Proof that the Best Satire Makes Fun of Everbody

Haven't laughed this hard in awhile. And since this is of such clear relevance to ongoing topics of conversation on this blog, I'm inspired to make the effort to post a video. (Thanks go to John Shook for calling this to my attention). Enjoy:

Materialist Conceptions of Mind, Part III: Self-Monitoring Brains and Strange Loops

This will be my last post before the start of the new academic semester—at which point most (if not all) of my blog posts will be deliberately paired with topics I’ll be covering in my philosophy of religion class. But before that starts I want to conclude my series of posts on materialist conceptions of consciousness.


In this final post in the series I want to consider what I’m calling “perspectivalism”—roughly, the idea that consciousness is to be identified with the way that brain states “look” from a distinctive internal perspective. But on this definition, perspectivalism needn’t be a materialist conception of consciousness at all.

A non-materialist version of perspectivalism would hold that consciousness is the way that brain states look to a “subject” that isn't reducible to anything physical. On this view, while every conscious state is correlated with a physical state of the brain, and while changes in the brain will always bring about corresponding changes to consciousness (in other words, while this theory of consciousness fully aligns with everything that science tells us about the relationship between mental and neurological phenomena), consciousness does not arise without the introduction of a non-material subject. Such non-material perspectivalism, as defined, does not specify what this non-material subject is (and hence allows for numerous variants), but only what it is not: any component or part of the brain.

A materialist version of perspectivalism, by contrast, shares the idea that states of consciousness are the way that brain states “appear” from a distinctive internal perspective. But the “observer” in this case--that which provides the perspective on the brain states--is the brain itself. In other words, consciousness emerges when the brain begins to monitor its own activity—when brain states begin to represent brain states.

To unpack this idea as best I can, I want to recall a comment from my previous post—which at the time was little more than an aside. The comment is one I made in relation to my extended example of the two instantiations of the photo of my children—one a “hard copy” on my desk, the other an electronically produced image on my computer screen. The image, I said then, is an emergent property of two disparate physical substrates. But then I made the following remark:

Arguably, the emergent property in either case doesn’t really “emerge” in the absence of an observer who has the capacity to find in the similar organizational structures of the two physical substrates a shared meaning. In other words, at least in some cases, emergence requires a subject who is capable of meaning-attributions. Without that observer, we have an arrangement of inkblots or of illuminated pixels, but we simply don’t have an image of my children. That requires someone to find meaning in the pattern—and neither a piece of photo paper with ink on it nor a computer can do that.

The idea here is that the common feature of both physical systems doesn’t really come into existence apart from a meaning-bestowing observer. The idea I want to follow up on here is that consciousness is what certain neurological patterns “become” to the right kind of meaning-bestowing observer—and that the brain itself is capable of being such an observer. Put more simply, conscious states emerge from the physical system of the brain when that brain “monitors” its own processes (in the sense of tracking and modeling them). On this view, it should be clear that perspectivalism is really a distinctive species of emergentism--but one which adds an additional element that is intended, presumably, to help close the explanatory gap that a bare emergentism leaves us with.

What I want to do in this post is explain why such self-monitoring activity cannot solve the problems that I have articulated with respect to the previous species of materialism (identificationism and emergentism). In other words, the arguments I will be developing against perspectivalism will presuppose the conclusions I have reached on the basis of arguments in the previous two posts. As such, I want to offer an initial qualifying remark about what I do and don’t believe I am accomplishing in the current post.

Specifically, I am well aware that the arguments already laid out against identificationism and perspectivalism are not convincing to everyone--and I don't think this post will add anything new to those arguments (and hence won't do anything to convince those who are skeptical of them). My aim here is simply to show that if you find these arguments convincing, then the same basic concerns that lie behind your rejection of identificationism and emergentism will lead you to reject material perspectivalism as well. Material perspectivalism doesn’t add anything new that can rehabilitate materialism if the problems with identificationism and emergentism are granted. In short, what I hope to show in this post (even to those who don’t find in the earlier species of materialism the same problems I find) is that those who do find the earlier species of materialism problematic in the ways I highlighted won’t discover in perspectivalism a way around those problems.

