Climbing to Consciousness: The Mind-Body Problem and the Computational Order

Abstract

In his book The Structure of Behavior, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposes a solution to the mind-body problem. Merleau-Ponty argues that there is a nested hierarchy of three orders—the physical order, the biological order, and the mental order—in which each lower order composes each higher order. Through the structuration or organization of a lower order, a higher order is created. MerleauPonty’s solution is promising, but it leaves an explanatory chasm between the biological order and the mental order that cannot be crossed without introducing an intermediary order. I propose just that: the addition of a fourth order—the computational order—to bridge the chasm. In his book The Structure of Behavior, Maurice Merleau-Ponty develops a view of what constitutes the mental, paying particular attention to the mind-body problem, that is, the question of what relation the mental has to the physical (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 202). Merleau-Ponty is not satisfied with what he calls the classical solutions to the mindbody problem and attempts to formulate his own solution. The classical solutions are those proposed by two opposing camps that from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective dominate the discourse on mentality. He calls these two camps the “mentalists” and the “materialists”, respectively (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 182). René Descartes is the paradigmatic mentalist. Descartes famously holds that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different, utterly distinct types of being, or substances. For this reason, Descartes’ view is usually called substance dualism. Substance dualism, however, is by no means exhaustive of mentalism. Idealists also fall into the mentalist camp. Merleau-Ponty discusses Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism in particular. Transcendental idealism is the position that all that we can ever know is what appears to us (phenomena), and we can know nothing of any things in themselves (noumena). Res Cogitans (2015) 6 Eady | 15 2155-4838 | commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans Materialism, for Merleau-Ponty, includes most notably behaviorism in psychology. There are at least two versions of behaviorism. In the first version, mentality is ignored for methodological reasons. Behavior is not attributed to anything mental. In the second version, the mental is discarded as metaphysical excess. This latter version of behaviorism is a form of eliminative materialism about the mental in general. Both versions favor an understanding of behavior that uses purely physical or physiological language. Merleau-Ponty is not content to join either the mentalist or the materialist camp. On one hand, he denies that the mental is something over and above the physical or the biological. On his view, the mental does not exist independently from the physical and biological constitution of human beings. Thus, Merleau-Ponty rejects substance dualism. He also rejects transcendental idealism. On Merleau-Ponty’s view appearances or phenomena, being mental, are not something over and above the things in themselves, i.e. the physical and the biological. Therefore, knowledge of appearances or phenomena necessarily entails knowledge of the things in themselves. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty enthusiastically affirms the existence of consciousness, thus rejecting the eliminative materialist version of behaviorism and other forms of eliminative materialism about the mental in general. He also rejects the methodological version of behaviorism on the grounds that the observation of behavior (itself a behavior) requires a conscious observer. The removed, “third-person” perspective of science is founded in the involved, first-person perspective of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s proposal avoids both the mentalists’ and the materialists’ solutions to the mind-body problem by positing a compositional or hierarchical relation between the mental and the physical. Crucially, it is not a direct relation, but a nested relation in which the biological (or “vital”, as Merleau-Ponty calls it) takes an intervening place between the mental and the physical. To put it more accurately, then, Merleau-Ponty posits a compositional or hierarchical relation between the mental, the biological, and the physical (in descending order). In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of three orders. He posits a physical order, a biological order that is higher than and “enrooted in” the physical order, and a mental order which is higher than and rooted in the biological order (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 184). Importantly, Merleau-Ponty rejects the idea that the mental is something that is “added to” the lower orders (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 181). The three orders are not layers that are stacked on top of each other, such that they constitute three different parts of a human being. For Merleau-Ponty, the relation of a lower order to a higher order is the relation of the “partial to the total” (Merleau-Ponty Res Cogitans (2015) 6 Eady | 16 2155-4838 | commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans 1967: 180). The relation, then, is not only hierarchical but also compositional. That is, a lower order composes a higher order as parts compose a whole. Although there is an intervening biological order, Merleau-Ponty’s claim is nevertheless that the mental is ultimately composed of the physical as a whole is composed of parts. This claim must confront a serious challenge. It is normally thought that a physical thing, on its own, is just mindless, meaningless matter. A quark, an electron, an atom, a molecule, a birthday cake, a watermelon, or a mound of gravel seems as devoid of mentality as anything could be. Moreover, wholes composed of many physical parts seem equally unconscious as any other physical thing. For example, an airplane is made of thousands of physical parts, and yet the mental seems as far out of its reach as it is for a mound of gravel. Its lack of mentality cannot be explained by positing that it has an insufficient number of parts, since it seems that the addition of more parts to an airplane would result only in more of the same. For example, we can imagine lengthening the fuselage and adding seats, lights, baggage containers, windows, engines, and wings. We can imagine doing this until there is no room left on the planet for such an aircraft, or even until there is no room for it in the known universe. Even if we could add parts unboundedly towards infinity, it seems that no number of them would ever suffice to constitute mentality. Whether a physical thing is an ordinary object or an arbitrarily large whole makes no difference. Physical things, it seems, are mindless. Merleau-Ponty claims that the mental is ultimately composed of the physical, yet the physical seems only to amount to mindless, meaningless matter. One might be tempted to interpret Merleau-Ponty’s view, then, as a form of panpsychism that holds that all physical things, contrary to what it seems, do in fact have some amount of mentality. In this case, the impression that atoms, mounds of gravel, or airplanes are entirely devoid of mentality would just be wrong. However, since Merleau-Ponty dismisses “animism” this cannot be his view (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 161). How else could the physical order ultimately compose the mental order? Merleau-Ponty answers that the biological order is a “structuration” of the physical order, and the mental order is in turn a structuration of the biological order (MerleauPonty 1967: 184). On Merleau-Ponty’s view, then, the mental and the physical are not different substances or different “powers of being” (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 184). Even by using the word “order” to describe the mental and the physical, Merleau-Ponty evokes the idea of structure or organization. Two orders of things can be different and yet the things that they order can be exactly the same. If the mental is the mental order, as Merleau-Ponty claims, then the mental is ultimately composed of the same kinds of things as inanimate physical objects. Merleau-Ponty’s view entails that at the fundamental level there is nothing that the mental has that the physical does not. For Merleau-Ponty, then, the mental is ultimately, through the biological, a certain Res Cogitans (2015) 6 Eady | 17 2155-4838 | commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans organization of the physical. All that is required for consciousness, on his view, is for otherwise mindless, meaningless matter to be organized in the right way. To claim that structuration or organization can constitute consciousness out of the merely physical is to attribute to it an immense capability. In order to investigate whether it indeed has that capability, we must attempt to climb the ladder from the physical order to the mental order rung by rung. The physical order can roughly be said to include matter, energy, and physical forces. The contribution of the physical to the climb is that the physical is not a void. Physical existence is a kind of existence. As such, the physical order surmounts for us the problem that nothingness would pose. Moreover, physical existence is not chaotic, but ordered. The physical order, then, introduces existence and order, two necessary foundations for the mental. The structuration of the physical is what gives rise to the biological, without the aid of a new substance or an élan vital. The organization of the physical transforms inert matter pushed around by physical forces into a new category of things that have functions. The heart does not merely passively allow physical forces to push blood through it; it is the organization of those forces in such a way that it is a thing that pushes blood. As Merleau-Ponty writes, the higher order “eliminate[s] the autonomy” of the lower order and introduces a new logic (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 180). Through the organization of the physical, there exist things—organisms—that actively maintain their own integrity, through homeostasis and other forms of self-preservation. Another thing that