Cavendish and Strawson on Mentality [4]

2025-1 Descartes

 

1. Cavendish allows that there exists conscious mentality, but she argues that much of our conscious intelligent thinking would not take place without unconscious "fairies" that "set" our conscious thoughts "in order." Explain her argument and illustrate it with an example.

Strawson and Cavendish both think that there are a lot of familiar instances of mentality that are not conscious or reflective. For example, they both hold that at the atomic level there exists at least a kind of proto-mentality. Otherwise there would not exist mentality at the macroscopic level. But both also grant that there exists conscious reflective thought. If conscious reflective thought does exist, then at the atomic level there must exist a version of mentality from which conscious reflective thought could emerge.

“But put the case there were such atoms, out of which all things are made; yet no man that has his sense and reason, regular, can believe, they did move by chance, or at least without sense and reason, in the framing of the world, and all natural bodies; if he do but consider the wonderful order and harmony that is in nature, and all her parts.” - Margaret Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1668), 263

“Most spend their time in talk rather then in thought; but there is a wise saying, think first, and speak after; and an old saying that many speak first, and think after; and doubtlesse many, if not most do so, for we do not alwayes think of our words we speak, for most commonly words flow out of the mouth, rather customarily then premeditately, just like actions of our walking, for we go by custome, force and strength, without a constant notice or observation; for though we designe our wayes, yet we do not ordinarily think of our pace, nor take notice of every several step; just so, most commonly we talk, for we seldom think of our words we speak, nor many times the sense they tend to….” - Margaret Cavendish, Worlds Olio, unnumbered.

“Who knowes, but in the Braine may dwel Little small Fairies; who can tell? And by their severall actions they may make Those formes and figures, we for fancy take. And when we sleep, those Visions, dreames we call, By their industry may be raised all; And all the objects, which through senses get, Within the Braine they may in order set. And some pack up, as Merchants do each thing, Which out sometimes may to the Memory bring. Thus, besides our owne imaginations, Fairies in our braine beget inventions.” - Margaret Cavendish, “Of small Creatures, such as we call Fairies Poems and Fancies,” Poems and Fancies (1655), unnumbered

 Here Cavendish is referring to the very common experience in which our mental life “in order set[s].” Our thinking often unfolds in an orderly and coherent manner: perhaps we are having a conversation or are thinking through an idea; or perhaps we think of an invention, where first there comes before our mind the idea of a need or interest, and then gradually there forms in our mind an idea of the invention as well. The process does not appear to be this: we think of the need or interest, and then decide that we will have an idea of a particular invention, and then the idea of the invention forms. That would suppose that we have the idea of the invention already.

The same would also seem to apply in the case of a larger train of thought: we might describe ourselves as authoring a line of thinking, but cognitive associations and other trains of thought often happen by their own devices. We might suppose that we are one step ahead of thoughts as they unfold, deciding which to have from among many; but if a menu of such thought options were before us, it would be before us already, and already tagged by their weighting and relevance. Whatever the process by which thoughts come to us in a coherent order, Cavendish is supposing that it involves sophistication and intelligence itself.

A string of thoughts is in some cases something that we just observe as it unfolds: we have a thought of a toy, and then of a marketplace and all the beautiful objects that are sold in it; or we think of a wedding, and the figures of a bride and groom begin to dance in our imagination. Cavendish is supposing that in cases such as these the bodies that compose our ideas are intelligent and creative and are able to enter into creative formations. She appreciates that she is not explaining much when she uses the language of “fairies” to identify the causes that “in order set” our ideas. A few pages before the first poem, she remarks that some may “laugh at the report of Fairies, as impossible,” but specifies that all that she means is “onely small bodies, not subject to our sense” that somehow are able to order our thought.

Cavendish does not purport to understand how our thoughts take on the order that they do. She likes the connotation of “fairy” because it suggests that no real explanation is being given other than to say that there is an effect that occurs, and that there exists a cause that somehow has the capacity to help to bring about that effect. We do not understand any cause-effect relationships, Cavendish thinks, but instead there is natural magic. Like Hume, she is arguing that thoughts tend to come to us in an order that makes sense and that, when they do, a highly cognitive faculty is at work to order them in that way. There is conscious intelligent thinking, of course, but a condition of conscious intelligent thinking is that there be non-conscious cognitive activity that is taking place behind the scenes. More and Cudworth would object that, although such unconscious intelligence is pervasive, it is a feature of imma¬ terial minds only. Cavendish supposes that there are a number of immediate properties that admit of no further explanation and that intelligence is an immediate property of matter.

2. Cavendish defends the view that thinking is physical. Discuss two of her reasons for this view. Why does she think that bodies exhibit mentality at the most basic level?

