Knowing Before Being, Part 3: Knowing Brains

On the existential importance of not confusing epistemology and ontology

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been asking what science is, and how science acts. In Part 1, I stressed that science must be understood as a method rather than as a fixed ontological vision of reality; last week, in Part 2, I built on this basic position to argue in favor of C.S. Peirce’s understanding of how to do the scientific method: pragmatically predicting future qualitative, phenomenal experience.

Knowing Before Being: Part 2: Appearances & Predictions

This week, I want to conclude this series by asking: why does any of this matter? As I suggested at the end of Part 2, I think Peirce’s pragmatic phenomenology has many applications, but I think its most fruitful ones are in philosophy of mind. For most of the last century, English-language philosophy of mind has been committed to a physicalist understanding of the mind. This physicalist or materialist philosophy of mind basically generally took two tracks: first, an earlier mid-20th century emphasis on a behaviorist-informed perspective of eliminativism, which denied that qualitative consciousness really exists at all. Second, the latter part of the 20th century saw the rise of various schools of (often functionalist-informed) property dualism which remain the most popular today (at least in English-language analytic philosophy): epiphenomenalism, non-reductive materialism, emergentism, etc., which argue that consciousness truly exists or happens—and is distinct from physical substances or physical properties—but that it is generated by physical matter or is identical to the arrangement of certain types of physical matter (the specifics depending on which school of property dualism one is subscribed to).

Now, these two broad approaches—eliminativism and property dualism—are obviously different in many important ways. But they both argue that only physical “stuff” is real, and that consciousness is, at best, a kind of metaphysical addendum, generally with little if any causal role to play in reality (though the constitutive non-reductive physicalism of Nancey Murphy or Kevin Corcoran would assign more ontological weight to consciousness). This perspective has major ramifications for ethics and spirituality, and so has generated a wide and deep backlash from people, of a wide array of cultures, ideologies, and perspectives, who feel that physicalism is both philosophically insufficient as well as morally dangerous.

Those who have read much of my substack will know that I share this criticism of physicalist philosophies of mind, yet these physicalist approaches remain pretty well-entrenched, especially in English-language analytic philosophy of mind. And I don’t think it’s hard to see why: as we have been discussing the last two weeks, science is an extremely powerful tool for answering questions; it has revealed a vast trove of knowledge that our ancestors a few centuries ago lacked. It has enabled us to develop truly astounding technologies that have reshaped and continue to reshape our lives. And so it’s not difficult to understand why good philosophers of mind would want their theories to be in accord with science. And since science operates with a materialist, or at least physicalist,¹ method, the logic is clear: good philosophy of mind should be physicalist, too. On this view, what we are is brains, brains that know, and we should know that we are brains.

But I hope that Parts 1 & 2 have shown that such a conclusion, though understandable, is faulty. Firstly, because science’s physicalist commitment is methodological and not ontological, and second, because genuine science actually must assume a non-physical human consciousness to begin with. This is certainly the position that Peirce defended, and that I began reflecting on last time. Let’s build on those Peircean insights here and see why a good, scientifically-informed philosophy of mind should certainly not assume physicalism, and why indeed it should probably embrace—as both Peirce and Immaneul Kant did—a mode of idealist metaphysics. On this view, brains on their own, since they are objects known, may not be able to account for the act of conscious knowing itself.

We saw last time how Peirce understood the work of science: one develops a hypothesis, and then one tests that hypothesis. Ultimately, that testing results in the conscious human subject receiving information about the world through their own qualitative, phenomenal consciousness: purely quantitative measurement must be received by the human observer, the human scientist, within their qualitative consciousness. So, if I am measuring the temperature of something, I place a thermometer in it, wait a few minutes, and then check the reading. But that act of checking the reading is always not just mediated by my qualitative consciousness, it is really an event that happens within my consciousness: as Peirce and Kant both stressed, the only thermometer I know, the only thermometer I can know, is the thermometer-as-known, the thermometer as a phenomenon. The noumenal thermometer, the thermometer in its own pristine existence independent of my mind, is utterly unknowable to me (this does not mean that it is not real or does not exist; Peirce and Kant’s point here is thoroughly epistemological, not ontological.)

