THERE IS a conception of the relation between mind and body which is in a
certain respect the converse of the epiphenomenalistic and which might therefore
be termed Hypophenomenalism (Gr. hypo = under + phainomai = to appear.) It is,
in brief, that the living body is a hypophenomenon of the soul or mind or of
some constituent of it - an effect or product or dependent of it, instead of the
converse of this as epipheomenalism asserts.
Conceptions of this type have appeared several times in the history of thought,
but they have been presented as parts or corollaries of certain cosmological
speculations rather than as conclusions suggested by the results of observation.
1. Two hypophenomenalistic: conceptions
In Plotinus, for example, who conceived
the universe as arising from the ineffable One, God, by a series of emanations,
the soul is the penultimate of these, two degrees below God; and the lowest is
matter. Thus, the soul is not in the body, but the body is in, and dependent
upon, the soul, which both precedes and survives it, and whose forces give form
and organization to the matter of which the body is composed.
Schopenhauer's conception of the relation between body and soul" is somewhat
similar to this, but he does not speak here of soul or of mind but more
specifically of "will," which he does not regard as a part of the psyche. Except
in cases where the will has kindled to itself the light we call intellect, that
impersonal will is blind as to what specifically it craves but nonetheless
creates. Schopenhauer accordingly conceives the body, or more exactly the body's
organization, as objectification of the will-to-live; the hand, for example,
being an objectification of the unconscious will to be able to grasp. He writes
that "what objectively is matter is subjectively will ... our body is just the
visibility, objectivity of our will, and so also every body is the objectivity
of the will at some one of its grades."(1) And elsewhere he speaks of a certain
part of the body, to wit, the brain, as "the objectified will to know."(2)
(1) The World as Will and Idea, Supplements to Bk II. Ch. XXIV p. 52. Haldane
and Kemp Transl. Vol. 3. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. London 1906.
(2) The Will in Nature, tr. Mme. Karl Hillebrand, London, George Bell and Sons,
1897, p. 237.
2. Biological hypophenomenalism distinguished from cosmological
In
philosophical discussions of the mind-body relation, the type of theory of which
two classical examples have just been cited, and for which the name Hypophenomenalism is here proposed, has received relatively little attention as
compared with epiphenomenalism, materialism, idealism, parallelism, or
interactionism. We shall therefore have to provide here ourselves the
formulation of it that would seem most defensible. It will unavoidably have to
be fuller than in the case of the familiar other theories of the mind-body
relation.
The first thing we must do is to distinguish between what may be termed,
respectively, cosmological and biological hypophenomenalism. Cosmological
hypophenomenalism would contend that not only the living body, but also all
other material objects are hypophenomena of minds, i.e., are products or
objectifications of psychical activity or, as Schopenhauer had it, of Will.
Biological hypophenomenalism, on the other hand, concerns itself only with the
material objects we term "living," and contends only that the life, which
differentiates living things from dead or inorganic things, is a product,
effect, or manifestation of psychic activity and more particularly of conation.
This is the hypophenomenalism which alone we shall have in view, for it is the
one directly relevant to the central problem of the present work, namely, that
of the relation between the individual's mind and the life and the death of his
body. This relation is different both from the ontological relation between mind
and matter in general and from the epistemological relation between them, which
constitutes mind's knowledge of matter.
Biological hypophenomenalism does not occupy itself with the question whether
matter in general, or in particular the matter of the body as distinguished from
its life, is a product or objectification of mind. It has to do only with the
relation between the life of the body and its mind; but whereas epiphenomenalism maintains that both the occurrence at all of consciousness and the
particular states of it at particular times are products of the living brain's
activity, biological hypophenomenalism on the contrary maintains that the life
of the body and of its brain is an effect or manifestation of psychic activities
and in particular of conations - these being what "animate" living organisms.
