*(not this guy)
Kevin Kim is a reader and occasional commenter on this blog, and a blogger himself. Moreover, he’s the author of a (self-published) book entitled Water from a Skull: Essays on Religious Diversity, Christianity, Buddhism, Mind, and Other Things that Matter. I recently purchased a copy, thinking that reading it would be a quicker way to get a handle on Kevin’s views on Things that Matter than trying to sift out the relevant blog posts from the far more numerous posts on what he cooked for dinner last night. 
(And I’d rather read those than these. )
I started reading Water with the relatively brief section on philosophy of mind. I’m fairly sympathetic to the views that Kevin puts forward, but I found myself wondering: how does he reconcile these positions with the views he apparently holds on religion? This sent me back to the book’s introduction, where I found that Kevin describes himself as a “nontheist Presbyterian.” ?!?!?!? This led me to skim the section on Christianity, and, while he gives an account of what led him to abandon theism, as far as I can tell he says nothing at all about why he continues to identify himself a Presbyterian. Dude, here’s some advice: go join the Unitarians. They like guys like you.
But back to the philosophy of mind. The first, and longest, essay on that topic is called “Toward a Theory of Mind.” It also appears, pretty much verbatim, here. (I haven’t done a line-by-line comparison to see how much Kevin tweaked it before committing it to print.)
First, a brief summary. In the essay, Kevin argues against what he calls the Argument from Qualia, which is shorthand for the Argument for Substance Dualism Based on the Radical Subjectivity of Qualia. He does so, primarily, by challenging the claim that qualia are “radically subjective.” He then proposes his own view, and defends the functionalist views of folks like Ray Kurzweil against criticisms from John Searle.
It seems to me that, at this general level, the essay suffers from three major weaknesses:
- He relies on a false disjunction between materialism and substance dualism, and pays insufficient attention to the possibility of other positions (including, particularly, other versions of dualism);
-
He never tells us what the Argument from Qualia is;
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He doesn’t seem to fully appreciate that, in contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind, intentionality is for the most part a separate issue from the qualia question.
Substance Dualism is not the only Dualism
In the essay, Kevin names substance dualism as his target. He recognizes the possible affinity of his own view with other options in the philosophy of mind, particularly neutral monism, but doesn’t explore the connection. While obviously one can’t do everything in a single essay (which, after all, means “attempt“), a little more acquaintance with some of those views would have enabled him to put forward a sounder argument. At the least, a bit more attention to Searle’s work subsequent to his Chinese Room paper, such as The Rediscovery of the Mind and The Mystery of Consciousness, might have led him to explore the similarities between his views and Searle’s, and would provide him with an entry point into current discussions.
What “Argument from Qualia”?
My point here is simple: Kevin never explicitly presents the premises and inferences that are alleged to lead from certain beliefs about qualia to the acceptance of substance dualism. Instead, he lets the fuzzy notion of “radical subjectivity” do the work for him. I’ll go into detail about why that doesn’t work below; but first, to point (3) above.
Functionalism and the Chinese Room
Kevin provides a pretty good account of Searle’s argument. He doesn’t make explicit, though, that the Chinese Room argument applies, centrally, to the other main issue in the philosophy of mind: intentionality. To quote a pretty good introduction to the issues I located online:
Philosophical discussions of consciousness now tend to centre on two things which (for the time being, at least) set conscious humans apart from ‘mere’ computers. First, real subjective sensations (qualia); second, in various forms, real understanding or meaning (intentionality). Whether or not they are ultimately attainable by computers, both remain profoundly mysterious even in their human form.
Let me qualify that criticism in a couple of ways:
Qualification One: A search of BH reveals that Kevin has discussed intentionality before, principally here. And I think his philosophical instincts are quite sound when he argues that those who categorically reject the possibility of mental phenomena emerging from physical systems commit the fallacy of composition.
Qualification Two: The Chinese Room argument isn’t necessarily completely unrelated the problem of qualia, since some people have tried to give functional accounts of qualia.
Now on to
Radical Subjectivity
Here, I’ll present my difficulties with the notion of radical subjectivity via a close reading of the section of Kevin’s essay entitled “Substance Dualism and the Argument from Qualia.”
Kevin says,
In philosophical Taoism, we learn that “The Tao that can be talked about is not the eternal (or true) Tao.” There is no discursive approach to (ultimate) reality. To know it, you cannot read about it. You cannot hear someone else’s account of it. You have to experience it for yourself for yourself. This is true whether we are talking about the taste of chocolate, the pain of a fresh ear piercing, or a kiss.
