James Ross's Immaterial Aspects of Thought

[utunumsint]

Hi,

Has anyone read James Ross’s Immaterial Aspects of Thought?

If yes, I would appreciate your impressions of the paper. I’ll be posting my thoughts as I go through it as well.

God bless,
Ut

 

[utunumsint]

He states the following:

ANIMAL cognition and desire, from the appetite of a clam to the optical systems of vultures and frigate birds, is supposed to have neurobiological explanations resultant from, if not reducible to, universal laws of physics. That is a minimal and modest project for epistemology naturalized, one to be assisted by specialized sciences.’

And then follows up with this footnote to that paragraph:

1 After three centuries of amazingly successful science, we do not have a successful explanation of animal cognition, not even for a spider or a fish. Probably, we have been misconceiving the project in ways that makes science both less productive and less helpful.

That is a pretty wild claim! It would be interesting if a counter example could be found since this was written in 1992. Is there a case where an animal’s cognition has been fully explained based on neurobiology? For that matter, is neurobiology reducible to universal laws of physics?

God bless,
Ut

 

[paduard]

Don’t know about James Ross; but quantum-physics [uncertainty principle] has pushed many sciences aside.
paduard

 

[inocente]

That is a pretty wild claim!

I remembered a TED talk by Jaak Panksepp, who says that emotion systems are similar in all mammals, but we’re can’t say what animals are thinking without anthropomorphizing.

Googling around about spiders, Prof. Robert Jackson and Dr Fiona Cross similarly say scientists concerned at charges of subjectivity have tended to avoid researching animal cognition until recently, see here. The chapter title is presumably a reference to Thomas Nagel’s famous What is it like to be a bat.

Shame that only part of that paper is available for free, it sounds interesting from the abstract: “Spiders, having minute brains, were once considered simple, instinct-driven automatons, but research on spider biology is revealing increasing evidence of their cognitive abilities. In this review, we discuss the complex, flexible behaviour of spiders, especially salticids, and highlight how sometimes the cognitive character of spider behaviour closely parallels that of much bigger animals.” - researchgate.net/publication/251449434_Spider_Cognition

 

[utunumsint]

As someone who is not a neuroscientist I can’t tell whether Ross’s assertion is correct or not. It does seem that the problem of consciousness is being studied and that neuroscientists have various opinions about the subject. Each group of neuroscientist seems to have a corresponding set of philosophers they tend to appeal to.

Those who are convinced that neuroscience cannot itself explain all aspects of consciousness - specifically qualia - tend to appeal to philosophers who underscore this problem and appeal to immaterial aspects of mind, or some appeal to philosophers who propose redefining our conception of matter itself.

Those who are convinced that neuroscience can explain all aspects of consciousness typically appeal to reductive materialist philosophers like Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett to confirm their world view (at least if they are writing to popular audiences). One of main problems with mapping mental states at the neuronal level, however, is described in this way by Eric Harth:

We would want to know in every millisecond (the time it takes a neuron to fire) which of the 100 billion or so neurons are active and which are not. If we denote activity by a “1” and inactivity by a “o,” this would require a string of 100 billion zeros and one every millisecond, or 100 trillion every second. To give a running account of the true neural state, I would have to produce in every second something like 110 million books, each containing a million symbols. This awesome record is to be compared with my mental states as they occur."

But is this really impossible? I looked up the fastest super computer on the planet. It appears to be China’s Tianhe-2 which reaches up to 33.86 petaflops per second. That is 33.86 thousand trillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). As per google,

Floating-point numbers have decimal points in them. The number 2.0 is a floating-point number because it has a decimal in it. The number 2 (without a decimal point) is a binary integer. Floating-point operations involve floating-point numbers and typically take longer to execute than simple binary integer operations.

So Tianhe-2 could calculate the following:
33,000,000,000,000,000
Eric Harth is claiming for mapping one brain state is as follows:
100,000,000,000,000

So in principle is could be done, but only if you could develop sensors sufficiently precise to actually detect each of the 100,000,000,000,000 neuronal fluctuations a second. This would seem to make any reductive theories of consciousness completely untestable. At least given the current state of neuroscience at present.

But even if you could, what would this data get you? Even if you could correlate the though “hot dog” with 100,000,000,000,000 neuronal fluctuations a second, what would that even mean? Say 50 trillion are on and 50 trillion are off… what does this get you? Why would this inherently mean “hot dog” or “2+2” or “rosebud”? There is essentially nothing about this raw data that empirically must contain this or that meaning at all without presupposing a language user who is imposing that meaning… But perhaps the problem is that these thoughts are too conceptual. Perhaps sensory experiences would yield more interesting results such that 50 trillion are on and 50 trillion are off might be detectable when a certain smell or taste is experienced regardless of cultural background. But even then… there are so many culturally subjective meanings and qualia applied to the experience of a hot dog…

But perhaps this is just a tangent when it comes to Ross’ paper. He appears to want to claim that in principle, reductive materialist theories of mind cannot work.

