Noam Chomsky: What Is The Mind-Body Problem?

No, if I were to ask you to tell me a philosophical story of the

mind

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body

problem

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what

story would you tell me? It has a long history dating back to the classical era, but in the modern period the basic

mind

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body

problem

has entered and persisted. in modern philosophy it is basically the Cartesian formula the Cartesian formula was based on the fundamental principle of modern science initiated, the so-called mechanical philosophy, philosophy of course meant science, so Galileo and his contemporaries reacted sharply against the reigning neo-scholastic doctrines , version of Aristotelianism that they were based on

what

they called hidden properties, so that two things, two material bodies, attract each other because they have sympathies, an object, a movement because of its internal energy, its agency, moves to the place to which it belongs, its natural place, the natural place of a The material object is the earth and that is why it falls and other occult properties of this type wanted real explanations and it had to be assumed that the explanations had to show that the world was intelligible and there was a criterion for intelligibility, that is, could there be disadvantages? described to be built by a skilled craftsman that is the mechanical philosophy.

I have to remember that at that time Europe was awash with complex and intricate artifacts made by skilled craftsmen who modeled humans and performed puppet shows. Gordon's at Versailles, you know, seemed all semi-human. in fact, it was kind of like today, with uh mostly misleading, the idea was a true explanation, it would be a mechanical model, that's the mechanical philosophy of the court, uh, essentially everyone believed it, galileo de court, uh isaac newton leibniz , uh christian huygens, it was simply the reigning doctrine of modern science, Descartes tried to solve it, he thought he had shown that there is a mechanical explanation for all the phenomena in the world with one exception, the human mind, they said that the human mind has properties that They cannot be accommodated by a mechanical object.

By the way, one of those properties was language. He said that the ability of humans to create new expressions by indefinitely expressing new thoughts and to do so in ways appropriate to situations but not caused by them is a property beyond the capacity of the mechanism. Well, that was it. So your first serious scientist established a new principle of racial cogitons and his metaphysics is a thinking substance and that is in addition to race-extender matter, so there are two substances, matter and mind, and then of course looks to link them and argued that there's maybe a connection through the pineal gland that's not duplicated in the brain in just one place, so that's basically the classic mind-body problem didn't last long.

Newton demonstrated, to his anguish, that there are no bodies, one of the two elements that compose it. of the image disappeared, contrary to what many modern philosophers, Gilbert Ryall and others, claim that Newton did not exercise the ghost in the machine, he exercised the machine, the ghost remained intact, he demonstrated that there were no bodies in the sense of the Newton's mechanical philosophy. considered this to be total absurdity, he said it is so absurd that no person with scientific knowledge can believe it and in fact his main work is called non-physics physics or in those days philosophy is called mathematics because as he said he only has one account mathematician can't give a physical explanation because what he's postulating doesn't make sense in physical terms uh, uh, for the rest of his life, in fact, he proved that Descartes' model didn't work and, in fact, no model would. work that is newton's great discovery he thought it was ridiculous his contemporaries thought it was ridiculous uh for the rest of his life newton tried to find some kind of answer to this but I totally don't hypothesize it was in the context of explaining that he didn't It has a physical explanation so it can only give a mathematical model.

Well, there were several reactions to this reaction. The connection to the mind-body problem was from John Locke. This is not in his main work, but in a letter to Stilling Fleet he discussed this and his conclusion was. Basically, I quote that the judicious Mr. Newton has shown that God attributed to matter properties that we cannot conceive and that are inconceivable to us and, similarly, he said that God may have added to matter the property of thought, which it means that some organized form of matter produces that idea. was taken up throughout the 18th century by almost every important figure who attempted to show how, according to some, the brain secretes thought in the same way that the liver secretes bile, this reached its apogee with the priestly chemical philosopher, at the end of the 18th century developed these ideas.

They were persecuted extensively in the 19th century, but not intensively, then forgotten when the revolution took place in the 20th century, all of this was totally forgotten, in fact it is still largely unknown to philosophers and cognitive scientists and others. They were rediscovered in the 20th century. the last decade was rediscovered in the middle of the 20th century essentially in the study of language, that is what generative grammar is, but in the world of philosophy, cognitive science was not rediscovered until the last decade of the 20th century, it is called the decade of the brain. dedicated to the brain and at the conclusion, the neuroscientists who gave the final summary of it, vernon mount kozil, described what he called the thesis of the new biology that thought is simply a property of the brain, this was considered what francis called a surprising new hypothesis radical idea and very exciting philosophy of mind repeats almost in the same words what was common in the 18th century as a result of the suggestion of blocks and that is basically where it is found I think there was another consequence of the demolition of mechanical philosophy by newton science changed its course early modern science galileo through newton sought to discover an intelligible world that was abandoned scientists tacitly recognized it, you know, no one actually said it that an intelligible world cannot be found As John Locke said in his theological framework, God has added properties to matter that are inconceivable to us, but it is just a fact and, in fact, science proceeded with that fact without forgetting the theological framework.

