| | The real culprit behind modern science's reductionist tendencies in explaining human action is the Humean and Laplacean views of causality, which Pols contextualizes as developments from Descartes' erroneous mind-body dualism. Here is the relevant excerpt from my review essay on Pols' Mind Regained:
In chapter 2, "Descartes’ Dualism and Its Disastrous Consequences," Pols highlights the main points and rationale of Descartes’s extreme mind-body dualism, with special attention to the aspects of it that led to the negative view of mind’s power to know reality and to the state-event model of causality. Descartes saw mind as so radically different from body that by the very extreme difference in their constituents (soul or "thinking substance" and matter or "extended substance") neither could have a causal effect on the other. Despite his attempts to argue that the mind/soul and a machine-like physical body interacted via the pineal gland (!), neither the rationalist nor the empiricist philosophers who followed Descartes would accept the idea of mind-body interaction, instead opting for some form of parallelism or preestablished harmony, on the one hand, or materialistic monism, on the other. The empiricists leaned toward materialism because they uncritically adopted Descartes’s idea that "the reality of the physical world is different from what common sense takes it to be," that the physical world is real while our common sense experience of it is not -- or that the physical world is more real than our experience of it. Like Descartes, the empiricists believed that "knowledge does not consist in a relation between our mind and things but rather in the relation between the mind and its ideas..." Unlike Descartes, whose rationalist view that innate representative ideas gave the mind the ability to access the reality behind the veil of appearance, the empiricists held that the real source of knowledge was specifically the impressions in the stream of experience, which are not representative in a way that allows us to infer a reality beyond them, although prudence leads us to anticipate in their future course as much as possible. This effectively blocked empiricists from using experience as the basis for demonstrating that scientists are describing a real material world behind the appearances of the impressions of experience (54-5). They and the rest of modern philosophy remain trapped in what Pols calls "the central predicament of all post-Cartesian epistemology," an unreal one to be sure, else (despite Descartes’s intricate and ingenious efforts) there would be no way out of it:
[I]deas purport to represent real things or features of real things, but we have access only to the representations and not to their originals, if indeed there are originals....Thus if subjects called bodies really exist -- both the bodies that seem to make up the commonsense world and our own particular bodies, considered as parts of that world -- we can know what bodies are (their true natures) and whether bodies really exist independently of mind only by undertaking a demonstration that begins with the representative reality of our own ideas. (50)
Pols points out a further way in which Descartes’s dualism has, more indirectly, undermined or distorted the empirical study of mind, which often adopts the assumption that "mind and body may be understood in terms of two distinct streams of states/events, one mental and the other physical." The idea of a succession of mental states/events is implicit in Descartes’ idea that mind is a radically different substance from body, but it is developed in explicit detail in Spinoza’s parallelism and, more important, in Hume’s phenomenalism. Hume held that we cannot demonstrate the existence of the external world from the sequence of impressions in our experience. Yet, since he held that our knowledge of the mental stream is more certain than that of the physical stream, a dilemma arises. Hume wants to argue that the latter stream of events is more basic and that it is ruled by cause-and-effect; however, he also wants to argue that the existence of the physical world is a postulation based on the mental stream, and that causality is not based on necessities in the (inaccessible) external world but merely on the observed regularities of sequences of events in the mental stream. Strictly speaking, then, Hume’s view limits empiricists to viewing causality in either stream of events as being mere "constant correlation: x is the cause of y if and only if when x occurs y follows and when x does not occur y does not occur." Nor is there any apparent solution to the problem of which stream is more real or basic. The hard-nosed realism of the causal views of mainstream empiricist materialism are at sixes and nines with the watered-down causality of Hume’s phenomenalism (56-7).
