A Substantial Posthumanist Self

The poststructuralist self is constructed by language and prone to prevailing and countervailing interpretations sustained through dynamic power relations. The critical posthumanist self is a functionally unified hybrid of dynamic natural, cultural and technological systems and self-organising materials. Either way, there does not seem to be enough, here, to explain the objective endurance of a single self over time. Yet, an objectively enduring self is needed to explain the unavoidability of moral reasons (given my argument in this post that unavoidability entails overwhelming adverse consequences for those who disregard moral reasons), because otherwise the consequences are not experienced by the same self who behaved immorally.

There are many theories of personal identity over time. However, most connect the persistence of a person to the continuity of some set of physical or psychological properties, and it is increasingly common for questions to be raised from within fields such as cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology about whether any putatively adequate set of properties is sufficiently stable and universal to deliver personal identity in anything like the ways that common sense suggests, so as to secure the said unavoidability of moral reasons.

Perhaps surprisingly, an enduring posthumanist self can be derived from mind/body substance dualism of the kind for which Rene Descartes is known, and which is reputed to entail the kind of autonomous human subject that is associated with humanism. In fact, there is nothing about the bare theory of substance dualism (the view that mind and body are two different things and two different kinds of things, capable of independent existence) that entails the autonomy of the human will and reason. The human mind can be entirely determined by, constructed by and dependent upon evolutionary and socio-political forces, and yet be a distinct substance from the body and its environment. Even so, regardless of the ways in which contextual forces affect the construction and development of a mind, the endurance of the self is not threatened. This is because that endurance then ceases to relate to the continuity of mental properties (being a mind alone, it only has mental properties). Instead, the mind is unified over time as long as it is still the same substance or thing. In that case, a mind is theoretically capable of possessing a diverse range of discontinuous and fragmented properties without ceasing to be one and the same mind.

The real problem for substance dualism, the one that doomed Descartes’ dualism from the outset, is a problem that threatens regardless of whether the mind substance is regarded as being transcendently autonomous or contextually determined, and that is the mind/body interaction problem. This problem can be expressed in four statements, each of which appear to be true, though all of them cannot be true (this version being taken from Jonathan Westphal’s The Mind-Body Problem, 2016):

1. The mind is a non-physical thing.
2. The body is a physical thing.
3. The mind and the body interact.
4. Physical and non-physical things cannot interact.

Only one of these four statements must be rejected for the remaining three to become consistent, and the most common contemporary strategy is to reject the first, i.e. that the mind is a non-physical thing. However, there are three respects in which reducing the mind or its functions to a physical brain/body/environment/community remains implausible. The first of these is what David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind, 1996) dubbed the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. The easy problem of consciousness is to relate the functions of the mind to functions of neuro-physical correlates in the brain and nervous system. The hard problem is to explain how these physical systems give rise to phenomenal qualities (a.k.a. qualia), or the what-it-feels-like to experience colour, taste, pain, sound etc. Despite the many attempts to provide an explanation of qualia in physical terms, they usually turn out to be solutions to the easy problem, only, or they lack sufficient explanatory power.

In fact, the irreducibility of qualia is one of at least two hard problems of the mind. The second is the hard problem of intentionality, or the about-ness of mental states. Most, if not all, mental states seem to be directed towards something beyond the mind, i.e. the things that they are of or about. It turns out to be quite difficult to explain just how a mental state is objectively determined to be about one thing rather than any other thing in a person’s environment or the wider universe. This is especially so if we grant that some things we think about and desire do not exist, but that is a more controversial as a claim, and it is not necessary to press this extra claim in order to state the problem.

The problem of intentionality or about-ness that I have in mind is of the sort implicit in Hilary Putnam’s model-theoretic argument (first stated in ‘Realism and Reason’, Meaning and the Moral Sciences, 1978) and Jacques Derrida’s critique of structuralist semiotics (as found in Of Grammatology, 1967). It starts with the claim that there does not seem to be anything special about mental states to make them objectively about one thing rather than any other. In this respect, they are just like artificial signs or symbols, which are only about one thing rather than another to the extent that someone interprets them as being about that one thing. Yet, if minds are just like signs in needing to be interpreted, then the interpreter’s mind also needs to be interpreted as providing one interpretation rather than any other. We end up with a vicious regress of interpreters without ever explaining objective about-ness.

One possibility that Putnam raises, in order to mock it, is the idea that the mind possesses some magical ‘noetic rays’ that reach out and grasp the thing of which it is about. However, all that Putnam is highlighting by this is that the property of minds in question cannot be explained as a feature of a purely functional, physical system. So, we can still have the objective about-ness that we appear to have in mind, but it becomes a second hard problem for those who seek to reduce the mind to a physical base.

Instead of rejecting the first statement of the four that make up the mind/body interaction problem, I opt for rejecting the third statement, i.e. that minds and bodies interact. As suggested in a number of my previous posts, the correlation between minds and the physical world need only be the result of a pre-established harmony initiated and maintained by the creative power of God’s will. This is a version of the parallelist view of substance dualism, to which there are two main objections. The first is that we seem to experience being the cause of events in the physical world through actions initiated by our minds. To this it can be responded that the experience of being a cause is different from the experiences we have of physical causes in the world, such as our experience of forces, energy and resistance. We do not experience our minds producing or transmitting force, energy or resistance. Instead, we experience the intentionality (about-ness) of our volitions, the immediacy of our bodily responses, and the satisfaction of that intentionality when whatever our volition represents beyond our bodily response is realised in the physical world. So, action is not causation, in my view. Furthermore, we are responsible for our actions as a matter of moral responsibility, rather than causal responsibility, as I explained in this post.

The second major objection to the parallelist view is that it rules out human free will in a big way, but I reject free will in favour of determinism, as I also explained in the just-mentioned post.

In fact, parallelist substance dualism is consistent with a theocentric posthumanism precisely because it excludes the human autonomy associated with humanism. Furthermore, being a mind substance need not be definitive of humanity, as Descartes believed. So, it does nothing to advance exclusivist humanism. There may be many kinds souls and proto-souls, and the extent that this is so is a matter for God’s determination. Generally, however, a good rule of thumb seems to be that, if it appears to be conscious, it probably has a mind/soul. This applies to many orders of animal. Perhaps, it applies to some machines.