God bless,
Ut

 

[utunumsint]

I think what I’ve written in the previous post helps to set up Ross’s claim here:

There is a larger and bolder project of epistemology naturalized, namely, to explain human thought in terms available to physical science, particularly the aspects of thought that carry truth values, and have formal features, like validity or mathematical form. That project seems to have hit a stone wall, a difficulty so grave that philosophers dismiss the underlying argument, or adopt a cavalier certainty that our judgments only simulate certain pure forms and never are real cases of, e.g., conjunction, modus ponens, adding, or genuine validity.

Based on this failure he perceives in the physical sciences to explain “thoughts that carry truth values and have formal features” he goes on to say:

The difficulty is that, in principle, such truth-carrying thoughts2 cannot be wholly physical (though they might have a physical medium),3 because they have features that no physical thing or process can have at all.4

So for footnote 2, he explains that by thought he means what Aristotle meant in De Anima Book III that “Mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought”. Ross states that thoughts that involve feeling cannot be entirely nonphysical.

Footnote 3 he points to De Anima Boo II and Aquinas’ commentary on Book III. Specifically he mentions “that the understanding cannot have an organ as sight has the eye (and nowadays philosophers suppose thinking has the brain), because the limited physical states of an organ would fall short of the contrasting states of understanding that we know we can attain.”

Interesting. This is what ThinkandMull was getting at in a previous thread.

I think I had better read up on De Anima Book III before proceeding any further since so many of these initial claims rest on the De Anima.

God bless,
Ut

 

[utunumsint]

I spent some time reading book III of De Anima. Enough to understand that there is a three level division between sense perceptions, then imagination, then intellect. And Aristotle’s theory that the intellect deals with forms. And how the intellect is a passive power that is capable of taking on a form without becoming the form. The senses and the imagination, on the other hand, are all based on a physical and particular receptivity to form such that when we touch something, it is because of the interaction of elements. For example, the sense organ of the ear can hear sound through the medium of air because it is made up of air. The eye can see light and colours and shapes because it is made of water. The underlying science is totally wrong, but the principle might be right. That sense perceptions are physical and that the imagination is derived from the sense perceptions and therefore also physical.

Its interesting that up to this point, Aristotle seems to agree with Hume. Sense perceptions… the immediate sense perception… is the most clear and distinct, while the imagination is the most prone to error.

Where Aristotle would disagree with Hume is where the intellect comes in. It has no form itself, but contains a sort of receptivity to all forms through learning. In a way, it is kind of like prime matter. I’m still working on his argument for immateriality though.

God bless,
Ut

 

[utunumsint]

That being said, Ross goes on to build on this Aristotelian concept of intellect making the following claims:

First, the underlying arguments themselves are among the jewels of analytic philosophy (underdetermination considerations);

So I presume these arguments will be especially compelling for those who have knowledge of analytic philosophy. Unfortunately, I do not have such knowledge so I’ll have to glean what I can on the subject before going too much further.

and, secondly, to deny that our judgments are of definite logical forms and pure functions conflicts with our own certainty and with what we tell our logic, mathematics, and linguistics students about validity, proof, and formal syntax, and leaves us unable to explain what we do when we do mathematics, logic, or any other formal thinking.

So the arguments are based on underdetermination and determination. Specifically that judgements are definite logical forms and pure functions (in other words mathematics, logic, or any other formal thinking).

God bless,
Ut

 

[utunumsint]

Ah, good old Stanford Encyclopedia:

plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/

I will read through it and report back.

God bless,
Ut

 

[fisherman_carl]

For Aquinas and Aristotle there is no mind body problem. If one were to start out with a proper understanding that is. According to Feser’s book on Aquinas. The soul is the form of a living body. It is what distinguishes it from the forms of inanimate objects. Soul comes from the word anima which means to animate something. Thus the word soul is a descriptive word to distinguish living forms from non living ones. It is not in this sense a ghostly object. Nor is it a substance that powers the body. The intellect and will for Aquinas is found in humans but not animals. Thus the humans have a rational soul.

To quote Feser…

"Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already misleading. For Aquinas does not approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind–body problem.” No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body, but rather between soul and body. Even that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul” what contemporary philosophers tend to mean by it, that is, an immaterial substance of the sort affirmed by Descartes. Furthermore, while contemporary philosophers of mind tend to obsess over the questions of whether and how science can explain consciousness and the “qualia” that define it, Aquinas instead takes what is now called “intentionality” to be the distinctive feature of the mind, and the one that it is in principle impossible to explain in materialistic terms. At the same time, he does not think of intentionality in quite the way contemporary philosophers do. Moreover, while he is not a materialist, he is not a Cartesian dualist either, his view being in some respects a middle position between these options. But neither is this middle position the standard one discussed by contemporary philosophers under the label “property dualism.” And so forth.

