Mental dispositions and desires

Psychology necessarily deals with dispositions and not just with what events actually occur. Even the behaviorists recognized that they should study tendencies to behavior and not merely the behavioral events themselves. Our question will concern the ontological status of these tendencies or dispositions.

Ryle (The Concept of Mind, 1949) takes the view that dispositional ascriptions “assert extra matters of fact” and claims that they are only “inference-tickets which license us to predict, retrodict, etc.” He quite explicitly denies that one should look for either causal or mechanistic explanations of the dispositions. This holds even in cases in physics and chemistry where there are explanations in terms of constituents and their propensities to attract and repel each other. His restriction against looking for explanations in terms of internal dynamics is, fortunately, largely disregarded in scientific practice.

We could interpret psychological dispositions in the same way that physics interprets potential energy. Bawden, for example, claimed in 1947 that “the role of the psychical in relation to the physical (in the living organism) is essentially the relation of the potential or incipient to kinetic or overt action.” I respond that potential energy is (again) a kind of disposition that must in some way exist, as a substance. 

In cognitive psychology it is a common starting point that mental activities consist of functions of information-processing modules, engaged, for example, in signal or symbol processing. This description refers only to the structural or formal aspects. Admittedly, structural changes are described, but no specific powers or dispositions for those processes are admitted. This is inadequate, however, from the point of view of any causal realism. Any account based on computation can only be realistic if it at least allows that the hardware implementations use objects with powers, as then physical symbol processing is consistently possible. Remember (from the previous post), that dispositions/causes remain absolute different in category from forms and information.

So, what is the actual nature of the dispositions that are operative in mental activities?  Are these just aggregations of physical dispositions, or are there ‘true mental dispositions’ that are distinct from the physical?  If the later were true, we would ask what impact the true human substances have on cognitive processing, since they will have their own characteristic powers and propensities not necessarily present in computers. The issue in psychology is thus whether the dispositions and powers that constitute the substance for mental objects and processing are related to the dispositions and powers manifest in the mind itself. I am thinking specifically of the emotional and motivational dispositions that make up the apparent life of mental feelings and intentions. These are powers that appear on first phenomenological analysis, so psychology should consider whether they could be the first ‘more fundamental’ underlying stuff of which cognitive and symbol processing is the activity.

According to Descartes, the soul (mind) is a substance and thought is the mode of its operation. This might explain what constitutes minds. However, Descartes does not offer a dynamical account to explain the operations of the soul. (On the contrary, he was pleased that the rational soul, as he conceived it, was completely outside the scope of the new empirical sciences and could be made subject to the edicts of ethics and religion.) In the end, Descartes never discusses reasons for the details of mental powers or capacities.  That is what we want really to discover!

Trying to understand Spiritual Identity

Many of us feel that that our identity is not constituted by our bodily or mental processes that change many times during each day, but is formed from something more fundamental and permanent. We might call this our 'soul' or our 'spirit'. Two recent blogs have been trying to understand this in more detail. They have made partial progress progress, but are still short of a full account.

The first comes from a blog by StephenB under the topic of  'Christian Darwinism and the Evolutionary Pathway to Spirit, and has (so far) generated 59 comments. Stephen describes;

Traditional Theistic Evolution [that] acknowledges two Divine creative strategies. (1) Through a purposeful evolutionary process, God “forms” man’s material body from the bottom up, and (2) By means of a creative act, God “breathes in” an immaterial soul from the top down, joining spirit with matter

He contrasts this with 'Contemporary Christian Darwinism', but here I am more concerned with what he takes to be the better view. He elaborates:

spiritual entities such as souls, minds and faculties, are non-physical entities and contain no parts, which means that they cannot disintegrate, die, or be changed into something else. ….  If then, spirit is to be joined with matter, its origins cannot come from matter or from a material process; it must come from another source, that is, it must come directly from God, who creates spirit and implants it in a pre-existing being from the top down.

What is interesting to me about this, is how he characterizes souls as 'non-physical entities'. That is the challenge for theistic science: to describe those entities in a  realistic and scientific manner as possible. We should not rely negative descriptions such as 'non-physical, but should seek a good positive description. And our new scientific description of the soul should describe *how* the soul *operates*. It is not fruitful to describe our soul as having 'no parts', and being 'unable to change into something else'. I know he means that they do not stop being souls, but it sounds like they would have trouble changing into a newer soul. Birth, growth, and re-birth of souls almost sound like they are forbidden. He also claims that souls 'come directly from God' and are 'implanted' in our newly conceived bodies. Surely, we might have thought, no body can live without some soul -- since souls are the source of our lives. So how can we ever live before that soul was implanted? To think of bodies existing without souls, even for a short time, opens many bizarre opportunities from zombies to soul-less humans. Not only bizarre, I should think, but impossible.

The other recent blog comes from a blog by  Gregory Ganssle for the Evangelical Philosophical Society under the topic Existential Dissonance and Core Identity, especially in relation to how young people form their own spiritual identities as the result of trying to sort out cognitive dissonances between conflicting scientific, philosophical and theological viewpoints. Gregory writes:

At the heart of each person is the very deepest region of our selves. I call this region, for lack of a better term, our core identity. A person’s core identity involves the deepest sense the person has of who she is or who she longs to be. What constitutes our core identity is rarely in the forefront of our minds. Often it takes patient self-reflection and work to identify the contours of one’s core identity. 

