Philosophy of mind.
Clarifying the true ‘philosophy of mind’ is essential to understanding volition, and other forms of causality. David Hume’s assault on volition and more broadly on all causality[1], was made possible by his erroneous general views on mind and cognition. It is amazing how naïve, inaccurate, and fallacious, much of what is nowadays made to pass as philosophy of mind is in fact.
For a start, what do we mean by ‘mind’? With regard to etymology, briefly put, this word is thought to derive from ‘men-’ a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘to think’, with derivatives referring to qualities and states of mind or thought[2]. The term ‘mind’ gives rise to numerous nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and phrases. The mind (n.) refers colloquially to a non-material space, playground or storehouse (as it were), for all the entities, states, qualities, actions, etc. which we would consider mental as against material (more on that distinction later). This would include primarily contents of sensory-perception, memories of such contents, imaginations derived from them, and intuitions. Such concrete contents and derivatives are, to be precise, all mental qualia; that is, they have the phenomenal qualities of what is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched, or felt (in the intuitive or emotional sense). At a later stage, the term mind includes a large number of more and more abstract contents, such as the concepts of sensation, of perception, of intuition, of memory, of imagination, of qualia, of concrete and abstract things, and a lot more. From the term mind, we derive a large number of others, such as mental (adj., pertaining to the mind), minding (v., paying attention to or caring about), not minding (ignoring or being indifferent to), reminding (calling to one’s attention again), mindful (being fully aware), mindless (lacking awareness), and many more.
We are thought and said to have, minimally, a body (a physical entity we seem to inhabit and own) and a mind (a non-physical entity we seem to inhabit and own). In this perspective, the mind is often taken to include ourselves, i.e. our souls – that to which body and mind ‘belong’. I personally prefer, for clarity’s sake, to call this larger concept of mind the psyche, and to reserve the term mind for the more specific concrete and abstract contents (not including the soul itself, but of course including concrete intuitions and abstract thoughts of it and its three functions). Thus, for me, psyche includes soul (the self, the spiritual aspect of our existence) and mind (in the narrower sense). Both soul and mind are evidently closely related to the body in various ways.
Thus, we have three dimensions of being, as it were: our soul, our mind, and our body. These clarifications are not trivial, but a necessary beginning, if we aim for an intelligent philosophy of mind. The soul has three basic functions, three ways its existence is expressed and is made evident. These are: consciousness (the cognitive function), volition (the function of inner and outer action) and valuation (the function of choosing and deciding).
It must be stressed that I do not (or no longer do since I wrote the essay “Critique of the Buddhist Five Skandhas Doctrine”) conceive of a ‘soul’ as a sort of ‘substantial entity’, a sort of ‘body’ composed of a ‘spiritual’ stuff (as distinct from one of ‘material’ stuff), something with an extension and a location in space, existing in some other dimension(s) of being, somehow intertwined with the material world. No, all these descriptive terms are mere metaphors, not to be taken literally. The spiritual ‘realm’ (again, just a simile) is so very different from the more manifest physical realm (or indeed the mental ‘realm’ of personal memories and imaginations, and feelings and emotions) that we have no words for it. For this reason, we are forced to think and speak of it by means of rough analogies. But the existence of this ineffable thing is, through personal intuitive experience, indubitable; and there is much reason for each of us to assume others have (are) the same.
The term consciousness refers primarily to a cognitive act or relation between a subject (the soul or self) and an object (whether the soul itself, or a mental content, or a bodily or wider physical phenomenon). Cognition is something sui generis; it cannot be ‘reduced’ to any other concept (like a physical process in the brain or a physical field of sorts). Consciousness is thus something essentially static; it is not primarily an entity or a quality or a state or a process. Consciousness means, primarily, being aware of something; not just ‘aware’, note well, but ‘aware of something’. Usually, when we are conscious, our focus is on the object of consciousness; but it is also possible to focus on our consciousness, in which case it is then an additional object of consciousness[3].
Whether awake or asleep, we cannot be said to be conscious if we are literally not at all conscious of anything at the time. A person may be said to qualitatively ‘be conscious’, i.e. to have a ‘state of consciousness’, only derivatively – only if and when and while it is actively conscious of something, i.e. performing the cognitive act of consciousness which relates it in a special way to some concrete or abstract object(s), whether material (based on sense-perception), mental (memory, imagination, or dream) or spiritual (as in self-awareness and intuition of functions of self).