3. The life processes apparently purposive
The fact from which hypophenomenalism starts is that not only the distinctively human life
activities and the life activities typical of animals, but even the vegetative
activities - where life is at its minimum - seem to be definitely purposive. And
hypophenomenalism, on the basis of an analysis of the notion of purposiveness
more careful than the common ones, contends that the life activities, even at
the vegetative level, do not just seem to be purposive but really are so.
Most biologists, however, are averse to employment of the notion of purpose on
the ground that it is a subjective, psychological one, inadmissible in a biology
that strives to be as wholly objective as are physics and chemistry. They
therefore speak instead of the "directiveness," or of the "equifinality" of
biological processes or, as does Driesch in the formulation of his Vitalism, of
an "entelechy" which, however, is not psychic but only "psychoid." But the
question is whether, if these terms are not just would-be-respectable-sounding
aliases for purposiveness, what they then designate is ultimately capable of
accounting for the facts it is invoked to explain. For the sake of concreteness,
let us therefore advert to some examples of those facts.
The peculiarities that differentiate living things from inanimate objects
include not only the fairly obvious characteristics - metabolism, growth,
reproduction, adaptability to environment - by which we ordinarily identify the
things we term "living"; but also various more recondite facts. An example would
be that "when ... one of the first two cells of a tiny salamander embryo is
destroyed, the remaining one grows into a whole individual, not a half, as one
might expect." Again, that "two fertilized eggs induced to fuse by artificial
means were found to produce one animal instead of two." The facts of
regeneration similarly challenge explanation: "The leg of a tadpole, snipped
off, may be restored, or the eye of a crustacean"; and so on. In sum, "if the
organism is prevented from reaching its norm of 'goal' in the ordinary way, it
is resourceful and will attain it by a different method."(3)
(3) E. W. Sinnott: Cell and Psyche, the Biology of Purpose, Univ. of North
Carolina Press, 1950, pp. 6, 29, 33.
Facts such as these strongly suggest that the life processes are purposive. But
that a process or activity is "purposive" is commonly taken to mean that it is
incited and shaped by the presence together of three factors in the agent: (a)
the idea of an as yet non-existent state of affairs; (b) a desire that that
state of affairs should eventually come to exist; and (c) knowledge of diverse
modes of 'action respectively adequate in different circumstances to bring about
the desiderated state of affairs. And, obviously, such an explanation of the
biological occurrences in view is open to several prima facie serious
objections. These, even when they have been merely felt rather than explicitly
formulated, have been responsible for the reluctance of biologists and
physicists to accept a teleological explanation of the facts cited,
notwithstanding the difficulty, which they have also felt, of doing altogether
without it. Let us now state and examine each of those objections.
4. Objections to a teleological explanation of, life processes
(a) The first
objection is that it is scientifically illegitimate to ascribe processes which,
like those in view, are material, to the operation of factors which, like
thought, desire, and intelligence, are mental.
The sufficient reply to this objection, however, is that, as David Hume made
clear long ago, only experience can tell us what in fact is or is not capable of
causing what. The Causality relation presupposes nothing at all as to the
ontological nature - whether material, mental, or other-of the events that function
as its terms. That a material event can be caused only by an event also itself
material is not a known fact but merely a metaphysical dogma. To look for a
material explanation of every material event is of course a legitimate research
program and one which has yielded many valuable fruits; but to assume that, even
when the search yields no material explanation of a given material event,
nevertheless the explanation of it cannot be other than a material one is,
illegitimately, to erect that legitimate research program into a metaphysical
creed - the creed, namely, of pious ontological materialism.
(b) The second objection is that a teleological explanation of biological
processes is superfluous because all their peculiarities can be adequately
accounted for by ascribing them to the existence and operation, in the organism
we call "living," of various servo-mechanisms; that is, of mechanisms whose
attainment and maintenance of certain results (to wit, growth of the organism to
a normal form, restoration of it when it gets damaged, preservation of a normal
equilibrium between its internal processes and the changes in its environment,
etc.) is due to guidance of the mechanism's activity at each moment by elaborate
feed-back channels that are constituents of the mechanism itself.
