[lit-ideas] Re: Popper's 'Philosophy of Mind' I
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2011 21:34:13 +0900
Thanks, Donal.
Just curious, do you have any thoughts about the use and/or abuse of Popper
by his most economically successful disciple, George Soros?
John
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 8:59 PM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> For discussion, a first post on the subject (apologies if it's too
> philosophical for some):-
> ______________
>
> One review of Popper’s contribution to “The Self and Its Brain” [‘TSAIB’]
> (co-authored with the Nobel laureate J.C. Eccles, though their contributions
> are individual not joint) said that it’s the closest we have to Popper’s
> ‘philosophy of mind’. Popper’s way into the subject differs, typically, from
> many other philosophers. In particular, as Popper says in the first section
> [marked P1.1], “I am not offering what is sometimes called an ‘ontology’”.
>
> Popper’s whole approach is underpinned by his theory of the three worlds or
> realms – of, roughly, the physical [World 1], mental [World 2] and cultural
> [World 3]. The distinction drawn between these worlds or realms is an
> “ontology” of sorts; but what Popper is not attempting to answer is ‘*what
> is it* that constitutes something being physical?’, or ‘mental’, or a
> ‘constituent of World 3’. That is, he is not offering an “ontology” in an
> essentialist sense, or even in the sense of an introductory text like Colin
> McGinn’s “The Character of Mind” that appears fixated with questions of
> ‘what is the mental?’ as opposed to ‘what is the physical?’ It has been an
> almost life-long aspect of Popper’s approach to decry this kind of
> philosophising, for a variety of reasons including the absence of ‘ultimate
> explanations’. In ‘TSAIB’ we see how far we might get without stumbling at
> the first hurdle of these, to others, seemingly inescapable and yet
> insurmountable ‘What is?’ questions.
>
> It is important to emphasise that Popper’s conception of World 2 includes
> not just conscious but unconscious mental states; even though, almost of
> necessity, the focus of his attention on World 2 will be conscious states,
> and indeed examining these states in their articulated forms as products in
> World 3 [for example, by examining a World 2 ‘thought’ or ‘mental state’ in
> a linguistically expressed and therefore World 3 form, including that of a
> ‘theory’ or explanation], it is clear that most brain activity is not
> conscious activity or consciously controlled. The ‘conscious mind’ may be
> the tip of the iceberg in terms of the scope and amount of brain activity.
> Yet the ‘conscious mind’, and its interaction with World 3 objects [which
> themselves are the product of the mind], utterly changes what would
> otherwise be our situation in ways that justify focus on the ‘conscious
> mind’ [and its products] within any ‘philosophy of mind’. For any adequate
> of ‘philosophy of mind’ would have to be adequate to account for a work such
> as ‘TSAIB’ itself.
>
> There is an aspect of Popper’s method that invites misunderstanding and
> should be perhaps mentioned. Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies” has
> been misread, for example, as being primarily a critique of the political
> philosophies of Plato, Hegel and Marx; whereas it is a defence of democracy,
> with many ideas of its own, that is presented by way of criticism of these
> philosophies. In ‘TSAIB’, likewise, Popper’s “philosophy of mind” is mostly
> presented by way of criticism of other views, but it would be a similar
> mistake to think it is simply a set of such critiques. At the same time,
> Popper takes many of the underlying problems addressed by ‘TSAIB’ to be
> ‘open’ problems and even insoluble, or at best only partially soluble. This
> modesty, as to what can be argued for, runs through the book. While Popper
> elsewhere takes the proponents of ‘inductive logic’ to be on a fool’s
> errand, the positions he opposes in ‘TSAIB’ are deemed worthy of respect,
> not just for how they have inspired worthwhile developments [e.g. Popper’s
> account of “materialism” as a programme of explanation in science, and in
> the ‘philosophy of mind’] but that they represent schools of thought that
> may continue to inspire important developments. This is not perhaps so
> surprising, as Popper is an interactionist and pluralist: that important
> developments might spring from seeking some ‘materialist’ [or
> physical-chemical] explanation of the mind, or might spring from seeking
> some irreducibly psychological or cultural explanation, is more than left
> open. Both are likely if the truth here involves, as Popper suggests, a
> complex interaction of entities and phenomena that he divides broadly along
> the lines of Worlds 1, 2 and 3, with World 2 the only realm that has
> interaction with both the other realms.
>
> Brief outlines of aspects of ‘TSAIB’ with comments:-
>
> (1) Popper on so-called 'identity' theories.
>
> Identity theories of body and mind, which argue that in some sense a mental
> event is ‘identical’ to a physical one, raise the question ‘In what sense
> can we speak of ‘identity’ here?’
>
> What interests Popper is not so much trying to formulate or refute the
> specifics of an ‘identity’ theory but to understand these as the upshot of a
> certain kind of underlying metaphysical position. This approach, which
> eschews surface logic-chopping, is seen also in his wide-ranging survey of
> possible positions on the body-mind problem, and in his seeing resemblances
> between positions that might otherwise seem far apart but not when these are
> considered as part of a deeper metaphysical stance. For example, the kind of
> radical materialism (that denies there is such a thing as conscious
> experience a la Quine), and that might seem very far removed from
> pan-psychism (that says “*all matter* has an inside aspect which is a
> soul-like or consciousness-like ‘quality’”), shares, Popper suggests, “a
> certain simplicity of outlook. The universe is in both cases homogeneous and
> monistic.” Considering things in this metaphysical sweep, Popper likewise
> observes, with typical astuteness, that “Epiphenomenalism may be interpreted
> as a modification of pan-psychism, in which the “pan” element is dropped and
> the “psychism” is confined to those living things that seem to have a mind”
> [p.54 of Chapter P3 "Materialism Criticized"].
>
> Donal
> London
>
>
>
>
>
>
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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