Southern Bread

*Previous posts in this series

In the first part of this series of posts I became convinced of some form of supernaturalism based on 5 arguments. Four of the five arguments have to do with the mind and so that’s what I want to explore this time. The idea of a non-corporeal mind linked somehow with a physical body has been the dominant understanding of human personhood for millenia. A strict physicalist view of the world is really a very recent development. When I say “strict physicalist” I am speaking of people like Daniel Dennet. Christian “monists” also refute a mind-body dualism but they should not properly be called physicalists.

The main obstacle for physicalism is that aspect of the mind that is intentionality, or aboutness. This is that peculiar property that minds have but nothing else that exists has. For example, when you ponder a word problem you are thinking about what the answer might be. You daydream about going on vacation. You set off to the store with the intention to buy some curtains for your house. It is this quality of your thoughts to be intent upon, or about something that requires your mind to be non-physical. This problem is explained by Leibniz in his following example:

“One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the
same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception.”

–Leibniz(zle), Monadology (1714)

Physicalists will refute Leibniz by saying that it’s simply a matter of not knowing how the brain works yet. They will contend that many things in the past were thought to be spiritual or magical but were later explained by science and seen for what they were. This isn’t the case here though, because the mind-body problem is primarily a logic problem, not a scientific one. We can’t even conceive of a possible world in which physical objects are about other things. It’s logically incoherant to think of a baseball bat being about something. However, it’s not impossible to envision a baseball bat thinking about something if it had a mind. Silly maybe, but not impossible. The mind is the only thing that makes any logical sense as a purveyor of intentionality.

In his example, Leibniz is trying to get across that it’s not simply a matter of not being able to see inside the mental machine that makes it impossible to understand. Even if we could get inside the machine, which we routinely do with modern neurology, we would still have no idea of how it’s doing what it’s doing, because the qualities we are looking for are in the “substance” of the machine instead of being produced by any physical workings of the machine. This notion is commonly referred to as substance dualism. In other words, minds are mental because they are minds.

According to Nolan and Whipple, Descartes believed that it is easy to mistake the workings of the mind for physical processes since being embodied obscures or confuses the two. You could say that we are too close to ourselves to see the distinction. This is primarily a function of the causal relationship between the physical and mental substances such that hitting your finger with a hammer causes a mental state of pain to ensue. We would routinely attribute the pain to a physical state, but pain is a subjective mental state. Where is the pain? The nerves in your finger are firing but the pain is not in your finger because pain isn’t the type of thing that can be in a finger. There is a reason that their is no such thing as a pain meter. It’s not the type of thing that can be measured physically.

This all leads me to a belief that if there is a supernatural mind at work in each of us, then if there is anything else supernatural out there, there is a pretty good chance it’s rational. I hope to refine this further next time by exploring Lewis’s Argument from Reason.