental and involve the first- person point of view. "Intelligent behavior" on the second set of criteria involves thinking, and thinking is essentially a men- tal process. Now, if we adopt the third-person criteria for intelligent behavior, then of course computers—not to mention
pocket calculators, cars, steam shovels, thermostats, and indeed just about everything in the world—engages in intelli- gent behavior. If we are consistent in adopting the Turing test or some other "objective" criterion for intelligent behavior, then the answer to such questions as "Can unintelligent bits of matter produce intelligent behavior?" and even, "How exactly do they do it?" are ludicrously obvious. Any thermostat, pocket calculator, or waterfall produces "intelligent behavior," and we know in each case how it works. Certain artifacts are designed to behave as if they were intelligent, and since every- thing follows laws of nature, then everything will have some description under which it behaves as if it were intelligent. But this sense of "intelligent behavior" is of no psychological relevance at all.
In short, we tend to hear both the question and the answer as oscillating between two different poles: (a) How do uncon- scious bits of matter produce consciousness? (a perfectly good question to which the answer is: In virtue of specific—though largely unknown—neurobiological features of the brain); and (b) How do "unintelligent" (by first- or third-person criteria?) bits of matter produce "intelligent" ( by first- or third-person criteria?) behavior? But to the extent that we make the criteria of intelligence third-person criteria, the question contains a false presupposition, and this is concealed from us because we tend to hear the question on interpretation (a).