With this in mind, consider the hypothesis that consciousness is what happens when the brain monitors its own activity, so that its brain states become the object of the brain’s own scrutiny. Just as the image on a computer screen acquires a distinctive emergent property by virtue of there being a meaning-bestowing observer to attach meaning to the pattern on the screen, perhaps consciousness is a property that emerges when the brain observes its own states.

There are two main objections to this view. First, in order for the brain to serve as an observer that bestows meaning on its own brain states, we must solve the riddle of how a physical system can generate semantic content. In other words, we must first close the explanatory gap in order for this self-monitoring process to do the job we need it to do. But the job we were hoping the self-monitoring process would do is close this very gap. But if the gap must first be closed in order for the self-monitoring system to close the gap, it follows that the self-monitoring system cannot be what closes the gap.

And so, if you think that the explanatory gap between neurological systems and conscious states is the kind of gap that can’t be bridged without the addition of some external element—that is, if you accept the core objection to emergentism—then the materialist version of perspectivalism won’t work. Perspectivalism, it seems, adds nothing to the explanatory picture that will be convincing to those who are skeptical of the emergentist hypothesis.

The second problem with perspectivalism connects up with the chief objection to identificationism. As a reminder, that objection holds, in brief, that a conscious state cannot be identified with its corresponding brain process because the conscious state (the “quale”) has relational properties that the brain process do not have. For example, I can be familiar with the conscious state (the way the wasp sting on my ankle feels) even though I am entirely unacquainted with the underlying brain state. (The argument is more complicated than this—but for a fuller treatment, see the first post in this series and the subsequent discussion).

At least at first glance, it seems that materialist perspectivalism can avoid this problem with identificationism. After all, for perspectivalism the quale isn’t identified with the underlying brain state at all. Instead, it is identified with the way the brain state appears to a brain that’s engaged in self monitoring activity. And there is no difficulty with an appearance from a certain perspective having properties that the underlying cause of that appearance lacks (or vice versa). I can be immediately acquainted with the way that the northern lights look without knowing anything about the underlying physical reality (and vice versa).

But here’s the problem: on this perspectival view, it’s true enough that a quale is not identified with the corresponding brain event. But it is identified with a second-order brain event—one in which parts of the brain are undergoing brain processes in response to other brain processes.

But if this is right, the original problem just crops up at the next level. The reason why we couldn’t identify the quale with the first-order brain event was because we’re acquainted with the quale even when we are entirely unacquainted with the underlying brain event. But surely the very same thing can be said about the second-order brain event, generating the very same problem. One could try to perform the same move again, by identifying the quale with the way that the second-order "monitoring" brain event looks from a certain vantage point—but if that vantage point is the one provided by a third-order brain event, we’d just be moving the problem up one more level without making any progress. The only way to stop this endless buck-passing would be either to abandon perspectivalism at some point (in which case why not abandon it right away?), or to ground consciousness in the way that a brain state appears to a subject that isn't reducible to a brain state (in which case we’ve embraced non-materialist perspectivalism).

What all of this means is that if one accepts the problem with identificationism, then perspectivalism won’t get us any closer to an adequate materialist account of consciousness.

But before leaving perspectivalism altogether, I want to briefly consider Douglas Hofstadter’s “strange loop.” Here, I must confess that I haven’t had the time to study Hofstadter closely, so there may be something important I’m missing. If so, please pipe in with appropriate comments. In any event, as I understand it the basic thrust of Hofstadter’s idea is that the brain is designed to make representations of objects via various neurological mechanisms—but that one of the things it makes representations of is itself. But in representing itself, it includes in that representation the other representations—including its self-representation. The result is a kind of feedback loop out of which consciousness emerges—like the noise produced when a microphone is held up to the speaker to which it is connected, or the strange visual images that result when a video camera is focused narrowly on a monitor that is displaying a live feed of what the camera is filming.