To the modern philosophical reader, all this might make Aquinas sound very odd indeed, confusing and perhaps confused…Yet had Aquinas been familiar with the ideas of contemporary philosophers of mind, he would have regarded them as the confused ones, and in particular as having gotten the basic conceptual lay of the land totally wrong. For the “mind–body problem” is essentially an artifact of the early modern philosophers’ decision to abandon a hylemorphic conception of the world for a mechanistic one, and its notorious intractability is, in the view of Thomists, one of the starkest indications of how deeply mistaken that decision was."

 

[fisherman_carl]

To quote Feser…

““Soul” translates the Latin anima, which is why living things are sometimes said to be “animated.” It also translates the Greek psuche, which is where the term “psychology” comes from. Psychology, for Aristotle and Aquinas, is not merely the study of the mind, but the study of that which makes the organism as a whole a living thing, and of the mind only insofar as it is an aspect of the whole organism.”

 

[fisherman_carl]

"Let us begin with the nature of the intellect. That it is irreducible to sensation is evident from the fact that “sense is cognizant only of singulars” while “the intellect is cognizant of universals, as experience proves” (SCG II.66.3; cf. ST I.12.4). Through seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling, we can only perceive individual, particular things: this triangle, that cat, and so forth. But the intellect can grasp triangularity in general, “catness” in general, and other universals, as essences which apply to indefinitely many individuals. Moreover, “sense-cognition is limited to corporeal things,” while “the intellect knows incorporeal things, such as wisdom, truth, and the relations of things” (SCG II.66.4). That is to say, abstractions like the ones Aquinas mentions are not physical objects, but the intellect is nevertheless capable of entertaining them, while the senses can only ever perceive physical things.

Now sensation gives rise to imagination: the visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile, and olfactory perceptions we have are recalled in mental images or “phantasms” (as Aquinas calls them). Early modern empiricist philosophers like Berkeley and Hume held that intellect could be reduced to imagination. But for Aquinas, this is as impossible as reducing intellect to sensation, for like the senses, “imagination has to do with bodily and singular things only,” while “the intellect … grasps objects universal and incorporeal” (SCG II.67.3). And it is notoriously difficult to defend the empiricists against this objection. Any mental image is always going to be particular and individual in some respect, in a way that the concepts grasped by the intellect are not. For example, the mental image you form of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an equilateral, isosceles, or scalene triangle specifically; but the concept of a triangle that your intellect grasps is one that applies to all of these, precisely because it abstracts away from these properties. Hence your concept of a triangle cannot be identified with a mental image. Mental images are also often vague and indistinct in a way that concepts are not. To repeat an earlier example, you can form no clear mental image of a chiliagon – a 1,000-sided figure – certainly not one that is distinct from your mental image of a 997-sided figure, or for that matter from your mental image of a circle. Still, the intellect can easily distinguish the concept of a chiliagon from the concept of a 997-sided figure and the concept of a circle. There are certain things we can form no mental images of – abstractions like law, love, and economics, the absence of a thing, and so forth – but the intellect can easily form concepts of them. And so on. Thus, as Aquinas argues, the intellect is as irreducible to the imagination as it is to sensation.

At the same time, “the operation of the intellect has its origin in the senses” (ST I.78.4), and “in the present state of life in which the soul is united to a passible body, it is impossible for our intellect to
understand anything actually, except by turning to the phantasms” (ST I.84.7). That is to say, though the intellect is distinct from sensation and imagination, it depends upon them for its raw materials. In explaining what this involves, Aquinas, following Aristotle, draws a distinction between agent intellect (or “active intellect”) and possible intellect (or “passive intellect”). Sensation involves perceptions of individual things, which give rise to the images or phantasms of the imagination and memory. The visual perception you have of a cat, for example, is later recalled in the mental image you have of what the cat looked like, and your imagination is also able to produce images of cats you have never seen by rearranging the elements of your mental images of things you have seen. But all such images or phantasms are, as we have said, particular or individual, just as the original perceptions and the things perceived were; and as such they are not “intelligible,” that is to say, they are not the sort of thing the intellect can grasp. But “the active intellect … causes the phantasms received from the senses to be actually intelligible, by a process of abstraction” (ST I.84.6). In other words, it strips away all particularizing or individualizing features of a phantasm so as to produce a truly universal concept or “intelligible species,” leaving you (for instance) with the idea not just of this or that particular cat, but of “catness” in general, of that which is common to all cats. The abstract concept is then stored in the possible intellect (ST I.85.1). This account of the origin of our concepts is intended by Aristotle and Aquinas to serve as a middle position between two erroneous extremes: the materialism of ancient thinkers like Democritus, which in its overemphasis on the sensory origin of our concepts tended to identify intellect with sensation; and the hyper-intellectualism of Plato, who, though he correctly distinguished the intellect from the senses, tended too radically to divorce the former from the latter, and to cut off the intellect from the material world altogether (ST I.84.6).

