Joshua Fost

I’m reading Lakoff & Johnson: Philosophy in the Flesh. Lakoff may mention this somewhere explicitly, and perhaps I’ve even seen him do so, but in any case: the modal western spatial metaphor for time is that the future is ahead of us and the past is behind us. For some reason, I am enamored of rotating this 90 degrees, so that the future becomes up and the past down. Besides being more congenial to geological (e.g. sedimentary) processes, there is something cosmically modest about making reference to the stars when referring to the future.

At a talk I gave this weekend, a man in the audience (a psychiatrist, actually) took an interactionist view of the mind: he said that while the brain could certainly influence the mind, the reverse was also true: mind can causally influence the brain. I failed at the time to convince him otherwise. I realize now that what I should have said was this: Can the wind influence air molecules?

Obviously, the wind IS air molecules. Nothing more. If one says that the wind influences air molecules, all one is really saying is that if a whole bunch of air molecules happen to be moving in some direction (that’s what we mean by “wind”), this motion will influence other air molecules. That is to say, air molecules influence each other, which is obviously true. Wind itself doesn’t have any existential status, let alone causal power, over and above its constituent parts.

To prove his point, the psychiatrist said that things like counseling can work better in some psychiatric conditions than medication. Fine. QED for top-down causation, he thought: a non-biological intervention influences biology. But how does counseling work? It involves talking. How does that talking make a difference to the listener and his or her brain? The sound from the talking goes in their ear, and that produces electrical activity in the auditory nerve, etc. If that sound is organized just right, the neurons processing it will influence other parts of the brain in such a way as to change emotion, or thought processes, or whatever. But at the end of the day, it’s neurons influencing other neurons. Moreover, what PRODUCED the talking, on the part of the counseling therapist, is their vocal apparatus, which is also controlled by their brain. So all we’re really seeing here is neurons affecting other neurons. (And neurons, of course, are similarly reducible into their constituent parts. Predictability, of course, is another matter, mostly because of nonlinear dynamics.) If one wants to refute that, the burden is to document a mental event that has no neural correlate (see also supervenience).

This whole episode reminds me strongly of the time a graduate student in English told me that Shakespeare was so much more that a sequence of letters. (She was railing against my delivery of the infinite monkeys scenario.) Excuse me? Shakespeare IS so much more? IS? What the hell are you talking about?