Now I must confess to finding something really cool and wondrous about these kinds of feedback loops. As I child I often wondered what would happen if one put two mirrors up against one another and somehow managed to get enough light in there to make visual reflection possible—without introducing the lamp itself or any other object that might be reflected. I had fantasies that this would open up a window into some parallel dimension—if only one could get in there to see it (which, of course, couldn’t be done without introducing an object that would then shatter the magic).

The closest I got to achieving this fantasy was to enter the mirror room that’s on display at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY (where I grew up). The interior of the room is entirely mirrored—walls, floor, ceiling—so that when one stands in it one sees endless corridors in all directions, with oneself endlessly repeated. There’s also a table and chair made of mirrors, but I always found that element distracting. In any event, I remember thinking that if only I could make myself invisible (and get rid of the mirror table and chair) I’d be able to produce the conditions of infinite-reflection-of-nothing that would open a window to another world.

But as appealing as this infinite feedback loop idea is, I don’t see how it can generate anything really new. Without any light to reflect, two mirrors pressed against each other won’t produce any kind of mutual feedback. A speaker that produces no sounds of its own won’t cause feedback when the microphone is brought close to it unless there are ambient noises in the room to be magnified through the feedback. Likewise for the monitor-and-video loop. These loops need something to work with—and while they can produce a kind of infinite magnification of what is given to them, can something new really arise from them? I don’t see how.

Now, if we accept Chalmers’ view that there are latent “consciousness” properties in matter, I can imagine how a feedback loop of the sort Hofstadter describes might “magnify” these properties—producing discernible consciousness in the brain out of indiscernible “traces.” But in the absence of this Chalmerian assumption, I don’t see how an infinite feedback loop can give us anything new. And so, unless the explanatory gap I talked about in the previous post can be closed in some other way, I don’t see how the mere introduction of a feedback loop can close it. Such a feedback loop might explain many things about the operation of the brain and identity-formation—but it seems that it can explain aspects of our conscious experience (such as our sense of self) only on the assumption that we already have conscious experience.

In short, as an account of the origins of consciousness, I don’t see how the feedback loop can be explanatorily significant. While I think that our brains do engage in self-monitoring activity—and while I think that this self-monitoring activity does generate feedback loops that are going to have interesting results that may explain various features or aspects of our conscious life—I don’t see how they can account for consciousness itself.

Materialist Conceptions of Mind, Part 1: Identificationism

In the next few posts I want to (a) consider what I take to be the main ways that a materialist can account for consciousness, and (b) try to identify the main hurdles that these accounts must overcome in order to be generally convincing.


For my purposes here a “materialist” will refer to someone who holds that phenomena in general and mental phenomena in particular (that is, conscious states and subjective experiences such as thoughts, sensations, emotions, and desires) are (i) purely material or physical, and (ii) wholly and adequately explained by the sorts of physical mechanisms and processes that, in the sciences, are routinely posited as explanations for empirical phenomena (even if those explanations might not be accessible to us right now). By the “material” or “physical” I mean, at the most basic level, entities characterizable in spatio-temporal terms that interact and affect one another in accord with causal laws whose consistent operation can be tested through scientific means—in short, matter and energy.

So, (i) is an ontological thesis about what mental phenomena are. To say that they are purely physical is not, however, to say that they must be entities composed of matter an energy, like tomatoes and rocks. While that is one way in which something can be purely physical, there are other ways. Mental phenomena might, for example, be physical process, or a certain class of properties possessed by these processes, or the way that certain physical processes “look” from a peculiar perspective.

The related thesis, (ii), is more of an epistemological one about what methods we should employ for coming to an adequate understanding of mental phenomena. The methods are scientific. That is, we will come to adequately understand mental phenomena in just the way that we have come to understand such phenomena as illness, lightning, or the cycle of the seasons: by uncovering the physical building blocks, structures, and mechanisms that (in accord with physical laws) explain the phenomena in question.

