The Embodiment of Meaning [1 ed.] 1032574089, 9781032574080

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The Embodiment of Meaning

This book presents an elaborated argument for why functionalism, as well as other dematerialized and disembodied theories of mind, can’t be right. In discussing the question of whether or not we are just material beings, Hilary Putnam once claimed that “we could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter.” Fifty years later, functionalism still reigns, and the psychological irrelevance of the materiality of our bodies remains a hardwired assumption of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. As this book shows, the idea of the possibility of a disembodied mind is rooted in a philosophical depreciation of the particular in favor of the abstract, an attitude which runs through Western philosophy as a red thread. The Embodiment of Meaning demonstrates how this privileging of the immaterial-abstract over the material-particular is not only untenable from a logical-philosophical point of view; it also runs counter to a basic fact of human psychology itself: rather than being irrelevant, the world precisely matters most in its material particularity. In addition to offering a thoroughgoing criticism of the Platonic-functionalist “abstract-over-particular” idea, the book aims to substantially contribute to a less ambiguous understanding of the various ways in which “matter matters.” Farid Zahnoun is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of philosophy of mind and cognitive science with an expertise in the topics of mental representation, perception, and the notion of information within theoretical neuroscience. He is currently affiliated with the Free University of Berlin (FU) and the University of Antwerp (UA).

The Embodiment of Meaning

Why Matter Matters for Cognition and Experience

Farid Zahnoun

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Farid Zahnoun The right of Farid Zahnoun to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-57408-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-57411-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-43924-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240 Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

To Arnold, for shaping me as a philosopher To Els, for shaping me as a person

Contents

Acknowledgments x Introduction 1 Notes 6 1 Mistaking the score for the music: intellectualism and the philosopher’s fallacy 1.1 A familiar picture: Russell, Dewey, and Plato  7 1.2 The marks of Platonism  9 1.3 From conversion to convergence: the functionalist fallacy  11 1.4 Reality plus minus 16 Notes 19

7

2 Multiple realizability and the irrelevance of matter 2.1 Multiple realization: the standard interpretation  22 2.2 Multiple realizability as metaphysically laden: type-realism  25 2.3 Matter doesn’t matter (much)  29 2.4 Multiple realizability: a thesis with identity issues  32 2.5 Matter doesn’t matter … for what?  35 2.6 MR and identity theory: where’s the rub?  40 Notes 43

22

3 The embodiment of meaning 3.1 The myth of the self-differentiating object  45 3.2 Multiple realization and the relevance of matter  49 3.3 Strong and weak embodiment of meaning  53 3.4 The continuity thesis of meaning  57

45

viii Contents

3.5 Multiple realizability and weak embodiment of meaning  60 3.6 Teleofunctionalism and the functionalist fallacy  64 Notes 70 4 Categorial and particular identity 72 4.1 Categorial identity (quidditas) 72 4.2 Particular and categorial identity in relation to acts of identification 76 4.3 Rigid designation and definite descriptions: Kripke and Russell  79 4.4 The contextual nature of multiple realizability  82 4.5 Relevance and irreplaceability  84 Notes 86 Intermezzo: six honest serving men Notes 91

87

5 Embodied experience 92 5.1 We could be made of Swiss cheese  92 5.2 The body as a condition of our evaluative perspective (qualitative relevance) 94 5.3 The notion of matter as dependent on our bodies  96 5.4 Disgust as a relation to matter  98 5.5 The body and the real  100 5.6 Relevance and irrelevance of materiality  101 Notes 103 6 Psychology as strongly embodied 6.1 The curious case of Martin Guerre  104 6.2 The cobbler and the prince  106 6.3 The soul as reified meaning  109 6.4 Locke and the idea of mind uploading  114 6.5 Functionalism and substance dualism  116 6.6 Model and modeled: a fundamental confusion  118 Notes 121

104

7 Embodiment and identity 7.1 Body image and body schema  122 7.2 The body as a necessary condition for personal identity  123 7.3 Personal identity coincides with the particular evaluative perspective: the story of S.  125

122

Contents ix

7.4 Numerical identity as relatively applicable  129 7.5 Categorial and particular identity as inextricably linked to practices of identity attribution  130 7.6 Attributing numerical identity  132 7.7 Numerical identity in relation to abstract types  134 7.8 The importance of the body for numerical identity in general  136 7.9 Functional and nonfunctional reidentification  140 Notes 145 Epilogue: the significant body Notes 149

147

Afterthought on sense-making

151

References 152 Index 158

Acknowledgments

This book is an attempt to bring together my ideas on the relation between meaning and body, some of which go back almost 20 years. As a student at the Higher Institute for Philosophy (Catholic University of Leuven), I became impressed by the teachings of philosopher Arnold Burms, and in particular his distinction between weak and strong embodiment of meaning. Here was a philosophical concept that managed to conceive of meaning not as some abstract property of sentences but as a concrete phenomenon that reveals itself not only in our linguistic practices but also in our various engagements with material objects, and in particular the human body. It began to dawn on me that natural language, far from being the unique locus of meaning, is perhaps best understood as itself indebted to our concrete bodily experiences, both in the sense of experiences with and of the body. It was only much later, while carrying out my PhD research under supervision of Erik Myin, that I realized how Burms’s notion of embodied meaning had direct relevance for contemporary discussions in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Erik introduced me to the rapidly growing field of embodied cognition, a cluster of approaches to the mind which had up until then remained virtually unknown to me, yet in which Erik was — and still is — a key player. And despite the heterogenous character of these less traditional approaches, most of them have this much in common that they want to provide an alternative to the dominant functionalist picture of the mind, a picture in which there is little or no place for the role of the body. As is well-known, a central thesis of functionalism has it that mental states are multiply realizable, meaning that one and the same kind of mental state (“pain,” to give the classic example) can be realized in different kinds of physical states. The critical insight that lies at the basis of this book is that what the functionalist refers to as multiple realizability should be understood as a confused expression of what Arnold Burms refers to as “weak embodiment of meaning.” What all of this means will hopefully become clear in the course of the following chapters. My reason for mentioning these things here in the acknowledgments section is to make it clear that this book

Acknowledgments xi

could not have been written without the preexisting work of two people in particular: Arnold Burms and Erik Myin. Yet, perhaps even more importantly than inspiring me through their work, they have never stopped supporting me personally. For this, I am forever in their debt. My greatest gratitude, then, goes out to Arnold and Erik. Thank you for everything. I am also deeply grateful to Dan Hutto, with whom I had the good fortune and privilege to work with during a 6-month research stay at the University of Wollongong (Australia). Like Arnold and Erik, Dan continues to be an incredible support, as well as one of my biggest inspirations. For this, I am deeply grateful. Much gratitude also to Karim Zahidi, with whom I shared an office at the University of Antwerp for 4 years during the time of my PhD research. Our numerous discussions, which sometimes lasted for hours, no doubt had an impact on my own thinking, especially on the subject of identity. Though still somewhat reluctantly, I can now say that Karim was mostly right. I also want to thank my other Antwerp colleagues who were less directly involved with my research yet who helped create the right atmosphere for me to complete my dissertation and continue my research. Thomas van Es, Herbert De Vriese, Jasper Van de Vijver and Luca Roccioletti deserve special mention here. Thanks also to my Antwerp students for their engagement in my Philosophical Psychology classes. It wasn’t always easy, neither for the student nor for the teacher, to stay motivated during online classes, but thanks to their praiseworthy efforts, we pulled through. Many thanks also to my friends and colleagues at the University of Wollongong (Australia) and the Federal University of Santa Maria (Brazil): thank you all for making me feel at home at both ends of the planet. In particular, I want to thank Glenda Satne, Michael Kirchhoff, Tiegue Vieira Rodrigues, César Schirmer dos Santos, Flavio Williges, Eduardo Vicentini De Medeiros, Marcos Fanton, Mitieli Seixas, and José Lourenço. Here, I also want to thank my Brazilian students for their truly excellent work. It was an honor having such bright young men and women in my classroom. More recently, I also had the opportunity of carrying out a research stay at Romain Brette’s neuroscience lab at the Vision Institute in Paris. These six months have proven tremendously enriching, both in an academic and personal sense. I feel honored to have met Romain, and I look forward to future collaborations. I explicitly want to thank Romain and the institute for providing me with all the facilities I could hope for. Many thanks also to my Paris friends and colleagues Marcel Stimberg, Pierre Yger, Irene Elices, Olivier Marre, and Ulisse Ferrari for making my time in Paris unforgettable. Many thanks also to Senior Editor Andrew Beck at Routledge for his commendable professionalism throughout the whole publication process. It was a pleasure working together, and I look forward to a future project. I am also deeply grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and stimulating comments. It was simply a pleasure to read their reports.

