About ten years ago, William Lyons wrote an informative book on intentionality (Approaches to Intentionality). One of the views he discussed was one in which intentionality was a biological function of informational covariance, where representational contents are analyzed by relations of causation and “signals.” The important point of that theory is that intentionality is NOT basic (and neither is mind as such) and therefore apt to be naturalized.
I was reminded of that view today in reading and thinking about Leibniz on the “perception” of monads. I put the term in scary quotation marks because for Leibniz perception in monads is analyzed by way of Leibniz’s technical notion of expression, where expression really has nothing irreducibly psychological about it at all.
When Leibniz says of monads that they express the entire universe from their respective “points of view,” similarly we should resist thinking of “points of view” as anything more than metaphor.
A “point of view,” like “perception,” is really just a way of talking about an information covariance, which is the job description of expression in Leibniz’s metaphysics.
“p expresses q” = “p contains information about q.” The nature of the containment is not irreducibly psychological, though it can be psychological (just not irreducibly so). A perception is just a special case of expression, which itself is just a case of informational covariance.
The surprise is that it accords so well with the spirit of some recent attempts to naturalize intentionality, though of course not with the letter.
If all this is correct (and I’m not saying anything original about how best to interpret Leibniz), then it poses huge challenges for Leibniz. When he says of a perception by a monad that it can differ in degrees of clarity and distinctness, the temptation to draw from the stock of commonsense, folk psychological concepts to elucidate these differences between the perceptions of monads is powerful. It has to be resisted, however, if he is to make good on the promissory note to analyze perception by means of expression (and not vice versa).
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
a hard saying from Leibniz
I don’t quite understand the following from Leibniz.
“If we pretend that there is a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perception, then we can conceive it enlarged, but keeping to the same proportions, so that we might go inside it as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts that push one another, and never anything that would explain a perception. Thus perception must be sought in simple substances, not in what is composite or in machines (Monadology 17).”
There’s a weak reading that might be expressed as follows: There is an inexorable conceptual gap between mental and material concepts. No amount of “fact-mining” about matter will result in concepts and propositions of matter that entail concepts and propositions of mentality. There is thus an unbridgeable explanatory gap.
The aforementioned weak reading, true as it might be, is probably too weak to express what Leibniz had in mind. He’s going after John Locke and others who claim that it is possible that purely material beings could also be thinking things. A weak reading does not square with the more ambitious goal of proving that thought belongs to the province of immaterial substances (in Leibniz’s case, monads that qualify as souls).
While I understand what the stronger reading would be, I don’t really know what the strongest Leibnizian argument for it would be (other than Leibniz asserting that matter, understood in the manner of the corpuscularian mechanists, does not exist... and Leibniz did NOT believe in the existence of matter but not for the same reasons as Berkeley). I suppose that Leibniz would advert to the Cartesian premise that mentality is basic to its proper, simple substance and therefore not an ontological product of more basic elements. But that’s not so much an argument as it is a principle that already loads the game in one’s favor.
I think it’s this kind of stuff that Kant was after when he discusses the “rational psychologist” — viz., philosophers who write about the mind with only a priori considerations in view.
“If we pretend that there is a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perception, then we can conceive it enlarged, but keeping to the same proportions, so that we might go inside it as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts that push one another, and never anything that would explain a perception. Thus perception must be sought in simple substances, not in what is composite or in machines (Monadology 17).”
There’s a weak reading that might be expressed as follows: There is an inexorable conceptual gap between mental and material concepts. No amount of “fact-mining” about matter will result in concepts and propositions of matter that entail concepts and propositions of mentality. There is thus an unbridgeable explanatory gap.
The aforementioned weak reading, true as it might be, is probably too weak to express what Leibniz had in mind. He’s going after John Locke and others who claim that it is possible that purely material beings could also be thinking things. A weak reading does not square with the more ambitious goal of proving that thought belongs to the province of immaterial substances (in Leibniz’s case, monads that qualify as souls).
While I understand what the stronger reading would be, I don’t really know what the strongest Leibnizian argument for it would be (other than Leibniz asserting that matter, understood in the manner of the corpuscularian mechanists, does not exist... and Leibniz did NOT believe in the existence of matter but not for the same reasons as Berkeley). I suppose that Leibniz would advert to the Cartesian premise that mentality is basic to its proper, simple substance and therefore not an ontological product of more basic elements. But that’s not so much an argument as it is a principle that already loads the game in one’s favor.