Science, then, is an attitude, a set of habits, a method, that happens within human consciousness. It always resolves to a qualitative phenomenal “state” within consciousness. Now this obviously has important ramifications for any materialist or physicalist view of science. Again, though, it matters greatly whether we take that physicalism as methodological or ontological:

To insist that science must be methodologically physicalist is simply to operate with the assumption that physical phenomena—that is, phenomena which signify physical entities in spacetime—play by consistent rules that govern their interactions with each other, that these rules are stable and can be discovered, and that no non-physical entity should be invoked as a cause of any physical event unless reason and evidence demand such a radical explanation. In other words, we assume that the arrangement of physical phenomena at time t₁ will predictably result in a different arrangement of physical phenomena at time t₂. The universally applicable way in which the first physical arrangement transforms into the second arrangement is what we describe as the laws of physics, and why science has shown time and again is that these laws can be applied effectively to sets of physical phenomena in very predictable ways. One need not invoke any super-physical reality in order to explain, for example, how a seed sprouts and becomes a massive tree.

So far, so good. But we must remember that this whole discourse about physical reality is happening within, to, and for, consciousness, and at times, among various consciousnesses. That is to say, the only physical entities we know are physical entities present to us as phenomena, constituted by qualities within consciousness. For this to not be the case, we would need to be able to refer to a physical entity in such a way that that physical entity was unknown, not present to consciousness and thought. But obviously, as pointed out above and in Part 2, any entity which has as a quality mind-independence is, by definition, unknown and unknowable to any mind—very much including to my own mind as I think about this very question.

In other words, our discussion about physical entities—which we do assume have existence apart from their presentation as phenomena within qualitative consciousness—nevertheless happens entirely within that very consciousness. This is a crucial point to any phenomenological discussion, and I think to any genuinely worthwhile philosophy of mind as well. But it is so easy to overlook.

Part of the problem—probably the biggest part—is that our dependence on phenomenal qualitative consciousness is, strangely, often invisible to us. We see a bird, and we assume that we really are seeing the bird, rather than reflecting “well here I have a phenomenon within consciousness which signifies the existence of an extra-mental bird, a bird which, by its very nature, is inaccessible to me as such”. And, of course, that makes sense. We don’t really have the time or energy to constantly engage in a phenomenological reduction of every experience we have.

But when we are doing philosophy of mind, we definitely should be doing that phenomenological reduction! Because failing to do so results in the vast network of confused ideas that currently passes for philosophy of mind in analytic philosophy.

Another way of putting this critical but opaque point is this: philosophy of mind often confuses epistemology and ontology. We perceive a given phenomenon, and instead of asking “how does this phenomenon mediate knowledge to me?” we ask “what is this thing?” So we easily take the world of the appearances to be the world as it really is, independently of our knowing it. Now, crucially, in good science, the appearances we are talking about are not the sensible objects that we perceive through sight, sound, touch, etc. Science has long recognized that the objects of sensory experience are not physical reality as it really is in its noumenal enclosure. Instead, the appearances that matter to science are the quantitative entities that we assume constitute those larger physical entities which we perceive through our senses qualitatively.

This reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative was essential to the Newtonian project, and was pioneered by thinkers like Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei. And, again, let’s not forget: this reduction of reality to the quantitative is extremely powerful and has resulted in a huge amount of genuine, extremely valuable knowledge about reality. Valid critiques of the way in which physicalism has distorted philosophy of mind should not devolve into simplistic diatribes against science or even physicalist method as such. The problems, and solutions, here, will be far more nuanced.

Even so, it is crucial to always remember that the reality we can actually test, the reality we can actually know, the reality that appears to, for, through, and within us, is entirely qualitative. We know redness, blueness, and greenness as qualities, not as differing frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. Now, just because light appears to us qualitatively does not, of course, mean this necessarily is what it really is, or that a quantitative description is somehow wrong—again, science can really only do its thing when it quantifies, and when it does its thing, all kind of genuine knowledge is generated.

But this methodological reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative is itself an act of bracketing, of choosing to regard and interpret experience quantitatively, even as that experience continues to present itself qualitatively. As recounted in part 1, to lose track of this and believe that the quantitative account somehow gives us an unmediated access to reality as it is, and to regard the qualitative presentation that we actually know as either dependent on the quantitative or actually just a sort of illusion, is a claim that needs to be justified epistemologically. But that’s precisely what physicalism in general, and physicalist philosophy of mind in particular, never seems to do.