The reply to this objection is that, although some servo-mechanisms are known to
exist in the organism, and although the existence and operation of additional
servo-mechanisms would indeed be theoretically capable of accounting for those
results, nevertheless servo-mechanisms that would be specifically such as to
insure all those particular results are not in fact independently known to exist
in organisms. Hence, unless and until their existence is established by
observation of them, or by observational verification of predictions deduced
from the supposition that they exist and are of specifically such and such
descriptions, invocation of them to account for all biological processes is
nothing but invocation of a deus ex machina.
This means that the possibility of a teleological explanation of biological
processes is as yet left entirely open; and in turn, this underlines the general
requirement that, for an explanation to be acceptable, the cause it invokes must
be of a kind not just postulated ad hoc, but independently known to exist; and
further, known to be capable in some cases of causing effects similar to those
which it is invoked to account for in the case of biological processes.
Moreover, the fact that some servo-mechanisms - though not ones adequate to
explain all the particular facts in view - are known to exist in living
organisms leaves the existence there of these known servo-mechanisms themselves
to be accounted for. And, to explain their existence as being the end-product of
the operation of some "more fundamental" servo-mechanism is not really to
explain it at all unless the existence of the latter is not just postulated but
is independently known, and itself then somehow explained.
(c) The third objection to the ascribing of purposiveness to biological
processes is that presence of the three factors of purposiveness mentioned - an
idea of an as yet non-existent form or state of the organism, a desire for its
existence, and knowledge of what means would, under varying circumstances, bring
it into existence - is dependent on presence of a highly developed brain and
nervous system; which, however, is altogether absent at the biological level of
the processes here in view.
To this objection, the reply is that conjunction of those three factors is
characteristic not of all purposive activity, but only of certain kinds and
levels of it. More specifically, it is characteristic of purposive activity that
is both consciously and skillfully heterotelic, but not of purposive activity
that is blind, as in the case of the vegetative life activities.
5. The nature, kinds, and levels of purposive activity
But the force and the
implications of the above reply to the third of the objections considered can
become fully evident only in the light of an analysis of purposive activity and
of its various kinds and levels. The branch of philosophy which occupies itself
thus with the theory of purposive activity has no current name but might be
called Prothesiology (from Gr. πρόθεσιѕ = purpose, resolve, design.) Kant's
discussion of the teleological judgment, in Part II of his Critique of Judgment,
would belong to it. In his discussion, however, he considers chiefly man's
judgments of purposiveness in Nature rather than the nature, kinds, and levels
of purposive activity itself.
Moreover, the "mechanism" he contrasts with purposiveness is mechanism conceived
in terms only of motion of material objects or particles, and thus leaves out of
consideration such psychological processes as are not purposive but mechanical,
i.e., automatic. Also, he erroneously conceives teleology as a different kind
of causality instead of, properly, as causality in cases where the cause-event
(not the causality relation) is of a special kind. Kant's discussion of
teleology therefore does not furnish us with the analysis and conspectus we need
at this point. We shall introduce it by considering first a concrete case of
purposive activity of the type in which the three factors mentioned above
operate - say, the case of our shaking an apple tree for the purpose of getting one
of the apples it bears. In this activity, we discern the following five
elements:
1) The
idea we have, of our as yet non-existent possession of one of the apples.
2) Our desire that possession of one by us shall come to exist.
3) Our knowledge, gained from past experience, that shaking the tree would cause
apples to fall into our possession.
4) Causation in us - by the joint presence to our mind of that idea, that
desire, and that knowledge - of the act of shaking the tree.
5) Causation in turn, by this act, of the imagined and desired eventual fall of
apples into our possession.
This analysis of the example is enough to make evident already that, contrary to
what is sometimes alleged, purposive activity involves no such paradox as would
be constituted by causation of a present action by a future state of affairs.
