McGinn’s Mysterianism

This Week’s Visits  Tuesday, April 6: Robinson, Theisen, Tierney, Weiland  And: Those who missed earlier visits. You know who you are.

Colin McGinn (b )  McGinn (U. of Miami) is a full-time surfer who has written influential books about consciousness, ethics, sports, film, evil, and Shakespeare.  Some of his books include: The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds In A Material World The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy Mindfucking: The Critique of Mental Manipulation

“New Mysterianism”  McGinn is the leading thinker of a group of philosophers known as the New Mysterians (named after a ’60s band).  They take up the mantle of the Old Mysterians like John Locke who maintained that we cannot understand the mind-brain connection.

Example of a mystery

Mysteries vs. Miracles  Clarification: McGinn maintains that consciousness is mysterious, but denies that it is miraculous. Mystery: a phenomenon that lies beyond the limits of our understanding. Miracle: an action of a deity that violates a law of nature.

1st Question: What is mysterious?  Question: What is it exactly about consciousness that McGinn regards as mysterious?

Answer  What is mysterious is the link or connection between (a) what goes on in the brain & (b) what goes on in phenomenal consciousness.  He does not doubt that brain events are de facto correlated with conscious events; he even concedes that brain events cause conscious events (although it is not clear he is entitled to the latter claim).  But creatures with our powers of understanding do not and cannot understand why particular types of brain processes are necessarily connected with particular types of conscious experience.

2nd Question: Why is it mysterious?  Question: Why does McGinn think that this connection is necessarily mysterious to us?  What is his argument for this claim?

Preliminary 1: ‘Cognitive closure’  Def. ‘cognitive closure’: “A type of mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or theory T) if and only if the concept-forming procedures at M’s disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (of an understanding of T)”. (p. 350).

Preliminary 2: ‘Natural Property P’  McGinn assumes that the psychophysical link will consist in some natural property ‘p’. (‘Natural’ here just means roughly ‘instantiated in the physical world’.  It is safe to say that McGinn does not feel a need to argue for naturalism: “There just has to be some explanation for how brains subserve minds” (353).  We will come back to this point later: if he is right that naturalists cannot hope to find ‘P’, the question becomes whether we should prefer (a) his ‘nonconstructive naturalism’, or (b) ‘constructive theism’.

Where is ‘P’?

What is the structure of his argument?  McGinn maintains that human beings cannot reasonably hope to discover ‘P’.  Question: What is the logical structure of the main argument that he presents for this claim?

Dilemma  P1: If we are capable of discovering P, then this must come either through (a) introspection, (b) perception, or (c) inference from perception.  P2: ~(a) introspection.  P3: ~(b) perception.  P4: ~(c) inference from perception.  C: We are not capable of discovering P.

~(a) introspection  Question: How does/could he support this claim?

~(a) introspection  “Introspection does not present conscious states as depending upon the brain in some intelligible way. We cannot therefore introspect P” (354).  Worry: It is hard to see how he could prove that this is the case. He can only prove that he cannot find P through introspection.

~(b) perception  Question: Why does he think that we cannot discover P through empirical investigation of the brain?

~(b) perception  The crucial point is that we only directly perceive spatial properties of objects. “You can stare into a living conscious brain, your own or someone else’s, and see there a wide variety of instantiated properties – its shape, colour, texture, etc. – but you will not thereby see what the subject is experiencing, the conscious state itself… I take it this is obvious” (357).  So MRIs let us perceive the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’; but not phenomenal consciousness itself.

~(c) inference from perception  McGinn maintains that we are not “Humean minds”, in the sense that perceptual closure does not (for us) entail cognitive closure.  Thus, even if we do not directly perceive P, we might be able to conceive of P through ‘inferences to the best explanation’ of what we do perceive. This is how science usually proceeds…  Question: How does he rule out this possibility (pp )? Why cannot we theoretically posit P in order to explain the workings of the brain?

~(c) inference from perception  First: “Homogeneity” constraint. “If our data, arrived at by perception of the brain, do not include anything that brings in conscious states, then the theoretical properties we need to explain these data will not include conscious states either… Everything physical has a purely physical explanation” (358).  Question: Does this seem plausible to you? Can you think of a counter-example to this principle?

~(c) inference from perception  Second: Appeal to analogical reasoning does not help. This is fine for physics: we can posit ‘atoms’; they are like physical objects, just much smaller.  But this does not work for consciousness: the inferred property P would be similar in kind to brain properties; but then it won’t be able to explain consciousness.

Conclusion?

Conclusion: Metaphysics or Epistemology?  McGinn argues that the mystery is merely a reflection of our ignorance. The M-B connection is not ultimately mysterious. It is just mysterious to us, given our limited faculties.  This is good enough for him. It teaches us that there is no philosophical problem about consciousness: “we can rest secure in the knowledge that some (unknoweable) property of the brain makes everything fall into place” (362).  McGinn seems to think that he is doing us a favor. We need no longer waste our time trying to solve the M-B problem. And we need not superstitiously invoke miracles to address it.

New Mysterianism: Thanks!

Evaluation?  Question: What are the strongest objections that can be raised against his position and argument?