I think it’s this kind of stuff that Kant was after when he discusses the “rational psychologist” — viz., philosophers who write about the mind with only a priori considerations in view.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
the "will" of God
When Socrates quizzed Euthyphro on the nature of piety, he bequeathed to us an interesting and seemingly perennial philosophical puzzle about how to speak of God (which, for me at least, is equivalent to how to think of God).
It seems that one’s answer to Socrates either limits the scope of God’s power or makes equivocal the sense of “good” that is used to speak of God. Either way, the results aren’t so great (for the theist).
The issue comes up again in a different context between Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. The context is the scope of their rationalism(s) vis-à-vis what can and cannot be explained.
Here are three different ways of thinking through the “will” of God and standards of value.
Descartes believes the following:
From this it follows that there is no (rational) explanation for God’s actions, which is equivalent to affirming the existence of “brute” theological facts.
[Philosophical and autobiographical aside: Acknowledging the very real differences between the early modern rationalists causes me to get heated about pontificators who make sweeping generalizations about “the” Modern Period and the allegedly monolithic views that “modernists” had about the power of human reason.]
Leibniz can’t stand Descartes’ view of the will of God for at least two reasons.
Leibniz similarly in his New Essays gives trouble to John Locke by complaining that (a) to credit God’s action to God’s “arbitrary will and good pleasure [Locke’s words]” is tantamount to (b) impiously denying that God is good and (c) conceptually botching the handling of “pleasure” (i.e., an analysis of “pleasure” in a divine being must include a rationalizing object in exactly parallel fashion as in the case of “will”).
Spinoza flushes the whole lot. What Spinoza brings to light is an issue about anthropomorphism with respect to the concept of “will.” He is especially situated to do so because of his monism. Using contemporary jargon, one might say that language at the two levels of mental attributes and physical attributes consists simply of two modes of presentation of the self-same substantial reality underlying every fact—namely, God or Nature, which amounts to the same thing. To take too seriously language about the “will of God” (and also perhaps language about God itself) is to commit a gross kind of anthropomorphism, because this implies that there is an irreducibly personal substance—either God or any allegedly individual substance—that makes choices.
For Spinoza, there is no sense in which it is ever right to say of God that it is “like a man,” which is what bothers him about Leibniz’s view. However, Spinoza is not a Cartesian either, since there is no sense in which God is a person on his account. God may be a substance, but it’s not a person or agent in any sense.
For now, I’m closer to Leibniz than I am to either Descartes or Spinoza. I confess to finding Leibniz’s conceptual analysis of “will” to be prima facie compelling, and, not being a philosopher of religion, I'm likely to have to work harder than many to iron out my own thoughts on this.
My first obvious thought, however, is: Isn’t my predilection for Leibniz's concept of “will” just a gross anthropomorphism—a kind of “putting God in a box,” to use the pious vernacular? Good question... I don’t know how to respond, except to ask whether the mere act of speaking of God is an instance of “putting God in a box.” Until someone can give some real content to that allegedly impious boogeyman of a phrase, I don’t know what to say except that conceiving of the “will” of God along Leibnizian lines seems simply one place along a continuum of speaking of God, which is to deny that it’s impious or limiting per se, the via negativa notwithstanding.
It seems that one’s answer to Socrates either limits the scope of God’s power or makes equivocal the sense of “good” that is used to speak of God. Either way, the results aren’t so great (for the theist).
The issue comes up again in a different context between Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. The context is the scope of their rationalism(s) vis-à-vis what can and cannot be explained.
Here are three different ways of thinking through the “will” of God and standards of value.
Descartes believes the following:
- The will of God is indifferent from eternity with respect to any fact.
- It is not possible that (a) God considers x to be good and (b) x’s being good is (logically) prior to the divine volition to make it the case that x is good.
- God willing the world to come to be as it is constitutes the world’s goodness.
- God did not will the world to come to be as it is because he somehow perceived that it would be good if he were to do so.
From this it follows that there is no (rational) explanation for God’s actions, which is equivalent to affirming the existence of “brute” theological facts.
[Philosophical and autobiographical aside: Acknowledging the very real differences between the early modern rationalists causes me to get heated about pontificators who make sweeping generalizations about “the” Modern Period and the allegedly monolithic views that “modernists” had about the power of human reason.]
Leibniz can’t stand Descartes’ view of the will of God for at least two reasons.
- Morally speaking, he finds it repugnant that God would be a being who chooses with no standards guiding its decisions. What Leibniz implies is that there is a stink of moral incompetence in a scenario in which an agent is making arbitrary, unguided choices.