Pols follows up on this problem at the end of chapter 4 by briefly pointing out that the difficulties with conceiving of causality exclusively in terms of the succession of physical states and events have a parallel in the error of arguing that the powers of the mind are exercised only by means of a stream of mental states and events. The attempt of some contemporary analytic-empiricist philosophers to thus "assimilate a supposed mental causality to the received scientific doctrine of causality" is not an adequate correction to the materialist emphasis on the physical. Such mental states and events are, in fact, "abstractions from the lives of persons. In all plausible cases of what at least purports to be causally significant mental activity, it is only after someone has acted rationally that you can pick out with any confidence a series of states/events (of whatever kind) and consider their causal role in certain purposive achievements" (91). What this abstract state/event model, in both its physical and mental variants, leaves out of an explanation of rational action and purposive achievement is the "telic unity" of their temporal structure, i.e., "the directed unity of [their] several stages." (92). A comment in the following chapter puts an appropriate cap on this point:
Given the profusion of acts of the mind that are intricately and ineluctably embodied, the notion that mind can be adequately described in terms of sequences of purely mental events set in contrast with sequences of purely physical events taking place in the brain seems an unreal contrivance. The contrivance is based on the obsessive notion that any physical event singled out from a physical system is wholly caused by prior physical events. Take that notion and apply it to supposed mental events and you have a straw-man dualism that can then be easily discredited in favor of one of the many forms of physicalist monism that are current today. (100)
Most of Pols’s concern in chapters 3 and 4 is to reveal the problems with conceiving of causality exclusively in terms of the succession of physical states and events. One of the chief problems is that the very prestige of this viewpoint inhibits many who study the mind from trying to see whether the physical world in general and human beings in particular exhibit hierarchical causality. In chapter 3, "The Received Scientific Doctrine of Causality," Pols traces the historical process by which Aristotle’s "four causes" were gradually replaced. The scientific efforts of Kepler and Galileo led to the modern view of causality that strips away formal causality in the full sense and thus telic or final causality as well. The received scientific doctrine also reduces material causality from the idea that "the hierarchical principle by virtue of which what was a formal cause at one ontological level could serve as a material cause for a higher (formal) ontological level" to the idea that inferred microentities are "more truly real than the entities to whose macroscopic structure they contribute,...the observed forms of macroscopic entities [being] dependent on the observer in a way analogous to such secondary qualities as colors;" reduces formal causality from the idea that a visible, intelligible structure emerges from a process of change to the idea that a law of nature (e.g., the laws of Newtonian mechanics) displays the mathematical form by which atoms and larger entities move; and treats efficient causality as interaction between observed entities, which move the way they do because they are composed of atoms (64-5). Following Newton’s acceptance of atomism, Laplace assumes that nature is really a concrete physical system composed of "microscopic particles moving inexorably form one state to another and giving rise to all the macroscopic realities to which human beings respond." Laplace’s view of causality thus sees the universe as a whole as being "a physical system that passes through successive states, any given state being the cause of the state that follows;" and "the transition from state to state is governed by laws of nature...[T]he laws of nature are causal factors no less than the physical states are" (69).
Since most research and applied science focuses on physical systems smaller than the universe as a whole, the "working model," the physical systems model, for Laplace’s view of causality regards a physical system at some particular time as the cause and that same system at a later time as the effect. Further, while this kind of mathematical analysis of two sequential states of the same physical system is sometimes most appropriate, at other times all that is necessary is a simpler model of causality that links two particular entities/events as the cause and effect of some transaction, the first event, condition, or entity being the cause of the second only if it is "necessary and sufficient" for the second (74). In an effort to precisely define "sufficiency," philosophers tend to argue in terms of a given transaction being governed by law. There is, however, a deep split among scientists and philosophers about the ontological status of the laws of nature. The Laplacean optimists because of their confidence in the realism of laws and their own ability to know things as they are, view the laws of nature as "prescriptive in a causally determinative sense...rather than merely descriptive...[W]hat is thus explained could in principle have been predicted" (76). The Humean pessimists on the other hand argue that "there is no justification for the claim that we as knowers can find in nature either necessary production or the lawful necessity of a succession of events....[I]f necessity does indeed exist in a nature understood to be independent of any formative/constitutive power the knower may conceivably possess, then the knower cannot observe, intuit, or otherwise confront it." The best we can hope for in formulating laws of nature is to use them descriptively, detailing how "transitions from one state to another of a physical system -- large or small -- do in fact take place" (78).
Since the Humean pessimists think that necessity cannot be found in an independent external reality, they attempt to re-interpret the Laplacean model in linguistic-logical terms: "statements about the state of a physical science that is regarded as the cause logically necessitate statements about the state regarded as the effect" (78). This is currently the dominant view in philosophy of science, and the result is that philosophy is trapped within "a linguistic prison," viewing physical entities not as real things belonging to a real external world but as linguistic postulations belonging to the "ontology" of whatever language the theories about them are expressed in. Despite this major difference in perspective, both factions pursue the traditional "reductionist goal for the unity of science," which requires that all laws aimed at explaining an upper level in a complex hierarchical system be deducible from the laws covering the base level, and that all concepts applying to the upper level be defined in terms of base-level concepts. Even though many of the Humean strain profess to view models of reality as being linguistic constructions, they no less than the others are "dominated by the image of a total (concrete) physical system in continuous progression from state to state under eternal laws that mandate just that progress and no other" (80).