 

[fisherman_carl]

"Aquinas’s talk of “phantasms,” “intelligible species,” and the like may give the impression that he is committed to some form of indirect realism, the view that all we ever directly perceive are subjective mental representations, and know of external material objects only by inference from these representations. But nothing could be further from the truth, and Aquinas is very much a direct realist, holding that in perception it is the objects themselves that the mind grasps and not merely representations of them. The role the mental items in question do play is summarized by Aquinas as follows:

The intelligible species is to the intellect what the sensible image is to the sense. But the sensible image is not what is perceived, but rather that by which sense perceives. Therefore the intelligible species is not what is actually understood, but that by which the intellect understands. (ST I.85.2, emphasis added)

When you see a cat, it is true that you have a perceptual representation or “sensible image” of the cat in your mind. But what you perceive really is the cat itself, and not the representation, which is merely that “by which” you perceive the cat in the sense of being the medium through which perception takes place. To use an imperfect analogy, if you need glasses in order to see the cat, you might say that the glasses are also something “by which” you see it; but it is still the cat you see, and not the glasses, which are only a means of helping you to see it. Similarly, when you think about cats in general, you do so by having the concept cat in your intellect. But what you are thinking about are cats themselves, not your concept of them.

Especially in the case of concepts, it would from the Aristotelian–Thomistic point of view be very misleading to think of them as “representations” in the first place, as contemporary philosophers of mind tend to do. The conception of the mind modern philosophy inherited from Descartes and Locke portrays thoughts, sensations, and other mental items as objects analogous to the words, pictures, and other representations familiar from everyday experience, but having a subjective rather than objective mode of existence. That is to say, unlike literal, physical words and pictures, which can be known through the five senses by any observer, these mental objects are taken to be directly knowable only by the thinkers inwhose minds they exist. This gives rise to the idea that what we are directly aware of are just the subjective mental representations themselves, which notoriously opens the door to the problem of explaining how, if this is so, we can ever have knowledge of a real physical world beyond our representations. It also generates the problem of “intentionality.” This is the feature of our mental states by virtue of which they represent or “point to” something beyond themselves (as your thought about cats represents or “points beyond itself” to cats). We know that literal, physical words and pictures can represent things (and thus have a kind of intentionality) despite being in themselves otherwise meaningless squiggles of ink or patterns of color, because we impart meaning to them by using them to convey our thoughts and ideas. But where does the intentionality that characterizes our own minds come from? If the representations outside the mind get their meanings from the representations inside the mind, where do the latter get their meaning?

From an Aristotelian–Thomistic point of view, this whole way of characterizing the mind’s relationship to the external world is wrongheaded from the start. For the intellect to have a concept is not for it to have something analogous to a little picture or word in the mind, a kind of internal subjective entity which “represents” another, external, objective entity. Rather, when the intellect understands something, it grasps its form. And that means that one and the same thing, namely the form of the thing understood, exists both in the intellect and in the thing itself. For example, when you understand what a triangle is, the form of triangularity which exists in actual triangles now exists also in your intellect; when you understand what cats are, the form of “catness” which exists in actual cats now exists also in your intellect; and so forth. There are not two things, a subjective representation (of a triangle, cat, or whatever) and an external object (the actual cat or triangle), which would raise the question of how the one gets in contact with or represents the other. There is just one thing, a form, which (again to make use of Scholastic terminology) exists in two ways, an “entitative” way (in this case, as instantiated in matter so as to comprise with it a material object) and an “intentional” way (that is, in the intellect)."

For this reason, Aquinas, following Aristotle, holds that “the soul is in a way all things” (In DA III.13.787), a startling claim that John Haldane has labeled the “mind-world identity theory.” But the qualifier “in a way” is obviously important. Aquinas is not claiming that the intellect is or is identical with the things it thinks about, without qualification; obviously your mind is not the same thing as a triangle or a cat, for example. His point is rather that it is of the essence of the intellect that one and the very same thing, a form, exists both in it and in the real world when the former knows the latter:

Intelligent beings are distinguished from non-intelligent beings in that the latter possess only their own form; whereas the intelligent being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing; for the idea of the thing known is in the knower. (ST I.14.1)

Had he been familiar with the modern philosophical problem of bridging the (epistemological and representational) gap between mind and reality, Aquinas would no doubt have said that no such gap can arise when the nature of the intellect is rightly understood."

 

[utunumsint]

For Aquinas and Aristotle there is no mind body problem. If one were to start out with a proper understanding that is. According to Feser’s book on Aquinas. The soul is the form of a living body. It is what distinguishes it from the forms of inanimate objects. Soul comes from the word anima which means to animate something. Thus the word soul is a descriptive word to distinguish living forms from non living ones. It is not in this sense a ghostly object. Nor is it a substance that powers the body. The intellect and will for Aquinas is found in humans but not animals. Thus the humans have a rational soul.

