I find it interesting that Noam Chomsky rejects the mind–body problem as it’s often presented, given that Newton demolished the concept of body, not mind. Below is a relevant passage from the book Optimism Over Despair, in which Chomsky explains his position. I’d appreciate any references that elaborate on this line of thought.
[Interviewer:] The well-known University College London linguist Neil Smith argued in his book Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge University Press, 1999) that you put to rest the mind-body problem not by showing that we have a limited understanding of the mind but that we cannot define what the body is. What can he possibly mean by this?
[Chomsky:] I wasn’t the person who put it to rest. Far from it. Isaac Newton did. Early modern science, from Galileo and his contemporaries, was based on the principle that the world is a machine, a much more complex version of the remarkable automata then being constructed by skilled craftsmen, which excited the scientific imagination of the day, much as computers and information processing do today. The great scientists of the time, including Newton, accepted this “mechanical philosophy” (meaning the science of mechanics) as the foundation of their enterprise. Descartes believed he had pretty much established the mechanical philosophy, including all the phenomena of body, though he recognized that some phenomena lay beyond its reach, including, crucially, the “creative aspect of language use” described above. He therefore, plausibly, postulated a new principle—in the metaphysics of the day, a new substance, res cogitans, “thinking substance, mind.” His followers devised experimental techniques to try to determine whether other creatures had this property, and like Descartes, were concerned to discover how the two substances interacted.
Newton demolished the picture. He demonstrated that the Cartesian account of body was incorrect and, furthermore, that there could be no mechanical account of the physical world: the world is not a machine. Newton regarded this conclusion as so “absurd” that no one of sound scientific understanding could possibly entertain it—though it was true. Accordingly, Newton demolished the concept of body (material, physical, and so on), in the form that it was then understood, and there really is nothing to replace it, beyond “whatever we more or less understand.” The Cartesian concept of mind remained unaffected. It has become conventional to say that we have rid ourselves of the mysticism of “the ghost in the machine.” Quite the contrary: Newton exorcised the machine while leaving the ghost intact, a consequence understood very well by the great philosophers of the period, like John Locke.
Locke went on to speculate (in the accepted theological idiom) that just as God had added to matter properties of attraction and repulsion that are inconceivable to us (as demonstrated by “the judicious Mr. Newton”), so he might have “superadded” to matter the capacity of thought. The suggestion (known as “Locke’s suggestion”) in the history of philosophy was pursued extensively in the eighteenth century, particularly by philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley, adopted by Darwin, and rediscovered (apparently without awareness of the earlier origins) in contemporary neuroscience and philosophy.
There is much more to say about these matters, but that, in essence, is what Smith was referring to. Newton eliminated the mind-body problem in its classic Cartesian form (it is not clear that there is any other coherent version), by eliminating body, leaving mind intact. (191–192)
That's fascinating. How did Newton "eliminate body" and demonstrate that "the world is not a machine"? Chomsky must be referring to specific texts here. Anybody know what they are?
Chomsky defends monism in regards to the mind-body problem. For him there is no coherent distinction between a physical body and a non-physical mind, there is no clear boundary between what is physical and what is not physical.
He takes Newton's gravity as an example. In the traditional mechanistic worldview 'bodies' or objects interact like cogs in a machine by direct contact with each other. With the discovery of gravity the material realm was expanded to forces like gravity which operate at distances, or electromagnetism which doesn't describe things in terms of physical objects but rather immaterial rules.
So according to Chomsky the definition of what is 'physical' kept expanding and became more and more abstract, and our view of the world has very little to do with the mechanical clockwork world of earlier centuries.
I'd have to agree with Chomsky. It would be tremendously difficult to contort ones thinking greatly enough to be able to explain things like why those who suffer total facial paralysis lose the ability to feel anger, then the ability to recall what feeling anger was like, then the ability to recognize anger in other people and other similar body-mind interactions while still holding on to some idea of there being a "non-physical mind" in the manner usually proposed. In my own opinion, 'mind' is a property, not a thing. You need a thing to exhibit the property, just like you can't simply have a box full of "hot" without some material exhibiting it, and consciousness is a property we're sure human brains can have (by definition if nothing else). Going beyond that is difficult, and you're guaranteed to fail if the first thing you do is seek to eliminate all the material while trying to retain the property.