For obviously what causes the act of shaking the tree is not the as yet
non-existent possession by us of an apple; but is, together, our present thought
of our future possession of one, our present desire for such future possession,
and our present knowledge of how to cause it to occur. By the very definition of
Causality, the cause, here as necessarily everywhere else, is prior in time to
its effect.
6. Conation: "blind" vs. accompanied by awareness of its conatum
Let us,
however pursue the analysis of purposiveness by considering next the various
respects in which examples of purposiveness may, without ceasing to be such,
depart from the type of the example analyzed above.
One possibility is that factor (1) in that analysis - to wit, an idea of the state
of affairs to be brought about - should be absent. In such a case, factor (2)
would properly be describable not as a desire, but only as a blind conation or
craving-blind as to what sort of state of affairs would satisfy it. A new-born
infant's craving for milk would be an example of this. "Desire," then, is
conation conjoined with an idea of its conatum; whereas "blind conation" is
conation unaccompanied by any idea of its conatum.
The activity incited by blind conation is even then purposive, but not
consciously purposive; and it is: (a) relatively random and therefore
successful, i.e., satisfying, only by chance; or (b) regulated automatically
(within a certain range of conditions) by some somatic of psychosomatic
servo-mechanism and therefore successful notwithstanding variations that do not
go beyond that range, as for example web building by spiders; or (c) stereotyped
irrespective of its appropriateness or inappropriateness to the special
circumstances that may be present in the particular case as when, for example,
the hungry neonate cries, irrespective of whether anybody is there to hear him
or not.
7. Desire, and ignorance or knowledge of how to satisfy it
When the inciting
conation is a desire, i.e., is coupled with awareness of the nature of its conatum - then termed its desideratum knowledge of a form of action that would
bring about occurrence of the desideratum may either be lacking or be possessed.
If it is lacking, the purposive activity incited is then of the consciously
exploratory, "trial-and-error," type. If on the contrary that knowledge is
possessed, the activity it incites is then not only consciously purposive but in
addition skilled, or informed, according as the knowledge shaping it is present
in the form of "know-how," or in conceptualized form.
8. Autotelism and heterotelism
Purposive activity - whether induced by a blind
conation or by a conation conjoined with awareness of the nature of its conatum
- may be autotelic, instead of heterotelic as in the example analyzed. That is,
what satisfies the conation may be the very performing of the activity, not some
ulterior effect caused by the performing of it. Examples of purposive activity
that is thus autotelic would be sneezing, coughing, yawning, stretching; and, at
a more elaborate level, the various play activities. In all such cases, what we
crave is to do these very things. The doing of them of course has effects, but
the activities are not, like the heterotelic ones, performed for the sake of
those effects, but for their own sakes.
9. What ultimately differentiates purposiveness from mechanism
The foregoing
survey of a number of ways in which telic activity may depart from the type
illustrated by the example of the shaking of the apple tree makes evident that
the one factor essential, i.e., necessary and sufficient, to purposiveness in an
activity, is that what directly incites the activity should be either wholly or
in part a conation.
It then becomes evident that causation of an activity or of any other event is
on the contrary "mechanical" if and only if the direct cause of it does
not
consist, either wholly or in part, of a conation. Moreover, this analysis of the
essence of "mechanical" causation applies irrespective of whether the activity
or event caused be a physical or a psychical one. Much of what goes on in our
minds occurs not purposively but mechanically; for example, occurrence of ideas
that had become associated with others by contiguity or by similarity; rote
recollections; orderly mental activities so habitual as to have become
automatic; etc. The mechanical character of such psychological processes, and
similarly of some psychosomatic and of some somatic processes, holds if what
directly incites them is not a conation; and holds even if a mechanism being
directly caused to function at a given time by something that is not a conation,
came itself to exist as end-product of a purposive activity that aimed to
construct it. (One's knowledge of the multiplication table would be an example
of a psychological mechanism that was so instituted.)