To quote Feser…

"Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already misleading. For Aquinas does not approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind–body problem.” No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body, but rather between soul and body. Even that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul” what contemporary philosophers tend to mean by it, that is, an immaterial substance of the sort affirmed by Descartes. Furthermore, while contemporary philosophers of mind tend to obsess over the questions of whether and how science can explain consciousness and the “qualia” that define it, Aquinas instead takes what is now called “intentionality” to be the distinctive feature of the mind, and the one that it is in principle impossible to explain in materialistic terms. At the same time, he does not think of intentionality in quite the way contemporary philosophers do. Moreover, while he is not a materialist, he is not a Cartesian dualist either, his view being in some respects a middle position between these options. But neither is this middle position the standard one discussed by contemporary philosophers under the label “property dualism.” And so forth.

To the modern philosophical reader, all this might make Aquinas sound very odd indeed, confusing and perhaps confused…Yet had Aquinas been familiar with the ideas of contemporary philosophers of mind, he would have regarded them as the confused ones, and in particular as having gotten the basic conceptual lay of the land totally wrong. For the “mind–body problem” is essentially an artifact of the early modern philosophers’ decision to abandon a hylemorphic conception of the world for a mechanistic one, and its notorious intractability is, in the view of Thomists, one of the starkest indications of how deeply mistaken that decision was."

Agreed! I have Aquinas, TLS, Philosophy of Mind, and Lock. The reason why I’m looking so closely at Ross’s paper is that Feser holds it in such high regard. Especially its combination of Analytic Philosophy with Aristotle’s thinking.

I think for Aquinas, it isn’t so much a discussion of the mind/body interaction problem, I think it is more a material, non-material problem. But for Aristotle and Aquinas, the interaction between soul and body is much more fleshed out along the lines of the four causes. The intellect, for Aquinas, is that part of the mind that can process the forms of things. This builds up man’s ability to reason. Reason and will are co-principles of action for human beings. Reason specifies what the will chooses and this corresponds to final causality or intentionality. The material cause is the physical stuff the body is made up of, the motor neurons, the muscles, the bones, and so on. The will in its finality also becomes the agent cause or the efficient cause of human actions that moves the material components of the human body. But essentially for Aquinas, it is Reason (formal causes) and Will (final causes) that in principle cannot be reduced to merely efficient and material causes.

At least, I think that is what he means, anyway. I have six kids and have not slept much in the last 10 years, so my brain is not always firing on all cylinders.

God bless,
Ut

 

[utunumsint]

"Let us begin with the nature of the intellect. That it is irreducible to sensation is evident from the fact that “sense is cognizant only of singulars” while “the intellect is cognizant of universals, as experience proves” (SCG II.66.3; cf. ST I.12.4). Through seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling, we can only perceive individual, particular things: this triangle, that cat, and so forth. But the intellect can grasp triangularity in general, “catness” in general, and other universals, as essences which apply to indefinitely many individuals. Moreover, “sense-cognition is limited to corporeal things,” while “the intellect knows incorporeal things, such as wisdom, truth, and the relations of things” (SCG II.66.4). That is to say, abstractions like the ones Aquinas mentions are not physical objects, but the intellect is nevertheless capable of entertaining them, while the senses can only ever perceive physical things.

Now sensation gives rise to imagination: the visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile, and olfactory perceptions we have are recalled in mental images or “phantasms” (as Aquinas calls them). Early modern empiricist philosophers like Berkeley and Hume held that intellect could be reduced to imagination. But for Aquinas, this is as impossible as reducing intellect to sensation, for like the senses, “imagination has to do with bodily and singular things only,” while “the intellect … grasps objects universal and incorporeal” (SCG II.67.3). And it is notoriously difficult to defend the empiricists against this objection. Any mental image is always going to be particular and individual in some respect, in a way that the concepts grasped by the intellect are not. For example, the mental image you form of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an equilateral, isosceles, or scalene triangle specifically; but the concept of a triangle that your intellect grasps is one that applies to all of these, precisely because it abstracts away from these properties. Hence your concept of a triangle cannot be identified with a mental image. Mental images are also often vague and indistinct in a way that concepts are not. To repeat an earlier example, you can form no clear mental image of a chiliagon – a 1,000-sided figure – certainly not one that is distinct from your mental image of a 997-sided figure, or for that matter from your mental image of a circle. Still, the intellect can easily distinguish the concept of a chiliagon from the concept of a 997-sided figure and the concept of a circle. There are certain things we can form no mental images of – abstractions like law, love, and economics, the absence of a thing, and so forth – but the intellect can easily form concepts of them. And so on. Thus, as Aquinas argues, the intellect is as irreducible to the imagination as it is to sensation.