Cavendish offers a number of arguments for the view that generally speaking matter is animated, sophistieated, and intelligent. She generates these arguments from axioms that she takes to be extremely intuitive and eompelling. The axioms include that it is impossible for immaterial entities to internet with material entities; that only material things are divisible; that only material things are capable of motion; that entities that behave in an orderly and intelligent manner must be intelligent and perceptive; and that entities (for example bodies) that are created by an infinite, intelligent, and perfect being would be sufficiently sophisticated and impressive that they would be able to think and engage in intelligent activity themselves. A subset of Cavendish’s arguments work to support the view that at least some matter thinks, while others are meant to establish that material thinking is ubiquitous and pervasive.

Cavendish assumes that material things interact with material things only and that interaction is always by contact. That is to say, there is no action at a distance. There might be apparent instances of action at a distance, but if interaction is always by contact, any case in which two distant bodies interact is a case in which there are contiguous bodies in between.

Cavendish thinks that mind body interaction occurs by contact and that instances of mind body interaction abound. For example: Cordials do cheer, and do revive the Soul or Mind, making the " thoughts more cheerful and pleasing. Bodies are almost incessantly affecting our sense organs and contributing to the production of ideas, and the simplest and most obvious explanation if bodies can only interact with bodies is that minds are material... Cavendish is arguing that on any view that allows that bodies play an active role in the production of our sensory perceptions, the most plausible thing to say is that thinking is material and that minds are thinking bodies.

Cavendish defended many of the same views almost four-hundred years ago (though Strawson fails to cite any of her work). She argues that our brains clearly think – if thinking takes place in the brain, for example – and she concludes that the elements that make up our brain must therefore exhibit mentality. There is no way that reason could arise from non-reason, she says, and no way that sense could arise from non-sense. An additional argument that she offers for the view that thinking has a physical ground is that when we travel, our thinking moves with us, but the only kinds of things that partake of motion are physical things.

We might worry that, with the motion argument, Cavendish is committed to some infelicitous conclusions like that a story moves from place to place when we read a book on a trip. If she wants to avoid such a conclusion, she cannot employ the motion argument to support the view that minds are physical. Her way out of this worry is to be an ontological minimalist. She would say that what exists is the book and the mind of the person reading the book, and she would say that that mind is entertaining ideas as it reads. But there is not – in addition to that – a story that exists. We might then ask the question – isn’t the book expressing propositions that are separate from the marks on the page, and separate from the ideas of the reader? For example, if the book is translated into different languages, and a lot of people are reading the different translations, aren’t they still reading the same story – the story that is captured by those different languages? Cavendish is thinking that there is no need to posit an additional entity like a proposition, or a story that is made up of propositions. What exists are bodies and their many features, including ideas that picture words on a page and many other things. She would say that we italicize the word ‘story’ and then are tempted to reify it, but that that would be to posit a weird kind of entity.

 

 

3. Strawson argues that mentality cannot emerge from body if body exhibits no mentality at the most basic level. Explain his reasoning. An opponent might object to Strawson hat emergence of new features happens all the time in nature-for example in the case if liquidity or heat-and so the emergence of mentality would not be unusual. What is his response to this objection?

One of Strawson’s central aims is to argue that there is no radical emergence in nature – and in particular that mental stuff (like minds, conscious awareness, ideas, decisions, etc.) do not emerge from physical elements that exhibit no trace of mentality themselves. An important move for Strawson straight out of the gate is to argue that scientists are mistaken to hold that radical emergence takes place often in nature – for example liquid and gas states emerging from elements that are neither liquid nor gas themselves. If we consider water as we experience it – with a color and temperature, for example – the liquid and steam versions do appear to be radically different from anything that we encounter at the atomic level. But he reminds us that color and temperature do not really exist as properties of water (or any other physical stuff), but instead water is a lattice of molecules that are either tightly arranged (ice) or loosely arranged (liquid) or very loosely arranged (steam). Those arrangement are not radically different from what exists at the atomic level. So we cannot appeal to radical emergence that is common in nature to argue that mental stuff emerges from physical elements that exhibit no trace of mentality. If minds, conscious awareness, ideas, decisions, etc., emerge in nature, it must be that the basic elements of nature exhibit mentality in some way, or at least proto-mentality.

And we know that minds emerge from the basic elements of physical reality – Strawson argues – because, like those basic elements, minds are physical. He gives numerous arguments – from the consideration that minds and bodies come into (physical) contact; from Ockham’s Razor; and from the datum that minds are spatio-temporal. At the very least, our own minds emerge in our brain and nervous system. But on the assumption that there is no extreme heterogeneity in nature – the assumption that the basic elements of nature have all of the same basic properties – he concludes that all physical elements have mentality or proto-mentality. Strawson is thus a panpsychist.