- Related to this is a conceptual constraint on the meaning of “will.” Leibniz writes in a letter to Monatus, “Descartes’ God has no will.” What he means is that the concept of will includes a rationalizing object of will (a particular good that is the proper object of a will). Surely, a perfect being should have a perfect will, which for Leibniz implies that there must be a rationalizing object of God’s will. Otherwise, what would it even mean to say anything about the “will of God,” much less a will in general?
Leibniz similarly in his New Essays gives trouble to John Locke by complaining that (a) to credit God’s action to God’s “arbitrary will and good pleasure [Locke’s words]” is tantamount to (b) impiously denying that God is good and (c) conceptually botching the handling of “pleasure” (i.e., an analysis of “pleasure” in a divine being must include a rationalizing object in exactly parallel fashion as in the case of “will”).
Spinoza flushes the whole lot. What Spinoza brings to light is an issue about anthropomorphism with respect to the concept of “will.” He is especially situated to do so because of his monism. Using contemporary jargon, one might say that language at the two levels of mental attributes and physical attributes consists simply of two modes of presentation of the self-same substantial reality underlying every fact—namely, God or Nature, which amounts to the same thing. To take too seriously language about the “will of God” (and also perhaps language about God itself) is to commit a gross kind of anthropomorphism, because this implies that there is an irreducibly personal substance—either God or any allegedly individual substance—that makes choices.
For Spinoza, there is no sense in which it is ever right to say of God that it is “like a man,” which is what bothers him about Leibniz’s view. However, Spinoza is not a Cartesian either, since there is no sense in which God is a person on his account. God may be a substance, but it’s not a person or agent in any sense.
For now, I’m closer to Leibniz than I am to either Descartes or Spinoza. I confess to finding Leibniz’s conceptual analysis of “will” to be prima facie compelling, and, not being a philosopher of religion, I'm likely to have to work harder than many to iron out my own thoughts on this.
My first obvious thought, however, is: Isn’t my predilection for Leibniz's concept of “will” just a gross anthropomorphism—a kind of “putting God in a box,” to use the pious vernacular? Good question... I don’t know how to respond, except to ask whether the mere act of speaking of God is an instance of “putting God in a box.” Until someone can give some real content to that allegedly impious boogeyman of a phrase, I don’t know what to say except that conceiving of the “will” of God along Leibnizian lines seems simply one place along a continuum of speaking of God, which is to deny that it’s impious or limiting per se, the via negativa notwithstanding.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Spinoza is not so strange... maybe
I’m getting more and more intrigued by Spinoza these days. I still can’t make sense of the ways that he connects his propositions in the early (and in my view the most interesting) parts of Ethics, but nevertheless I think I’m beginning to get a picture of what he’s really saying.
What strikes me about him is that on the one hand his philosophy is initially so bizarre as to make it hard to take him seriously, especially if one reads him too quickly; however, on the other hand, when one invests a little bit of patience and slowly mulls over his philosophical moves, he kind of sounds like he belongs to the 21st century.
In a very brief secondary text that I use for my History of Philosophy II course, Wallace Matson uses a nice metaphor to illuminate Spinoza’s monism. Jonathan Bennett, whose work has definitely impressed itself on me, also uses imagery of this sort. He asks us to consider a perspective of the cosmos as energy that is differentiated not in individual stuffs but only in degree of relatively frozen/stable states of regions of Stuff.
This would imply (at least) two levels of description of phenomena in that cosmos. Any purported individual-stuffs-language, especially descriptions of the motion of alleged individuals, would ultimately be analyzed by Stuff-language, perhaps like so:
Imagine if an alien being were to “enter our Universe” (per impossible). Or, if you don’t like that, imagine that an alien being were to be spontaneously generated. This alien being has vastly different sense modalities than we do. In fact, it only registers the relatively frozen/stable states of regions of Stuff, plus times. The purportedly individual-stuffs are frozen relative to the more fluid regions of less frozen Stuff.
Example: There is (a) the computer in front of me and (b) the region of space surrounding it. (a) is relatively frozen/stable vis-à-vis (b) which is relatively fluid. Throw in (c) some time indices.
How might that alien report its perceptions? [Philosophical aside: That there is an alien observer is irrelevant. I throw it in to help imagine the scenario; it actually plays no philosophical role.]
What we call an “individual thing” could be reported as an ordered pair that consists of a slice of space-time like so: t1 and a spatial region R, where at t1, R consists of (i) a relatively frozen/stable sub-region and (ii) a surrounding relatively fluid region.
