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Can We Solve the Mind--BodyProblem?

Colin McGinn

Mind, New Series, Volume 98, Issue 391 (Jul., 1989), 349-366.

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Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?

COLIN McGINN

How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a

result of initiating nerve tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the

Djin, where Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story . . . (Julian Huxley)

We have been trying for a long time to solve the mind-body problem. It

has stubbornly resisted our best efforts. The mystery persists. I think the

time has come to admit candidly that we cannot resolve the mystery. But I

also think that this very insolubility-or the reason for it-removes the

philosophical problem. In this paper I explain why I say these outrageous

things.

The specific problem I want to discuss concerns consciousness, the hard

nut of the mind-body problem. How is it possible for conscious states to

depend upon brain states? How can technicolour phenomenology arise

from soggy grey matter? What makes the bodily organ we call the brain so

radically different from other bodily organs, say the kidneys-the body

parts without a trace of consciousness? How could the aggregation of

millions of individually insentient neurons generate subjective awareness?

We know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we

have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so. It strikes

us as miraculous, eerie, even faintly comic. Somehow, we feel, the water of

the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a

total blank on the nature of this conversion. Neural transmissions just

seem like the wrong kind of materials with which to bring consciousness

into the world, but it appears that in some way they perform this

mysterious feat. The mind-body problem is the problem of understanding

how the miracle is wrought, thus removing the sense of deep mystery. We

want to take the magic out of the link between consciousness and the

brain.

Purported solutions to the problem have tended to assume one of two

One of the peculiarities of the mind-body problem is the difficulty of formulating it in a rigorous

way. We have a sense of the problem that outruns our capacity to articulate it clearly. Thus we quickly

find ourselves resorting to invitations to look inward, instead of specifying precisely what it is about

consciousness that makes it inexplicable in terms of ordinary physical properties. And this can make it

seem that the problem is spurious. A creature without consciousness would not properly appreciate the

problem (assuming such a creature could appreciate other problems). I think an adequate treatment of

the mind-body problem should explain why it is so hard to state the problem explicitly. My treatment

locates our difficulty in our inadequate conceptions of the nature of the brain and consciousness. In

fact, if we knew their natures fully we would already have solved the problem. This should become

clear later.

Mind, Val. xcviii, no. 391, July 1989

@ Oxford University Press 1989

350 Colin McGinn

forms. One form, which we may call constructive, attempts to specify

some natural property of the brain (or body) which explains how

consciousness can be elicited from it. Thus functionalism, for example,

suggests a property-namely, causal rolewhich is held to be satisfied by

both brain states and mental states; this property is supposed to explain

how conscious states can come from brain states2The other form, which

has been historically dominant, frankly admits that nothing merely natural

could do the job, and suggests instead that we invoke supernatural entities

or divine interventions. Thus we have Cartesian dualism and Leibnizian

pre-established harmony. These 'solutions' at least recognize that some-

thing pretty remarkable is needed if the mind-body relation is to be made

sense of; they are as extreme as the problem. The approach I favour is

naturalistic but not constructive: I do not believe we can ever specify what

it is about the brain that is responsible for consciousness, but I am sure

that whatever it is it is not inherently miraculous. The problem arises, I

want to suggest, because we are cut off by our very cognitive constitution

from achieving a conception of that natural property of the brain (or of

consciousness) that accounts for the psychophysical link. This is a kind of

causal nexus that we are precluded from ever understanding, given the

way we have to form our concepts and develop our theories. No wonder we

find the problem so difficult!

Before I can hope to make this view plausible, I need to sketch the general

conception of cognitive competence that underlies my position. Let me

introduce the idea of cognitive closure. A type of mind M is cognitively closed

with respect to a property P (or theory T) if and only if the concept-forming

procedures at M's disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (or an understand-

ing of T). Conceiving minds come in different kinds, equipped with varying

powers and limitations, biases and blindspots, so that properties (or theories)

may be accessible to some minds but not to others. What is closed to the

mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us

may be closed to the monkey. Representational power is not all or nothing.

Minds are biological products like bodies, and like bodies they come in

different shapes and sizes, more or less capacious, more or less suited to

certain cognitive tasks.3 This is particularly clear for perceptual faculties, of

I would also classify panpsychism as a constructive solution, since it attempts to explain

consciousness in terms of properties of the brain that are as natural as consciousness itself. Attributing

specks of proto-consciousness to the constituents of matter is not supernatural in the way postulating

immaterial substances or divine interventions is; it is merely extravagant. I shall here be assuming that

panpsychism, like all other extant constructive solutions, is inadequate as an answer to the mind-body

problem-as (of course) are the supernatural 'solutions'. I am speaking to those who still feel

perplexed (almost everyone, I would think, at least in their heart).

This kind of view of cognitive capacity is forcefully advocated by Noam Chomsky in Refections on

Language, Patheon Books, 1975, and by Jerry Fodor in The Modularity of Mind, Cambridge, Mass.,

MIT Press, 1983. Chomsky distinguishes between 'problems', which human minds are in principle

equipped to solve, and 'mysteries', which systematically elude our understanding; and he envisages a

study of our cognitive systems that would chart these powers and limitations. I am here engaged in

such a study, citing the mind-body problem as falling on the side of the mysteries.