He simply looked for intelligible theories that are very different, which is why Newton's theories were intelligible. Leibniz's organs could understand Newton's theories. It was the world they described that was unintelligible and Newton agreed, but over time science simply reduced its aspirations to developing theories that were intelligible, but inconceivable, from the world they described simply abandoned that when you get to the 20th century, Bertrand Russell he knew the sciences very well he just said it's ridiculous to look for intelligibility who cares we just want serious work that's a big difference from early modern science which had much higher aspirations uh this is often not understood uh I should say there's more that that Newton recognized that the world seemed to have inconceivable properties and speculated that, as far as we know, all matter could be alive, all matter, including the cup of coffee in front of us, we notice a little bit of matter that we cannot prove that it is not.

I live in the 20th century, this was independently picked up, uh, Sir Arthur Eddington, the great astrophysicist said that we know so little about matter that as far as we know, all matter is conscious, we can't prove that atoms aren't They are aware because we simply don't know anything. on the subject that bertrand russell had similar positions uh and in fact it is something interesting if we look at current philosophy philosophy philosophy interesting topic in current philosophy is what is called the cardiac problem of consciousness the 17th century also had a difficult problem The difficult problem was movement.

How can movement be explained? Answer: You can't, but the central problem of the 17th century was quite different from the difficult problem of today. If we look at the difficult problem of motion, the problem was formulated, the properties of motion could be established. Let's say here are the properties. of the movement, how can we find an explanation for them? That was the difficult problem in the 17th century and Newton's discovery was that there is no explanation in what we consider physical, it is quite different, it is not formulated, no one, the problem is what it is like to see the sun rise.

In the morning, well, no one can tell what it's like to see the sunrise. In the morning, maybe you can write a poem about it, but you can't say, here are its properties and what it's like to be a bet, no one can say what. Is it like being me? Maybe I could write a book about this, but I can't say, here are the properties. Well, there is this elementary thing unless you indicate what you want an explanation for, so that the central problem of current philosophy is formulated in one way. which has no answer, so it's not a problem at all, I'm just confused, you know, that's not a problem, it's quite different from the 17th and 18th century, when the problem was quite real and explicit and had no answer , so I think we should be very cautious in paying attention to what is the hot topic and the philosophical literature, it is not a formulated problem, it is just an expression of confusion and, as for the radical new idea and the missing philosophy, I think we should recognize the background, the history, the context and what is not conceivable to us even if it is apparently true, so no, there are so many different views of consciousness at this point, so many people have different theories of consciousness, there are panpsychism, there is illusionism, there is idealism, reductionist, physicalism, materialism, where do you think we are today?

Do you think it is the most prominent thought process behind theories of consciousness? Would you say it is reductive materialism? There is no such thing as materialism. Materialism, if it exists, has to give some explanation of what matter is. You can't have a theory of materialism if you. You don't tell us what matter is and no one knows what matters, so there is no materialism, which is why, as Arthur Eddington Russell, Lexi Newton, pointed out, we have no concept of matter, so if we look at the problem of consciousness, What is called the problem of consciousness, we know a lot about consciousness, in fact we know more about consciousness than anything else, is something that both Russell and more recently, Gail and Strawson, have emphasized.

I can tell you a lot of things about my current consciousness. I could describe in detail everything I'm seeing etc, what we don't know is what matter is business and matter because we ignore matter, that's why Eddington said that as far as we know, all matter is conscious because we don't know anything about she. Matter, as Newton said, maybe all matter is alive because we know nothing about matter, so these questions are not coherently formulated as far as panpsychism is concerned, it's basically Eddington's speculation, but actually Galen Strawson is one of those who has argued forward and interesting arguments, personally I am not convinced but at least you know coherent arguments but until we are what we can try to do is what science did after Newton showed that We cannot find an intelligible universe, try to find intelligible theories, so let us construct the best theories we can to account for the properties of consciousness.