xii Acknowledgments

Most of all, however, I want to thank my friends, some of whom I have known for over 25 years and who have no doubt helped shape me into the person I am today. It is a privilege to be able to say that I can’t name them all here, but some of them simply can’t be left out: thank you Koen Sels, Veronik Willems, Wim de Busser, Suzanne Grotenhuis, Alexander Daems, Jan Zienkowski, Maarten Gehem, Jelle Dehaes, Annelies Damen, Sophie Anson, Rinus Van de Velde, Joyce de Badts, the Van der Aelst family, and, of course, Jan van Eemeren, for all your love and support throughout the years. I hope to see you all again soon at Stanny’s. Yet, when it comes to writing a book, love and support are in themselves insufficient if the latter doesn’t include financial support. I therefore would like to thank the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) for providing funding via the project “Facing the Interface” [G049619N]). Yet I especially want to thank the wonderful Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for entrusting me with a generous two-year scholarship, allowing me to complete the book. Many thanks also to Jan Slaby (FU Berlin) for hosting my project in Germany, and to Joerg Fingerhut for providing shelter when I needed it. Finally, I want to thank my mother, Els Van de Gehuchte, and my grandfather, Staf Van de Gehuchte. All the philosophy in the world couldn’t teach me what I learned from them: the value of perseverance.

Introduction

We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter. —Hilary Putnam

In full-scale VR, users will build their own lives as they choose, genuinely interacting with others around them and leading a meaningful and valuable life. —David Chalmers

In various fields of inquiry, there is growing suspicion that our prevalent theories of who we are as psychological beings have been overlooking something vital, something without which any human self-understanding is bound to remain incomplete. Expressed in its most general form, what is felt to remain insufficiently acknowledged by the dominant philosophical anthropologies is the fact that matter matters, where this claim is supposed to pertain first of all to the materiality of our own bodies. Contrary to what mainstream cognitive science and philosophical functionalism would have us believe, the material bodies we have somehow determine or — as one philosopher puts it1 — shape the kind of psychologies we have. This turn toward matter in general, and the material body in particular, can be discerned for instance in the so-called New Materialism movement, most closely associated with feminist authors like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad. Yet the “bodily turn” is probably nowhere as pervasive as within philosophical psychology and the cognitive sciences. Despite different emphases, the so-called 4E approaches to cognition2 (embodied, enactive, embedded, extended) all acknowledge to a greater or lesser extent the role of the body when it comes to explanations of mind and cognition. And these embodied approaches appear to be only growing in popularity. As Fred Adams puts it, “embodied cognition is sweeping the planet” (Adams, 2010, p. 619).3

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-1

2 Introduction

Yet it would be premature to claim that the idea that “matter matters” is by now well entrenched in the minds of the mainstream cognitive scientist. The vast majority of people working in neuroscience, for instance, still conceive of the mind along functionalist lines; that is, as a disembodied, abstract information processing system that can in principle be realized in other materialities. Half a century after Putnam’s claim that “we could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter,” the classic cognitivist still considers our bodies to be utterly irrelevant when it comes to genuinely cognitive processes. And in fact, many of those claiming to be doing embodied cognitive science would only go so far as to attribute the body with a non-intrinsic, merely instrumental relevance. Clearly, having the kind of body we have matters in so far as it structures the kinds of inputs and outputs that are available to the cognitive system. Yet, what really counts as cognitive activity is what happens in between, that is, the internal computations over the (presumably) neurally realized representations. As Tony Chemero puts it, “embodied cognitive science is still a computational theory of mind.” In this sense, then, cognition is just as much in the head as it ever was. Embodiment, on this view, is at the end of the day nothing but a contingency. It should therefore not raise too many eyebrows that one of the prime architects of the extended mind hypothesis — probably the most discussed version of an embodied cognition theory — has recently published a booklength defense of why, ultimately, our bodies are of no real cognitive significance. In his 2022 book Reality+, David Chalmers elaborates on his earlier functionalist intuitions that all that matters to a mind is its abstract causalfunctional organization. Given the assumed abstract, disembodied nature of minds, we may just as well be living in a nonmaterial virtual reality. There is, in any case, no reason for assuming that we can’t lead “a fully meaningful life in a virtual world” (Chalmers, 2022, p. xvii). Yet, there are others — and I count myself among them — who take embodiment more seriously. So-called radical embodied cognition theorists don’t simply hold that the body matters for cognition; cognitive processes just are bodily processes. And these are always embedded in a material environment. Cognition, essentially, is dynamic organism–environment interaction. And these interactions are structured or, indeed, shaped by the kind of bodies we have. To be sure, the brain still has an indispensable role to play, but only as part of the larger body–environment system, not as the unique locus of cognition. With these radical theorists, then, we are far removed from the disembodied view championed by the functionalist and, in the end, also implicitly by many so-called embodied cognition theorists. For the radical 4E theorist, the body not only matters in an instrumental sense, it is claimed to matter in a constitutive sense. The problem, however, is that it is far from clear what this “matter mattering” amounts to. What does it mean to say that our physical constitution

Introduction 3

matters constitutively? And more generally speaking, what does it mean to say that matter does or doesn’t matter for who we are as psychological beings? Granted, saying that matter matters has a nice ring to it. Yet not only is this expression ambiguous to the point of becoming vacuous (“matter” and “matters” in what sense?); it is in its slogan form also elliptic: matter for what, exactly? One of the main ambitions of this book is to clarify the variety of ways in which sense can be made of the claim that matter matters in general, and the material body in particular. Yet all the interpretations we shall investigate have this much in common that they all agree that, to understand ourselves as psychological beings, we can’t abstract away from the materiality of our own bodies and of that of the world around us. There is no such thing as a non-embodied or non-embedded mind, and there is no such thing as a meaningful life in a nonmaterial environment. Claims to the contrary are built on a confusion between actual cognitive processes and our abstract representations of them, or so I will argue in the following pages. The book consists of seven chapters which are built around its two main objectives: on the one hand, providing an in-depth critique of the functionalist view of the mind as a disembodied and multiply realizable entity; on the other hand, showing in what ways the body matters for cognition, and in particular for conceptual thought. As I will argue, some of the most fundamental philosophical concepts which underlie and structure discussions about the mind–matter relation rely for their intelligibility on the embodied nature of our being. These concepts include the notion of matter itself, the notion of the real as opposed to the fake or virtual, the notion of what I will call categorial identity (what something is from a classificatory point of view) and even the notion of numerical identity (sameness over time). Despite the abstract character of these notions, their intelligibility nonetheless depends on a relation to our bodies and the relations our bodies have with the material environment. In the first chapter, as a kind of stage setting, I will take a closer look at the different ways in which the functionalist’s depreciation of matter and body manifests itself within the classic as well as more recent literature. Moreover, I will also show in what way functionalism implicitly endorses a familiar Western metaphysical picture, which goes back at least to Plato. Like Plato, the functionalist conceives of the particular, going from the abstract. Yet, despite an undeniable overlap between functionalism and Platonism, there is also one crucial point of divergence: whereas Plato never failed to keep the realm of the concrete separated from that of the abstract, functionalism tends to conflate both realms. Throughout the book, I will refer to this as the functionalist fallacy. As I will show, the fallacy pervades some of the most prominent ideas of functionalism, including that of the multiple realizability of the mental, which will be the central topic of the second chapter.