At the same time, “the operation of the intellect has its origin in the senses” (ST I.78.4), and “in the present state of life in which the soul is united to a passible body, it is impossible for our intellect to
understand anything actually, except by turning to the phantasms” (ST I.84.7). That is to say, though the intellect is distinct from sensation and imagination, it depends upon them for its raw materials. In explaining what this involves, Aquinas, following Aristotle, draws a distinction between agent intellect (or “active intellect”) and possible intellect (or “passive intellect”). Sensation involves perceptions of individual things, which give rise to the images or phantasms of the imagination and memory. The visual perception you have of a cat, for example, is later recalled in the mental image you have of what the cat looked like, and your imagination is also able to produce images of cats you have never seen by rearranging the elements of your mental images of things you have seen. But all such images or phantasms are, as we have said, particular or individual, just as the original perceptions and the things perceived were; and as such they are not “intelligible,” that is to say, they are not the sort of thing the intellect can grasp. But “the active intellect … causes the phantasms received from the senses to be actually intelligible, by a process of abstraction” (ST I.84.6). In other words, it strips away all particularizing or individualizing features of a phantasm so as to produce a truly universal concept or “intelligible species,” leaving you (for instance) with the idea not just of this or that particular cat, but of “catness” in general, of that which is common to all cats. The abstract concept is then stored in the possible intellect (ST I.85.1). This account of the origin of our concepts is intended by Aristotle and Aquinas to serve as a middle position between two erroneous extremes: the materialism of ancient thinkers like Democritus, which in its overemphasis on the sensory origin of our concepts tended to identify intellect with sensation; and the hyper-intellectualism of Plato, who, though he correctly distinguished the intellect from the senses, tended too radically to divorce the former from the latter, and to cut off the intellect from the material world altogether (ST I.84.6).

Right. There is such a wonderful jargon here to draw from! I think Ross is building on these arguments by adding one of his own meant to appeal to those with a background in Analytical philosophy. Especially building on Quine’s theories of underdetermination. His arguments presupposes the same Aristotelian psychology as is being described by Aqinas and Feser here.

God bless,
Ut

 

[fisherman_carl]

"The operations of the vegetative and sensory souls depend entirely on matter for their operation. For example, a plant cannot carry out photosynthesis without leaves, and an animal cannot digest its meal without a stomach. This is why the souls of plants and animals cannot survive the destruction of their bodies (ST I.75.3). Naturally, the vegetative and sensory functions of the human soul also depend on matter. Even phantasms or mental images, which might seem to post-Cartesian philosophers of mind to be paradigmatically ghostly and immaterial, are in Aquinas’s view dependent on the existence of bodily organs (ST I.85.1). However, the intellect, and the will insofar as it follows on the intellect, are different. These are in Aquinas’s view essentially immaterial, not requiring any bodily organ for their operation. This not only adds to the dignity of the human soul of which they are the distinctive powers, but entails that that soul alone has a kind of natural immortality.

Aquinas gives a number of arguments for the intellect’s independence from matter. …But two arguments in particular …The first is as follows:

By means of the intellect man can have knowledge of all corporeal things. Now whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature; because that which is in it naturally would impede the knowledge of anything else. Thus we observe that a sick man’s tongue being vitiated by a feverish and bitter humor, is insensible to anything sweet, and everything seems bitter to it. Therefore, if the intellectual principle contained the nature of a body it would be unable to know all bodies. (ST I.75.2; cf. In DA III.7.680 and QDA 14)

Aquinas describes this as the “main reason” why the intellect is immaterial (QDA 14). But especially for modern readers, it may not be obvious at first glance what the argument is. One possible reading would focus on the claim that the intellect can know “all corporeal things.” The example of the “sick man’s tongue,” as well as another illustration Aquinas gives later in the same passage to the effect that the presence of a certain color in the eye might make a liquid one is looking at seem to be of that color, would then seem to indicate that what Aquinas is getting at is this: when a sensory organ is “biased” in its perceptions in a certain direction, there are certain things it is incapable of perceiving. To a tongue coated with a bitter substance everything will taste somewhat bitter, so that at least some sweet substances will be undetectable to it. To eyes wearing green contact lenses, everything will seem to take on at least a faint green hue, so that certain shades of color will be invisible to them. But if the intellect depended on some material organ for its operation, then it would be “biased” in the direction of that kind of matter in just the way the tongue and eyes in question are biased in the direction of bitterness and greenness. And in that case there would be certain material things whose natures it could not grasp, just as there are certain tastes and colors that the tongue and eyes of our examples cannot perceive. But the intellect is not limited in the sorts of material natures it can grasp. Therefore it must not depend on the operation of any material organ.

Certainly this argument is clear. But it is also obvious that it might be challenged on several fronts. How do we know, for example, that the intellect can grasp the natures of all material things? Maybe there are some that it cannot grasp, and if so, this might be precisely because it depends on a certain kind of material organ itself. And is the analogy between the intellect and the senses close enough in the first place to justify the inference that a material intellect would be biased in a way that prevented the grasp of certain material natures?

