I think that I was always a Cartesian dualist (although I never thought that we should talk about “substances”298); and if not a dualist, I was certainly more inclined to pluralism than to monism. I think it silly or at least high-handed to deny the existence of mental experiences or mental states or states of consciousness; or to deny that mental states are as a rule closely related to states of the body, especially physiological states. But it also seems clear that mental states are products of the evolution of life, and that little can be gained by linking them to physics rather than to biology.299
My earliest encounters with the body-mind problem made me feel, for many years, that it was a hopeless problem. Psychology, qua science of the self and its experiences, was almost nonexistent, pace Freud. Watson’s behaviourism was a very understandable reaction to this state of affairs, and it had some methodical advantages—like so many other theories which deny what they cannot explain. As a philosophical thesis it was clearly wrong, even though irrefutable. That we do experience joy and sadness, hope and fear, not to mention a toothache, and that we do think, in words as well as by means of schemata; that we can read a book with more or less interest and attention—all this seemed to me obviously true, though easily denied; and extremely important, though obviously nondemonstrable. It also seemed to me quite obvious that we are embodied selves or minds or souls. But how can the relation between our bodies (or physiological states) and our minds (or mental states) be rationally understood? This question seemed to formulate the body-mind problem; and as far as I could see there was no hope of doing anything to bring it nearer to a solution.
In Schlick’s Erkenntnislehre I found a discussion of the body-mind relation which was the first since those of Spinoza and Leibniz to fascinate me. It was beautifully clear, and it was worked out in considerable detail. It has been brilliantly discussed, and further developed, by Herbert Feigl. But although I found this theory fascinating, it did not satisfy me; and for many years I continued to think that nothing could be done about this problem, except perhaps by way of criticism; for example, by criticizing the views of those who thought that the whole problem was due to some “linguistic muddle”.300 (No doubt we sometimes create problems ourselves, through being muddled in speaking about the world; but why should not the world itself harbour some really difficult secrets, perhaps even insoluble ones? Riddles may exist;301 and I think they do.)
I thought, however, that language does play a role: that although consciousness of self may be conjectured to be prelinguistic, what I call the full consciousness of self may be conjectured to be specifically human, and to depend on language. Yet this idea seemed to me of little importance until, as described in the previous section, I had developed certain views of Bolzano’s (and, as I later found, also of Frege’s) into a theory of what I called the “third world” or “world 3”. It was only then that it dawned on me that the body-mind problem could be completely transformed if we call the theory of world 3 to our aid.302 For it can help us to develop at least the rudiments of an objective theory—a biological theory—not only of subjective states of consciousness but also of selves.
Thus whatever new I might have to say on the body-mind problem is connected with my views on world 3.
It appears that the body-mind problem is still usually seen and discussed in terms of the various possible relationships (identity, parallelism, interaction) between states of consciousness and bodily states. As I am an interactionist myself, I think that a part of the problem may perhaps be discussed in this manner, but I am as doubtful as ever whether this discussion is worthwhile. In its stead I propose a biological and even evolutionist approach to the problem.
As I explained in section 37, I do not think highly of the theoretical or explanatory power of the theory of evolution. But I think that an evolutionist approach to biological problems is inescapable, and also that in so desperate a problem situation we must clutch gratefully even at a straw. So I propose, to start with, that we regard the human mind quite naively as if it were a highly developed bodily organ, and that we ask ourselves, as we might with respect to a sense organ, what it contributes to the household of the organism.
To this question there is at hand a typical answer which I propose to dismiss. It is that our consciousness enables us to see, or perceive, things. I dismiss this answer because for such purposes we have eyes and other sense organs. It is, I think, thanks to the observationalist approach to knowledge that consciousness is so widely identified with seeing or perceiving.
I propose instead that we regard the human mind first of all as an organ that produces objects of the human world 3 (in the more general sense) and interacts with them. Thus I propose that we look upon the human mind, essentially, as the producer of human language, for which our basic aptitudes (as I have explained earlier303) are inborn; and as the producer of theories, of critical arguments, and many other things such as mistakes, myths, stories, witticisms, tools, and works of art.
It may perhaps be difficult to bring order into this medley, and perhaps not worth our while; but it is not difficult to offer a guess as to what came first. I propose that it was language, and that language is about the only exosomatic tool whose use is inborn or, rather, genetically based, in man.
This conjecture seems to me to have some explanatory power, even though it is of course difficult to test. I suggest that the emergence of descriptive language is at the root of the human power of imagination, of human inventiveness, and therefore of the emergence of world 3. For we may assume that the first (and almost human) function of descriptive language as a tool was to serve exclusively for true description, true reports. But then came the point when language could be used for lies, for “storytelling”. This seems to me the decisive step, the step that made language truly descriptive and truly human. It led, I suggest, to storytelling of an explanatory kind, to myth making; to the critical scrutiny of reports and descriptions, and thus to science; to imaginative fiction and, I suggest, to art—to storytelling in the form of pictures.