4 Introduction

The idea that the same kind of mental state can be realized in various material substrates, and that this rules out a potential mind–matter identity relation, is to this day almost universally accepted. The elaborate critique presented in the second chapter is informed by insights from phenomenology, pragmatism, and more contemporary embodied cognition approaches, especially enactive approaches. It is meant to finally lay to rest the idea that the thesis of multiple realization is an interesting empirical thesis which can provide us with new insights about the nature of the mental. As I will argue, the thesis rests on certain problematic metaphysical assumptions without which it loses much of its appeal. More in particular, the thesis rests on two untenable presuppositions, both of which are Platonic in character. On the one hand, it takes for granted a kind of type realism which attributes numerical identity to types; on the other hand, it proceeds from a theory of classification which ignores the constitutive role of the embodied and evaluating subject when it comes to classification. Yet, once we reintroduce the embodied and enactive subject into the metaphysical picture, the thesis of multiple realizability loses much of its appeal. In addition, on this more plausible reinterpretation, it is no longer clear in what way the idea of the multiple realizability of the mental can provide an argument against a potential mind–matter identity relation. In the third chapter, I will further clarify the idea that the thesis of multiple realization is at bottom a thesis about our meaning-giving practices, rather than about the way the world is outside of these practices. To this end, I will draw a comparison between the idea of multiple realization on the one hand and the philosophical distinction between strong and weak embodiment of meaning. With this latter distinction — which originates in the work of philosopher Arnold Burms, yet which has traces in Wittgenstein — we find an explicit interconnection between the three M’s which take center stage in this book: matter (as a verb), matter (as a noun) and meaning. As I will argue, the idea of multiple realization is best understood in light of the phenomenon of weak embodiment of meaning, where matter doesn’t matter for the meaning of an entity (specifically functional entities). The fourth chapter will be dedicated to further disentangling two notions of identity which tend to get mixed up in discussions about the relevance of matter for the mind. Here, it will be emphasized that matter indeed doesn’t matter for the categorial identity of an entity (what the entity is) but that it always matters for its particular identity (this, not that thing). As I will argue in this chapter, the functionalist’s disinterest in matter is just one expression of a much larger and more serious problem: by confusing the abstract with the concrete, the functionalist can no longer attribute any significance to the world in its particularity, including the particularity of our experience. It is only by forgetting the particularity that the idea of a meaningful life in a departicularized virtual reality can begin to make sense. However, this idea

Introduction 5

also overlooks the psychological fact that things that matter most to us precisely matter in their material particularity. In this important sense too, matter matters, or so I will argue. After a short intermezzo dedicated to the methodological issue of the role of the question in philosophical and scientific inquiries, the fifth chapter will begin to explore in what sense the body matters for cognition. More specifically, the focus will come to lie with the relation of our embodiment to certain abstract concepts, one of which being the notion of matter itself. Contrary to what intellectualist philosophers have claimed, we can and do relate directly to objects in their materiality, not via conceptual thought but via embodied experience. Our abstract conception of matter ultimately relies on, and is rooted in, our embodied interactions with material objects. Yet without these interactions, the notion of matter and its cognates (“stuff,” “material substrate,” “materiality,” “substance”) would be bereft of all meaning. As I will further argue, it is also in the embodied interactions with our environment that a conceptual distinction between what is real and what is not can begin to emerge. At a fundamental level, the notion of the real is tightly connected to that of matter. For the developing child, something is felt to be real if it consists of the right material, even though the child can’t further specify the material in physiochemical terms. Chapter 6 will investigate a different yet equally fundamental sense in which our bodies matter for our psychologies. This fundamental sense is logical in nature. The very idea of attributing psychological predicates presupposes a particular embodiment. Simply put: a psychology is always a psychology of some body. This idea not only goes against traditional dualistic ideas of soul versus body (as can be found for instance in Locke); it also radically challenges the functionalist intuition of minds as abstract entities which can in principle be realized or, as it is nowadays popular to say, uploaded into a computer. The chapter will further evaluate the idea of mind uploading and argue that it is, in the final analysis, incoherent. Chapter 7, finally, is devoted to a discussion of the role of the body in relation to personal identity. The idea that the body provides a necessary condition for personal identity has famously been defended by Bernard Williams, but as Williams also realized, bodily continuity is not enough to warrant personal identity claims. By means of a fictional yet realistic example, I will suggest that in case of the identity of persons, but not of objects, what further determines identity is not a continuity in consciousness via memory (as Locke and others have defended) but a continuity in our evaluations of significance. It is not memories simpliciter that matter, but how these memories are evaluated, that is, what they mean for the person. If this meaning changes too radically or too abruptly (e.g., as a result of brain trauma), we feel that the person is no longer the same and that, in this sense, personal identity is lost despite material continuity. In this final chapter, via a

6 Introduction

discussion of Williams’s work, we will also see in what sense embodiment matters not just for correct or incorrect identification but for our practice of numerical identity attribution tout court. The fact that we have the kind of bodies we have structures and constrains the ways in which we assign numerical identity to things. As I will emphasize, even though we linguistically assign numerical identity to almost anything (objects, events, abstract entities, experiences, qualities, etc.), the notion of numerical identity unproblematically applies to only a small subset of our ontology. This fact needs to be accounted for in relation to the fact of our specific embodiment, or so I will claim. In the final sections of the chapter, I will argue that the fact itself that people are interested in reidentification can often only be made intelligible via reference to the body. Typically, we reidentify because of some intrinsic significance the object (or place) has in its material particularity. And the prime example of such an object is the human body, both one’s own body and those of others. It is only through some concrete material relation between a particular body and an object or place that these objects or places acquire an irreplaceable significance in their material particularity. In other words, the fact of our embodiment not only structures our cognition, it also explains to a large extent how things come to matter in the first place. And the things that matter most to us are irreplaceable precisely because they matter in their material particularity. This might well be one of the most characteristic facts of human psychology. Yet it is precisely this fact that remains invisible to the functionalist. Notes 1 See Gallagher (2005). 2 I take these approaches to include the so-called material engagement theory that is nowadays popular within the field of cognitive archaeology (see, for instance, Renfrew, 2004 and Malafouris, 2013). 3 Also quoted in Hutto and Myin (2013, p. 1).

Chapter 1

Mistaking the Score for the Music Intellectualism and the Philosopher’s Fallacy

1.1 A familiar picture: Russell, Dewey, and Plato Bertrand Russell’s contribution to Paul Schilpp’s edited volume The Philosophy of John Dewey (1939) marks the beginning of a longstanding dispute between Russell and Dewey. According to the then 80-year-old Dewey, Russell has shown himself intellectually incapable of grasping Dewey’s core distinction between what he calls primary experience and our subsequent conceptual abstractions pertaining to this experience. In discussing Dewey’s epistemological views, Russell writes: Inquiry, in his system, operates upon a raw material, which it gradually transforms; it is only the final product that can be known. The raw material remains an Unknowable. (Russell, 1996, p. 159)1 In line with his own philosophical thought, Russell attributes to Dewey the view that the “raw material” of experience is something we do not have access to and which, therefore, remains forever out of our grasp. In the same edited volume, Dewey provides Russell with a reply that hardly tries to conceal his discontent with this interpretation: Mr. Russell’s belief that I hold that the “raw material remains unknowable” is peculiarly indicative. For it affords final proof that Mr. Russell has not been able to follow (…) a distinction without which my view cannot be understood. The distinction at issue here is, as mentioned, that between primary experience, which is always particular and situational, and our abstract reflections pertaining to the material we are provided with in primary experience. Dewey continues:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-2