It is all we can do. We cannot reduce it to matter because we do not know what matter is. I can't say, I don't think you can say anything about that. I can't prove that all matter is not conscious, but that is because we don't understand anything about matter. In fact, if you think about it, what is matter? I mean, there's a great physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, John Wheeler, who suggested that maybe everything is there. is in the universe are the answers to the questions we ask is a theory called bit everything that exists is bits we ask a question we get an answer that is the universe there is nothing else I mean, I am not competent to say if this is a plausible theory or not, but let's assume it's okay and that's a matter of answers to our questions. uh, right now physicists are in the strange position of not being able to find, I think it's the universe, okay, that's where we are.

You can read articles in quantum theory journals. someone sent me one recently or a group of prominent quantum theorists uh debate what a particle is, the most fundamental question. I can't come to any conclusion. Well, that's where we are with respect to the matter. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman. work and his theory of consciousness who is Donald Hoffman's theory is a description of the properties of consciousness okay, I don't see a theory in the sense of explaining anything because he is basically one of those physicists who have concluded that the Space and time in essence does not really exist, so what you are trying to do is build a theory in which conscious agents are the fundamental entity of reality and then continue from there, but where do you think the problem lies? to start from there?What is explained, a theory, provides explanations.

What theory is what is explained? Yes, that's a good question. What's up with that? and sorry, did you want to add something else? I just want to express my own ignorance regarding conclusions about space and time, I am not competent to comment, I know physicists are worried about this and have no real answers. There doesn't seem to be a change in physics at the moment where many theories are starting to make the case that space and time overtake the way we think about space. Time doesn't seem to be what even Einsteinian physics has shown us, so Newtonian physics, both Einstein and Newton, seem like everything is being thrown out the window at this point, which is causing some physicists to completely question the fundamental nature of reality and so it is opening the doors to a new form of idealism where now consciousness is fundamental and then we move forward from there.

What do you think about that approach to the idealistic view of seeing consciousness? I don't think any of these discussions about physics about which I am not competent to pass judgment. I don't think any of them are unconscious in the slightest. They don't tell us about the fact that you know I see a red. detect what I feel when I see the red dot I don't see anything about it that's consciousness okay, also I don't really understand the concern about consciousness it's quite new it's a fairly new concern it's not true in the history of philosophy one Probably the Further academic study on this be done by Urutil, who points out that consciousness became a problem in philosophy practically with the Cartesians of the 17th century, Ralph Cudworth, says he was the first to discuss consciousness seriously, but they were talking about one same. -consciousness awareness of ourselves and that was the theme of consciousness until the 20th century. 20th century for some reason there was a sudden uh big concern with consciousness uh in the last few years it's been like I said the problem the difficult problem the only problem is it's not formulated so it's not a problem, but by what consciousness I mean, It turns out that if language is limited to the extent that we understand anything, almost everything that happens in our minds when you and I converse is completely outside the reach of consciousness. mental processes that take place, we have a fairly clear idea of ​​what many of them are, but we are no more aware of them than we are of what happens in our second nervous system.

We have another huge nervous system called the enteric nervous system, sometimes called the intestine. The brain is a huge nervous system that controls everything that happens in the body. Billions of neurons may have all the properties of Parkinson's enormous nervous system. We do not know anything. We know a lot about it, but from the outside, the way we study planetary motion. there is no introspection in it and the same goes for this nervous system, we have almost no introspective evidence about it, it is a very superficial phenomenon, but we can learn a lot about it in the same way that we learn other things in science, but then, why and what mental acts are? that takes place beyond the level of consciousness interact inextricably from the few fragments that we are aware of, so you don't go to sources that happen to be conscious, you want a real theory of what is happening, you will have to integrate it.

Everything we know or can discover about the internal unconscious is not a Freudian sense inaccessible to consciousness of the operations that are being carried out, which are more important than the fragments that reach consciousness, I think it is more important, That's why it seems to me that the emphasis is misplaced. Besides the fact that the problem is not formulated until the problem is formulated, you won't have an answer, so I think the philosophy is going in very dubious directions. I must say that Galen Strawson, one of the best young philosophers who has ever raised. this with a little more force than I, he with more force than he would, in fact, what he said is that the philosophy of the 20th century is the dumbest period in the history of philosophy, that is too strong, I think, but I think there are real questions about it, including an unwillingness to understand the history of the issue, which is telling, I think it's worth understanding how these issues developed.

