Galen Strawson's collection of essays comprises treatments of the mind-body problem, the self, intentionality, freedom and determinism, and causality, among other topics. It is all immensely interesting and provocative, and written in an enjoyably combative style. It deserves a much longer discussion than I am able to give here, and I can only raise a number of points relating to the topics I have listed.
The discussion of the mind-body problem occupies the first two papers, ‘Real Materialism’ and ‘Realistic Monism’. Strawson argues that standard physicalism, which he calls physicSalism, is clearly false, since it involves the denial of consciousness. Dualism, also, must be rejected, since it is confronted with the problem of explaining how an immaterial mind could possibly emerge from what is wholly material. The only viable position is one which Strawson still wants to call materialism, or physicalism, but which he is happy to accept is, or entails, panpsychism. Science, as both Russell and Eddington insisted, tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of the material world, and we can therefore hold that part of that reality, at least, is experiential. This position both acknowledges the reality of the experiential and also avoids the problem of emergence.
Trenchantly as Strawson argues for this position, it remains full of difficulties. First, if, as Strawson claims, ‘things (events) may (and presumably do) have non-experiential being as well as experiential being’ (20), we have to ask, what is relation between these two types of being? It looks as if we have the same problem as that which confronts the radical dualist: how do we avoid the conclusion that the experiential and the non-experiential are just found together in a sort of miraculous co-existence? Strawson says that ‘panpsychism certainly does not require one to hold that things like stones and tables are subjects of experience’ (72), but is it just a matter of bad luck that such objects miss out on the experiential aspect of being? And why is it that, while science can at least give us some idea of the formal properties of matter, it can give us no idea at all of the experiential aspect, given that there is a sense in which, apparently, everything is physical?
We must also ask how, if at all, the experiential aspect affects behaviour. Is it that science can fully describe and explain the operations of the material world without reference to the experiential? If that is the case, then the position is indistinguishable from epiphenomenalism. If Strawson recoils from that, and he ascribes to the experiential genuine causal efficacy, then the problem is to explain how this differs from interactionist dualism.
There is also a real problem in making sense of the idea that before the arrival of sentient beings in the course of evolution there were proto-experiential elements. Such an idea suggests that there were experiences which were not the experiences of any mind or person, and were therefore in an obvious sense ownerless, an idea which I find impossible to grasp. If, on the other hand, we grant that these proto-experience are in some sense owned, just in virtue of being experiences, it is very difficult to understand how they could lose their initial status and become owned in some larger amalgam of experiences. Altogether, the panpsychist answer to the mind-body problem raises more questions than it might promise to answer.
The paper ‘Self, Body, and Experience’, by contrast, seems to me wholly admirable. Here, Strawson argues convincingly against a number of familiar proposals purporting to establish that experience of body is necessary for self-consciousness, and ends by declaring: ‘If this makes me a Cartesian, then that is what I am’, and that Descartes is ‘much closer to the truth about mind than many twentieth-century philosophers’, a claim I find wholly congenial.
The following paper, however, I found puzzling and unsatisfactory, a response I find supported to some extent by Strawson's own admission that this paper ‘was abandoned rather than finished’. The central claim is that the relation between an experience, the subject of the experience, and the content of the experience is one of identity. That implies that if an experience with a certain content exists at t 1, and is seamlessly replaced by another experience with a different content which lasts until t 2, then one subject ceases to exist at, say, 10 milliseconds after t 1, and a completely new subject comes into existence (181). One fairly obvious response to this is that the same subject continues to exist just in case the successive experiences are both mine, and that this might be something basic and not further analysable. It is arguable, that is, that, contrary to what Strawson argues, the ownership of experience (the subject which has the experience) is a matter completely independent of the particular content of the experience. My experience at this moment comprises thoughts about Strawson's position together with visual and tactile impressions relating to the laptop in front of me, but this experience might have had a quite different content though it would still have been my experience at this moment. At any rate, Strawson's apparently atomistic view of the self seems hugely counter-intuitive, and it is striking that nowhere in the paper is there any consideration of how the first person perspective might impinge on the question.