8  Mistaking the Score for the Music

Instead, however, of holding that this material is unknowable, my view is that when the situations in which such material exists become problematic, it provides precisely that which is to be known by being inquired into. (In Russell 1996, p. 631; italics in original)2 And he adds: [A]pparently Mr. Russell is so wedded to the idea that there is no experienced material outside the field of discourse that any intimation that there is such material relegates it, ipso facto, to the status of the “unknowable”. (In Russell 1996, p. 632) The idea Russell is “wedded to” is what Dewey elsewhere calls intellectualism. Dewey observes that at least since Plato, the dominant Western philosophical tradition shows a tendency to mistake our abstract knowledge of things for the things themselves: according to this tradition, what things really are is what they are known to be. Dewey refers to this as “the great vice of philosophy.”3 To be sure, we indeed gain theoretical knowledge by abstracting away from the particularity of the object,4 and there is nothing wrong with that. Scientific theorizing and model construction, for instance, depend on it.5 According to Dewey, however, things go awry when one makes the mistake of attributing these abstractions with an independent and “antecedent existence”6 of their own (what he calls ontologization), an existence, moreover, considered to be more real and fundamental than that of which they are abstractions. This intellectual conversion is, at least according to Dewey, so typical for the philosopher he simply dubs it “the philosophic fallacy.” And it is clear enough from the foregoing that, according to Dewey, Russell too falls prey to such fallacious reasoning. The intellectualist, then, is mistaking the score for the music, thereby giving rise to a number of artificial philosophical problems. For Dewey, such problems are avoided simply by acknowledging that our acquaintance with the world is first and foremost a matter of concrete experience, not of abstract knowledge. We don’t know the music; we just hear it. Similarly, the world does not present itself in our abstract knowledge of it, but in our experience, which is always particular and situated. In short, then, Dewey tries to save the particularity of human experience from the abstract conceptual appropriations of the philosopher, here exemplified by Russell. However, he did not do so merely because he wanted to avoid the artificial problems generated by intellectualism (e.g., where that which is to be known is supposed to be coming from). He did so because he realized that such appropriations can only lead to a deeply distorted and highly impoverished image of human being. Confusing our abstract knowledge of human being with human being itself, which is always a particular and historical being, inevitably leads to

Mistaking the Score for the Music  9

the exclusion of that which resists abstraction, yet which is at the same time most important: our particular experiences and our experiences of the particular. And this includes the material particularity of the body. To be sure, not all philosophers can be accused of such fallacious reasoning.7 Yet it seems fair to say that an ontological privileging of the abstract over the particular does indeed characterize the dominant tradition in Western thought, a tradition which starts with Plato, catches a second breath with Descartes, and— as I will show subsequently — is today being kept alive in the dominant philosophical theories of mind and cognition: on the one hand, we find it in the so-called representational theories of perceptual experience, where experience is understood in terms of abstract content (e.g., the so-called content view of perceptual experience); on the other hand, we encounter it in the family of theories that conceive of the mind in terms of abstract functions, theories which are usually captured under the umbrella term “functionalism.” The focus of this book will be on functionalism, which is to this day “the dominant position in the philosophy of mind”8 and after more than half a century still “the most widely accepted theory of the nature of mental states among philosophers in the Anglo tradition.”9 True, functionalism has become quite “a mess,” as one philosopher puts it.10 Nevertheless, despite all the messiness, the marks of the Platonic tradition which Dewey sought to expose remain clearly recognizable over and above the great variety of functionalist theories characterizing the contemporary philosophical landscape. What are these marks? And how do they show themselves in contemporary functionalism? 1.2 The marks of Platonism 1.2.1 First mark: giving metaphysical and epistemological priority to the abstract

Within the Platonic tradition, not only is the abstract considered to be more real (what a thing really is, is its abstract essence), the world of particulars must also be understood and explained in relation to the abstract. Particulars are what they are in virtue of this relation and can only be made intelligible by reference to the abstract entities of which they are the imperfect instantiations. In classic Platonism, this relation is put in terms of participation (μέθεξις); in present-day functionalism, this relation is captured in terms of realization. In classic Platonism, particulars are to be understood as instantiations of abstract Forms; in functionalism, particulars are to be understood as tokens, that is, as instantiations of abstract types. There is, however, a twist here. For whereas Plato never failed to keep the realm of abstract entities divorced from the realm of particulars, in functionalism, this distinction often falters. I’ll return to this subsequently, where I will give a number

10  Mistaking the Score for the Music

of examples that show in what sense functionalism not only prioritizes the abstract over the particular but also often simply conflates the two. 1.2.2 Second mark: ignoring the potentially constitutive role of the subject

Both the world of particulars and the world of abstract entities (Forms, types) is assumed to be pre-given and mind independent. What something is depends entirely on its relation to the abstract entity (Form, type) of which it is the instantiation or realization. In other words, an entity’s categorial identity (what it is) is understood as depending on a dual relation (Form and instantiation, type and realization). The potentially constitutive or generative role of the subject is ignored.11 That role is limited to one of passive registration of a pre-givenness. In fact, on the functionalist view, the particular subject and its cognitive activities (such as classification) must itself be understood as the realization of an abstract functional description. The abstract causalfunctional profile just is the particular essence of a mind, and the particular essence of a mind just is the subject. This specific conflation of the abstract with the particular is, as we’ll see, the prototypical example of what I will call the functionalist fallacy. At the same time, the equation of mind, subject, and abstract functional description also implies the irrelevance of the particular body, which brings us to the third mark. 1.2.3 Third mark: matter doesn’t matter

The privileging of the abstract over the particular inevitably leads to a depreciation of matter in general, and the physical body in particular. Matter, as that which resists abstraction, is deemed unknowable and therefore also irrelevant.12 The depreciation of the body and the irrelevance of matter are not only prime characteristics of Platonism, they are at least as emblematic for functionalism. For the functionalist as for Plato, when it comes to the question of our minds, matter itself is irrelevant. As Putnam famously put it: “we could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter” (Putnam, 1975, p. 291). To be sure, this does not mean that, for the functionalist, there is absolutely no sense in which matter can be said to have a relevance. However, the sense in which matter might come to matter is purely instrumental. This is Dennett’s point when he writes: The only reason minds depend on the chemical composition of their mechanisms or media is that in order to do the things these mechanisms must do, they have to be made, as a matter of biohistorical fact, from substances compatible with the preexisting bodies they control. (Dennett, 1996, p. 76)

Mistaking the Score for the Music  11

With regard to who we are as mental beings, then, matter matters to the extent that it allows for the implementation or realization of the abstract causal-functional structure which the functionalist equates with an individual mind. Two important caveats here: first, since most functionalists think that the abstract causal-functional structure is realized only by the brain, the rest of the body does remain irrelevant (we could be brains in a vat).13 Second, because the same abstract causal-functional structure is assumed to be realizable in different material substrates, the point still is that, when it comes to particular brains and particular bodies in their material particularity, the irrelevance really is absolute. Without this second assumption, the idea of mind uploading,14 for instance, would make no sense. 1.3 From conversion to convergence: the functionalist fallacy I have just said that, with regard to the first mark of Platonism, there is a twist when it comes to functionalism. To be sure, here too, we find an undeniable preoccupation with the abstract at the expense of the particular, where it is assumed that the latter (the particular) can only be made intelligible by the former (the abstract), not the other way around. As we’ve seen, Dewey speaks in this regard of “a conversion.” Yet, as I now want to show, in addition to this so-called conversion, we also see that the abstract and the particular often get conflated altogether. There is, in other words, not so much a conversion as a convergence. Examples of such convergence of the abstract and the particular can be found among the most prominent functionalist theorists. A classic example is when Putnam explicitly identifies a thing with its description. He does this in connection to his fundamental notion of functional isomorphism. He writes: The concept which is key to unravelling the mysteries in the philosophy of mind, I think, is the concept of functional isomorphism. Two systems are functionally isomorphic if there is a correspondence between the states of one and the states of the other that preserves functional relations. (Putnam, 1975, p. 291; italics in original) To the extent that minds can be understood in terms of functional relations, any system whose states map onto the functional states of a mind is functionally equivalent and, therefore, the same mind, regardless of the material in which the functional relations are being realized. The idea, however, rests on a presupposition which is, as I’ll argue, highly problematic: [T]he notion of functional isomorphism (…) presupposes the notion of a thing’s being a functional or psychological description. It is for this reason