I am unaware of what Newton wrote to 'demolish the body', but I wonder if it is related to chaos theory, complexity, and similar intractable interconnections that limit pure reductionist mechanical understandings of things. We don't quite know how to bridge the gap from "we know we can not discount even the smallest detail without predictions deviating" to "yet we can predict complex systems with reductionist views and attain great accuracy if we restrict how much accuracy we want." Those two things are both true, and seem to be in direct conflict with one another. Should we ever be able to bridge that gap, it would probably herald a new golden age and be a far more important development than anything that has come before.
"to be able to explain things like why those who suffer total facial paralysis lose the ability to feel anger, then the ability to recall what feeling anger was like, then the ability to recognize anger in other people"
I have never heard of this before and I can find no information about this on the internet. I know people who have had facial paralysis (my uncle had MND and lost everything) and they were really really angry (at times) and I do not remembering that they lost empathy when I was interacting with them. My uncle struggled to express himself when using the eye tracker, but the last time I saw him he made jokes and asked me about my daughter, I think that that's empathic.
I originally read about the phenomenon years ago in a (audio)book, but I cannot recall which one. It may have been one of Oliver Sacks' books, or part of a course from The Teaching Company or the Great Courses Plus. They discussed related research that claimed to have found strong evidence for depression in patients paralyzed from the neck down which was greater than the life changes and such could account for. I was never clear on how they could possibly manage to separate the things to be able to make such a claim and the facial paralysis emotional involvement seemed to make much more sense. There is a great deal of evidence already linking facial involvement to emotion, such as the classic study where participants held a pencil in their teeth, which causes an involuntary 'smile', lessening the negative emotional response when watching sad videos, so it seemed to be reasonable.
It's not that the people become un-empathetic, but literally when shown a photograph of a face expressing the emotion of anger, they can not identify that it is the emotion being displayed. That is the most extreme extent that takes the longest to manifest as I understand it. If a person told them "I am angry" or there were other outward displays (raised voice, etc), I don't doubt they would deal with it appropriately. Issues with recognizing emotions in others based on facial expressions are not all that rare. It is very commonly found in men who abuse others that they are incapable of recognizing the expression of fear in the face of those they are abusing.
I think Chomsky is referring to gravity’s action at a distance, which Newton regarded to be absurd. I’ve heard Chomsky say that, after Newton, “physical” has come to mean “what we more or less understand” — that is, the physical is no longer identical to the material (body), in the sense of a world filled with nothing but billiard ball–like atoms bumping into each other. In the quotation above, Chomsky says that John Locke understood these points, so it may be worth looking at his work.
Mechanical: the contact theory, that one thing can only affect another by being in contact with it e.g. the teeth of gears.
Unfortunately, gravity ("spooky action at a distance") does not require contact, so the mechanical theory fails. Which can be stated figuratively as "the world is not a machine".
"The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding: Newton's contributions to the study of mind" at the University of Oslo, September 2011
https://youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0
I've read Chomsky's opinion on this before in his essay ""Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding", and I think he misunderstands the physics.
He seems to think Newton accidentally disproved the concept of locality through his theory of gravity. It's true that philosophers largely gave up on locality in the 18th century because of Newton, but that was only temporary: In the 19th century the principle of locality came back with a vengance after Maxwell.
Today the principle of locality is a key component of the Standard model: The Hamiltonian of the standard model is local, meaning you can compute what happens at a point in spacetime knowing only what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it. Even outside the standard model, LIGO proved that graviational waves exist, and therefore gravity is a local phenomenon.
Einstein was famously prepared to give up on quantum mechanics because it seemed to violate the principle of locality, which he thought was more important. That is still debated sometimes, though whether quantum nonlocality exists seems to be a matter of interpretation and is also different from the kind of locality chomsky is talking about. Locality is still a key principle in physics.
> what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it
A "field" is just a name for spooky action at a distance. It's a description, not an explanation. There is no mechanical contact, only "locality" of a field.
Or are you saying that fields are really mediated by particles... so there is mechanical contact?