The materialist, thus understood, has (I think) three main options for dealing with consciousness. These options are:

1) “Identificationism,” by which I mean a direct identification of mental phenomena with brain processes—what we call mental phenomena just are brain events in much the way that water is H20. (Note: while some equate this view with what is called “eliminative materialism,” I reserve “eliminative materialism” for the more radical view, seemingly embraced by Feyerabend and a few others, that mental phenomena don’t really exist at all).

2) “Emergentism,” by which I mean the view (most famously advocated by Searle) that consciousness is an emergent property of an active brain. What we know as our consciousness is a feature of the brain in something like the way that brittleness is a feature of glass—it is a property of the whole that arises by virtue of the activity of the constituent elements organized in the distinctive way that they are, and can thus be adequately explained by reference to those elements.

3) “Perspectivalism,” by which I mean the view that consciousness is the way that the complex processes of the brain “look” from a distinctive perspective—specifically, from the “internal” perspective that arises when the brain itself engages in self-monitoring/self-representing activity. This is the kind of view advocated by Douglas Hofstadter in I Am a Strange Loop.

In this first post, I would like to look at the first of these three options to explain why materialists would do well to look elsewhere. The view gets what plausibility it has from the growing body of neuroscientific research that has succeeded in correlating specific “inner” experiences (the sensation of bright light, pain, etc.) with (partially understood/described) physical processes in the brain. The idea here is to simply identify the former with the latter—to say, in effect, that what neuroscientists are slowly describing just is the conscious experience with which it has been correlated.

There are, in effect, two substantial difficulties with making this kind of direct identification. The first has to do with the failure of brain states and mental states to meet ordinary standards of identification. The second has to do with the prospects for “multiple realization” of mental phenomena.

Let me begin with the ordinary standards of identification. In any usual understanding of identity, in order for A and B to be identical, what is true of A must be true of B and vice versa. If A has properties that B lacks (or vice versa), then the relation between A and B must be more complex than one of simple identity (perhaps A names X-as-experienced-from-perspective-1 while B names X-as-experienced-from-perspective-2).

But mental phenomena—thoughts, sensations, desires, emotions, etc.—clearly have properties that the corresponding brain processes lack, and vice versa. To see this better, it is helpful to introduce the notion of “qualia” (“quale” in the singular), by which is meant the subjective contents of experience, or, perhaps, the “way it feels” or “what it’s like” to undergo this or that mental experience (for example, what the peculiarly bitter sunflower seed I just ate tasted like as I chewed it up). This “what-it’s-like-ness” of mental phenomena isn’t some incidental feature of these phenomena, but rather their chief constitutive element. Put another way, what I mean by the conscious experience of pain just is the associated quale.

And, as Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson have both famously argued in different ways, these qualia are inaccessible to scientific study in a way that the details of brain processes are not. Nagel, in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, points out that we know a great deal about the neurophysiology of bats, and we know a great deal about how their acoustic radar works. But none of this tells us what it’s like to experience the world through such a radar in the way a bat does. The qualia of a bat’s inner life seem to be inaccessible to science in a way that the brain processes of the bat are not.

Jackson offers a different thought experiment, in terms of a hypothetical scientist who knows everything there is to know, scientifically, about the physiology of color perception, including an exhaustive understanding of the brain processes that correspond with the experience of color…but she has never herself experienced color. And then, one day, she sees a red rose for the first time. Jackson asks: has she learned something new? He thinks the answer is obviously “yes,” which means that there is something about the experience of color that is “above and beyond” the neurological processes science can study.

Here’s a way to put their point: brain processes are third-party accessible objects of study. But there is something related to these brain processes that is inaccessible to such third party study, being instead only available through first-person introspection. This something else is what has come to be called the “qualia” of consciousness. But the fact is that we might as well say that it is consciousness itself—because what we are referring to when we speak of our conscious life just ARE these qualia.