The problems with the scientific doctrine of causality only get worse when you try to apply it to complex physical systems such as human beings, as Pols illustrates in chapter 4, "Mind and the Scientific Doctrine of Causality." Everything that exists and might be studied by science is part of an unimaginably complex universe of nested physical systems, so the Laplacean ideal of state-to-state research and analysis is in practice supplanted by treating a given entity in relative isolation from the rest of the universe and as a relatively stable structure and attendant substructures, within which some specific thing is happening that we want to understand. However, we don’t know how or what to add to the currently understood laws of nature to allow a causal analysis of any relatively complex part of the brain; nor do we know how to establish the initial conditions of such a part of the brain. Thus, rather than treating the whole brain, for instance, as a physical system moving from total state to total state, in practice, scientists instead adopt the more practical cause-effect model which treats one brain event as resulting in another brain event. The problem with this approach, however, is that although we know with certainty that, for instance, a complex pattern of guided electrochemical impulses is essential to vision, we don’t know just how those impulses contribute to vision, let alone how they contribute to our rational awareness that we are seeing something.
Beyond this, there is the problem of how complex biological structures arise, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. Pols points out the inadequacies of the current neo-Darwinist paradigm in evolutionary theory, which follows standard scientific doctrine in seeking to discredit and eliminate the idea of final causation. Although teleology appears to be the case, neo-Darwinists argue, given enough time all of the plants and animals and all of their characteristics could have arisen by chance operating through natural selection. If there were such a thing as absolute chance, their argument would succeed; but the consensus is that there is only relative (Laplacean) chance, the kind that "can be eliminated by better knowledge, although such knowledge is sometimes difficult to come by and hardly worth the trouble" (85). Neo-Darwinists indeed do adopt this viewpoint, holding as well the standard view of a smooth, continuous, necessitated movement from state to state. What they do not acknowledge is that relative chance does not have the same teleology-banning implications that absolute chance does, hence they persist in their opposition to purpose and final causation.
Another problem facing the accepted model of causality is the appearance-reality clash that shows up between common sense and the contemporary tendency to try to explain away the causality governing larger structures such as living organisms or the human brain in favor of that operating on the microentities that make them up. While scientists have basically abandoned the attempt to reduce higher-level laws and concepts to lower-level ones, many still try to argue that causality only actually works in the entities at the lowest, base level of nature. We should, they say, take microentities more seriously, i.e., as being more real and causally significant, than the organisms they constitute, and we should regard organisms as aggregates rather than integrated wholes. On the other hand, the mind tends to regard at least some macroentities as capable of rather serious things such as responsible action for which there is some causal and explanatory significance. Philosophers who deny the power of the mind to know an independent reality, however, claim that the commonsense idea that large systems and, in particular, the minds that belong to such systems as ourselves have a causal significance is based on some kind of deception: "...the antireductive disposition of common sense is nothing more than a disposition to take an appearance for a reality" (89). They blame mind for generating the appearance and then taking it as reality; mind by its very nature reacts to what it wants to know by making something else and then taking that for what it wanted to know in the first place. We take complexes of electrons to be physical objects, we take lights waves to be colors, we take linguistic constructs to be reality. This creates a deep problem for materialism, which views mind as being causally generated by the physical operations of microentities -- and also as itself generating the appearance that materialism’s view is not complete -- and also that mind too is an appearance. Despite this, the mind must also break free from its being a causally dependent appearance-generating appearance and somehow identify how things really are. Materialism and its view of mind can hardly be defended, when their very premises and conclusions seem to destroy the possibility of any such defense.
To depict starkly the difference between the standard scientific model of causality and the view that living beings are causal hierarchies, Pols proposes a thought experiment that illustrates the pitfall of any attempt to resolve the mind-body question via neurophysiology. First, he says, assume that an omniscient scientist could, at the start of a complex rational act, establish all the relevant conditions operating in the person carrying out the action, without interfering with that action in any way. Second, assume that the scientist knows all of the relevant laws of physics and chemistry and physiology. Third, assume that the scientist doesn’t know anything about what the person being studied is thinking about or intends to do. If, in fact, we are causal hierarchies, the omniscient scientist will be unable, despite all of his knowledge, to predict even the physical conditions in the nervous system at the end of the action, because the nervous system’s physical behavior is affected by the apex being’s mental functions. Although the person could not have carried out the action without the causal support of the nervous system, the events involving the neurons are not the entire cause of the person’s mental functions. Hence, the scientist will be unable to offer an adequate physical explanation of the state of the person’s nervous system at the end of the action (90-1).
[I would like to hear what reductionist fans have to say about Pols' proposed thought experiment....REB]
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