In other words, whatever our account of reality, whatever our ontology, it must somehow face the phenomenological primalness of qualitative consciousness: reality appear to the scientist first as quality; quantity is a conceptual reification she does in order to learn specific things about how physical existence appears to us. Indeed, according to Peirce, what the scientist is really doing is learning how to predict future qualititive appearances. At no point does this method somehow shortcut the reality of qualitative consciousness; indeed, this method presumes the primalness of qualitative consciousness and regards quantitative reasoning as contingent upon qualitative consciousness. This is the epistemological and phenomenological reality we must work from, no matter what ontology we might want to argue for in the final analysis.

Of course, physicalism wants to argue that, though reality may appear qualitative to us, it is actually quantitative (whether in Newtonian or post-Newtonian form(s)). But this then raises the million-dollar “hard problem of consciousness”: how does a purely quantitative state or arrangement of states generate qualitative consciousness?

It’s crucial to note that this question has nothing to do with trying to explain human behavior, which does indeed seem to be a set of (admittedly very complex) physical phenomena which is best answered by scientific—that is to say, quantitative—reasoning and experiment. Our question is not why a specific human being likes looking at a given tree, but rather: why is there something it’s like to look at a tree; why does a certain range of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum correspond to the quality of greenness?

As far as we can tell, this qualitative aspect of consciousness plays no role in making sense of behavior (though there is plenty of debate on this!) and yet, when we do any mental task at all, if we are paying attention to our own mind, the way reality presents itself to us, we find there the very qualitative reality that seems to be irrelevant to a scientific description of the world—again, a physicalist theory of reality is itself generated by and presented to qualitative consciousness, it is itself a purely qualitative arrangement in one’s mind. But if we are able to really step back and consider this situation, it strikes most people as extraordinarily strange: in the process of trying to describe the world without reference to consciousness, we find ourselves referring to nothing at all but qualitative, phenomenal consciousness and its contents. Physicalism’s very theoretical basis seems to be on a completely non-physical epistemological foundation.

As pointed to above, physicalists have had basically two strategies for trying to resolve this fundamental dilemma. The first, eliminativism, seeks to simply deny that qualitative phenomenal consciousness really happens at all (or that it is some kind of “illusion”), that for some reason brains trick themselves into believing they have, or are, this non-physical stuff, thing, or event, but that this just isn’t true. The eliminativist position had its day in the sun, but most philosophers today seem to have moved past it, and it’s not hard to see why: as I have discussed across all three parts of this series, when we simply pay attention to how reality is presented to us, what is there is qualitative phenomenality. The idea that qualitative phenomenality somehow doesn’t happen or exist is hard to square with the fact that the very idea that this doesn’t exist happens within that very thing. (And, if qualitative phenomenality is somehow an illusion, we have to ask: what thing is being deluded by the illusion? “Illusionist” accounts of consciousness seem to have to argue that consciousness is an illusion that it uses to delude itself—but this means that a fiction is lying to itself about itself. Again, if reality presents itself to us qualitatively, then this is an illusion that is really happening, and so it must be explained for what it truly is. We may indeed be deluded about the contents of consciousness, but that qualitative phenomena appear seems to the only thing I can’t really doubt.)

However, it is important to note that each of us has to investigate this matter for ourselves; in trying to “detect” qualitative, phenomenal consciousness, I can only evaluate how reality presents itself to my own mind, and you can only evaluated how reality presents itself to your own mind. As I’ve stressed before, qualitative consciousness is not a phenomenon; we can’t see if other people have, are, or do it. It is, instead, the very medium through which we know or experience anything at all. But this means that it does not “appear” within the realm of physical phenomena, since it is the (presumably non-physical) condition-of-possibility for us to experience any phenomenon in the first place. In other words, the question of phenomenal consciousness is thoroughly epistemological.

But note that a physicalist philosophy of mind is explicitly committed to offering a specific ontological claim about consciousness. And so the epistemological foundation must somehow cash out into a physical thing, or the product of a physical thing, if it is going to be anything at all (on physicalists’ terms). But if most philosophers of mind are going to reject eliminativism, the other option, generally speaking, is some form of property dualism.