Similarly, the term ‘stream of consciousness’ is a misnomer – it is used to describe, more precisely, a stream of thought, i.e. a stream of successive mental contents such as intuitions, perceptions, memories, mental images and sounds, verbal comments, feelings, conceptualization, and so on. Thought is made possible by many and diverse acts of consciousness, but the terms cannot be equated. It follows that, though we can speak of subconscious thoughts, by which we mean thoughts occurring with a very low intensity of attention, we cannot speak of literally unconscious thoughts – doing so would be self-contradictory.
It is likewise inaccurate and misleading to equate, as some people do (notably Buddhist philosophers), the terms ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’. It is also erroneous to describe the mind as an ‘entity’ made of consciousness. Consciousness is not the stuff of mind – mental contents might be regarded as made of sort of distinctly mental stuff, but consciousness is something else entirely (as above already defined). Most important, consciousness is not conscious; it is we (the self, the soul or spirit) who are conscious – conscious of other things, or even of oneself, or even of the fact of consciousness.
Consciousness is thus essentially a verb, not a noun or adjective or adverb. It relates the Subject (one’s very self) to some object or other. Intuition, sense-perception, inner perception (of memories and imaginations), conception (of abstractions based on the preceding concretes), verbal thought – these are species or types of consciousness, all involving the marvellous phenomenon of cognition.
Consciousness of something (i.e. many things, internal and/or external, concrete and/or abstract) is behind and a necessary condition for every volition (act of will) and valuation (projection of value onto something). Consciousness may be switched on and intensified by an effort of volition, but its cognitive functioning is independent of volition. Likewise, consciousness can occur without valuation, whereas valuation cannot occur without consciousness.
Volition can reasonably be placed ahead of valuation; because volition can and does (though relatively rarely) occur without any goal in mind, as pure caprice (with not even the goal of being capricious); and also, because valuation itself involves an act of volition (that of choosing and deciding), as well as of cognition.
Thus, every act of volition is preceded by and accompanied by some degree of consciousness, however dim, and usually aimed at some value which we have imagined or reasoned as worth pursuing (and which duly influences our act). To speak of will as being literally unconscious (i.e. to say ‘unconscious will’) is inaccurate; all willing necessarily involves at least a bit of consciousness, and if the latter is truly absent the movement involved cannot be characterized as volitional (but only as mechanical or fortuitous).
Valuation refers to the soul’s assignment of value (or disvalue) to something thought of or currently perceived. Obviously, this involves both consciousness and volition. Valuation is not to be confused with desire, because though one may experience a strong desire (e.g. a lust for sex or greed for food), one is still free to grant it value or not, and thus pursue it or not. We often try to evaluate things rationally, by going through a research and reasoning process of some sort, or by referring to an existing ethical doctrine; but often, too, we attach value (or disvalue) to things in a rather instinctive or arbitrary manner.
(The ethical concept of wisdom is, of course, relevant here. Wisdom is consciousness, volition, and valuation, in accord with objective ethical truth. Of course, such truth is not easy to determine, but there is surely such a thing.)
The three basic functions of soul thus form a nexus, even though they are conceptually distinguishable. The concepts of thought and belief, action and behavior, and motive and purpose, are less fundamental than the three basic concepts of consciousness, volition, and valuation – the former are bunches of the latter.
The epistemological basis of all we have said so far is phenomenological, note well. It is through careful first-person introspection, and discussion with other people, with an eye to logical consistency, and with ample use of intelligence and intellectual honesty, that we arrive at these insights fundamental to any philosophy of mind. Introspection is simply becoming aware of the phenomenological givens. This is as scientific as any other body of knowledge, provided it is well understood that the result is inductive and not dogmatic certainty. One can reasonably imagine that some of the appearances manifest to us might turn out to be wrong someday; but one cannot reasonably claim that such imagined theoretical possibility invalidates all our insights from the start. To propose an alternative theory, one would have to provide specific stronger evidence; it would not suffice to express a general skepticism about the reliability of introspection.
I am thinking here of the currently widespread prejudice, among alleged scientists of the mind, that what appears as ‘mental’ can be expected to one day be ‘reduced’ to purely physical phenomena, in the brain and nervous system. This claim is based on the prejudicial claim that the laws of physics are universal, although that claim is in fact merely based on generalization from observations in the physical world. These people argue that if the laws of physics did not ultimately apply to mental phenomena (meaning mainly consciousness, volition, and valuation, but also all other mental experiences), then these laws would not be universal. This is true; but it is a mere circular argument, with no logical force whatsoever, to consider this as a good reason for denying the distinctive nature of mental phenomena.
