[FRIAM] What Are We Monists Moaning About?

[Nick Thompson]

Dear Friammers, 

 

The subject line is the title of an article I am thinking about writing for
the Annals of Geriatric Maundering, and I want your help.   If you think
that I am offering you an opportunity to waste your time, in service of
advancing my career, you are, of course exactly correct.   Some of you have
accused me of starting a fight on FRIAM when a good scholar would actually
check out large, heavy books from the library.  That criticism is precise
and apt.  My excuse is I have two disabilities for true scholarship: my
eyesight sucks, and I am lazy.  So, here we go.  

 

To be a monist is first and foremost to be NOT a dualist.  The most familiar
form of dualism is the mind/body dualism, which is so embedded in our
language that it is hard to speak without depending on it.  According to
this dualism, there are two kinds of stuff, mind and matter.  Dualists like
to talk about the interaction of these two kinds of stuff, and are delighted
when they discover isomorphisms between events in consciousness and events
in the brain.  They like to discuss such topics as "information" and
"representation".  Dualists are fond of the subject object distinction, and
are enthralled by the mysteries of "inner" states.  They like to talk about
inverted spectrums.  They hail the Privacy of Mind.   Most of you are closet
dualists.  You LIKE to think you are materialists, but if you were
materialists you would have to be monists, and you wouldn't like that, as
you will plainly see.  I should confess that dualists, particularly closet
dualists, drive me crazy.   Just sayin'.  And as I have assured you many
times, I love you all anyway.  In fact, probably would have died years ago,
if you had not kept me active. 

 

Dualists are flanked on one side by pluralists and on the other by monists.
Pluralists are plainly crazy, and, besides, I don't know any, so we won't
bother with pluralism.  Monism is clearly the way to go.  There are two
familiar kinds of monism: idealism and materialism.  An idealist insists
that everything real consists of ideas and relations between ideas; a
materialist insists that everything real consists of matter and its
relations.  If you ask an idealist about matter and s/he will say, "What is
this "matter" of which you speak? All we have is ideas about matter.  If you
ask a materialist about ideas, he will say, "What are these "ideas" of which
you speak? Ideas are just arrangements of matter"  Of the two, I prefer
materialism.  It is easier for me to reduce ideas to relations amongst
matter than it is to reduce matter to relations among ideas. But neither of
these forms of monism seem quite honest to me, because each implies the
other.  To put it bluntly, realists and materials are all closet dualists. 

 

The remaining option is "neutral" monism.  Being a neutral monist is very
hard because people demand that you answer the question, "Of what does
everything real consist?"  It is VERY hard to answer that question without
becoming a closet dualist.  The answer requires some sort of noun (or
gerund) and therefore, any response implies its opposite or absence, and
thus relapses into closet dualism.  

 

One possibility I have considered is "event monism" .  Everything real
consists of events and their relations.  I like the concept of event because
it does not conjure up its opposite or absence quite so relentlessly.  What
is a non-event or the absence of an event, really?  It's an event in itself,
right?  We speak of days when nothing happened, but we don't really mean it.
Something DID happen; it just wasn't very interesting. On the other hand, it
does not accommodate "relations" talk very well. 

 

A extreme solution is to take a kind of mathematical notational approach and
just go for the relations:  "Everything that is real consists of [   ] and
its relations"; i.e., everything real consists of [[[[[[[[[   ].]..]..] etc.
ad infinitum.  In words, "Everything real consists of relations and their
relations.  

 

Neither of these solutions is very satisfying and both are rhetorically
ungainly.  By default, have started to call  myself as an "Experience
Monist".  When people look at me slyly and ask, "Experience of what?" I say,
"Of other experiences".   And when they inevitably ask, "What was the first
experience of?", I ask them , "How many first experiences were there?" After
they say, "One," I ask. "And how many subsequent experiences have there
been?"  And when they answer, "Oh, gosh, lots.  Almost an infinite number."
I say, "Well, then let's deal with the first one after we have dealt with
all the others, mmmmm?"  You call this cheap sophistry, but I think the line
of argument is fair because our obsession with "origins" (or "oranges", for
that matter) smacks of theology, and I am thoroughly fed up with theology.
"Let's begin in the middle," I say, "And not spend so much time worrying
about the beginning and the end."

 

And now we get to the crazy bit, the part where I imagine that FRIAMmers
might help out.  This conception of The Real always reminds me of a Turing
Machine.  That I make this connection might seem odd to you.  You might
wonder what a flunked-out Harvard English major is doing with thoughts about
a Turing Machine.  Fair question.  So how is it that I imagine a Turing
Machine? 

 

A Turing Machine (in my imagination) is a device that is capable of only
three operations, punching a tape, moving a tape, and reading a tape.  Uh,
oh, I need a 4th.  I need it to be able to punch a tape and move a tape on
the basis of what it finds on the tape.  Oh, gosh, I need a 5th.  I need
there to be punches on the tape NOT punched by the machine itself.  Oh, and
a 6th:  the survival of the machine needs to depend on anticipating patterns
on the tape

 

  OH CRAP!  I THINK  I  JUST BECAME A DUALIST! 

 


Has anybody written an article entitled, "What does the Turing Machine
know?" Would a flunked-out Harvard English Major understand it?  Could you
give me the link?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

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