The two papers on intentionality struck me as wholly convincing. The basic claim of these papers is that intentionality entails consciousness, the here-and-now state of thinking about something, or of being aware of something, and that standard materialists attempts to offer a dispositional-cum-functional analysis of intententionality, as a state which might be realised in a computer, are hopelessly wide of the mark. Intentionality is underived intentionality, an essentially conscious state. Understanding an argument, or entertaining certain propositions, is a cognitive experience. We cannot sensibly suggest that following and understanding an argument in a book or paper is merely a matter of, say, certain sensory-affective experiences. All this seems to me exactly right. The only qualification I have relates to Strawson's assumption that robots and computers are experienceless, given the panpsychism for which he has argued. Why is that physical processes in the brain have an experiential aspect, whereas physical processes in a robot or computer, no matter how complex, do not? This is also a question for dualism, of course, but once again one has to conclude that Strawson seems to be confronted with the same apparent inexplicable and miraculous co-existence of the physical and the experiential with which the dualist has to contend.
Several papers discuss the issue of freedom and determinism, and in particular the issue of responsibility for one's actions. Strawson's basic claim is that one cannot be ultimately (morally) responsible for one's actions. We act as we do at any particular time because of the way we are at that time, and we cannot be the ultimate, originating cause of ourselves and of how we are. The discussion is detailed and rigorous, but as Strawson says, he is left with a set of attitudes which are ‘dramatically inconsistent’ (357). My own gifts I regard as a matter of good fortune, but others' achievements evoke, say, gratitude of a true responsibility-presupposing kind. And I do not regard bad things that I do as mere bad luck, but I do naturally regard bad things that other people do as explicable in ways that make true responsibility-presupposing blame inappropriate, and Strawson suspects that this pattern of attitudes may be quite common. But Strawson is also at least tempted to say that when confronted with a choice between using ten pounds to buy a cake or depositing the note in the Oxfam bucket at the entrance to the shop he has a genuine free responsibility-presupposing choice. Overall, a very good discussion, alive to the complexities of the issue.
The final papers are devoted to the issue of causality. In ‘Realism and Causation’ Strawson argues that the regularity of the behaviour of the physical world is not some miracle occurring from moment to moment, something that happens without any possible reason, but is explained by the fact that material objects embody forces. I do not think that Strawson succeeds in answering the basic objection to this claim, and that is that if there is a problem in explaining how the regularity of the material world can be anything other than a miracle from one moment to the next, the positing of objective forces will not help, since the same question must arise about them: why do they behave in a regular fashion from moment to moment? Explanation must come to a stop somewhere, a point of which Strawson is fully aware, and, short of a demonstration that possession of objective forces means that it is logically necessary that material objects behave in a regular way, it is quite unclear what explanatory role they can have.
The other issue discussed by Strawson is that of the interpretation of Hume's account of causality. Strawson claims that, contrary to the traditional view, Hume did not think that notions such as that of power, production, necessary connection, etc., are simply meaningless because such notions correspond to no impression, but that we have no knowledge of the ultimate forces which determine the course of the physical world, a claim which Hume makes repeatedly in his discussion in the Enquiry, and which clearly implies that the notion of force or power is something that we understand.
Strawson develops this position in great detail, but I am left with a couple of doubts about it. The first is that it is not at all clear, in spite of Strawson's attempt to explain this, what point Hume's claim that the source of the idea of necessary connection lies in the association which is built up creating a felt determination in the mind to pass from the impression of the cause to the idea of its attendant effect can have on Strawson's view of the matter. Why produce this account if it's clear that, quite independently of this association, we do in fact have a proper idea of necessary connection? Second, it still remains unclear to my mind how we have come to possess the idea of necessary connection if it is true that such an idea picks out absolutely nothing in our experience. Hume, as Strawson admits, even rejects the suggestion that our ordinary experience of pushing and being pushed, pulling or being pulled, gives us any idea of power or production, but Hume's grounds for this rejection are that the experience of exertion, for example, has no known connection with any event. What follows it can only be known by experience; it could not be known a priori. That suggests that Hume's view is that the reason why we can have no idea of what terms such as ‘power’, ‘production’, and ‘necessary connection’ as they are ordinarily used could mean is that necessary connections obtain between concepts and propositions (‘relations of ideas’) and not between states of affairs in the world. If that is the case, then I'm not sure that Strawson has shown that Hume's challenge about the source of meaning has been radically misunderstood in the way he suggests. But all in all this is a fascinating and engrossing collection of papers, of which every one is deserving of detailed discussion.