However this may be, the physiological basis of the human mind, if I am right, might be looked for in the speech centre; and it may not be an accident that there seems to be only one centre of speech control in the two hemispheres of the brain; it may be the highest in the hierarchy of control centres.304 (I am here consciously trying to revive Descartes’s problem of the seat of consciousness, and even part of the argument which led him to the probably mistaken conjecture that it must be the pineal gland. The theory might perhaps become testable in experiments with the split brain.)305
I suggest that we distinguish states of “consciousness” in general from those highly organized states which seem to be characteristic of the human mind, the human world 2, the human self. I think animals are conscious. (This conjecture may become testable if we find, with the help of the electroencephalograph, typical dreamlike sleeping in animals as well as in men.) But I also conjecture that animals do not have selves. About the “full consciousness of self”, as it may be called, my central suggestion is that, just as world 3 is a product of world 2, so the specifically human world 2—the full consciousness of self—is a feedback product of theory making.
Consciousness as such (in its lower forms) seems to emerge and become organized before descriptive language does. Anyway, personalities emerge among animals, and a kind of knowledge or understanding of other personalities, especially in some higher social animals. (Dogs may even develop an intuitive understanding of human personalities.) But the full consciousness of self, I suggest, can emerge only through language: only after our knowledge of other persons has developed, and only after we have become conscious of our bodies’ extensions in space and, especially, in time: only after we have become clear, in the abstract, about the regular interruptions to our consciousness in sleep, and have developed a theory of the continuity of our bodies—and thus of our selves—during sleep.
Thus the body-mind problem divides into at least two quite distinct problems: the problem of the very close relationship between physiological states and certain states of consciousness, and the very different problem of the emergence of the self, and its relation to its body. It is the problem of the emergence of the self which, I suggest, can be solved only by taking language and the objects of world 3 into account, and the self’s dependence on them. The consciousness of self involves, among other things, a distinction, however vague, between living and nonliving bodies, and thereby a rudimentary theory of the main characteristics of life; also involved somehow is a distinction between bodies endowed with consciousness and others not so endowed. It involves too the projection of the self into the future: the more or less conscious expectation of the child of growing up in time into an adult; and a consciousness of having existed for some time in the past. Thus it involves problems that assume the possession of a theory of birth and perhaps even of death.
All this becomes possible only through a highly developed descriptive language—a language which has not only led to the production of this world 3, but which has been modified through feedback from world 3.
But the body-mind problem seems to me not exhausted by these two subproblems, the problem of states of consciousness, and the problem of the self. Although full consciousness of self is, in dispositional form, always present in adults, these dispositions are not always activated. On the contrary, we are often in an intensely active mental state and, at the same time, completely forgetful of ourselves, though always able to reflect on ourselves at a moment’s notice.
This state of intense mental activity which is not self-conscious is reached, especially, in intellectual or artistic work: in trying to understand a problem, or a theory; or in enjoying an absorbing work of fiction, or perhaps in playing the piano or playing a game of chess.305a
In such states, we may forget where we are—always an indication that we have forgotten ourselves. What our mind is engaged in, with the utmost concentration, is the attempt to grasp a world 3 object, or to produce it.
I think that this is a far more interesting and characteristic state of mind than the perception of a round patch of orange colour. And I think it important that, although only the human mind achieves it, we find similar states of concentration in hunting animals, for example, or in animals that try to escape from danger. The conjecture offers itself that it is in these stages of high concentration upon a task, or a problem, that both animal and human minds best serve their biological purposes. In more idle moments of consciousness, the mental organ may be, indeed, just idling, resting, recuperating, or, in a word, preparing itself, charging itself up, for the period of concentration. (No wonder that in self-observation we only too often catch ourselves idling rather than, say, thinking intensively.)
Now it seems clear to me that the achievements of the mind require an organ such as this, with its peculiar powers of concentration on a problem, with its linguistic power, its powers of anticipation, inventiveness, and imagination; and with its powers of tentative acceptance and rejection. There does not seem to be a physical organ which can do all this: it seems that something different, like consciousness, was needed, and had to be used as a part of the building material for the mind. No doubt, only as a part: many mental activities are unconscious; much is dispositional, and much is just physiological. But much of what is physiological and “automatic” (in playing the piano, say, or driving a car) at a certain period of time has previously been done by us with that conscious concentration which is so characteristic of the discovering mind—the mind faced with a difficult problem. Thus everything speaks in favour of the indispensability of the mind in the household of the higher organisms, and also for the need to let solved problems and “learned” situations sink back into the body, presumably to free the mind for new tasks.
A theory of this kind is clearly interactionist: there is interaction between the various organs of the body, and also between these organs and the mind. But beyond this I think that the interaction with world 3 always needs the mind in its relevant stages—although as the examples of learning to speak, to read, and to write show, a large part of the more mechanical work of coding and decoding can be taken over by the physiological system, which does similar work in the case of the sense organs.
It seems to me that the objectivist and biological approach sketched here allows us to see the body-mind problem in a new light. It appears too that it blends extremely well with some new work in the field of animal psychology, especially with the work of Konrad Lorenz. And there is also, it seems to me, a close kinship with some of D. T. Campbell’s ideas on evolutionary epistemology and with some ideas of Schrödinger’s.