12  Mistaking the Score for the Music

that, in various papers on this subject, I introduced and explained the notion in terms of Turing machines. And I felt constrained, therefore, to defend the thesis that we are Turing machines. (Putnam, 1975, p. 292; my emphasis) It remains unclear, however, how anything, regardless of whether it’s a Turing machine or a person (or both at once, as Putnam suggests here) can literally be its abstract description. It’s simply a mistake to think that something, whatever it is, can be identified with its description. Nevertheless, on closer inspection, this conflation abounds within the literature, though perhaps not as explicitly as in this first example. Take, as another example, David Chalmers’ central notion of organizational invariance. According to Chalmers, conscious minds exhibit organizational invariance because their causal organization can be abstractly specified without referring to the material substrate in which the causal structure is implemented.15 This principle of organizational invariance is quintessential to Chalmers’ theory of consciousness. He writes: According to this principle, what matters for the emergence of experience is not the specific physical makeup of a system, but the abstract pattern of causal interaction between its components. (Chalmers, 2010a, p. 25) Besides being entirely stipulative, the problem with this idea is that the abstract pattern of causal interaction only exists at the level of our descriptions, not at the level of the causal system itself. It is only by conflating both levels that Chalmers can claim that organizational invariance can be somehow itself causally relevant for the emergence of conscious experience. If there is such a thing as the property of organizational invariance, it can only be a property at the level of our abstract descriptions of a causal system (or rather, of our comparisons between two or more causal systems), not a causally relevant property of such a system itself. Which is to say, it can’t matter for the emergence of consciousness.16 A very similar third example comes from another computational functionalist, Gualtiero Piccinini. According to Piccinini, physical neural computation requires the causal manipulation of medium-independent vehicles, where medium-independence is understood as a defining property of computational vehicles, that is, the property of being independent from the material in which they are realized.17 The problem however is that, like Chalmers’ notion of organizational invariance, “medium-independence” is an entirely abstract notion. According to Piccinini, neural computation is a physical process characterized by sensitivity to the property of being medium-independent. Yet, how can a concrete physical and causal structure

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be sensitive to the abstract property of being medium-independent? How can the presumed fact of the irrelevance of the medium itself have causal relevance? As my coauthors and I elsewhere put it, “we have no conception of how concrete neural processes could causally manipulate abstract, medium-independent vehicles” (Hutto et al., 2018, p. 278).18 Again, as with Putnam and Chalmers, the level of the concrete and causal gets conflated with that of our abstract descriptions. A fourth example can be found in Paul Churchland’s discussion of Alan Turing’s proposal to think of human intelligent behavior in terms of computable functions. It is worth quoting Churchland at length here: Turing’s basic theoretical suggestion here is that the general input–output relation that characterizes normal human behavior-in-the-world is one instance of a computable function. After all, our behavior-in-the world displays a systematic if complex structure, and the brain is quite evidently a finite system. The guess that human conscious intelligence is, in some way or other, a finite computational specification of an infinite set of potential input–output pairs, is at least an intriguing entry point for further research. (Churchland, 2007, p. 116; m.e.) Of particular interest here is Churchland’s use of the notion of “specification,” which I highlighted in the preceding quote. Even if we agree that it is theoretically possible to provide an abstract computational specification of human conscious intelligence, saying that specific human conscious intelligence just is this specification conflates the level of the specified (here, human intelligent behavior) with that of the abstract specification (here, a computational specification). On several occasions, and within a closely related context, philosopher Erik Myin warns against literally this conflation between “the specific” on the one hand and “the specified” on the other.19 Myin does this in relation to the topic of perceptual experience, which is today standardly thought of as being representational, and therefore as carrying a content with satisfaction conditions. In a way reminiscent of Dewey, Myin argues convincingly that perceptual experience can be specific without specifying. Indeed, we can specify a specific experience, and crucially, we can do so correctly in more than one way.20 But it is not the specific experience that is doing the specifying.21 It is we who are providing a (not the) specification of a specific experience. Similarly, we can come up with a computational specification of a specific phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean that the specific phenomenon is itself in the business of computationally specifying, describing, or representing anything. The moral is always the same: it is a mistake to conflate a specific phenomenon with one of its specifications, regardless of whether we are dealing with hurricanes, Turing machines, perceptual experiences, or human consciousness.

14  Mistaking the Score for the Music

The fifth and final example of the abstract-particular conflation comes from Daniel Dennett. The example is less directly linked to (computational) functionalism, yet it deserves to be mentioned as it deals with such a huge topic: the evolution of life itself. At the same time, it also provides us with a good illustration of what Dewey refers to as the “historical fallacy,” which can be regarded as a more specific version of the philosophic fallacy. Simply put, the historical fallacy occurs when the abstract results of investigating a process are read back into the process itself, and/or seen as the cause of the process. The fallacy typically, though not exclusively, occurs in relation to the explanation of psychological processes (which is why Dewey, following James, also referred to it as the “psychologist’s fallacy”; see Dewey, 1896, p. 367; see also James, 1890/2007, p. 196). In Dennett’s case, however, the process in question is nothing less than evolution by natural selection. As Dennett repeats to us time and again, evolution is an algorithmic and therefore “substrate neutral” process. In his earlier work on this subject, we read: Life on Earth has been generated over billions of years in a single branching tree — the Tree of Life — by one algorithmic process or another. (…) It is hard to believe that something as mindless and mechanical as an algorithm could produce such wonderful things. (…) Darwin’s dangerous idea is reductionism incarnate, promising to unite and explain just about everything in one magnificent vision. Its being the idea of an algorithmic process makes it all the more powerful, since the substrate neutrality it thereby possesses permits us to consider its application to just about anything. It is no respecter of material boundaries. (Dennett, 1995, pp. 51, 59, 82; m.e.) And more recently, he puts it as follows: Since natural selection is a substrate neutral family of algorithms that can occur in any medium with a few simple properties, evolution in silico (simulated in a computer program) is sometimes faster and cheaper than evolution in vivo, and can be applied to almost any question or problem you formulate. (Dennett, 2017, p. 352)22 Basically, what happens here is that Dennett not only conflates the abstract “idea of an algorithmic process” (which is quite obviously substrate neutral) with that which the notion applies to (in this case, the process of evolution by natural selection); he also conceives of the algorithm as what causes, produces, or generates the process(es) under analysis. Clearly, however, it is a mistake to think that it is the algorithm which produces “such wonderful things.” Otherwise put, it is not because evolution is describable as an

Mistaking the Score for the Music  15

algorithmic process that it is therefore the causal result of an algorithmic process. By analogy, it is not because cell division is describable as the exponential function 2x (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 …) that this exponential function is generating the process which is describable as such. And neither is the process of evolution — or rather, the countless interactive processes that make up evolution — identifiable with an algorithm. Only if this were the case would the substrate neutrality of algorithms confer to the processes themselves. But these processes are not identifiable with an algorithm, they are identifiable as instantiating or exemplifying an algorithm. Crucially, and pace Dennett, what makes them identifiable as such may very well have everything to do with respecting “material boundaries.” So the distinction between “identifying with” and “identifying as” makes all the difference here. In any case, again we find that the presumed irrelevance of the material particularity (here referred to as “substrate neutrality”) is grounded not in some facts about the way the world is, but in a lumping together of our abstract ideas or descriptions with what is being described. In contemporary functionalism, then, there is more going on than what Dewey called a conversion between the particular and the abstract. As we’ve just seen, the distinction between particular and abstract often blurs out altogether: the abstract description collapses with what is being described. Within the context of functionalism, where the fallacy takes on a distinctive guise, I will refer to it as the functionalist fallacy.23 It is the fallacy of conflating our abstract functional descriptions with what is being described, thereby equivocating properties of the abstract description (e.g., substrate neutrality) with properties of the described. As mentioned, probably the most prominent example here is the functionalist’s equation of an individual mind with its functional description. And as we’ll see at length in the next chapter, the fallacy also lies at the heart of the idea of the multiple realizability of the mental, one of the trademark ideas of functionalism. One of the inevitable consequences of confusing our abstract descriptions with the particulars they are describing is that matter becomes irrelevant. Karen Barad puts it as follows: “There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.” (Barad, 2003, p. 801). Right, although one may wonder whether it ever really did. For as we’ve seen, the metaphysical picture against which functionalism is best understood, and in which the world in its material particularity loses all intrinsic significance, goes back at least to Plato. That metaphysical picture, which comprises an anthropology, is that of a dualism of form over matter, abstract over concrete, type over token, realizable over realizer, functional role over role filler, description over described, and, of course, mind over body. However, as we’ve just seen, in functionalism, the dualism is inconsistent in the sense that these distinctions often get conflated: our abstractions get conceived as themselves part of the concrete causal structures they are