It seems to me, however, that this interpretation of Aquinas’s argument doesn’t get to the heart of it. In particular, and as parallel texts seem to imply, the argument does not in fact crucially depend on the claim that the intellect can understand every kind of material thing, and the “bias” that matter would impose on the intellect does not crucially depend on the analogy with sense organs. The force of the argument depends instead on the way in which, as we have seen, the intellect takes on the form of the thing it understands in the very act of understanding it. This capacity shows that the intellect has “potencies” which material things do not have (In DA III.7.680), and in particular that the intellect can, unlike material things, take on the form of other things (whether all of them or only some is irrelevant) without losing its own form (SCG II.49.3). "

 

[fisherman_carl]

“understood in light of his general account of what intellectual activity involves, what Aquinas is saying in the specific argument in question seems, then, to be something like this: when the intellect grasps the form of a thing, it is necessarily one and the same form that exists both in the thing itself and in the intellect. The form of triangularity that exists in our intellects when we think about triangles is one and the same form that exists in actual triangles themselves; the form of “catness” that exists in our intellects when we think about cats is one and the same form that exists in actual cats; and so forth. If this weren’t the case, then we wouldn’t really be thinking of triangles, cats, and so on in the first place, since to think about these things requires grasping what they are, and what they are is determined by their forms. Now suppose that the intellect were a material thing (some kind of brain activity, say). Then for the forms of our example to exist in the intellect would be for them to exist in a certain material thing. But for a form to exist in a material thing is just for that material thing to be the kind of thing the form is a form of. For example, for the form of triangularity to exist in a certain parcel of matter is just for that parcel of matter to be a triangle; for the form of “catness” to exist in a certain parcel of matter is just for that parcel of matter to be a cat; and so on. Thus, if your intellect were really a material thing, it would follow that that material thing – that part of your brain, say – would become a triangle whenever you thought about triangles, or a cat whenever you thought about cats. But of course, that’s absurd. Hence, since the assumption that the intellect is material leads to such absurdity, we must conclude that the intellect is not material.”

Indeed, if the intellect were material and thus became a cat when thinking about cats, it could never think about anything else ever again (whether triangles or whatever) since it would in that case not exist anymore – the parcel of matter composing it, having now become a cat, would no longer be an intellect at all (which seems to be Aquinas’s point in the passage cited from SCG II.49.3). Similarly, if the intellect were material it could never think about cats and triangles at the same time, for in taking on their forms (as it does in grasping them) it would then become both a cat and a triangle at the same time, which of course nothing can be. This, I would suggest, is what Aquinas means by saying that if the intellect were material, its knowing one thing “would impede the knowledge of anything else.” The point is not so much that the intellect can know all material things, but rather that it can know enough of them to justify us in inferring that it cannot be material. Indeed, just knowing that it can grasp both triangles and cats suffices to justify this inference. Insofar as it can take on the forms of multiple things, both over time and at a particular moment, the intellect has a potency that nothing material has or can have. The second of Aquinas’s main arguments for the immateriality of the intellect is as follows: from the fact that the human soul knows the universal natures of things, [philosophers] have perceived that the species by which we understand is immaterial. Otherwise, it would be individuated and so would not lead to knowledge of the universal. From the immateriality of the species by which we understand, philosophers have understood that the intellect is a thing independent of matter. (QDV X.8; cf. ST I.75.5 and DEE 4) Precisely by virtue of being universal, the objects of the intellect are not material, for all material things are particular rather than universal. This or that individual triangle is a material thing, but the universal triangularity is not; this or that individual cat is a material thing, but the universal catness is not; and so on. If triangularity, say, were a material thing, then our knowledge of it would be knowledge of just one particular material thing among others and thus not knowledge of a universal at all. That much is relatively uncontroversial. But how does it follow that the intellect which grasps these immaterial universal natures is itself immaterial?

One basis for this inference that we might suggest on Aquinas’s behalf would be that if the intellect were material, then its operation would presumably involve some purely material process, such as the manipulation of formal symbols a la modern “computational” accounts of the mind. In that case a thought about triangularity, for example, would consist of some physical representation of triangularity in the brain somewhere (in the form of a neuronal firing pattern or whatever). But no such physical representation could possibly count as the universal triangularity, because like any other physical representation of a triangle, this one too would be just one particular material thing among others, and not universal at all. Thus the operations of the intellect cannot consist of purely material processes. "

 

[fisherman_carl]

"Another basis for the inference from the immateriality of the objects of the intellect to the immateriality of the intellect itself is one suggested by James Ross. When you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact. (Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy; but as we’ve seen, to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it.) Now the thought you are having must be as determinate or exact as triangularity itself, otherwise it just wouldn’t be a thought about triangularity in the first place, but only a thought about some approximation of triangularity. Yet material things are never determinate or exact in this way. Any material triangle, for example, is always only ever an approximation of perfect triangularity (since it is bound to have sides that are less than perfectly straight, etc., even if this is undetectable to the naked eye). And in general, material symbols and representations are inherently always to some extent vague, ambiguous, or otherwise inexact, susceptible of various alternative interpretations. It follows, then, that any thought you might have about triangularity is not something material; in particular, it is not some process occurring in the brain. And what goes for triangularity goes for any thought that involves the grasp of a universal, since universals in general (or at least very many of them, in case someone should wish to dispute this) are determinate and exact in a way material objects and processes cannot be.

