Putnam on causation, intentionality, and Aristotle

Putnam on causation, intentionality, and Aristotle

...the aim of a causal theory is to explain intentionality or representation in purely physical terms – terms that make no reference to concepts other than those recognized by physical science.  Yet given their actual examples, causal theorists in fact help themselves to a “notion of things ‘causing’ other things [which] is not a notion… simply handed to us by physics” (Renewing Philosophy, p. 50) – namely, the everyday notion that presupposes the interest-relative distinction between “the cause” and contributing or background conditions.  That is to say, they make reference to ordinary objects – cats, the valves on pressure cookers, and the like – in a way that gives them a causal significance they do not have in the sorts of explanations physics offers.  Nor is it easy to see how these theorists can avoid doing this, given that their aim is precisely to explain how we can represent such everyday objects in thought and language.  But in doing it they are subtly presupposing the existence of intentionality – the very phenomenon they are supposed to be explaining.

The bottom line, as Putnam puts it in “Is the Causal Structure of the Physical Itself Something Physical?”, is that “Nature, or ’physical reality’ in the post-Newtonian understanding of the physical, has no semantic preferences” (p. 83, emphasis mine).  There is nothing in the physical facts so conceived that can determine why any particular causal chain “can be singled out as ‘the’ relation between signs and their referents” (p. 89).  On the Aristotelian conception of nature championed by the medieval Scholastics, material substances and processes were inherently “directed towards” certain ends or “final causes” beyond themselves, given their “essences” or “substantial forms.”  A kind of meaning was built into the material world from top to bottom.  But the early modern philosophers and scientists defined themselves against this essentialist and teleological view of nature, embracing a “mechanistic” picture of the world as devoid of any inherent formal or final causes – a picture contemporary naturalists take for granted.

Yet, as Putnam argues, causal theorists of intentionality, though officially committed to the anti-Scholastic, anti-Aristotelian revolution of the early moderns, are also implicitly beholden to “a notion according to which what is normal, what is an explanation, what is a bringer-about, is all in the essence of things in themselves”; and they are thereby beholden, in effect, to “a medieval notion of causation” (p. 88, emphasis added).  For the idea that there is an “intrinsic distinction” between the cause of an event and mere background conditions “has much more to do with medieval (and Aristotelian) notions of ‘efficient causation’ than with post-Newtonian ones” (The Many Faces of Realism, p. 26).  It presupposes an “Aristotelian conception of form” – of “self-identifying structures” which objectively demarcate the ordinary objects of our experience from each other in a way they are not demarcated by modern physics (“Aristotle after Wittgenstein,” pp. 68-69).  And if we implicitly affirm such notions in the course of giving a causal account of intentionality, “then we abandon materialism without admitting that we are abandoning it” for in that case we “project into physical systems properties… that cannot be properties of matter ‘in itself,’” at least not given the post-Newtonian conception of matter to which materialists are committed (“Causal Structure,” p. 90).

“A more general version of this question is this: How can one clump of stuff anywhere in the universe be about some other clump of stuff anywhere else in the universe—right next to it or 100 million light-years away?

…Let’s suppose that the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way red octagons are about stopping. This is the first step down a slippery slope, a regress into total confusion. If the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way a red octagon is about stopping, then there has to be something in the brain that interprets the Paris neurons as being about Paris. After all, that’s how the stop sign is about stopping. It gets interpreted by us in a certain way. The difference is that in the case of the Paris neurons, the interpreter can only be another part of the brain…

What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted—by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain)—as being about that stuff outside the brain. What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for “being about”) another clump of matter outside the brain. But there is no such physical stuff.

Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort…

…What you absolutely cannot be wrong about is that your conscious thought was about something. Even having a wildly wrong thought about something requires that the thought be about something.

It’s this last notion that introspection conveys that science has to deny. Thinking about things can’t happen at all…When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong.”

- Alex Rosenberg, An Atheist's Guide to Reality

In light of the above claim by the materialist Alex Rosenberg, see neuroscientist Raymond Tallis on Intentionality -->

From his latest book On Time & Lamentation:

The object is experienced as being not only something other than the perceptions that reveal it but more than what is revealed. The object that the perception is “of” or “about” has a constancy – over time, across angles from which, and lights in which, it is perceived, and between persons. This constancy withstands change. This is most clearly evident in the case of a change of position: Object O at Position 1 at time t1 is the same as Object O at position 2 at time t2. In virtue of the continuing existence of Positions 1 and Positions 2, O becomes at t2 the curator of its own past. By this means, it transcends not only the experiences that reveal it at any given time but, courtesy of those experiences and the constancy of the background against which it changes, it transcends its state at any particular time. That is implicit in our perceiving enduring objects rather than time-slices or disconnected states of objects. Thus the intentionality of human consciousness at its most basic: the appearance of an object to a subject. Ultimately intentionality will unfold to create the vast “semi-osphere” – the realm of aboutness, of signs and meanings – that constitutes the individual, shared, and collective consciousness corresponding to the human world. Because it does not fit into the scientistic world picture, intentionality has attracted the hostile attention of philosophers committed to those various forms of physicalism that would assimilate the human world to the physical one. Let us first remind ourselves just what a difficult customer intentionality is.