10. Servo-mechanisms
A servo-mechanism is a mechanism so provided with
feed-backs that the functioning of it does, notwithstanding disturbances of
certain kinds and magnitudes, automatically insure attainment or maintenance
within certain limits of a certain effect. A simple instance of a
servo-mechanism is an oil-burning furnace controlled by a thermostat which
maintains the house temperature within specific limits.
The point essential here to bear in mind in connection with servo-mechanisms is
that although, to an observer struck by the similarity of their behavior to that
of the behavior of a man actuated by a purpose, their behavior seems purposive
too, nevertheless it is wholly mechanical. The purpose which the observer infers
from his observation of the servo-mechanism's behavior is not entertained by the
servo-mechanism itself, but is the purpose which the constructor of the
mechanism intended that it should be capable of serving, and which the user of
the mechanism is employing it to serve: the thermostat's action, which turns the
furnace burner on or off, is not caused by a craving or desire in the thermostat
to maintain the room temperature within certain limits. Although the existence
of the thermostatically controlled furnace is artificial, i.e., came about
through somebody's purposive constructional activity, nevertheless once the
mechanism has come to exist, its operation is just as wholly mechanical as is
operation of the increase or decrease of the quantity of water pouring over the
natural spillway of a natural mountain lake, in maintaining the level of the
lake constant within certain limits.
But although the action of the thermostat in turning the burner on or off is not
itself purposive, it is nevertheless purpose-serving - the purpose served being
of course the householder's purpose of maintaining the house temperature
approximately constant. On the other hand, as the case of the mountain lake
shows, an activity, in order to be capable of serving somebody's purpose, does
not need either to be the activity of a purposive agent, or to be the activity
of a purposively constructed mechanism.
11. Creative vs. only activative conations
In the various types of telism
considered up to this point, the effect of the conations involved was to
activate some preexisting psychological or psychosomatic mechanism; either,
autotelically, for the sake of its very activity; or, heterotelically. for the
sake of an ulterior effect which the mechanism's activity automatically causes.
What we must notice next is that, instead of or in addition to being thus
activative, a conation may be both creative, and blind as to the determinate
nature of that whose creation would satisfy the conation.
An example would be the imaginative creation of the poem, drama, or musical or
pictorial composition which issues out of the composer's "inspiration," i.e.,
which is "breathed into" his consciousness by the specific conation operating in
him at the time. The creative process is here usually a step-by-step one, in
which ideas of portions or features of the composition are spontaneously
generated by the conation; these ideas, when they turn out to be such as to
satisfy it, being then embodied by the composer in perceptible material-words,
tones, colors, etc., as the case may be.
Other examples would be those constituted by discovery of the solution of some
intellectual problem; for instance the problem of discovering a proof that no
cube can be the sum of two cubes. The correct solution, if it comes, is - like
the incorrect ones that come - generated spontaneously by the intense conation
to solve the problem; which conation, however, is satisfied only by advent of
the correct solution and awareness that it is correct.
Another category is that of instances where what the conation generates is a
psychological or psychosomatic servo-mechanism g
such that possession of it constitutes possession of a skill. Instances of this
are of special interest in the present connection because part of what is then
created is an elaborate set of connections among neurons in the brain and the
cerebellum; and the fact that the conation to acquire a skill thus has a
creative somatic effect lends plausibility to the supposition that the somatic
phenomena of organic growth to a normal form, of regeneration, of adaptation,
etc., are similarly manifestations of conations that are somatically creative,
but are autotelic and blind as to what will satisfy them. This would mean that
the tadpole's new leg, restored after the original one had been snipped off-and
indeed the original one too - is, as Schopenhauer would have put it, an
"objectification" of, i.e., a spontaneous somatic construction by, the blind
conation for capacity to swim; and the crustacean's restored eye similarly a
spontaneous construction by the conation for capacity to see.