Suppose that the computer moves from one region to another through time.
How might this be reported?
It could be reported as sequential sets of ordered pairs described above: {R1, t1}, {R2, t2, ... {Rn, tn}. The conditions are as follows: (i) the times are continuous, and (ii) R-members are continuous when taken in order.
This provides the raw materials for an analysis of “There are individual things whose positions alter through time.”
What is ultimately being analyzed (in fact, reduced) is reference to “individual things.” All reference to individuals (understood as res) must be reduced to reference to modes of energy (or rather, Energy), specifically its distribution in regions of relatively frozen/stable or fluid states.
Like so: “There are sequences of ordered pairs, {R1, t1}, {R2, t2, ... {Rn, tn}, and the R-members are not identical.”
The upshot is that you can get “movement through regions of space” without any individual res doing any movement. Instead, it’s simply, at the bottom level of analysis, a fact about relative distributions (i.e., modes) of the one and only thing that exists (i.e., Energy).
This is why Spinoza belongs to the 21st century (and also maybe why his work presages that monism, mysticism, and 21st century physics would converge in unexpected ways).
What strikes me about him is that on the one hand his philosophy is initially so bizarre as to make it hard to take him seriously, especially if one reads him too quickly; however, on the other hand, when one invests a little bit of patience and slowly mulls over his philosophical moves, he kind of sounds like he belongs to the 21st century.
In a very brief secondary text that I use for my History of Philosophy II course, Wallace Matson uses a nice metaphor to illuminate Spinoza’s monism. Jonathan Bennett, whose work has definitely impressed itself on me, also uses imagery of this sort. He asks us to consider a perspective of the cosmos as energy that is differentiated not in individual stuffs but only in degree of relatively frozen/stable states of regions of Stuff.
This would imply (at least) two levels of description of phenomena in that cosmos. Any purported individual-stuffs-language, especially descriptions of the motion of alleged individuals, would ultimately be analyzed by Stuff-language, perhaps like so:
Imagine if an alien being were to “enter our Universe” (per impossible). Or, if you don’t like that, imagine that an alien being were to be spontaneously generated. This alien being has vastly different sense modalities than we do. In fact, it only registers the relatively frozen/stable states of regions of Stuff, plus times. The purportedly individual-stuffs are frozen relative to the more fluid regions of less frozen Stuff.
Example: There is (a) the computer in front of me and (b) the region of space surrounding it. (a) is relatively frozen/stable vis-à-vis (b) which is relatively fluid. Throw in (c) some time indices.
How might that alien report its perceptions? [Philosophical aside: That there is an alien observer is irrelevant. I throw it in to help imagine the scenario; it actually plays no philosophical role.]
What we call an “individual thing” could be reported as an ordered pair that consists of a slice of space-time like so: t1 and a spatial region R, where at t1, R consists of (i) a relatively frozen/stable sub-region and (ii) a surrounding relatively fluid region.
Suppose that the computer moves from one region to another through time.
How might this be reported?
It could be reported as sequential sets of ordered pairs described above: {R1, t1}, {R2, t2, ... {Rn, tn}. The conditions are as follows: (i) the times are continuous, and (ii) R-members are continuous when taken in order.
This provides the raw materials for an analysis of “There are individual things whose positions alter through time.”
What is ultimately being analyzed (in fact, reduced) is reference to “individual things.” All reference to individuals (understood as res) must be reduced to reference to modes of energy (or rather, Energy), specifically its distribution in regions of relatively frozen/stable or fluid states.
Like so: “There are sequences of ordered pairs, {R1, t1}, {R2, t2, ... {Rn, tn}, and the R-members are not identical.”
The upshot is that you can get “movement through regions of space” without any individual res doing any movement. Instead, it’s simply, at the bottom level of analysis, a fact about relative distributions (i.e., modes) of the one and only thing that exists (i.e., Energy).
This is why Spinoza belongs to the 21st century (and also maybe why his work presages that monism, mysticism, and 21st century physics would converge in unexpected ways).
Thursday, June 5, 2008
how to stumble into Spinoza, or maybe Berkeley
Religious piety, combined with some traditional theses about the nature of (the Christian) God, can result in some surprises.
Christians believe that there is only one God. They might argue further that there can be only one God.
How could one argue for this? Here’s one way to argue for it by reductio that combines (a) a plain-vanilla thesis about omniscience and (b) a traditional, pious orientation towards whether or not God can be affected.