People call these thing gravitons but they are particles in the sense that light and electricity are particle based - which is to say that in the limit it turns out that a discrete particle doesn't describe everything that's happening and some wave like properties in space and time are a good fit too. The particles are sort of like a manifestation or a partial mathematical description of the thing that's underneath. The particle is an excitation of a field - all particles are, so mechanical interactions reduce to fields. The thing to remember is that your intuitive and perceptual apparatus was largely evolved to help you get fruit in a forest, and later to help you catch rabbits and shell fish. The ideas that are obvious are approximations that allow you to navigate the world of the past - but they are not "right".
Yes, forces transmitted through fields act "at a distance", but is that really "spooky"? Do you think it is "spooky" that if you make a wave at one end of a pond, the wave reaches the other end? I don't. I consider the propagation of waves to be a "local" non-spooky phenomenon.
Disturbances in a field propagate through space similarly. A disturbance of the field at a point only affects the value of the field in the immediate spacetime surroundings, just like a water wave. I would call that "local" and non-spooky. Whether or not there is "mechanical contact", whatever that means, is irrelevant.
This is in contrast to Newton's theory of gravity, where the force of gravity was spookily felt instantaneously across space.
> A disturbance of the field at a point only affects the value of the field in the immediate spacetime surroundings, just like a water wave.
Ok, I see that's local (though not mechanical, as you say).
I think a magnetic field (as from a magnet, not a wave) is not local though? So, the transmissiin of modulation is "local", but the field itself is "at a distance"?
You can find plenty more if you google. I personally agree with the ideas of that paper in a broad sense if not in detail, as do many people.
Second, if you are trying to argue that locality is no longer a guiding principle, note how the standard model is quantum-mechanical so obeys bell's inequality, yet we still call it "local". Locality was a key guiding principle of the standard model.
Gravity is not spooky action at a distance, Einstein showed us how the fabric of space time implements Gravity in a mechanistic way. Some quantum processes (I don't dare to elaborate - read Wikipedia and then do 6 years of physics to find out more!) are referred to as "spooky action as a distance" or non locality. This is simply not understood - hence the bloody bloody Copenhagen interpretation and the bloody bloody people who chant "look at my sums it's all fine and I have no responsibility to understand and because I can't I will try and stop anyone who wants to".
I feel bad about all of this. And ignorant, but I am confident that Gravity is a mechanistic force. And I think that the jury is out about the world as a machine, but as far as I know everything that we understand about it is mechanistic. The other bits may be non-mechanistic, but we may never understand that.
Old school materialism was demolished in which the world is basically made up of the substances we perceive. Instead, we find out that solid objects are mostly empty space, forces are fields acting over a distance, Relativity has counter intuitive results for time, space and mass, and QM demonstrates that matter and energy behave in spooky ways.
The material world went from something solid we could touch, see, smell, etc. to something ghostly and mathematically abstract. Scientists call it physical.
The old material world turns out to be largely an illusion of our senses and minds, replaced by physical theories. Plato's cave is inverted. The scientist wonders outside the cave of the solid objects to find ghostly forms instead.
I think one question here is to ask where are the machines in the universe that are not equivalent to a (near) Turing machine? As far as I know all physical processes that are understood are equivalent to a UTM, the ones that aren't understood may or may not turn out to be, but I don't know of any examples.
Another question is to ask what calculations / inferences are intractable when implemented on a UTM and yet can be performed by humans - I mean exact calculations, not guesses that are mostly right (I'm happy that humans are allowed to make errors, but the process must be transparently able to produce exact correct results). Some people claim that mathematicians can create insights that could not be done on a machine, but I have never heard of a specific example and I think that things are running backwards here. Now machines are creating proofs that humans don't understand.
I think a lot of GOFAI approaches ought to be revisited to see whether they benefit from the new perceptual and decision capabilities of Deep Learning systems. Alex Graves's papers are particularly good at this.
I can recommend his new book, "The book of Why" very highly. Even though I am very familiar with Bayes nets, I discovered that that a lot of progress has been made in that side of AI.
In my experience, the best way to improve my attention is by practicing śamatha meditation. The śamatha practices that entail mindfulness of breathing are thought to be ideal for those living in modernity.
The best introduction to śamatha that I’m aware of is B. Alan Wallace’s “The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind.”