Whatever one thinks of arguments like this, it is important to understand that they are not the sort that might be undermined by the findings of neuroscience, or any other empirical science for that matter. They are not “soul of the gaps” arguments any more than Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence are “God of the gaps” arguments. That is to say, Aquinas is not presenting a quasi-scientific explanation of some psychological phenomenon that we simply haven’t got enough empirical data to explain in a materialistic way. As with the Five Ways, he is attempting to provide a metaphysical demonstration. He is claiming that it is in principle impossible, conceptually impossible for the intellect to be accounted for in a materialistic way. If his arguments work at all, they establish conclusively that the intellect could no more be identified with processes in the brain than two and two could make five. If they are mistaken, they would be mistaken in the way one might make a mistake in attempting to carry out a geometrical proof, and not by virtue of having failed to take account of this or that finding of brain research."

 

[utunumsint]

"Another basis for the inference from the immateriality of the objects of the intellect to the immateriality of the intellect itself is one suggested by James Ross. When you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact. (Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy; but as we’ve seen, to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it.) Now the thought you are having must be as determinate or exact as triangularity itself, otherwise it just wouldn’t be a thought about triangularity in the first place, but only a thought about some approximation of triangularity. Yet material things are never determinate or exact in this way. Any material triangle, for example, is always only ever an approximation of perfect triangularity (since it is bound to have sides that are less than perfectly straight, etc., even if this is undetectable to the naked eye). And in general, material symbols and representations are inherently always to some extent vague, ambiguous, or otherwise inexact, susceptible of various alternative interpretations. It follows, then, that any thought you might have about triangularity is not something material; in particular, it is not some process occurring in the brain. And what goes for triangularity goes for any thought that involves the grasp of a universal, since universals in general (or at least very many of them, in case someone should wish to dispute this) are determinate and exact in a way material objects and processes cannot be.

Whatever one thinks of arguments like this, it is important to understand that they are not the sort that might be undermined by the findings of neuroscience, or any other empirical science for that matter. They are not “soul of the gaps” arguments any more than Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence are “God of the gaps” arguments. That is to say, Aquinas is not presenting a quasi-scientific explanation of some psychological phenomenon that we simply haven’t got enough empirical data to explain in a materialistic way. As with the Five Ways, he is attempting to provide a metaphysical demonstration. He is claiming that it is in principle impossible, conceptually impossible for the intellect to be accounted for in a materialistic way. If his arguments work at all, they establish conclusively that the intellect could no more be identified with processes in the brain than two and two could make five. If they are mistaken, they would be mistaken in the way one might make a mistake in attempting to carry out a geometrical proof, and not by virtue of having failed to take account of this or that finding of brain research."

Yep. This is the one I want to explore.

God bless,
Ut

 

[ccmnxc]

I have read Ross’s paper, and find it incredibly interesting, even if I am not full behind it as of yet (due primarily to my lack of complete understanding of it all).

I think I have a general idea of what he is getting at though. Say that one employs modus ponens in an act of reasoning. Going with the assumption that such reasoning is an entirely physical process (whether the reasoning itself is reducible to or emergent from said process), this process or function is going to be executed by various neuronal firings in the brain. For example:
(1) If Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.
(2) Socrates is a man.
(3) Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Here, the neural firings (or whatever physical process) corresponding to premises 1, 2, and the conclusion 3 will be of such-and-such an organization. The problem, however, it that one can use an invalid form as well. One can use a logical function like “modus phonenz”: p -**> q; p, ∴ q = p → q; p, ∴ q when p has a major premise whose subject starts with the letter “S,” ∴ r otherwise. Now, “modus phonenz” is obviously an invalid argument form, despite the fact that the premises and conclusions are still true, as well as the fact that the physical process corresponding to the reasoning process will be exactly the same. This is because the physical process is simply connecting the two premises and the conclusion, both in the case of modus ponens and in the case of “modus phonenz.” And one can think of any invalid form to correspond to an argument, depending upon the criterion necessary for validity. Thus, physical processes are indeterminate between incompatible forms.

The problem then, and one materialists seem to often deny for some reason, is that we do in fact have determinately formal thought when reasoning. If not, any argument we would ever make would be invalid, including any materialist position.

Does this seem to get it right?