The sort of thing we were talking about sheds a lot of light on what we should do, I think, but the crucial point is that the hard problem in The 20th Century is not formulated unlike the hard problem in the 17th century, which was formulated and conducted to very interesting results, so until the current heart problem is formulated we will be wandering in the desert. Do you think we have focused so much? energy in this difficult problem of consciousness because just as science has exposed so much about reality in terms of spirituality god um copernicus removing us from the center of the universe you have darwin removing us from the top of the food chain and now we have lost this thing that it allows at least to maintain some kind of spirituality and maybe meaning, value, purpose, do you think that's why we are so obsessed with this topic right now?

Frankly, this seems like empty talk to me, uh, yes, we have a conscience. I have a dog at my feet. Does it have a conscience? I guess I can't prove or disprove it. Does the microphone in front of me have a conscience? Well, as Arthur Eddington pointed out, we know so little about the matter that we cannot say. which has no consciousness because we know nothing about matter, so it has nothing to do with idealism, nothing to do with spirituality, nothing to do with our place in the universe, these are just things that confuse us and mine . see is a much more interesting question is what is inaccessible to consciousness I am not trying to convince other people if what is interesting I just tell myself that it seems much more interesting we can learn a lot about it we can discover what it is like up close Integrated with the small fragments that reach consciousness, our brain is doing all kinds of things, every now and then it's throwing out little bits that we're aware of, well, those bits or some interest, but I don't think they're the main interest in finding.

To find out what our mental processes are in terms of the distinctive characteristics of human beings, we don't have to worry about the kind of questions that you first raised, we don't have to worry at all, but there are totally different distinctive properties of humans and that is interesting, a distinctive property of humans is what you and I are doing now, there are no other organisms that can have discussions about these or other questions, that means language and thought, in whatever sense we understand, thought seems to be human characteristics unique, there is no analogue. for them in any part of the world perhaps the universe and they seem to be common to all humans, so it seems a species property, we do not know any difference between humans in these capacities they can speak and grow in any community and easily grasp the language and his system of thought, so he appears to be just an ordinary human being, is a good reason to suspect that these abilities arose alongside modern humans, so if you look at the archaeological record, sparse, but there is something , there is no evidence of any significant symbolic activity before.

Humans show up, you might have a scratch on a bone or something, but essentially there's nothing before humans show up, not long after humans show up in evolutionary time, you start to have very rich symbolic activity. and complex, all of which suggests that, along with modern humans, these language capabilities emerged. thought that is probably the same thing that was assumed incidentally by the classical Indian philosophy of Aristotle and so on in really distinguished language and thought that extends practically into the modern period, but uh, and I think it's a plausible assumption, I think we're going back .

For him, language is just the system for generating thought, thought is what generates language, internal thought, internal language, not the noises we speak, which is superficial, if that is true, then interesting questions are what are the properties of this internal thought language. system, I think it's much more interesting than the fragments that reach consciousness, which are fragments, so we probably won't learn much about them. I mean, a good example is an illustration of this, what's called inner speech when you think about language. If you pay attention to it, it's not language, it's sounds, so when you think about a sentence you can ask how long it lasts, does it rhyme with another one?

That's not language, that's the externalization of language in one sensory medium or another. motor and sensory. Motor systems have nothing to do with language, they were there millions of years before language emerged, they have never changed, so they are non-linguistic systems that we use to externalize and that you can use gestural signs anyway, You don't even have to do it. sounds, so we don't want to be fooled with what we call inner speech, it's not internal, it's external, the internal, we don't have access to what you think, the fact that we are English, for example, I mean someone who obviously He's a master of linguistics and I mean, you're sort of known as the father of cognitive science.

Do you think that our limitations in terms of the language that we use most often, which is mostly English, limits our ability to discuss certain philosophical questions like this mind-body problem, do you think that if we had a different language that had more Meaning, maybe ancient Chinese Sanskrit would be better for us today? There is a hypothesis called the superior war hypothesis. Edward Sapir Benjamin Lee Wharf about a century ago arguing that the way we think is shaped in some significant way by the language we speak. This hypothesis has been investigated empirically for about 75 years. Almost nothing.

