The Mereological Fallacy

Philosopher Anderson Brown contends that much of our confusion about the mind-body problem is a "mereological fallacy," a confusion about parts and wholes.

The stomach doesn't "have lunch." The stomach digests, which is part of the process, but we don't accordingly say that the stomach has lunch, and we don't think of the activity of having lunch as internal. It is a fact about our behavior.

Likewise, the brain doesn't think. Brown doesn't give a name to exactly what the brain does -- what is the equivalent of digestion here? "impulse processing"? -- but it isn't "thinking," anyway. A person thinks and, as with lunch, there is nothing internal about it.

I'll reproduce here in italics the comment I made on his site, except that I'll clean it up a bit for this blog.  I was a more-than-usually sloppy typist in the comment section of his.

I'm reminded of one aspect of Julian Jaynes' theories, in his book on the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

I don't have the book with me so I'll work from memory, and more than usually subject to correction. But Jaynes said that the "bicameral mind" was not "conscious" in the way in which we are, NOT just for reasons of neurology, but because certain metaphors hadn't come into use yet. The idea of a sort of theatre "inside" the human body -- chest or head, depending on who is writing -- started as a highly literary metaphor, and gradually became an essential part of how people saw themselves. THAT was the "breakdown" of Jaynes' title, when the metaphor became generally accepted as a literal fact. Thus, "consciousness" pulled itself into existence by imagining itself, if you will.

This seems akin to your point, except for chronology.

Yet implicit in Jaynes' account is the point that we don't really have a choice. Going back to the bicameral mind is not an option. Or, in your terminology, thinking of thought as a fact about behavior, like lunch, isn't really an option either. The notion of an inner space where we deliberate is something more than a useful fiction, it is a constitutive fiction.

Perhaps rather like the fiction that the elite group of white men that gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had any business speaking for "We, the people" of the United States.

Looking Inside

Anderson Brown has a fascinating post on the "mereological fallacy" and its significance for the philosophy of mind.

I'll just link to it and allow you to find my further comment on it there.

Funny Stuff

I would like to thank Anderson Brown, the philosopher behind several blogs and some wonderful Facebook entries, for introducing me to this.

I've never taught in my life, yet I can sufficiently sympathize to find this fantasy funny.

Also, that led me to this one, another YouTube gem using the same generic animation software, and for that matter the same professor character in the same virtual office. Enjoy.

"Can you see where I am teaching? We're in Nowhere, Nebraska."

Nice dis of Harold Bloom, too.

Personal Identity, Part One

Thirty years ago there was a law student at Western New England College, School of Law, that bore my name. He was a very different person from me, in just about every respect. Every cell of his body was different -- the body as a whole was younger and more energetic -- and subjective characteristics such as his tastes and opinions were very different from my own as well. Yet in some sense I want to be able to say, coherently, that he was me -- that I am simply (or not-so-simply) an older version of that person.

What does this claim of the continuous identity of a person over time mean? This is a venerable philosophical question, to which there are three traditional answers: the core of identity is an unchanging imperishable soul; it is the continuity of memory; it is the continuity of a physical organism.

Professor Anderson Brown, of the University of Puerto Rico, has recently spoken to this issue on his blog. In his mind, the only live alternatives it seems are the second and third. And on that I have to agree. Though I am in my own manner religious, as regular readers will know, I think trying to tie personal identity to an immutable soul is a racket.

So we turn, with Brown, to the choice between the other options. Is identity over time more of a subjective, psychological fact? or more of an organic, physical fact? Brown is exercised by the sort of thought experiments that are often employed to argue in favor of the psychological/subjective answer to that question. "What if a mad scientist transferred your thoughts to somebody else's body...?" He asserts that the questions presume what is to be established. I won't argue with him over those thought experiments.

Rather, I will say that in my view the case for the psychological/subjective answer can be made and has been made in ways independent of the counter-factual arguments that Brown finds deficient. The strongest argument of which I am aware is that put forth by William James in Chapter X of Principles of Psychology. I say so in my comment to Brown's post (the fourth comment there) -- and I will retrace that argument with more particularity here tomorrow.