 

4. Strawson defends a conception of self as conscious and reflective. How is his view picking up on the argumentation of the Second Meditation? Consider the self of some specific individual. Are there any aspets of that self that Strawson's account overlooks?

Strawson holds that minds do not emerge from non-mind. That would be radical emergence.

For the record note that Strawson is not as confident as Descartes about the most basic features of body. Physicists have uncovered that body is a really complicated and mysterious thing, and not just something with the basic features of size, shape, and extension. What Strawson will insist however is that one of the basic features of body is proto-mentality, even if we do not know much else about body. 

Strawson and Cavendish both think that there are a lot of familiar instances of mentality that are not conscious or reflective. For example, they both hold that at the atomic level there exists at least a kind of proto-mentality. Otherwise there would not exist mentality at the macroscopic level. But both also grant that there exists conscious reflective thought. If conscious reflective thought does exist, then at the atomic level there must exist a version of mentality from which conscious reflective thought could emerge.

Note that some philosophers defend the view that conscious reflective thought does not exist – not even at the macroscopic level. Eliminative materialists subscribe to this view – for example Patricia and Paul Churchland. On this view, we use words like ‘conscious’ and ‘reflective’, but they do not refer to anything. They are like the word ‘witch’, but witches do not exist (presumably). Something exists when we identify someone as a witch, namely the person who is being misdescribed, and something exists when we identify something as a mind, namely a brain with wholly physical features, but witches do not exist, and minds do not exist. All that exists are the elements of the periodic table, and (contra Cavendish and Strawson) those elements do not have proto-mentality, so minds do not exist at any level.

But conscious reflective thinking is different. Cavendish and Strawson have to say that there is mentality at the atomic level that is similar enough to conscious reflective thinking that it is able to bring about conscious reflective thinking. Note finally that Cavendish and Strawson would not want to downplay the mentality of basic physical elements, even if they are not conscious and reflective themselves. Sometimes we say of stuff that it is “mere” matter – if we are thinking of it in Cartesian terms – but Cavendish and Strawson are arguing that matter is far more exalted.

Strawson in effect agrees with Descartes that the “I” or self is the conscious reflective entity of the Second Meditation. But Strawson allows that there are stretches of time in which a person is not conscious or reflective – whether it’s during a deep sleep, or in case of behavior that is “in the zone,” or in the case of unconscious background processes that undergird our conscious thinking. For example, if such processes result in the occurrence of a conscious thought, Strawson will not say that “I thought it,” but that “it occurred to me.”

Strawson holds that the “I” is episodic in nature. It exists for a stretch of time, and then goes out of existence, and then it exists again. But because the “I” just is conscious reflection, and conscious thinking often stops and is followed by a gap, the “I” that exists afterward is not the same “I” that existed before. The current “I” might have memories of the previous “I,” but those are memories of the existence of a different entity. Strawson is saying that Descartes was right about the identification of the “I” and conscious awareness, but that Descartes was wrong that a single “I” accompanies the human body for an entire lifespan.

A piece of evidence that is consistent with Strawson’s view is that sometimes an individual undergoes enough of a change in personality and psychology that we say that they are now a different person than they were before. Strawson goes to even more of an extreme: he argues that the psychological stages of one stretch of the “I” could be nearly identical to the states of a different stretch, and still the first “I” would be a different entity from the second so long as there is a gap.

A number of objections might be raised against Strawson’s view of the self as episodic. One is that punishment and accountability would be inappropriate in pretty much all cases of human behavior. Strawson might actually concede and say that punishment is inappropriate in most cases, given his views on meta-ethics, or he might say that punishment and accountability are a function of the need to put individuals away if they are a current danger to society, regardless of whether their current self is responsible for their past behavior. But then another worry is that if we are determining punishment and accountability just on the basis of whether or not someone might be a danger – and not on the basis of what their self has actually done – then Strawson might be committed to saying that we need to put people away before they have actually committed a crime. Strawson seems to just want to avoid ethics as a philosophical sub area.

Another possible worry is that Strawson does not include as part of the self behavior and skills that are below the threshold of conscious awareness, but that still seem to apply to a person. A great basketball player might be able to make expert passes, or a pianist might press piano keys – but without conscious attention to their movements. If Strawson is right, we do not include such skills as pertaining to the person. (We would not be able to include those skills in their eulogy or obituary, for example.) Or if a person regularly talks over other people or is rude, or much worse if the person regularly engages is racist or sexist behavior but is not aware of it, that behavior is not attributable to the person. They can just introspect and say that because they do not see the behavior in their thought, the behavior is not theirs. Also they would probably deny that they are exhibiting the behavior at all.

Note that this latter objection also applies to Descartes. He was extremely influential in terms of his philosophical views, and some people think that he really blew it here – allowing us to conceive of ourselves in a very selective way that overlooks important aspects of who we are.