I mean some superficial things. So, for example, the first person to study it was Eric Linenberg. to found the biology of language, a great scientist who studied, he was a friend of mine in graduate school, uh, he studied this in the early '50s and found some things, so he discovered that there are some languages ​​that differ in where they set the limits of color words, as some languages ​​do not have color words only black and white, other languages ​​like us have distinguished, say, red and orange, other languages ​​do not distinguish written Hopi orange, for example, and you get some effects of that, but they don't make sense, so if you take a language that doesn't distinguish between red and orange and ask people to give them a spot of color, then show that spot of color again, if it's just an edge red orange, if you speak English, remember I called it red so you can see it's red if you have a language that says you don't have a label for it you won't remember it so you won't call it you won't remember what it was I mean very superficial Things have been discovered well, but nothing of importance, it is still widely debated, but I think the options are very slim, so it seems that each language can have a way, since the ways of speaking about everything, of course, may not have words like hundred. years ago you didn't have the word computer, you know, okay, so you couldn't talk about it, you could, but not in our sense, you didn't have the word, you know, elemental combat quarks, but that's any language that can capture them from the same way. way you mentioned these unconscious processes and I mean, the most intriguing question is how do those unconscious processes get to these conscious processes?

What if you think about people like Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish, who used the argument that because most of what we experience happens unconsciously, simply through introspection we tend to come to the conclusion that we have some kind of of an ethereal entity, so in essence, there is no qualia, but rather there is a memory of an experience that felt qualitative, but in essence, everything is quantitative. What do you think about that conclusion about the enteric nervous system, the gut brain, everything is unconscious? Do we assume there is something ethereal spiritual going on in our gut, as far as I know?

So why should we do it with this brain? Because we have? It's interesting that traditional dualism, Cartesian dualism, metaphysical dualism was a real science. A serious scientific theory. Descartes had serious scientific arguments for postulating two substances. Metaphysical dualism was proven correct, incorrect, but many scientific theories have been proven that science has been replaced by something. Otherwise, what I sometimes call methodological dualism, no one will say that I am a methodological dualist, but many people act that way, including the ones you are describing, they say that when we discuss something below the neck, metaphorically speaking, we are allows Being rational when we discuss things up here we have to become totally irrational, that is methodological dualism, as I say,No one claims to profess it, but you just said why we should treat unconscious processes here differently than unconscious processes down here.

I don't see any reason. I think Loch John Locke was right basically, forgetting about the theological framework, however the world works, there are facts about movement that are inconceivable to us and there are facts about thought that are inconceivable to us, but they are there and we can study them. and learn about them and assume that any thought is some property of organized forms of matter where matter is simply what there is when luck used the word matter or body, he didn't mean anything specific, he said whatever the world is made up of. , we do not do it.

I don't know, Newton showed that we don't know, I think it's a sense of latitude and I don't think we've progressed beyond that and no, when you think about it, I mean, I mentioned before that a lot of people are pretty obsessed. With this mind-body problem because it's kind of a replacement for today's agnosticism and atheism, what advice would you give to these people who are growing up today in a world where science has shown so much and has taken so much away from them in terms of their spirituality and its um? purpose in life um what can you tell them to keep going, keep moving forward and keep focusing?

Just as a kind of inspirational advice from you. I can't speak for others but I find enough inspiration in what Galileo for example considered as one of the most amazing features of the universe for Galileo and his contemporaries one of the most amazing things about the impressive universe was what you and I are Doing now how can humans be able to build from a finite number of symbols? an infinite number of thoughts and even use these thoughts to transmit to others who do not have access to our minds the innermost workings of our minds, so you do not have access to my mind, but I can transmit to you with a finite number of symbols the workings more internal.

In my opinion, Galileo thought this was the most amazing phenomenon in the universe. Galileo himself considered the alphabet to be the most spectacular of human inventions because he was able to implement this, comparable to Michelangelo or Titian. Well, that sounds pretty inspiring to me. Sometimes I have done it. He called it the Galilean challenge. How is this conceivable? It's the court problem that led him to postulate a second substance, just as Newton showed that we have only one substance left, the mind, the other one disappeared, the body, uh, but uh, I don't see why, I mean?

I find it inspiring enough that physicists can't figure it out. 95 I think that's the number of what makes up the universe. It seems to be exciting enough when the more we discover, the more we realize how much we don't know. Um, for example, I mean freedom. experiments many of the experiments on free will many people now believe that we do not have free will what are your thoughts on the relationship between the mind and free will? That's an interesting question. Each of us acts as if we believe in freedom. of the will 100 of us, including those who deny that free will exists, all act as if they believe in free will point number one point number two science tells us something about it answer no science tells us account of determinism you