These facts make a simple identification between mental phenomena and brain states at best highly problematic. Mental phenomena are something that each of us has immediate first-person familiarity with; but these phenomena seem inaccessible to neuroscientists engaged in third-person investigation of our brains. And we can claim familiarity with what this or that conscious experience is like—and so honestly claim familiarity with mental states—even if we know absolutely nothing about the brain states with which they correspond. As such, it seems as if mental states have relational properties which brain states lack, and vice versa.

Some defenders of identificationism try to escape this conclusion by pointing to the fact that we can identify water with H2O even though, for a long time, people were entirely unfamiliar with the chemical composition of water (and many remain so). Doesn’t that show that someone’s being familiar/acquainted with A but not with B doesn’t preclude the identity of A and B?

The problem with this rejoinder is that it fails to make a crucial distinction. “Water” denotes a certain entity out there in the world—one we are acquainted with primarily through a range of properties such as liquidity, clarity, capacity to quench thirst, etc. “H2O” denotes the same entity out there in the world understood from a scientific perspective in terms of chemical composition. It turns out that the entity characterized by the former set of properties is the same one that has the given chemical composition.

That is, water and H2O are identical because they refer to the same thing. What is referenced by "water" is not a set of properties but a certain kind of thing (a "natural kind," some might say) that exists in the world but which we are acquainted with through the given set of properties. What we are referring to when we use "water" is the underlying thing which has the properties. But when we speak of pain, we are referring to the quale itself--the "what it feels like" of pain, as opposed to any underlying physical mechanism which might or might not be able to explain the emergence of this sensation.

To better see the problem here, let's consider a different example: the statement "Clark Kent is Superman." Now, consider two possible ways to look at this statement, related to two distinct ways of understanding “Clark Kent” and “Superman.” In the first case, the statement comes out true while in the second it comes out false (at least if we set aside for the moment the unique challenges associated with fictional individuals).

Consider Case 1. In this case, by “Superman” we mean “the individual who embodies a range of traits, including super strength, ability to fly, a do-gooder personality, etc.”; and by “Clark Kent” we mean “the individual who embodies a range of traits, including being mild-mannered, dorky, a reporter for the Daily Planet, etc.”. In this case the identification holds because the individual who possesses the former traits is the same individual who possesses the latter. It isn’t that Superman and Clark Kent possess different properties not possessed by the other. Rather, it is that we know the individual under one name in terms of some of that individual’s properties, and we know the individual under the other name in terms of a different set of that same individual’s properties. But given that the two names refer to the same individual, every property possessed by Clark Kent is also a property possessed by Superman, and vice versa. Hence, a simple identification is possible.

Now consider Case 2. In this case, by “Clark Kent” we mean “the identity taken on by Kryptonian Kal-El in which he masquerades as a normal Earthling”; and by “Superman” we mean “the identity taken on by Kal-El in which he exercises his unique powers in public view.” In other words, under this usage each term refers, not to an individual person, but to an “identity” or “persona” that an individual person has adopted. Well, given THOSE meanings of the respective terms, it would be a mistake to say that Clark Kent is Superman. After all, Kal-El’s “secret identity” is very different from his “superhero identity”, and so they cannot be the same identity—even if it is the same individual who adopts them both.

But given the way in which we use the language of mental states and the way that we use brain-state terms, the two are related in something more like Case 2 than Case 1. And this means that a simple identification of the kind “Clark Kent is Superman” is false, even if it might be true that there is a common underlying entity which is the bearer of both the “mental state” and “brain state” identities. This means that the materialist is better served by the materialist version of what has come to be called “property dualism”: the view that brain states have “mental properties” that are distinct from the physical properties studied by scientists. And while there are different ways to explicate this sort of property dualism, the one that strikes me as being the most plausible is emergentism—the idea (energetically defended by John Searle) that consciousness is an emergent property that supervenes on an active neurological system like the brain taken as a whole.