16  Mistaking the Score for the Music

abstractions of. Either way, however, the result is the same: the exclusion of the relevance of entities in their material particularity. The Platonicfunctionalist picture leaves no room for the idea that things can matter qua particulars, that is, in their materiality. And it is against exactly this metaphysical background that we need to understand David Chalmers’ present claims about virtual realities, which he lays out for us in his 2022 book Reality +. In line with his computational functionalism, this work contains just the right elements to demonstrate just how irrelevant the world in its material particularity has become. As a kind of stage setting for the upcoming chapters, let’s take a closer look at Chalmers’ recent work. 1.4 Reality plus minus In his 2022 book Reality +, Chalmers sets out to defend the thesis that virtual reality is genuine reality. He breaks down this thesis in three parts, which I will quote at length: • Virtual worlds are not illusions or fictions, or at least they need not be. What happens in VR really happens. The objects we interact with in VR are real. • Life in virtual worlds can be as good, in principle, as life outside virtual worlds. You can lead a fully meaningful life in a virtual world. • The world we’re living in could be a virtual world. I’m not saying it is. But it’s a possibility we can’t rule out. The thesis — especially the first two parts — has practical consequences for the role of VR technology in our lives. In principle, VR can be much more than escapism. It can be a fullblooded environment for living a genuine life. (Chalmers, 2022, p. xvii) And just a few lines further down: Like physical reality, virtual reality has room for the full range of the human condition — the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Chalmers, 2022, p. xvii) What is particularly interesting is that Chalmers presents the notion of the real, here and elsewhere, as closely connected to the notion of the meaningful. Chalmers thinks — correctly — that whether what we engage with is real or not makes a difference for the significance of our own lives. Indeed, the real and the meaningful are so intimately connected that, in ordinary language, we sometimes take them to be practically synonymous (e.g., in connection to relationships, we say: “What you and I have is real.”). However, when it comes to Chalmers’ claims as to the possibility of “a fully meaningful life within a virtual world,” or that such a reality “has room for

Mistaking the Score for the Music  17

the full range of the human condition,” Chalmers shows himself to be a true disciple of the Platonic-functionalist tradition. Indeed, it matters to us whether something is real or not. One could say that, in an important sense, being real is a precondition for the meaningful. Obviously, however, it all depends on what we mean by “real.” The term may mean various things in various contexts, and it would be a fool’s errand to try and look for some common essence. Yet, there is at least one fundamental sense of what it means to be real that applies to the objects and persons in our nonvirtual environment, yet which does not apply to Chalmers’ virtual environment. This sense of “real” is succinctly captured in the science fiction series Westworld. In one of the episodes, the android Dolores Abernathy asks Bernard, one of her programmers: “What is real?” After giving it a few seconds of thought, Bernard answers: “That which is irreplaceable.”24 This short phrase manages to capture something very deep and, indeed, very real about human experience. And this “something” is entirely lost on Chalmers: the things that matter most to us, and indeed, the things that make life worth living, matter to us in their irreplaceable material particularity. In Chalmers’ virtual worlds — which, as he quite absurdly puts it, are “made of bits”25 — nothing is irreplaceable. There is nothing in the computer-generated worlds Chalmers envisions which cannot be replaced, duplicated, repeated, or erased and brought back. Another way of saying this is that nothing in these realities matters in its material particularity. In fact, it isn’t even clear whether the notion of material particularity still has meaning within a virtual world. By contrast, in real life, the things that matter most to us (for instance, our friends and families) do matter in their material particularity. The specific meanings they have for us are inseparably connected to the specific physical structures with which they coincide, that is, their bodies. No other material entity could ever embody the specific meaning my best friend has for me better than my best friends’ body. True, we could establish meaningful relations with others within a virtual world, but only in as far as we assume that there are particular individuals with particular physical bodies behind the avatars we meet. In any case, as I will try to show in this book, when Chalmers claims that “virtual reality has room for the full range of the human condition,” he is very much mistaken. Virtual reality leaves out at least one fundamental characteristic of the human condition: the intrinsic connection between the meaningful and the irreplaceable. It is of course no coincidence that Chalmers so easily overlooks the fundamental fact that what matters most to us matters in its irreplaceable material particularity. Like Russell, Chalmers too has the greatest difficulty, first, with keeping the object in its material particularity from getting mixed up with our representations of it, and second, with the very notion of relating to objects and persons in their material particularity. This becomes

18  Mistaking the Score for the Music

paradigmatically clear in his discussion of what it means “to see a particular person.” Chalmers writes: It is widely accepted that when we look at a photograph or a film clip of Winston Churchill, we see Winston Churchill. We may see the photograph or the screen as well, but we see Churchill when we see the screen (seeing him in the photograph or screen, as Richard Wollheim has put it). The reasons for saying this include that Churchill was the causal basis of our experience, and the features of our experience depend systematically on the features of Churchill when he was filmed. (Chalmers, 2017, p. 319) From this, then, it is further argued that, since visual perception in virtual reality is in various respects more like ordinary seeing than seeing a photograph or a film clip, there is nothing illusory about the objects we see in a virtual reality environment. I am not so much concerned with this argument as a whole, but only with the first premise. Saying that we see Winston Churchill when we look at a photograph of him is blatantly false. And so is Chalmers’ attribution of this claim to Wollheim, for saying that we see Churchill in the photograph and saying that we see Churchill are two very different things. Of course, we would ordinarily say that we see Churchill when we are shown a picture of him, but the expression “seeing X” is in itself ambiguous and only disambiguated by a context. In the context of being shown a picture, we can indeed unproblematically say that we see Churchill. But this does not mean the same as saying that we see Churchill when that person is in fact in front of us. Really seeing somebody requires the presence of this person in their material particularity, that is, in the flesh. The fact that Chalmers appears unable to distinguish between seeing a person and seeing a person in a picture is symptomatic for the particularity-eshewing metaphysics which frames his ideas. And it is the exact same inability Dewey detects in Russell, one century earlier. Ultimately, it is the failure to attribute reality and significance to that which resists abstraction and representation. It is the error of not recognizing that matter does matter, at least in one important sense. After all, saying that objects or persons matter in their particularity comes down to saying that matter actually does matter: the object or person in its particularity just is its materiality. This object here and now just is this material structure here and now. For the functionalist, for whom matter can have an instrumental function at best, there is no conceptual room for the idea that matter can have intrinsic significance — even more so for the intellectualist, for whom matter is simply inaccessible because unknowable. Indeed, a particular object will, in its material particularity, remain forever out of our intellectual grasp. Such is the nature of thought. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t relate to the particular at all, nor that it