As summarized very briefly above, property dualism argues that the only real “stuff”, the only kind of substance that exists, is physical—but that this physical stuff has both physical properties and non-physical properties. Thus, a physical thing (like a living human body) can act in all the ways we expect a physical thing to act, but can also generate, or constitute, a certain kind of non-physical state or event (in this case, consciousness). Now property dualism comes in many flavors, from emergentism—which argues that consciousness is a new kind of (non-physical) thing that happens when physical systems are in very specific arrangements (like brains’ neurons firing in sequence)—through epiphenomenalism—which argues, like emergentism, that certain physical states cause consciousness, but which also stipulates that consciousness has no causal role whatsoever (while emergentism maintains that the emergent “phenomenon” of consciousness might itself then have a causal role in physical systems)—through non-reductive physicalism—which takes various forms, but basically argues that consciousness is just what it is for physical matter to be in a certain kind of arrangement, but that consciousnes has no ontological identity outside of being that formal arrangement²—all the way to physicalist panpsychist theories, which argue that all modes of physical existence, even down to the smallest bit of matter, have as part of their being an inherent kind of interiority or phenomenality.³

Now, as different as these various property dualist approaches are, it seems to me that they all share the same basic problem, already hinted at above: how does a purely quantitative state or substance generate something non-quantitative? The maneuver that property dualism tries to make is to argue that physical stuff does have properties that can be described purely quantitatively (its physical properties) but that it also has properties that cannot be described this way (its non-physical properties). But in attempting this admittedly clever maneuver, I think property dualism has simply caught itself on a new dilemma:

The first problem here is that if really existent stuff has both physical and non-physical properties, what does it mean to call this stuff “physical”? Surely physical stuff is physical precisely because it has (only) physical properties. If real stuff has both physical and non-physical properties, then I think the most obvious conclusion is that the stuff itself cannot be described simply as physical or as non-physical, but must somehow be “trans-physical”. And in fact Bertrand Russell already proposed such an ontology, which he called “neutral monism”: reality is made of some kind of unknowable stuff, and that stuff presents itself to us in both physical and mental modes. But of course, this ontology can’t be described as physicalist. And that seems to be the rub; for many analytic philosophers of mind, as I already suggested, good philosophy of mind in the 20th and 21st centuries must be basically physicalist.⁴

But the problem isn’t just terminological. To the extent that property dualism really succeeds at incorporating non-physical consciousness within itself, it seems to undermine its physicalism on analytic grounds as well. This is perhaps clearest in physicalist versions of panpsychism: if it is argued that every instance of material stuff, all the way down to the quark or muon, has some kind of interiority, phenomenality, conscious aspect, or even pre-conscious aspect, then, again, it’s not clear that we are talking about quantitatively-described matter all. Such a view seems to require reading idealism into physicalism (or indeed a shift to substance dualism), and surely the committed physicalist doesn’t want that!⁵

But to the extent that one’s property dualism keeps the non-physical, qualitative properties at bay by seeing them as emergent from purely physical stuff and its physical properties, then one falls onto the other horn of the dilemma: how do purely quantitative values somehow add up to a qualitative experience? No matter how many times you add, subtract, multiply, or divide a number, you only get another number. You can’t add two numbers together and get the qualitative experience of greenness.

Now, again, you certainly can point out that the qualitative experience of greenness correlates and corresponds to a certain wavelength of electromagnetic radiation when it enters the human eye and is processed by the brain. But this only raises the question anew: how does that quantitative value (500-550 nm wavelength) come to cause the qualitative experience of greenness? Nothing about mathematics, or about a physicalist ontology, predicts this, or even has theoretical space to include such information. To argue that you can put various physical stuff in certain arrangements and somehow cause qualitative states of consciousness is philosophically no different from arguing that magic is real. 2+x cannot equal “green”, no matter what value x has.

So, property dualist philosophies of mind oscillate between giving qualitative phenomenal consciousness too much of an ontological role—thereby forfeiting their physicalism—and giving it too little of a role—thereby rendering the theory incapable of even referring to qualitative phenomenal consciousness at all, giving it no purchase in philosophy of mind by rendering it a stealthy form of eliminativism.

What this really boils down to is methodological ambition leading to a basic category error: physicalist philosophies of mind are focused on defining an ontological claim about consciousness: what it is made of, what real stuff causes or sustains it. But in trying to do this, physicalism simultaneously ignores the epistemological and phenomenological basis of its own knowledge while also smuggling that knowledge into its ontological system, unaccounted for. What good philosophy of mind needs to be able to do is start with reality-as-presented-in-consciousness, and then work from there to whatever system it wants to justify. Physicalism, though, begins at the end, begging the question by assuming that consciousness must have its basis in the physical, and massages, excises, and smashes the facts in order to make them seem to point to this inexorable conclusion. But if we begin with consciousness itself—which is not only what philosophy of mind needs to explain but also the source and location of all of its claims—then this question-begging maneuver appears utterly unjustified. One must clear one’s epistemological ground before offering an ontology; physicalist philosophy of mind operates in precisely the opposite direction.⁶