12. The question as to how conation organizes matter
It might perhaps be
objected, however, that anyway we do not understand how a conation manages to
organize or to shape matter. If so, the pertinent reply would be that the puzzle
is a wholly supposititious one. For wherever, as in this case and in many
others, what is in view is not remote but proximate causation, i.e., causation
of one event by another not through causation of intermediary other events but
directly and immediately, then the question as to the "how" of the causation is
strictly absurd. It is absurd because in any such case it loses the only meaning
it ever has, which is: "Through what intermediary causal steps does A cause
B?"
and hence to ask this, i.e., to ask "how," in cases of direct causation, is to
ask what the intermediary causal steps are in cases where there are none!
13. Telism ultimately the only type of explanation in sight for the life
processes
The supposition formulated above - of organization as direct effect
of conation - has the merit that it invokes a kind of cause, to wit, conation,
of which - by introspective attention to our psychological experience - we know
that some cases exist; a kind of cause, moreover, which we know to be sometimes
creative; and indeed sometimes somatically creative.
On the other hand, our examination of the objections to teleological explanation
of the life processes showed that each of the three objections is without force.
Moreover, no explanation of those processes, other than a teleological one, is
in sight; for to speak (as do E. S. Russell, R. S. Lillie, and others) of the "directiveness"
of the life processes; or (as does Driesch) of an "entelechy" that is not
psychic but "psychoid"; or (as does von Bertalanffy) of the "equifinality" of
the life processes; and so on, is either to bring in purposiveness itself, under
an alias; or else it is to invoke the operation of servo-mechanisms whose
existence, however, even if it were observed instead of only postulated, would
itself stand in need of explanation. That the explanation could ultimately be
only in terms of purposiveness follows from two considerations.
One is that since what differentiates living material, even in its most
elementary forms, from non-living material is the prima facie purposive
character of its processes, this character of all living material cannot be
accounted for by the hypothesis of chance variations or mutations in living
material, and of survival of those fittest to survive.
The other consideration is that the adequacy of that hypothesis to account even
for the differentiation of species within' already living material is to-day
seriously questioned by a number of biologists for several reasons. One is: (a)
that mutations are "rare, isolated, occurring in but one out of thousands or
tens of thousands of individuals, and hence have but infinitesimal chances to
propagate themselves and to persist in such a population." Moreover, (b)
mutation "does not recur sequentially in the same form, and hence cannot be
cumulative" and thus cannot produce the continuous and harmonious change which
the hypothesis of progressive evolution depicts. Besides, (c) "by the very laws,
which govern crossings in sexual reproduction, mutants have but infinitesimal
chances to survive and to propagate their type." Furthermore, (d) "mutation is
almost always a depreciative, noxious, or pathological phenomenon." Again, (e)
"mutation never affects any but relatively minute details, and never traverses
the limits of the species... In brief, mutation is at the most a factor of
variation within a species ... it certainly cannot transform the existing
species into novel ones."(4)
(4) Louis Bounoure: Determinisme et Finalite, Flammarion, Paris, 1957, Ch. II
pp. 70-72. Note also Raymond Ruyer: Neofinalisme, Presses Universitaires de
France, Paris, 1952; especially chs. IV, V, XVI, XVII. Also, H. Graham Cannon:
The Evolution of Living Things, Thomas, Springfield, Ill. 1958, and Lamarck and
Modern Genetics, Manchester Univ. Press, 1958 - See, however, E. Schroedinger:
Mind and Matter, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959 - Ch. 2.
14. Conation in the vegetative, the animal, and the human activities
The
eminent author from whose chapter on "Evolutionism: An illusory science" the
preceding observations are quoted considers in another chapter entitled, "Do
cells have a soul?", the neo-finalism of Ruyer, and criticizes it.