The Western philosopher might say that the Taoist is talking about qualia.
Here, it seems to me that Kevin commits an elementary logical error: from the facts that a is F and b is F, it does not follow that a=b. Just because the Dao is ineffable and must be directly experienced to be known, and the same can be said about qualia, it does not follow that the two terms refer to the same thing. For what it’s worth, I think our ability to recover anything like the meaning that the Dao De Jing had for its original audience are about as good as our chances of determining what Julius Caesar had for breakfast on the day he died; and from my limited acquaintance with the Chinese commentarial tradition, it seems pretty questionable that [most of its readers have thought] qualia are one of the things that the DDJ’s about, and very unlikely that they’re the main thing it’s about.
Kevin goes on:
Qualia are radically subjective. . .
This is the first mention of “radical subjectivity.” He never defines it or tells us how it differs from moderate subjectivity. Clues to what radical subjectivity is emerge in Kevin’s arguments against the notion, which I’ll examine momentarily. But first, a semi-relevant digression.
The example of a quale that Kevin chooses is problematic:
What is it like to experience a nine-gee turn in a fighter jet, for example?
One of the things frequently said about qualia is that they are atomic. The best example I’ve been able to find online is a discussion in Nelson Goodman’s The Structure of Appearance; see pages 140-144 (available online at Google Books). Whether or not one thinks there are qualia associated with doing a nine-gee turn, it’s much more controversial whether there’s a single “doing-a-nine-gee-turn” quale. And if someone wants to argue that such a thing exists, I imagine they’d still admit that it’s not the best example for getting an initial handle on the concept of qualia.
I turn now to the next section of Kevin’s essay: “My Objections to the Argument from Qualia.”
First Objection
“First, I question [the] radically subjective nature [of qualia]. . . . I have reason to believe that qualia contain an objective element because people, as a matter of everyday discourse, “relate to” each other. If qualia we absolutely unique from person to person, how would we be able to say “I can relate to that?”
Let’s take that bit by bit.
qualia contain an objective element . . .
In response, let me present the following passage from Searle:
In the sense in which I am here using the term, “subjective” refers to an ontological category, not to an epistemic mode. Consider, for example, the statement “I now have a pain in my lower back. That statement is completely objective in the sense that it is made true by the existence of an actual fact and is not dependent on any stance, attitudes, or opinions of observers. However, the phenomenon itself, the actual pain itself, has a subjective mode of existence, and it is in that sense which I am saying that consciousness is subjective.
What more can we say about this subjective mode of existence? Well, first it is essential to see that inconsequence of its subjectivity, the pain is not equally accessible to any observer. Its existence, we might say, is a first-person existence. . . . Subjectivity has the further consequence that all of my conscious forms of intentionality that give me information about the world independent of myself are always from a special point of view. The world itself has no point of view, but my access to the world through my conscious states is always perspectival, always from my point of view.
The Rediscovery of the Mind, p. 94.
Note that the notion of subjectivity at work here never denies that one person’s qualia can be very much like another person’s; it only holds that each one of us has a unique kind of access to her own qualia. Kevin may be be confusing numerical identity with qualitative identity; of course one of my qualia can’t be numerically identical with one of yours, but they can very well be qualitatively identical. (This suspicion is reinforced by the invocation of Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance” a couple of paragraphs later. We don’t need anything as un-identical as family resemblance; qualitative identity seems to fit the bill here.)
. . . how would we be able to say “I can relate to that?”
Ordinarily, the statements to which we respond “I can relate to that” describe complex mental states, frequently emotionally laden ones. The way I talk, it would be odd to say “I would relate to that ” as a response to “I think this paint sample is closer in color to the fabric swatch than that one is”; instead one would say something like “It looks that way to me, too.” The color-matching scenario furnishes a better example of the basic atomic sense of qualia than does a more complex experience.
This point is relatively unimportant, except that it’s possible that thinking about a holistic rather than an atomic example may have misled Kevin into misunderstanding what the qualiaphile means by the “subjectivity” and “privacy” of qualia. It may be the case that the total experience of what it’s like for me to do a nine-gee turn is different (and not just numerically) from what it’s like for you to do a nine-gee turn; but surely the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds that I see through the cockpit can be qualitatively identical to the blue and the white that you see.
For a break in this relentless sniping, let me say that Kevin’s speculations about the possibility of directly accessing other people’s qualia, and that this would present a challenge to the claim of privileged access, are on target. For similar speculations along the same lines, see this article (PDF), especially p. 432. (No, the articles’s not 400 pages long; it’s excerpted from a longer publication.)
