Neo-Existentialism

by Markus Gabriel

  In his sophisticated book Purple Haze, Joseph Levine distinguishes two kinds of ways in which singular terms, such as nouns or descriptive phrases like “the most expensive ring in this room,” can be seen to refer to the objects they pick out. One way might be called “mere labeling.”20 Mere labeling puts a speaker in semantic contact with some object or stuff in her environment with which she is already in causal contact in such a way that she puts a random label on the object or stuff without associating any explicitly available feature with the object itself. The object is thinly presented to her, as Levine puts it – that is, she might have all sorts of ideas about the object in question, while at the same time she is immediately in a position to grant that her ideas might be largely wide of the mark (Levine 2004: 8–9, 118–19). For instance, my use of “boson” and “fermion” in an earlier paragraph of this chapter is fairly thin, as I am by no means a trained atomic physicist. If someone who is more of an expert on particles were to tell me that I got even the basics wrong in my token use of the scientific terms, I would be happy to concede this and to revise my notions so that the result might be a more watertight use of the relevant terms. Another standard, albeit ultimately misguided example among philosophers is the identity of water and H2O, about which no ancient philosopher had any idea.21 Yet, this does not mean that Thales, Plato, or Karl Marx, for that matter, were not able to correctly use the words ὕδωρ or Wasser respectively. “Water” is just a mere label we apply to watery stuff regardless of our knowledge or ignorance of its molecular composition. The nature of water is not necessarily manifest in any competent referential use of water terms.

  Levine contrasts the labeling case with the case of “thick,” “phenomenal,” or “substantive” concepts, as he calls them respectively (Levine 2004: 7–9). That something looks reddish to me in a certain way might also be expressed by uttering the words “This red is beautiful” or “This red is closer to purple than that other red.” What we judge when we claim that assertions of this type are apt to be true cannot be judged by replacing the term with its thin counterpart. “This energetic structure with a wavelength of roughly 650 nm is beautiful” presents the object in a way that just does not lend itself to the judgment of beauty associated with the phenomenal experience of reddishness.

  On closer inspection, the distinction between a thick and a thin concept does not help our case against the materialist. For, there are various materialist strategies of leveling the contrast between thin and thick referential usages of singular terms. For one thing, the contrast between water and H2O that explains why we can learn something by figuring out that water is H2O also relies on a thick phenomenal concept of water as watery stuff (thirst-quenching bottled water, relaxing bath water, salty sea water which reminds us of our first teenage love, or whatever). We might at first be surprised to learn that water evaporates, congeals and boils because of its molecular features when we find a hidden unity among the various surface qualities of water. But, in any event, there will be a phenomenal concept of water so that neither water nor red are mere labels. Given that we can perform materialist explanations in the thick water case (as Levine himself concedes), this undermines his case for red. If there are thin and thick usages of any term, pointing out that there is a thin usage in a given case (such as red) does not help against the materialist. At best, it amounts to a version of Jackson’s knowledge argument and lands us in a different dialectics.22 Be that as it may, Levine is after something worth keeping in mind for the constructive story to be told in the second half of this chapter. He offers a subtle semantic version of the gap, one which potentially does not motivate a placement issue per se.

  David Chalmers argues prominently against materialism on a slightly different, but relevantly similar semantic basis, which accounts for the apparent distinction between the water case and the red case in different terms. Chalmers unequivocally argues “that materialism is false and that a form of dualism is true” (Chalmers 1996: xv). He defines materialism as “the widely held doctrine …, which is generally taken to hold that everything in the world is physical, or that there is nothing over and above the physical, or that the physical facts in a certain sense exhaust all the facts about the world” (ibid.: 41). His much discussed conceivability argument against materialism can be reconstructed in the following simplified manner. First, we need the notion of a philosophical zombie – a physical replica of an actual human being without any inner mental life. A philosophical zombie will look just like me on the outside and on the inside, but no one will be at home, as it were. In order to make the option of philosophical zombies look slightly more plausible, imagine a scenario (a possible world) in which there is a planet on which matter regularly happens to be arranged in such a way that human observers would believe they were witnessing real human patterns there. But all there is are very stable arrangements of matter which under any possible scrutiny are indistinguishable by anyone from human beings.

  Notice that Chalmers does not claim that zombies are possible in our actual world. In our world, he believes, everything which would be a physical replica of me – that is, an exact copy located in a different position from where I stand right now – would, of course, be conscious and probably in some sense have largely the same experience as I do. This is why the conceivability argument is both weaker and stronger than it appears at first glance. It is weaker in that it does not establish non-materialism for our world and stronger in that it shows that the identity of mind and matter can never be established in principle. “In our language, materialism is true if all the positive facts about the world are globally logically supervenient on the physical facts. This captures the intuitive notion that if materialism is true, then once God fixed the physical facts about the world, all the facts were fixed” (Chalmers 1996: 41). Here is a sketch of the argument, which merely serves to illustrate the basic ideas and is not intended to be the most compelling version.