And this brings us back to the primary points of parts 1 and 2: science (as a method) happens within qualitative consciousness; as Peirce argued, it only makes predictions about what kind of qualitative states we might experience in the future. Quantitative descriptions of reality, then, function within science only to be “cashed out” as qualitative experiences. Combined with the interminable difficulties of crafting a physicalist philosophy of mind—even on property dualist terms—I think this means that the most parsimonious philosophies of mind will be idealist—or at least idealist-adjacent—not physicalist or dualist (whether property dualist or substance dualist). That is to say, we ought to regard reality as fundamentally qualitative, phenomenal, and conscious in character not only because that’s actually how reality appears to us, but because any effort to explain how that appearance could be generated by something ontologically different is immediately split open upon the dilemma discussed above. And while physicalism, as I believe I showed above, cannot incorporate qualitative phenomenality within its ontological boundaries, idealism—as I showed in parts 1 and 2—seems quite capable of preserving the truth of science within itself (though admittedly crafting an idealist metaphysics that can answer all the questions raised here is work still be completed).

Idealism has largely been a defunct ontology and/or metaphysics for the past 150 years, at least in the English-speaking philosophical world.⁷ Physicalism, as I said above, has been the primary, even assumed, position, with the less-common substance dualists (of the Cartesian or post-/semi-Cartesian variety) constantly trying to make their own comeback. But it’s worth pointing out not only that Kant and Peirce were idealists, but that much of the best philosophy from human history—most notably Madhyamika and Yogachara Buddhist and basically all schools of Vedantin Hindu philosophy—has also basically been idealist. I also think most forms of Platonism, but especially including Neoplatonism and all its heirs, is also basically idealist or at least idealist-adjacent.⁸

In other words, a huge number of smart and curious people thought that an idealist or idealist-esque description of reality was the best bet. This ancient lineage doesn’t mean that idealism is necessarily true, of course—as I have stressed over all three parts of this series, genuine science is pretty new and has arrived at a vast array of amazing insights about reality—but I do think this rich heritage, combined with what I think are insolvable problems with physicalist philosophies of mind (as discussed above), mean that idealist approaches—which certainly have plenty of their own problems and issues!—need to be considered afresh.

1. “Materialist” and “physicalist” can often be understood as synonyms, though some thinkers would prefer the latter term because it more clearly indicates the possibility of non-material physical reality.

2. It’s worth noting that such non-reductive physicalist philosophies of mind, especially those of the “constitutive” school of thinkers like Nancey Murphy and Kevin Corcoran, seem as though they might in many ways be a modernized version of Aristotelean hylomorphism. But that’s a topic for another day.

3. Panpsychism is increasingly in vogue, but it’s important to keep in mind that it comes in many forms. There are both physicalist-leaning and idealist-leaning (as well as neutral monist) varieties of panpsychism. My critique here is limited the physicalist and physicalist-leaning versions only.

4. It’s important to note that even David Chalmers, who is famous for both outlining the “hard problem of consciousness” and for proposing various property dualist solutions to it, is clear in The Conscious Mind that he is scandalized and shamed by his own refusal to accept the necessity of physicalism, and it’s clear that he makes every effort to keep his property dualism as physicalist as possible. But one might wonder whether this deep commitment is philosophically necessary, or even defensible.

5. I should not here that, as I have described elsewhere, I myself felt the dogmatic gravity of physicalism, and throughout my 30s—and the entirety of my time in graduate education—I was basically seeking to articulate some version of a physicalist, or at least physicalist-adjacent, philosophy of mind that could robustly defend the reality of consciousness as well. Needless to say, I do not think I succeeded!

6. This, of course, does not mean that philosophy of mind can ignore all the ways in which physical reality definitely does impinge on the mind. But, again, here is where separating the “hard problem” of consciousness from questions about the contents of consciousness is so important.

7. There have been, of course exceptions, such as John C. Lennox’s idealist-friendly proposals in Can Science Explain Everything?, and of course continental thought is much more circumspect on these issues in general. Even so, I think it’s fair to say that idealism has been an extremely minority position in modern philosophical thought, with far less representation than even the rather beleaguered substance dualism.

8. Though some would see earlier Platonism as potentially dualistic, and then again one might argue that, especially when we get into Neoplatonism and Christian Neoplatonism, we might want to use a term like “theo-monism”—but I’ll save that discussion for a later time