We see again here a struggle to formulate some clear idea of our soul as the basis for our identity. However, he does not seem to have a clear idea of what this 'deepest region' is actually made of. It is clearly related to 'longing', but it cannot be just what we long to be, but what we already are, now. He sees that is related to our 'values and beliefs':

we may determine that some belief or value that functioned within our core identity ought to be revised in light of other beliefs and values. We may recognize that we have a deeply ingrained habit that we want to change. This habit may be revealed in our relationships with others or our thoughts about our own lives. Beginning such change will be difficult, in part, because we are changing against the contour of our deeper values. We have to re-habituate ourselves to inhabit a new ordering of values and beliefs.

I do not think, however, that we are constituted by what we value or believe, but by something else. One of his commenters (Marty) has put a finger on something important here:

"What we love, the proper ordering of our loves, is a critical component of spiritual formation. Our heart always follows our treasure. Always."

I think that the best explanation of our 'core identity' is  that it is our most fundamental love. It is what we love that defines who we are. Everyone loves differently, so we are all different people. This idea of love as a substance may seem strange, but I see it as an essential and fundamental part of the theistic science that we are trying to construct. 

This views also consonant with a new view of the substance of physical objects as being constituted by all their powers and dispositions. See for example my paper 'Power and Substance' at  generativescience.org.

"God is Not Dead": is this proved in Amit Goswami's book?

This again an ambitious book, trying to use quantum mechanics to prove that God is not dead. Does he succeed? Yes: if you accept his very limited definition of God. But No: if you acknowledge rather that God is transcendent & immmanent Person.

Goswami starts with quantum mechanics, but soon stretches it beyond recognition. He does take quantum non-locality seriously, but he wants 'quantum correlations' to enable communications between all sorts of things between which we have trouble seeing the connections. In this way, he postulates connections between our four bodies that are physical, vital, mental, and the supramental soul. (Having of course postulated that all four exist!). These 'quantum correlations' are instances of 'downward causation', and give rise to 'wave function collapses'.

There are many difficulties with his views, both from the physical and theistic points of view.

From physics, he realises (p217) that Eberhard's theorem says that no information transfer can occur by means of quantum correlations. This would appear to cripple his whole scheme, but he states that "I have repeatedly pointed out that for information transfers between brains and minds, in which consciousness collapses the synchronistic events that constitute the transfer of information, Eberhard's theorem does not apply". The apparent reason for it not applying is that Eberhard refers to physics correlations, whereas Goswami is referring to 'correlations through consciousness', and 'For such correlation, there is no reason why Eberhard's theorem should apply, and therefore, message transfer may be possible.' This is hardly a positive statement of what can actually happen!

From a theistic viewpoint, he makes some very strange claims. Some of these stem from his attempting to make a non-dualist theory (p46), but, despite his claims, his theory is never really monistic at all. That is because he has 4 kinds of bodies not reducible to each other, or to God.

Some of his strange claims are:

1. 'God is the agent of downward causation'. One reading of this is true in theism, but Goswami turns it around. According to him, every instance of downward causation is God(!). So any experiment which demonstrates non-local correlations is therefore a proof of God. That is not God was we know him! We certainly do not believe his claim to have thereby 'rediscovered God within science'!
2. He has a 'body of mental archetypes' (the soul), alongside the other 3 physical, vital and mental bodies. To avoid the 'dreaded dualism' like the plague, he refuses to order these four bodies in any sense of being more spiritual or more material. It is never clear why 'archetypes' in one of our bodies have control over all the others. Similarly, there is no sense of the mind eg 'encompassing' the physical body, so it is not clear whether his final monism is idealistic or materialistic.
3. He does not want the 'superhuman' God of popular Christianity. Instead, he equates God with Brahman, with quantum vacuum, with 'quantum consciousness', and with the 'akashic field'. These last 3 are not transcendent in the religious sense.
4. His idea of God is of consciousness but not of love; of an agent but not a will; not a person; and not someone to love or worship. Later though (pp233ff) he does talk about 'Love of God', but does not explain it, and in the end has no real sense of spirituality of love.
5. He postulates consciousness only when we are deciding. So when we are processing information without deciding, we are not consciousness. This would imply erroneously that intellectual thought is not conscious!
6. So God is not conscious (p109)! Nevertheless, God works by making plans 'in potentia'. God must do this unconsciously!
7. The aim of evolution is 'play, purposive play, play of expression, the expression of all that is possible to express' (p129). There is no sense here of choosing (or even advocating) what is good to express, rather than the opposite.
8. He says (p142) that 'dualism is untenable because of experimental data that establish the law of conservation of energy', and then goes on to talk about theories of 'vital energy' (pp149-152). In reply, we note that if vital energy exists, then physical energy cannot be all there is, so it is unlikely to be conserved by itself. And then we note that there have been no experiments to test conservation of energy within living/thinking systems, which is just where we need to know if it is true or not.
9. He thinks that all altruism is just helping ourselves, because, by virtue of non-locality, we are all one within a monism. That is, he says we are all just selfish even when we help others! See my earlier post about monism/non-dualism.
10. I pass over his comments on Jesus.