  Zombies are conceivable (the concept of a zombie does not harbor any logical contradiction).

  If zombies are conceivable, they are possible (there is a possible world where everybody is a zombie = a zombie world).

  If brain and mind are identical, the brain–mind link is metaphysically necessary (given the metaphysical necessity of identity).

  If the brain–mind link is metaphysically necessary, there is no zombie world.

  If materialism is true, the brain–mind link is metaphysically necessary.

  There is a zombie world.

  The brain–mind link is not metaphysically necessary.

  ∴ Materialism is false.

  What is more interesting from a philosophical point of view than the actual argument, which in my view, as will come out later, is flawed beyond repair, is the technical backstage machinery called two-dimensional semantics. Here again the idea is quite simple and easy to follow.

  There are two senses in which we use the term “water.” In one sense, which Chalmers calls the “primary intension” – that is, the primary sense – “water” means watery stuff. Thales and Plato knew what they were talking about when they used ὕδωρ, even though they had false beliefs about its molecular composition, if any. If water had turned out to have a different molecular composition, say XYZ, as philosophers usually put it, Thales and Plato could still have insisted that they knew the meaning of ὕδωρ. The second sense of “water,” its “secondary intension,” is a function from linguistic meaning to the actual referent. The term “water” actually picks out stuff that contains H2O molecules, and in this second sense it is necessary that it do so. Here is a simple reason for this: all identities are necessary. The fact I am I or that Mainz is Mainz is necessary, if anything is. If Mainz exists it will be Mainz, no surprise. “Boys will be boys.” If water is identical to H2O it could not have been otherwise. What this means on Chalmers’s semantic construal is that we evaluate uses of “water” in two dimensions: in one dimension, where we know what we mean regardless of what the natural f
acts turn out to be – facts which are involved in the referential bit of our speech patterns – and in another where we take into account that water actually refers to a certain stuff with a given molecular composition. What “water” actually refers to simply could not have been otherwise than the way it turns out to be.

  Given that this is a semantic model and not a linguistic claim about the actual use of water terms in various languages, dialects, or idiolects, all that we need is the prima facie stability of the model. It is not obviously incoherent, and Chalmers and others have defended it with respectable technical precision and detail.23 So far, so good, then.

  Chalmers now points out that, in the case of our mental vocabulary – the vocabulary in which our self-descriptions as mentally endowed conscious subjects are couched – the primary and the secondary intensions cannot come radically apart. Take as an example my impression that it feels comfortably warm in this room as I am writing this sentence. This feeling is causally hooked up with a very complex network of physical properties ranging from kinetic energy to a complicated structure of information processing triggered in my organism as a result of its surface exposure to its natural environment. Yet, it seems extremely odd to entertain the thought that the feeling of being warm could literally be an aggregate state of a natural kind which has the state of being angry at the fact that Trump won the American election as one of its parts. It looks as if we could rule this out regardless of further empirical inquiry. There seems to be no room for this option. Temperature does not suddenly change into anger so that we need an account of this process. By contrast, we know that many natural phenomena, such as the phenomena earlier called “electricity” and “magnetism,” hang together and are manifestations of a single phenomenon which is only revealed once we fix the actual referents, the secondary intensions, of our earlier uninformed electricity talk. Our phenomenal experience cannot always or in principle differ radically from how things are on the level of their neural support in such a way that we could find, from the third-person perspective, that we are in a phenomenal state that is entirely different from what the subject is capable of reporting.

  Chalmers thinks that his two-dimensional semantics is capable of supporting his version of the age-old Cartesian intuition that we have a privileged access to our own minds: “We know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far better than we understand consciousness” (Chalmers 1996: 3). However, what seems really to be the case here is the reverse: if two-dimensional semantics demonstrates that there is something like a thick use of phenomenal concepts, it thereby proves that we both know and fully understand consciousness a priori in the relevant dimension. Therefore, there neither is a mystery, nor a great riddle, nor a hard problem. We just know consciousness from within and we fully understand it – at least on the level of our competent usage of mentalistic vocabulary along one of the two semantic axes. Given that the two cannot radically come apart according to the application of two-dimensional semantics to the brain–mind problem, there does not seem to be a further issue here.

  There is a lot of wiggle room for the materialist to challenge the notion that there really is a semantic gap between two ways in which singular terms refer such that this gap would lend support to anti-materialist conclusions about our mentalistic vocabulary. Like Levine, Chalmers provides detailed and interesting technically sophisticated responses to some of the maneuvers that come to mind here.24 Be that as it may, and setting some details aside, I agree with the upshot of Levine’s, Chalmers’s, and many others’ basic idea that there is something special about our mental vocabulary, an idea that harks back at least as far as to Plato.