More quickly and briefly, let me stress one additional difficulty with identificationism. The problem lies in the fact that, by all appearances, on the assumption of materialism we should suppose consciousness admits of “multiple realizations.” The idea of multiple realizations is this: the same property or process could be produced by very different physical building blocks and arrangements. If several engineering firms are given the same task—to design a device that dispenses Starbucks-quality lattes in response to the voice command, “Overpriced coffee! Now!”—they might realize their objective in very different ways. The materials might be different. How those materials are physically arranged might be different. The internal processes of the resultant machine might be quite different in many ways—and yet, both machines might have the very same “emergent” property of dispensing Starbucks-quality lattes in response to appropriate voice commands. This property thus cannot be identical with any particular set of physical components organized and operating in a particular way, because the same property can supervene on very different physical building-blocks.

Now I suppose it is possible that only organic materials exactly like those in terrestrial brains, organized in only the ways that more highly developed terrestrial brains are organized, and operating only in terms of those brains’ distinctive “programming parameters,” can give rise to what we know as consciousness. But this seems implausible to me. Maybe that’s just because I watched one too many episodes of Star Trek--but I think it's more than that. Among other things, rejecting multiple realizations makes the emergence of consciousness through natural selection seem to be an even bigger miracle than it already is (something I doubt a materialist would find congenial).

So, I’m inclined to think that if consciousness is the kind of thing that can emerge from physical systems at all, it will be the kind of thing that will admit of multiple realizations. If so, then one kind of mental phenomenon (say, the experience of pain) cannot be identified with the kind of neurological activity it happens to be correlated with in human brains. And so, if you are a materialist, you will need a different account than identificationism. And since the contender which seems to arise most naturally out of the ashes of identificationism is emergentism, this is what I will take up in my next post.

Music and Spirituality, Part II: The Difference Ontology Makes

My last post, which was about music and spirituality, sparked a number of thoughtful comments. As I started to respond to some of these, my response kept growing until I realized that it should be a post of its own. So...here is Part Two, in which I want to focus more deeply on what difference, if any, our ontology makes for assessing the significance and value of our aesthetic responses to music (and other aesthetic objects, human-made and otherwise).


Let me begin by sharing my affinity for Bernard’s comment, when he expresses “great wonder in being able to create worlds through words which are then reimagined into existence in brains on the other side of the globe. I delight in this from a purely materialist point of view.” Like Bernard, I think there is something amazing about the idea that activity in my brain could produce something in the physical world—a work of fiction, say—which would then stimulate the brains of people across the world to follow patterns similar to (but not identical with) many of those that motivated the author (and many of those experienced by other readers).

But if this is right, does that mean I should be able to dispense with any non-materialist beliefs without my aesthetic experience thereby losing any of its significance? Let me put it this way. When I contemplate a world in which artists produce physical artifacts that stimulate the brains of others, producing a kind of connection and harmony among far-flung human brains—well, I find this to be a kind of meta-level artistic creation. One of the wonders of a live musical performance is that this kind of shared experience can itself become an object of experience by musicians and listeners. One gazes across the auditorium and sees feet tapping to the same rhythm as one’s own, tension building and releasing in tandem across dozens of faces, etc.

The original work of art—the musical work or the piece of creative writing—becomes an instrument for producing another work of art at a higher level, one painted on a human canvas. And this work of art is beautiful.

But the same question that we confronted with respect to the beauty of the original work arises with respect to the beauty of this meta-level creation. In what does that beauty consist? Is the beauty of this neurological interplay among different human brains just another brain response? When I call this interplay beautiful, does that simply mean that when my brain receives this interplay as input, it is stimulated to generate a certain kind of pleasure response?

More profoundly, does it matter? Does it make a difference for the significance of the statement “X is beautiful” whether my subjective response to X is produced by its beauty (and is a fitting or appropriate response to its beauty) or whether the statement just means “X produces in me (and others) a certain kind of neurological response.”

One thing we can say about the latter alternative is this: If beauty just is a neurological response (or, more precisely, if something having the property of being beautiful just amounts to it have the propensity to produce a certain kind of neurological response in human observers), then it is a contingent fact that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is a great aesthetic work whereas my dog’s farts are not (please excuse the crudeness--my dogs have been eating something recently that made this example leap to mind).