Can We Solves the Mind-Body Problem? 351

course: perceptual closure is hardly to be denied. Different speciesarecapable of

perceiving different properties of the world, and no species can perceive

every property things may instantiate (without artificial instrumentation

anyway). But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the

properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a

property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of

perceiving and conceiving mind. The invisible parts of the electromagnetic

spectrum are just as real as the visible parts, and whether a specific kind of

creature can form conceptual representations of these imperceptible parts

does not determine whether they exist. Thus cognitive closure with

respect to P does not imply irrealism about P. That P is (as we might say)

noumenal for M does not show that P does not occur in some naturalistic

scientific theory T-it shows only that T is not cognitively accessible to M.

Presumably monkey minds and the property of being an electron illustrate

this possibility. And the question must arise as to whether human minds

are closed with respect to certain true explanatory theories. Nothing, at

least, in the concept of reality shows that everything real is open to the

human concept-forming faculty-if, that is, we are realists about reality.4

Consider a mind constructed according to the principles of classical

empiricism, a Humean mind. Hume mistakenly thought that human

minds were Humean, but we can at least conceive of such a mind (perhaps

dogs and monkeys have Humean minds). A Humean mind is such that

perceptual closure determines cognitive closure, since 'ideas' must always

be copies of 'impressions'; therefore the concept-forming system cannot

transcend what can be perceptually presented to the subject. Such a mind

will be closed with respect to unobservables; the properties of atoms, say,

will not be representable by a mind constructed in this way. This implies

that explanatory theories in which these properties are essentially men-

tioned will not be accessible to a Humean mind.5 And hence the

observable phenomena that are explained by allusion to unobservables will

be inexplicable by a mind thus limited. But notice: the incapacity to

explain certain phenomena does not carry with it a lack of recognition of

the theoretical problems the phenomena pose. You might be able to

See Thomas Nagel's discussion of realism in The View From Nowhere, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 1986, ch. VI. He argues there for the possibility of properties we can never grasp. Combining

Nagel's realism with Chomsky-Fodor cognitive closure gives a position looking very much like Locke's

in the Essay Concerning Human (Jnderstanding: the idea that our God-given faculties do not equip us to

fathom the deep truth about reality. In fact, Locke held precisely this about the relation between mind

and brain: only divine revelation could enable us to understand how 'perceptions' are produced in our

minds by material objects.

Hume, of course, argued, in effect, that no theory essentially employing a notion of objective

causal necessitation could be grasped by our minds-and likewise for the notion of objective

persistence. We might compare the frustrations of the Humean mind to the conceptual travails of the

pure sound beings discussed in Ch. I1 of P. F. Strawson's Individunls, London, Methuen, 1959; both

arc types of mind whose constitution puts various concepts beyond them. We can do a lot better than

these truncated minds, but we also have our constitutional limitations.

Colin McGinn

352

appreciate a problem without being able to formulate (even in principle)

the solution to that problem (I suppose human children are often in this

position, at least for a while). A Humean mind cannot solve the problems

that our physics solves, yet it might be able to have an inkling of what

needs to be explained. We would expect, then, that a moderately

intelligent enquiring Humean mind will feel permanently perplexed and

mystified by the physical world, since the correct science is forever beyond

its cognitive reach. Indeed, something like this was precisely the view of

Locke. He thought that our ideas of matter are quite sharply constrained

by our perceptions and so concluded that the true science of matter is

eternally beyond us-that we could never remove our perplexities about

(say) what solidity ultimately is.6 But it does not follow for Locke that

nature is itself inherently mysterious; the felt mystery comes from our own

cognitive limitations, not from any objective eeriness in the world. It looks

today as if Locke was wrong about our capacity to fathom the nature of the

physical world, but we can still learn from his fundamental thought-the

insistence that our cognitive faculties may not be up to solving every

problem that confronts us. To put the point more generally: the human

mind may not conform to empiricist principles, but it must conform to

some principles-and it is a substantive claim that these principles permit

the solution of every problem we can formulate or sense. Total cognitive

openness is not guaranteed for human beings and it should not be

expected. Yet what is noumenal for us may not be miraculous in itself. We

should therefore be alert to the possibility that a problem that strikes us as

deeply intractable, as utterly baffling, may arise from an area of cognitive

closure in our ways of representing the world.7 That is what I now want to

argue is the case with our sense of the mysterious nature of the connection

between consciousness and the brain. We are biased away from arriving at

the correct explanatory theory of the psychophysical nexus. And this

makes us prone to an illusion of objective mystery. Appreciating this

should remove the philosophical problem: consciousness does not, in

reality, arise from the brain in the miraculous way in which the Djin arises

from the lamp.

I now need to establish three things: (i) there exists some property of the

brain that accounts naturalistically for consciousness; (ii) we are cogni-

tively closed with respect to that property; but (iii) there is no philosophi-

cal (as opposed to scientific) mind-body problem. Most of the work will go

into establishing (ii).

See the Essay, Book 11, ch. IV. Locke compares the project of saying what solidity ultimately is to

trying to clear up a blind man's vision by talking to him.

' Some of the more arcane aspects of cosmology and quantum theory might be thought to lie just

within the bounds of human intelligibility.Chomsky suggests that the causation of behaviour might be

necessarily mysterious to human investigators: see Rejections on Language, p. 156. I myself believe that

the mind-body problem exhibits a qualitatively different level of mystery from this case (unless it is

taken as an aspect of that problem).

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