According to Ruyer, the apparent preordination of biological processes to
specific ends is owing to a dominating, essentially active and dynamic "primary
organic consciousness," whose sole intent, or ideal, consists of the forms and
capacities of the organs it constructs. This primary organic consciousness would
thus be concerned basically with the vegetative processes of living things; and
the processes of animal and of typically human life would be eventual
derivatives from it.
Ruyer contends in addition, however, that a similar consciousness, though at
more elementary levels, operates also in individual molecules and atoms, since
they are not mere aggregates but are systems. His hypophenomenalism. would thus
be not biological only but cosmological. But - leaving aside that additional
contention of his - the "primary organic consciousness" he invokes to account
for the apparent purposiveness of biological processes would seem to be much the
same thing in essence if not perhaps in its details, as the conations which we
found to be the constituent alone indispensable and therefore essential in the
only actions whose purposiveness is, not inferred, but directly and intimately
observable by us. These are, of course, our own purposive actions, whose
motivation we can scrutinize introspectively; whereas external perception, as we
pointed out earlier, has no way to distinguish between action really purposive,
and action automatically regulated by servo-mechanisms.
Bounoure criticizes Ruyer's hypothesis, by emphasizing that the processes that
go on in living organisms are triggered at every stage by determining conditions
- chemical stimuli, mitogenetic causes, etc., of which he describes various
interesting examples in some detail.
This determinism, however, which is beyond question, does not account for the
organism's inherent capacity to respond to those determinants and to variations
in them in a manner so adaptable as to attain a fixed result. Possession of such
capacity is the characteristic of servo-mechanisms, but it does not account for
its own existence. Indeed, Bounoure himself points this out when he writes that
"finality is implicate in organisms, but implication does not constitute
explanation. What needs to be accounted for is not organization already
existent, but the activity that constructs and organizes life" (p. 216).
Immediately after, however, he dismisses as futile and anthropomorphic Ruyer's
postulated immanent agent-consciousness.
What then does Bounoure himself ultimately offer us instead? Unfortunately, only
a statement that, in the organism, "the preordination of phenomena and ... the
vital value of their concatenation" are "marvellous characteristics of life;" or
a reference to the "essential mystery of life;" or an "acknowledgment, in the
organism's development of a veritable marvel." In effect, nothing but virtuously
emphatic avowals that he has no explanation whatever to offer!
As we shall see in the next chapter, however, some biologists no less
distinguished, among them H. S. Jennings, whose observations on the behavior of
paramecium Bounoure has occasion to cite - have not shared Bounoure's metaphysical
prejudice against the possibility of psycho-physical causation.
15. Hypophenomenalism vs. epiphenomenalism
How now do the merits of the hypophenomenalism we have formulated compare with those of epiphenomenalism?
Epiphenomenalism as we saw, has two defects. One is that although it
acknowledges that states of consciousness are not material events, nevertheless
it describes their relation to brain activity - which activity it alleges
generates them - only in terms of the in fact non-analogous relation between an
activity of a material object and generation by it of another material object.
The biological hypophenomenalism we have described, on the other hand, does not
suffer from any corresponding defect, for it does not contend - as would a
cosmological hypophenomenalism - that purposive mental activity, i.e., conation,
generates the matter of which the body consists, but only that it "animates" or
"enlivens" this matter, i.e., organizes it purposefully.
Again, epiphenomenalism is, we pointed out, altogether arbitrary in its dogma
that causation as between consciousness and brain is always from brain states to
states of consciousness, but never causation of brain states by states of
consciousness. In the contentions of hypophenomenalism, on the contrary, there
is nothing to preclude causation of particular changes in the state of the
living brain by particular changes in the state of consciousness; nor is there
anything to preclude causation in the converse direction. The biological
hypophenomenalism we have described is hospitable equally to both possibilities;
for the causality relation does not require that both its cause-term and its
effect-term be material events, nor indeed that either of them be so; and what
unprejudiced observation reveals is not only instances of physicophysical
causation, but also instances of psycho-physical, of physico-psychical, and of
psycho-psychical causation. This, however, brings up interactionism, which will
be the subject of the next chapter.