At the most basic level, intentionality points, metaphorically speaking, in the opposite direction to causation. This is not, of course, reverse or backward causation or some kind of force emitted by perception. It is better to conceive of intentionality by thinking of perception reaching beyond itself to that which occasioned it and beyond that in turn to an object underlying, or implicated, in the immediate extra-cerebral, indeed extra-corporeal, cause of perception. In conventional understanding, seeing a cup has as its proximate cause the light reaching me from the cup, entering my eyes and ultimately triggering off nerve impulses in my visual cortex. Again in accordance with conventional understanding, the light that has been reflected from the surface of the cup – in virtue of which I see it, it appears to me – is causally upstream from the events in my brain. My seeing sees beyond myself and any bodily processes that are involved in seeing.

This is very awkward indeed for the materialist world picture. Just how awkward becomes apparent if we attempt to describe object perception as we have just done in the standard materialistic language of cause and effect. We have to envisage the effect (neural activity in my visual cortex) somehow being in contact with its own causal ancestry (the light from the cup), in order to “reach out to”, “to be about” the cup and to relocate the light arising from the cup back on to it. To put this another way: the causal chain in virtue of which the light “gets in” (to the eye and the brain) fits comfortably inside the world picture of physicalism; while the gaze that “looks out” most certainly does not. This is underlined by the fact that what the gaze looks at is not the ever-changing pattern of light on the object but something that we see revealed by that light: an object with a back, and an underneath, and an inside, and a future, and a past, none of which are presently exposed by the light.

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"That intentionality cannot be understood in terms of the laws of physics may seem a rather startling claim. It will help to explore a very basic example: my perceiving a material object — more specifically, my seeing a material object. If you believe the kind of account that underpins determinism, the light from the object enters my eyes and stirs up neural activity, and this activity is the basis of my seeing the object — and, moreover, my seeing the object is [i]nothing more than this neural activity. But this story is incomplete. For while the passage of light into the brain is an instance of standard physical causation, the gaze that looks out most certainly is not. It is different from a physical causal chain in two respects. First, whereas the directionality of the phenomenon of light passing into the brain is “downstream” from cause to effect (from the object that deflected the light to the neural activity in the brain), the directionality of the gaze is “upstream,” from the effect to its cause (the neural activity to the object of the perception). And second, whereas the “forward arrow” of the causal chain that includes the triggering of neural activity by the light extends without limit forward into the causal nexus, the “reverse arrow” of the gaze is finite: it refers to and so comes to a rest on the object, and does not, for example, refer or look beyond the object to the earlier history of the light.[/i]

This “bounce back,” this causal reversal, has crucial consequences. The object that is picked out by the gaze has some notable features, the most important of which is that in human beings and not in any other sort of beings, it [i]explicitly exceeds the experience of it. The perception is not just of the appearance of the object but about the object as something that is more than its present appearances. It is experienced as a source of future possible experiences. These possible experiences have a generic character, quite different from the definite particularity of the items in the material world. Objects of perception open up, and hold open, what we might call a Space of Possibility that exists explicitly for embodied subjects such as you and I. The object is also public, accessible by any other embodied subject; it is therefore the ground floor of a shared Space of Possibility — what the American philosopher Donald Davidson called “the community of minds.” This is the human world that unfolds through the joint and shared attention we pay to things. It is outside of material causation. Indeed, it is in this shared human world that, as the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling put it, “Nature opens her eyes and sees that she exists.[/i]
  -How Can I Possibly Be Free?

Some brief arguments for dualism, Part V

Edward Feser

Now, again, what is it about this complex chain of events that justifies picking out A and B specifically and labeling them “the beginning” and “the end” respectively? Why is it the cat’s presence on the mat that counts as “the beginning” – rather than, say, the flipping of the light switch, or the flow of the current to the ceiling lamp, or the arrival of such-and-such a photon at exactly the midpoint between the surface of the cat and the observer’s left retina? Why is it brain process B exactly that counts as “the end” of the causal chain – rather than, say, the brain process immediately before B or immediately after B, or the walk over to the refrigerator, or the motion of such-and-such a shard of glass from the broken milk bottle as it skips across the floor? Of course, we have an interest in picking out and identifying cats and not in picking out and identifying individual photons, and an interest in brain processes and their associated mental states that we don’t have in shards of glass. But that is a fact about us, not a fact about the physical world itself. Objectively, as far as the physical world itself is concerned, there is just the ongoing and incredibly complex sequence of causes and effects, which extends indefinitely forward and backward in time well beyond the events we have described. Objectively, that is to say, there is no such thing as “the beginning” or “the end,” and nothing inherently significant about any one event as compared to another.

Popper’s point, and Putnam’s, is that what count as the “beginning” and “end” points of such a causal sequence, and thus what counts as “the causal sequence” itself considered in isolation from the rest of the overall causal situation, are interest relative. These particular aspects of the overall causal situation have no special significance apart from a mind which interprets them as having it. But in that case they cannot coherently be appealed to in order to explain the mind. It is no good saying that the representational character of our mental states derives from their causal relations when the causal relations themselves cannot be specified except in terms of how they are represented by certain mental states. A vicious circularity afflicts any such “theory” of intentionality.