Mistaking the Score for the Music  19

couldn’t be significant. We relate to the world in its particularity all the time, not via conceptual and abstract thought but via our bodily experience. Through our own material particularity, which is our body, we are able to relate to other bodies (in the broad sense of the term) in their material particularity. Such is the nature of embodied experience.26 And, as we shall further see, the fact that we have the kind of body we have shapes and structures this relation, which already points us to a second sense in which matter can be said to matter: it matters to the nature of our experiences. This, of course, goes radically against the third principle of the Platonic and functionalist metaphysics. It also puts severe pressure on one of the most central ideas of functionalism to which we shall now turn: the alleged multiple realizability of the mental. Notes 1 References are to the republished paper by Russell, and Dewey’s reply, in Russell, B. 1996. A fresh look at empiricism: 1927–42. See bibliography for more details. 2 Dewey’s response to Russell first appeared in 1939 as part of Dewey’s reply to his critics in an edited volume by Paul Arthur Schlipp, titled The Philosophy of John Dewey. See Schlipp 1939. 3 Experience and Nature, p. 21. Merleau-Ponty uses the same term. 4 I use “object” here in a broad sense, so including events, relations, phenomena, and so on. 5 For an excellent treatment of the topic of abstraction in both John Dewey and William James, see Grønfeldt Winther (2014). 6 Experience and Nature, p. 29. 7 A notable contemporary exception can be found, for instance, in the work of Colin Renfrew and Lambros Malafouris. Their so-called material engagement theory emphasizes from the very start the importance of what I would call our horizontal relations to our material environment. Far from being abstract, these relations are historical and specific and are constituted by the material nature of both our bodies and the objects with which we actively engage. See, for instance, Renfrew (2001) and Malafouris (2013). 8 Churchland (2007, p. 18). 9 Shapiro (2020), online in “Foundations of philosophical functionalism,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia. 10 Thomas Polger writes: “Functionalism is a mess. Whether you are an advocate or an opponent of the view, there can be little doubt about that.” (Polger, 2004, p. 71). 11 How this potentially constitutive and generative role of the subject is supposed to be understood will be explored in detail in the next chapters. 12 Dewey might have replied to Russell (who, as we’ve seen, endorsed this idea) with a question: if matter is truly unknowable, how, then, did we come to refer to it? The answer, of course, is that we do come to know of matter, not in the intellectual sense of propositional knowledge, but in the experiential sense: we come to know of matter through our particular bodily experiences with material objects, experiences which we wouldn’t and couldn’t have if we didn’t have the kind of material bodies we in fact do have. As I will argue further, our notion of matter depends on our bodily interactions with other bodies (in the broad sense of the term).

20  Mistaking the Score for the Music 13 Note that the fact that the prime contenders to functionalist theories of the mind are grouped together under the name “embodied cognition” is in this regard quite telling. Apparently, it is felt that it is with regard to the role of the body that the contrast is greatest. 14 For further discussion of the idea of “mind-uploading,” see Chapter 6. 15 See, for instance, Chalmers (1996): “I claim that conscious experience arises from fine-grained functional organization. More specifically, I will argue for a principle of organizational invariance, holding that given any system that has conscious experiences, then any system that has the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. According to this principle, consciousness is an organizational invariant: a property that remains constant over all functional isomorphs of a given system. Whether the organization is realized in silicon chips, in the population of China, or in beer cans and ping-pong balls does not matter. As long as the functional organization is right, conscious experience will be determined” (Chalmers, 1996, pp. 248–249). 16 The fact that this fallacy is so easily overlooked might be related to a bias in our thinking about consciousness: conscious experience is intuitively felt to be an entirely “ghostly,” immaterial kind of thing. It might be tempting to assume, then, that its explanatory basis is characterized by that same feature, that is, an independence from matter. 17 See, for instance, Piccinini 2015. 18 In their discussion of Piccinini, Polger and Shapiro make the same point and describe the source of confusion as a conflation of the abstractness of computational models with features of “the processes being modelled” (Polger & Shapiro, 2016, p. 166). 19 See, for instance, Myin (2020). See also Myin and van den Herik (2020). 20 See also Travis (2004, 2013). 21 For a more elaborated argument against the idea that perceptual experience carries representational content, see Zahnoun (forthcoming). 22 I am grateful to Daniel Hutto for drawing my attention on these lines. 23 It should be noted that the conflation between the abstract and the particular is not the providence of the functionalist philosopher alone. As I show elsewhere, within representational theories of perception, where perceptual experience is said to have a content, this alleged content is often conflated with the content of our descriptions or judgments pertaining to the experience. See Zahnoun (2020b, forthcoming). But we encounter the conflation outside of philosophy as well. A prominent example, which originated in physics, yet which has by now crossed disciplinary boundaries, is connected to Wheeler’s it-from-bit idea: the idea that things can be made from bits. As we’ll see in the next section, we find this example in Chalmers’ recent work as well: “I argue that if indeed we’re in a simulation, tables and chairs are not illusions but perfectly real objects: they are digital objects that are made of bits. This leads us to what is sometimes called, in modern physics, the it-from-bit hypothesis: Physical objects are real and they are digital” (Chalmers, 2022, p. xix). A bit is an abstract measurement unit. Nothing is made from abstract measurement units. 24 Westworld, season 2, episode 1: Journey into Night. Within the context of the series, the quote takes on an additional meaning because the androids don’t know that they’re androids and, therefore, replaceable. In fact, unbeknownst to them, they get replaced and duplicated all the time. On the idea that the real is that which is irreplaceable, it follows, then, that they are not real. Indeed, the fact that these androids have a physical body rather than a digital body “made of

Mistaking the Score for the Music  21 bits,” as Chalmers would say, doesn’t matter. Ultimately, what makes them nonreal is not the stuff they are made of, but their replaceability. Both the physical reality of Westworld and the digital realities Chalmers has in mind are equally virtual realities, precisely because they are characterized by replaceability. 25 See footnote 23. See also Chalmers 2017: “if we discovered that we are in a Matrix, instead of saying that there are no tables, we should say instead that tables are digital (or computational) objects made of bits.” (Chalmers 2017: 311) 26 Chalmers is aware that the disembodied nature of VR might present problems. As he sees it, however, there is nothing to worry about because, as he believes, future technology will have no difficulties with overcoming these problems. He writes: “A common worry is that in VR one lacks a body, which is the source of much value in life. One can have a virtual body in VR, but at least for now these are much more limited than nonvirtual bodies, and lack many of their functions. Eating, drinking, exercising, and having sex, for example, are either impossible or at least extremely limited in current VR. One’s physical body can supply some of these things, but then one is relying on physical rather than virtual reality. Still … it is easy to imagine that as the technology becomes more sophisticated, virtual bodies will be able to do everything that physical bodies do, as they do in movies such as The Matrix. So while disembodiment is certainly a source of disvalue in current VR, it is probably not an essential and permanent problem.” (Chalmers, 2017, pp. 341–342). I must admit that some of the things which Chalmers feels are “easy to imagine” are far beyond my imaginative capacities. How, for instance, does one eat or drink with a virtual body?

Chapter 2

Multiple realizability and the irrelevance of matter

2.1 Multiple realization: the standard interpretation The idea of the multiple realizability of the mental is without doubt one of the all-time most influential ideas within philosophy of mind. This idea, which was originally introduced by Hilary Putnam in the 1960s as a rebuttal of the mind–brain identity theory, says that one and the same kind of mental state (pain, say) can be realized by different kinds of physical states. Moreover, Putnam presented this idea not as a metaphysical but as an empirical hypothesis. In an oft-quoted passage, Putnam writes: Consider what the brain state theorist has to do to make good his claims. He has to specify a physical-chemical state such that any organism (not just a mammal) is in pain if and only if (a) it possesses a brain of a suitable physical- chemical structure; and (b) its brain is in that physicalchemical state. This means that the physical-chemical state in question must be a possible state of a mammalian brain, a reptilian brain, a mollusc’s brain (octopuses are mollusca, and certainly feel pain), etc. At the same time it must not be a possible … state of the brain of any physically possible creature that cannot feel pain. Even if such a state can be found, it must be nomologically certain that it will also be a state of the brain of any extraterrestrial life that may be found that will be capable of feeling pain before we can even entertain the supposition that it may be pain. (Putnam, 1975, p. 436) Instead of mind–brain identity, Putnam proposes an alternative hypo­thesis:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-3