16. Hypophenomenalism and experimentation
Each person whose body is functioning
normally is in position to make perceptual observations of it and of the bodies
of others; to act physically upon it and upon them; to observe introspectively
in his own case the psychological effects of physical stimuli on his body, and,
in the case of other human bodies, to infer the psychological effects of such
stimuli more or less well from the behavior of those bodies. Also, situated as
we are, each of us is in position as occasion arises to observe human bodies
unconscious as well as conscious, dead as well as alive, and being born as well
as dying. It is because we have been in position to make these and related
observations of human bodies and of other physical objects and events, that we
have been able to gain such knowledge as we have of physico-physical causation
in general, and of physico-physical causation upon, by, and within the human
body. These last facts of causation are what in particular has invited, and has
been used as an empirical and experimental springboard for, the speculative leap
of epiphenomenalism, which, as we saw, goes far beyond those facts.
For the sake of healthy philosophical perspective, it is necessary now to point
out the respects in which our situation would need to be different from what it
is during life, in order that it should provide us with an analogous empirical
and experimental springboard for the hypophenomenalistic speculative leap.
In order to have such a springboard for this, we would need to be discarnate
minds, instead of as now minds possessed of and confined to a physical body. We
would need, as discarnate minds, to be able to communicate with and act upon
other discarnate minds directly, i.e., without, as now, physical bodies as
intermediaries; perhaps also, to some extent and exceptionally, to be able to
communicate with and act upon some incarnate minds likewise directly. We would
need to be able to observe the "spirit birth" of a mind, i.e., its advent, at
bodily death, into the world of discarnate minds; and conceivably also its
"spirit death", if bodily birth should happen to consist of incarnation of an
already existing "spirit" or "germ of a mind."
The situation of a discarnate mind as just depicted is of course more or less
what Spiritualists believe to be that of the minds of persons whose bodies have
died. They speak, however, of "spirits" rather than of discarnate minds -
apparently meaning by a "spirit" a mind or "soul" which although discarnate is
clothed with a "spiritual," more subtle kind of body. Spiritualists hold that
such discarnate minds can on exceptional occasions describe to us, in terms of
the observations and experiments which minds are able to make when discarnate, a
mind-body relation which, although not labelled by them hypophenomenalistic, is
yet essentially this; those occasions being the rare ones on which, purportedly,
a discarnate spirit borrows for the moment the body or part of the body of an
entranced "medium," and by its means communicates with us whether vocally, or by
automatic writing, or typtologically. Such paranormal incursions by a discarnate
mind into the world of living bodies would be the analogues of the paranormal
incursions of incarnate minds into the world of spirits, which Swedenborg and
some other psychics have claimed to have made.
It is interesting to note in this connection that if, at or after death, a then
discarnate spirit should lose the memories of the incarnate life he left at
death, he would then probably be just as skeptical of reports as to the
existence of an earth world and of physical human bodies as now we, who have no
memories of a spirit world, are skeptical as to the existence of one and as to
our having had, or being eventually to have, a life in one!
These remarks are of course not intended to prejudge the question of survival
after death; but only to make clear why the hypophenomenalistic speculative leap
cannot, our minds being situated as now they are in a physical body, be made
from an empirical and experimental springboard analogous to that which, situated
as they now are, they can use in making the epiphenomenalistic leap.
Attention to beliefs such as those of Spiritualism, which seem to us queer or
even paradoxical, can have the value of freeing to some extent our imagination
from the unconscious parochialism of its outlook, which naively terms
"unrealistic," or "contrary to commonsense," or perhaps "unscientific," anything
that clashes with our existing habits of thought.
Of course, readiness to consider paradoxical ideas must not generate readiness
to accept them without adequate evidence; but readiness to consider them can
well turn out to generate awareness that some of the ideas currently orthodox
whether in science or elsewhere are being accepted without adequate evidence.
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