With respect to (a), if something is to count as God, then it must know everything that can be known.
With respect to (b), if God knows something, it has to be explained by reference to a feature intrinsic to God itself—in other words, in good Thomistic fashion, it’s got to be something other than God’s being affected, since being affected would imply an alteration of the type that counts against immutability and simplicity (and maybe atemporality).
Suppose that there are two Gods named Way-yeah and Hovah-Je. Does Way-yeah know about Hovah-Je? Either it does or it doesn’t. If it does not, then Way-yeah doesn’t satisfy the relevant restrictions on what would count as God. If it does, then ex hypothesi (since Hovah-Je is also a God), its knowledge is a function of its being affected—which implies that Way-yeah is not a God.
This might get the desired result: that there is and can be only one God.
However, doesn’t such an argument threaten to prove much more? It doesn’t promise to show only that there cannot be a God and another God. Doesn’t the argument also threaten to show that there cannot be a God and anything else?
By way of analogy, I know (or at any rate, have beliefs) about the computer screen in front of me because I am being affected by it.
By way of contrastive analogy, I know about my own beliefs (i.e., the content of my own mind) because either (i) my beliefs are a “part” of me or (ii) I am being affected by my own nature.
Replace Hovah-Je above with “the world” and amend the argument slightly:
Suppose that there are two things: a God and its creation, the world. Does God know about the world? Either it does or it doesn’t. If it does not, then it doesn’t satisfy the relevant restrictions on what would count as God. If it does, then its knowledge is a function of its being affected—which implies that it is not a God.
One way to block the second horn to is deny that God’s knowledge of the world is a function of its being affected by the world. One way to do that is to specify that its knowledge, in some interesting sense, comes from itself. However, an illuminating analogy for how that’s supposed to work is the one above that lines up this kind of knowing with knowing the contents of one’s own mind.
Bam: we’ve got pantheism (or atheism with “God” talk as reverent residue). Or maybe we’ve got Berkeleyan idealism... I don’t know.
Another way to block the inference is to deny traditional assumptions about the nature of God—which is to affirm that God can and does change and that it is affected by things outside of itself.
Christians believe that there is only one God. They might argue further that there can be only one God.
How could one argue for this? Here’s one way to argue for it by reductio that combines (a) a plain-vanilla thesis about omniscience and (b) a traditional, pious orientation towards whether or not God can be affected.
With respect to (a), if something is to count as God, then it must know everything that can be known.
With respect to (b), if God knows something, it has to be explained by reference to a feature intrinsic to God itself—in other words, in good Thomistic fashion, it’s got to be something other than God’s being affected, since being affected would imply an alteration of the type that counts against immutability and simplicity (and maybe atemporality).
Suppose that there are two Gods named Way-yeah and Hovah-Je. Does Way-yeah know about Hovah-Je? Either it does or it doesn’t. If it does not, then Way-yeah doesn’t satisfy the relevant restrictions on what would count as God. If it does, then ex hypothesi (since Hovah-Je is also a God), its knowledge is a function of its being affected—which implies that Way-yeah is not a God.
This might get the desired result: that there is and can be only one God.
However, doesn’t such an argument threaten to prove much more? It doesn’t promise to show only that there cannot be a God and another God. Doesn’t the argument also threaten to show that there cannot be a God and anything else?
By way of analogy, I know (or at any rate, have beliefs) about the computer screen in front of me because I am being affected by it.
By way of contrastive analogy, I know about my own beliefs (i.e., the content of my own mind) because either (i) my beliefs are a “part” of me or (ii) I am being affected by my own nature.
Replace Hovah-Je above with “the world” and amend the argument slightly:
Suppose that there are two things: a God and its creation, the world. Does God know about the world? Either it does or it doesn’t. If it does not, then it doesn’t satisfy the relevant restrictions on what would count as God. If it does, then its knowledge is a function of its being affected—which implies that it is not a God.
One way to block the second horn to is deny that God’s knowledge of the world is a function of its being affected by the world. One way to do that is to specify that its knowledge, in some interesting sense, comes from itself. However, an illuminating analogy for how that’s supposed to work is the one above that lines up this kind of knowing with knowing the contents of one’s own mind.
Bam: we’ve got pantheism (or atheism with “God” talk as reverent residue). Or maybe we’ve got Berkeleyan idealism... I don’t know.
Another way to block the inference is to deny traditional assumptions about the nature of God—which is to affirm that God can and does change and that it is affected by things outside of itself.
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