What this contingent fact is contingent upon is what our human neurological wiring happens be. Had human brains been wired differently, so as to generate the kinds of responses to canine farts that Beethoven’s 9th tends to produce and vice versa, then—by virtue of brain wiring—it would be true that canine farts are things of sublime beauty whereas Beethoven’s 9th is not.

And it would follow, furthermore, that there would be nothing deficient or defective about our brain responses in this hypothetical state of affairs. That is, we could not rightly say that brains wired in this way are less discerning than brains wired in the other way (in the way that we could, for example, say that brains which fail to distinguish between fresh milk and spoiled milk are deficient in their capacity to discern significant truths about the world).

Let me summarize my point in the following way. Consider this claim: “Beethoven’s 9th symphony is a sublime aesthetic achievement worthy of Beethoven’s labors, and if our brains were wired such that we found more of aesthetic value in sniffing dog farts, then our brains would be deficiently wired.” This statement is true only if there is more to beauty than a certain kind of neurological response. If “beautiful” just means “apt to produce X kind of neurological response,” then the claim is false (because in that case alternative neural wiring could never lead to deficiencies in aesthetic discernment, and certain kinds of alternative wiring would entail that Beethoven’s efforts become aesthetically fruitless—akin to the compositional efforts of my tone deaf friend from high school—without there being any change in the actual substance of what he produced).

Now I’m pretty sure that if reductive materialism is true, then we must accept all of these implications. But I’m also pretty sure that these implications are not trivial—that they do have an impact on the significance of what is going on between artists and their audiences. If these implications are right, and there were some drug that could mimic the neurological effects of exposure to a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th, then wouldn’t the act of administering the drug have a comparable aesthetic significance as the act of putting on a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th?

Perhaps there is a difference insofar as the performers undergo neurological events that aren’t repeated when the drug is administered on the would-be audience. But then suppose there’s another drug that could produce in the would-be musicians the relevant neurological outcomes.

One might point out that administering these drugs severs the neurological activities associated with our encounter with a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th from the actual human effort that ordinarily goes into such a performance—the hours of individual practice and collective rehearsal, not to mention the investment of energy and attention during performance. One might suppose (and I think this is true) that the aesthetic “payoff” is cheapened if cut off from that effort—that there is something valuable about these aesthetic payoffs being the result of the cultivation of human talents and the collective effort to channel those talents together into a great performance.

But when we say it is valuable that these things--artistic effort and aesthetic payoff--be linked, what do we mean? The value of connecting effort with a certain kind of outcome is not a physical property of that connection, measurable with scientific instruments, etc. And so materialism cannot treat that value as a property of the connection. It has to treat it as nothing more than a subjective response to that connection. And if subjective responses are nothing more than neurological responses, the value of this connection just is another neurological response.

And so, once again, what if there were a drug that could produce that response? Of course, there isn’t. But the point is that if there were, the reductive materialist could offer no reason to favor a world in which musicians cultivate their talents and put on a great performance over a world in which the right drug cocktail is administered instead. The materialist cannot offer any such reasons because the offering of such reasons requires that there be objective values—aesthetic and other kinds of values that aren’t just “in our heads.” (I think this line of thought has bearing on issues of free will as well, but I won’t pursue that here).

Of course, the reductive materialist can still point out that, as a matter of contingent fact, we don’t have the hypothesized drugs. And so, in the real world, the desired neurological effects will be achieved only if actual musicians take up their instruments, work hard, and put on a performance before an appreciative audience. Since the desired effects really are highly desired and appreciated by many, this means that the work of musicians and other artists has real significance in the actual world, even if materialism is true. But my point is that, given reductive materialism, there is nothing about a great performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony that makes it true of that performance that it is has aesthetic merit. The aesthetic merit is purely a brain event, which can hypothetically exist even in the absence of the work of art.