Second Objection
The charge here:
. . . it hovers dangerously close to outright solipsism . . .
I deliberately leave the pronoun in the quotation, because doing so points out the basic problem here: we don’t know what view is charged with coming close to solipsism. Is it substance dualism, or the belief that there are qualia?
Moreover, Kevin does not demonstrate that any of the views he considers have solipsistic consequences. I can sum up the gist of the issue in a retort to one of Kevin’s rhetorical questions.
One has plenty of reasons for believing there is something going on inside one’s own head, but one can never be sure about anyone or anything else. How practical a stance is this?
My response: It’s an eminently practical stance, and the one that each of us necessarily occupies towards her own experience. One can never be certain about anyone or anything else. This is not to deny that we have extremely good reasons for our beliefs about the external world, other persons, etc.; of course we do. But we never have the same certainty about those things as we do about the immediate contents of our own experience.
(Of course, anti-Cartesians of various stripes would disagree here, saying this is not the way we actually experience and think about the world. But I think that they would agree that such a position is theoretically possible, and would admit the distinction between certainty and justified beliefs of various degrees that fall short of certainty.)
Third Objection
Kevin says,
I have nothing against which to check the reliability of my qualia.
There are, in principle, two possible interpretations of the issue of the reliability of qualia. One is: Do I have reason to believe that my qualia accurately represent the external world? This is the question Kevin deals with in this section. The other is: Do I have reason to believe that my qualia represent anything at all? I.e., is there an external world? This the question of solipsism, which Kevin’s already dealt with in Objection 2.
As for the present issue, there’s a very simple response to Kevin’s claim. You do have something against which to check the reliability of your qualia: other qualia.
To illustrate the point, let’s consider the example that Kevin proposes: phantom limbs. I can verify the accuracy of my proprioceptive qualia of having an arm by checking the beliefs I form based on them against the beliefs I form based on my visual qualia: I open my eyes and look to see whether or not I have an arm.
Physicalism and the Progress of Science
Kevin puts forward his own views in the section entitled “Materialistic Nondualism and Problems with Substance Dualism.” Here, I wish to take issue with a few of the particular statements Kevin makes, and then offer an observation on his more general position.
Kevin says
(1)
[Mind] is a subset of life, and life is a subset of matter
Strictly speaking, this is false. What is true (or at least plausible) is
(2)
The set of beings with minds is a subset of the set of living things, and the set of living things is a subset of the set of material objects
Pointing this out may be a minor quibble. However, it may be the case that Kevin’s statement indicates that he believes, or some of his readers may believe, that the explanatory principles that apply to beings with minds are a subset of the explanatory principles that apply to living things, etc. This is highly controversial, and in no way follows from (2).
Furthermore, Kevin repeatedly makes statements like:
The substance dualist walls himself off from even the possibility of having his view empirically contested, insisting that the mind is radically other, causing physical changes through an incomprehensible — yet somehow possible — process, that is totally immune to scientific proof or disproof.
It is true that substantive versions of substance dualism — well-developed accounts of what the mind is like — are relatively scarce, compared to the more frequent arguments for the possibility of substance dualism. On the other hand, perhaps the most prominent defender of substance dualism during the past half-century was neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate John Eccles, who put forward a quite substantive theory: that the mind consists of psychons — nonmaterial particle-like entities, located in the synapses of the brain. Eccles’ claim, moreover, was that the view was consistent with the best scientific accounts of the microstructure of the brain, and that it was preferable to physicalism in that it offers an intuitively satisfactorily explanatory account of our ordinary beliefs about human agency.
In the meantime, the dualist offers no positive arguments for his thesis.
. . .
Substance dualists, by contrast, too hastily trot out the dangers of scientism, but do so while adopting a dogmatic stance immune to discussion.
To refute these claims, it seems to me sufficient to point to three cogent defenses of dualism available on the internet — one from a theologian, one from a physicist (pdf), and one from a psychologist. One could cull numerous further examples from this bibliography at the New Dualism website. One might also point to the existence of such books as The Immaterial Self: A Defence of the Cartesian Dualist Conception of the Mind and The Substance of Consciousness: An Argument for Interactionism.
More generally: the main argument that Kevin makes here is what Ole Koksvik has called a “meta-induction on the history of science.” See pages 132-137 of his master’s thesis “In Defense of Interactionism”(pdf), where he presents convincing reasons why the dualist need not find this line of argument persuasive.
And I, having exhausted myself to the point that I am uninclined to provide even the briefest summaries of the arguments towards which I mutely gesture in support of my claims, am going to shut up now.
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