The reductionist thesis is a mere hypothesis, which would only become credible if and when (if ever) the laws of physics could predict, through exact mathematical formulae and theoretical explanations applied to precise empirical findings, the relationship of mental phenomena to physical ones. Until then, all these people have to offer is a statement of faith, a materialist ideology that arbitrarily ignores and denies inconvenient phenomenological evidence, viz. the empirical givens of mental experience and life. Note well, the materialists have not (and I dare say never will) empirically or theoretically proved that mental phenomena are kinds of physical phenomena; they just presume they ‘ultimately’ are.
For example, Francis Crick[4] famously declared, in his The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994), “you, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells.” In this one short sentence, he at once denied self/soul, consciousness, volition, and valuation!
It should be clear to all honest thinkers that even if specific electrochemical and other physical processes in the brain and other parts of the nervous system are identified as always underlying specific mental events, that would not prove that the former are the causatives of the latter; it would only at best go to show initially that physical processes accompany mental ones, i.e. are parallel events; for it remains conceivable given such comparative data that, on the contrary, the latter are the causatives of the former. It is also possible, and (in my view) most probable, that sometimes the physical causes the mental and sometimes the mental causes the physical. It would certainly not constitute valid reductionism, unless and until (to repeat) mental phenomena as such were themselves proven to fall under the laws of physics, i.e. to be material phenomena.
What is sure is that the proponents of such materialist views of mind have nowhere near achieved this necessary scientific proof. Until they do (and they never will, I wager) we should assume, on the contrary, that physical events always accompanying mental ones are (sometimes if not always) effects, rather than causes, of them – in view of the arguable autonomy of volitional acts by people (and probably animals) as against the determinism of observable purely physical movements, and in view of the exceptional nature of consciousness (of objects by subjects).
Some people go so far as to deny outright the very existence of mental phenomena, claiming that what we mean by these words is nothing other than the neurological events that physical science can actually detect, describe, and quantify. This is known as ‘identity theory’ – because it does not merely claim that mental and physical processes are parallel, with the one causing the other or vice versa, but that they ‘are’ one and the same, and indistinguishable, and entirely physical. This is an extreme version of behaviorism. Effectively, these people are willing to deny the very existence of anything that they cannot wrap their little heads around!
According to them, there is no such thing as persons with powers of consciousness, volition, and valuation, experiencing distinctively mental phenomena. Humans and animals are just sophisticated inanimate machines, subject to blind determinism. If so, how could these people at all formulate their self-denying theory? What would they be talking about if there were nothing mental to talk about? If they don’t exist and they lack awareness, free will, and value judgment, how would they have come to see the mental domain as a problem needing their inane solution? These people are not scientists, because they discard the scientific method. They choose to adapt reality to their theory, rather than adapting their theory to reality.
Without normal scientific proof, i.e. without strict application of the scientific method, and blithely ignoring all the evidence of mental life and stupidly ignoring numerous logical considerations such as those above laid out, the materialist reductionists arbitrarily claim a thesis of ‘matter over mind’, in place of the commonsense thesis of ‘mind over matter’ (or more precisely put, of ‘soul over mind and matter’). They want to simplify and unify knowledge at any cost. They think that what seems ‘obvious’ to them needs no further proof.
In truth, it is useless and self-contradictory to deny reality to consciousness and volition, as these people are desperately attempting to do, because any such denial itself necessarily involves and logically implies acts of consciousness and volition (which they maliciously fail to take into account and explain). Only a person with consciousness and volition can engage in meaningful affirmation or denial of anything; and such judgments can only be understood by persons with the same powers. All they have to offer, to repeat, is a prejudice – a far from credible, indeed absurd, yet amazingly persistent prejudice.
Unfortunately, this materialist mindset is widespread today and has been for the last couple of centuries or more; so, it is hard to awaken people to its absurdity. It is effectively a faith, a sort of atheistic religion. Those who accept such nonsense are truly simpletons.
[1] In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).
[2] See: www.etymonline.com.
[3] Indeed, contemplation of one’s consciousness while one is aware of whatever (else) one happens to be aware of here and now (whether inside or around one) – this is a powerful meditation technique (which I occasionally practice and recommend). In this meditation, note, the first object of consciousness is not ignored; but the fact of consciousness of it becomes in turn an object of consciousness, superposed on the first, and indeed henceforth the principal focus of our attention. The act and state of consciousness, the miracle, marvel, and mystery, of the cognitive relation we are able to have with things in and around us, all become objects of one’s meditation.
[4] The British physicist, neuroscientist, and molecular biologist (1916-2004) who discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953 together with James Watson and others. About his book, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis.
- January 2025 (7)