Now, obviously, none of this is an argument for the existence of God. At most, it is an argument in support of looking for some coherent alternative to the reductive materialist account of aesthetic value. But whether it is even that much is open to dispute. What I have most directly aimed to do here is point out that the reductive materialist account has implications for our understanding of aesthetics that I (and others) find both counterintuitive and personally troubling. These troubling implications can be avoided only if we assume that aesthetic judgments have an objective truth value—that is, only if they are true or false apart from what is going on in our heads. And it is hard to see how they can have such a truth value if we accept a materialist ontology.

While this helps to explain why I am drawn to alternative ontologies—why I might “root for them,” so to speak—can it have any bearing on what it is reasonable for me to believe?

As has been pointed out before, one cannot conclude that an ontology is false just because one finds it to be troubling or counterintuitive. That is, true statements are often personally troubling, and our intuitions can deceive us. But, as has also been pointed out before, there is a big difference between a holistic interpretation of experience and a specific hypothesis about the world of experience for which specifiable standards of evidence are clearly applicable. Among other things, one’s holistic interpretation of experience plays a crucial role in determining which of our experiences are to be treated as having the veridicality necessary for counting as evidence. As such, when we go about deciding on a holistic interpretation of experience, any attempt to do so by first settling on specific criteria of evidence will beg the question (because we will thereby implicitly embrace a holistic interpretation of experience in advance).

So how do we approach the task of deciding among such holistic interpretations, if any standard of evidence we invoke for doing so is necessarily going to beg the question? As I have alluded to before, Hegel offers an approach that I think is quite brilliant (even if his own application of that approach was, in my judgment, fatally infected by arrogance)—an approach which proposes that we tentatively “put on” or try out a holistic framework with its standards of evidence and see where it takes us. His presumption is that an inadequate framework will encounter deep problems of various kinds (which he collectively calls “contradictions”). We should then revise the framework to overcome these problems and try out the new and improved framework to expose its problems. And so on.

I will develop these ideas more fully in a later series on Hegel. For now, I just want to note that in this methodological approach, our intuitions as well as an awareness of where we cry out in protest against a framework’s implications can and do play a role.

One last point deserves mention. An important reason why many insist that aesthetics is ultimately all in our heads is because they believe that treating aesthetic claims as objective makes no sense. And the reason why they think this is because they implicitly or explicitly accept the core thesis of logical positivism, which holds the following:

“In order for a proposition to be a meaningful statement (that is, a statement with a truth value), it must either be an empirically testable claim (a claim such that the world would be different in empirically discernible ways were the claim true than it would be were the claim false) or an analytic one (one that asserts a logical relationship among concepts).”

I will hereafter refer to this as the "Logical Positivist Thesis." If this Logical Positivist Thesis is embraced, then aesthetic judgments will be meaningful only if they are understood to be saying something about what is going on in our heads. Why? First of all, because aesthetic judgments are not analytic, and so (given the Logical Postivist Thesis) in order to be meaningful they need to be empirically testable. But, to put it loosely, no scientific instrument could measure how many turps of beauty are contained in Beethoven’s 9th. If beauty is a property of the symphony, it’s not an empirical one. Since Logical Positivism has no room for the meaningful attribution of non-empirical properties, it must either dismiss aesthetic judgments as meaningless or identify them with something that is empirical. Neurological activity is empirical, and it does correlate with judgments of beauty (that is, those who experience what they take to be beautiful have something going on in their heads that is empirically different from what is going on in the heads of those who are smelling dog farts). And so the identification is made.

The big problem with this entire line of thought—one I’ve pointed out before—is that the Logical Positivist Thesis is self-referentially incoherent: it’s neither empirically testable nor analytic. And so, if we accept it, we must reject it. It is one of those principles which absolutely cannot be true. And this means that there must exist meaningful (true and false) statements that are neither empirically testable nor analytic.

In short, it is necessarily true that there exists a class of meaningful propositions (propositions which have a truth value) which are not reducible to empirical or analytic propositions. There must be true propositions that are not just matters of how ideas are related to each other, and are not empirically testable statements about the material world.

Perhaps aesthetic propositions fall into this class.