  However, I entirely disagree with their way of locating the semantic gap within the natural order. What characteristically happens when we try to force the conscious mind with its semantic peculiarities into the natural order can be seen in roughly the last hundred pages of Chalmers’ famous book.25 Chalmers argues both for the irreducibility of the conscious mind to a non-conscious material fundamental level and for its integration into the natural order. According to this strategy, he needs to make room in the natural order for the conscious mind that ex hypothesi does not fit into the natural order if the natural order is exactly like the materialist wants to describe it. Hence, Chalmers resorts to the strategy of “wonder tissue” (Dennett 1991: 40), as Dennett has polemically coined moves of this sort. Like so many others over the last hundred years before him, Chalmers invokes the various interpretations of quantum mechanics as a source for possible radical revisions of our notion of the material-energetic realm in order to have space for new kinds of material entities or laws, which might then include natural laws governing additional, conscious, or proto-conscious wonder tissue.

  Let me call strategies which invoke new hitherto scientifically undisclosed features of the universe in order to solve the placement problem of the mind “speculative (meta-)physics.”26 The most prominent historical representative of this strategy is Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who actually inspired medical science and neurobiology and was scientifically up to date in his time. Schelling also founded the Journal of Speculative Physics, which published articles arguably designed to widen our notion of nature so as to have room for the conscious mind and its pre-historical evolutionary stages (Schelling 2017, 2014).

  In his most recent book, Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel explicitly affiliates himself with Plato, Schelling, and Hegel and proposes a simplified version of their overall teleological account of mind’s position in the cosmos.27 Nagel indeed shares a starting point with the objective idealists, for he claims that science is bound to commit to some version of an idealist principle of intelligibility. The idealist principle of intelligibility generally holds that reality has to be intelligible to such an extent that we can rule out a priori that any far-fetched hypothesis holds which makes reality in principle inaccessible to human inquisitiveness.28 The theory of evolution, and its actual application in various subfields of biology, assumes that its explanatory model resonates with the reality it attempts to explain. It rules out a priori – that is, without any application of its model to an empirically given item or structure – that nature did not come into existence five minutes ago with the traces of a far-reaching past and that, for similar reasons, Young Earth creationism or any other skeptical hypothesis can be discounted in actual scientific practice. Evolutionary theory, like any theory with obvious objective purport, relies on a match between thought and reality that guarantees there is nothing intrinsic in the reality grasped by the theory that makes theorizing inherently impossible.

  Nagel rightly points out that, on closer inspection, any view about the cosmos as a whole will implicitly or explicitly draw on speculative assumptions. If this is the case, we are at the very least entitled to assume that the cosmos is not necessarily incompatible with our search for understanding and explanation. A weak version of the anthropic principle holds that the fact that there are scientific observers, such as us, tells us that the cosmos is not in principle inaccessible to thought. For thought has arisen from the cosmos itself and has managed to adapt to its laws. Any picture of human mindedness in which it is governed by laws in principle unintelligible from within human mindedness or reason will smack of unjustified skepticism.

  However, after a convincing defense of the reality of reason and its irreducibility to principles external to reason (such as those discovered by evolutionary biology), Nagel jumps to the conclusion that we need a new kind of futuristic science which respects the weak anthropic principle by assuming that there is tendency in the cosmos to produce intelligent life making sense of the cosmos. Nagel happily rejoices in the romantic notion that the cosmos gradually awakens via the evolution of intelligent life until it sees itself in the mirror of human scientific practices and figures out its own existence and the place of consciousness in the world as whole.29

  Nagel’s romantic musings only make
sense against the backdrop of the common assumption that any conception of the human mind must be able to integrate mental phenomena in their entirety into the natural order. Speculative meta-physics, be it of Chalmers’s quantum-mechanical or Nagel’s Natur-philosophical variety, is a side-effect of a conception of mind that actually views mind as something which cannot belong to the natural order as it is understood by the materialist. By trying to fit the mind into the natural order, as originally conceived by the materialist, they are granting the materialist the rules of the game, which they try to change as they play along. This incoherent sleight of hand, however, will not convince the materialist. Rather, it entitles her to postulate that, if the choice is between a fully materialistic world-view and a materialistic world-view with a magical or speculative appendix, there must be a respectable materialist theory of the mind after all.30

  III Geist as an Explanatory Structure

  When I gave the talk that turned into this book chapter, the majority of the audience were awake. Many were actually following my argument, trying to locate gaps and other shortcomings or attempting to figure out where I was leading them before they made up their minds about the acceptability of my claims. Every person in the room was feeling a certain way. Also, every person in the room believed that more than 300,000 Chinese households own more than one pair of shoes. Everybody who was awake during my lecture or daydreaming either heard my voice or saw my gestures, whether attentively or consciously, or at least to such an extent that each could direct the spotlight of their attention to the phenomena I was pointing out.