Multiple realizability and the irrelevance of matter  23

I shall, in short, argue that pain is not a brain state, in the sense of a physical-chemical state of the brain (or even the whole nervous system), but another kind of state entirely. I propose the hypothesis that pain, or the state of being in pain, is a functional state of a whole organism. (Putnam, 1975, p. 433) The idea of pain being identifiable as a functional state is then generalized to all mental states: all mental states are functional states, and more specifically, computational states. And since functional states in general, and computational states in particular, are not tied to the material that realizes them, at least two things follow: on the one hand, the idea that mental states can’t be identical with physical states; second, the idea that the materiality of the realizing physical states can’t be relevant for the occurrence of the particular mental state. We encounter both points in Putnam’s 1975 paper “Philosophy and Our Mental Life”: [I]t is clear from what we already know about computers etc., that whatever the program of the brain may be, it must be physically possible, though not necessarily feasible, to produce something with that same program but quite a different physical and chemical constitution. Then to identify the state in question with its physical or chemical realization would be quite absurd, given that that realization is in a sense quite accidental … (Putnam, 1975, p. 293) For now, I want to brush aside both the issue of what I will call the contingency of matter on the one hand, and the question of whether this so-called argument from multiple realization has ever deserved its status as “defeater of the identity theory,” a status which it to this day enjoys. What is more important at this point is that we first get as clear as possible about the idea of multiple realization itself, that is, the idea that different physical structures can realize one and the same kind of mental state. To avoid misinterpreting the idea, we need to keep in mind a crucial — and to most readers presumably familiar — distinction which Putnam does not make explicit in the preceding quote: the distinction between physical and mental kinds on the one hand, and between particular instantiations of a given physical or mental kind. Borrowing the terminology from C.S. Peirce, this distinction is often captured in terms of types and tokens. At least within the context of this discussion, types are synonymous with kinds, whereas tokens are supposed to refer to the particular instantiations or, as it is more commonly expressed, realizations of those types. Tokens, then, are said to be the realizers of types, whereas types are said to be realizable. This means that the thesis of the multiple realizability of the mental pertains exclusively to types

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of mental states, not mental state tokens. Saying that the particular headache I’m having right now is multiply realizable makes no sense, because the term “realizable” logically does not apply to particular tokens. Similarly, it is equally mistaken to think of kinds or types as doing the realizing. Strictly speaking, then, the definition of multiple realizability we find in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is inaccurate. John Bickle, who is the author of the entry on multiple realization, defines the thesis as follows: In the philosophy of mind, the multiple realizability thesis contends that a single mental kind (property, state, event) can be realized by many distinct physical kinds. (Bickle, 2020) As we’ve just seen, it is not the kinds or types that do the realizing, but the particular instantiations or tokens which, it should be added, are assumed to be physical in nature (strictly speaking, however, they don’t need to be). In any case, to avoid confusion, the distinction between what is doing the realizing and what is being realized should always be kept well in view. Bickle’s definition, then, should have read something like this: The multiple realizability thesis contends that a single mental kind can be realized by tokens of many distinct physical kinds. Assuming, then, that different physical structures (that is, tokens of different physical kinds) can realize one and the same type of mental state, there can be no one-to-one mapping between physical types and mental types and, therefore, no strict identity between types of brain states and types of mental states. Whether this argument against the identity theory is convincing is, as said, something we will return to later. What is more important for my present purposes is that the thesis of multiple realizability is — and has always been — put forward as an empirical thesis. Putnam himself was very clear about this: Since I am discussing not what the concept of pain comes to, but what pain is, in a sense of “is” which requires empirical theory-construction (or, at least, empirical speculation), I shall not apologize for advancing an empirical hypothesis. Indeed, my strategy will be to argue that pain is not a brain state, not on a priori grounds, but on the grounds that another hypothesis is more plausible. (Putnam, 1975, p. 433) Putnam’s alternative hypothesis was, of course, the allegedly empirical hypothesis that mental state types are multiply realizable functional state types. However, putting something forward as an empirical thesis and actually being one are two different things. In fact, as I will argue in the next section, the

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idea of multiple realization (henceforth: MR) is best seen not as an empirical hypothesis for which data can be gathered, but as a specific metaphysical interpretation of the empirical data. The reason for this essentially is that the thesis’s central notions (types, tokens, and realizations) are not empirical notions; they are metaphysical constructions based not on empirical evidence but on philosophical choice. Too often it is overlooked that theories in general, and philosophical theories in particular, are always to some extent, and inevitably, based on choice. Dewey, for one, did not fail to recognize this: Philosophical simplifications are due to choice … Selective emphasis, choice, is inevitable whenever reflection occurs. This is not an evil. Deception comes only when the presence and operation of choice is concealed, disguised, denied. Empirical method finds and points to the operation of choice as it does to any other event. Thus it protects us from conversion of eventual functions into antecedent existence: a conversion that may be said to be the philosophic fallacy, whether it be performed in behalf of mathematical subsistences, esthetic essences, the purely physical order of nature, or God. (Dewey, 1925/1981, p. 27–29) Incidentally, this passage from Dewey’s Experience and Nature is not only relevant for highlighting the role of choice in philosophical reflection, it is immediately relevant to our discussion of MR as well. For it seems clear enough that types are precisely the kind of subsisting essences that are being put forward as having a kind of antecedent existence and that, in some way, explain the order of nature. As such, then, the postulation of types is just one more expression of what Dewey calls the philosophic fallacy. The idea of MR is, as Dewey would put it, a “philosophical simplification” in that it entirely overlooks not just the complexities related to human classifications but the very phenomenon of classification itself. It reduces the complex relation of conceptual categorization, which constitutively involves not just a cognitive agent but a whole socionormative background (what something is not decided at the level of the individual, but at the level of the group), to a simple two-place relation between a particular and a universal. The assumed mind-independence of the universal precludes the idea that we might in fact be dealing here with what is on other occasions referred to as concepts. 2.2 Multiple realizability as metaphysically laden: type-realism To repeat: the notions in terms of which the thesis of MR is formulated (types, tokens, and realizations) have their origin not in empirical research but in a specific metaphysical framework in which the thesis is molded: the

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Platonic metaphysics of type-realism. To work as an argument against the identity theorist, it is vital for the MR thesis that types — whatever they are exactly — exist in such a way that we can sensibly attribute numerical identity to them. After all, the thesis claims that one and the same type can be realized by tokens of a different kind. Without this attribution of numerical identity to types, which entails a commitment to type-realism, the thesis of MR has no story against the identity theorist. Merely saying that the type of pain realized in an octopus’ brain is similar, rather than numerically identical to the type of pain realized in a human’s brain is, after all, perfectly compatible with the claim that the two types of pain octopi and humans experience are identical with their two respective brain state types. In other words, there can in principle still be a one-to-one mapping between mental and physical here, a mapping which is only ruled out by the assumption that there is one and only one type of mental state being realized here. The problem, however, is that it is not clear how this claim could be empirical. What could it mean to say that one can find evidence for the claim that two particular headaches are the realization of one and the same type? What evidence is there that a particular mental state is the realization of a type tout court? In fact, what empirical evidence is there that types exist in the first place? A recent answer to the latter question comes from philosopher Linda Wetzel, who has devoted a book-length defense of the claim that types exist.1 Wetzel’s central argument for holding that types — which “are quintessentially objects” (Wetzel, 2009, p. xiii) — exist is that we can apparently use true sentences to refer to them. In the opening chapter, Wetzel sets out to collect what she calls “data” for the claim that talk of types is ubiquitous within various science domains. True scientific sentences contain reference to types all the time, and this, according to Wetzel, is proof enough that types exist. As she sees it, “the burden of proof is on those who would deny it” (Wetzel, 2009, p. 23). Here are just a few samples from the “data” she relies on to argue for the existence of types: If the Tarahumara frog has disappeared from the United States, then there is a species [i.e., type of frog] that has disappeared from the United States. If there are only four or five genes involved in the trait that prompts novelty-seeking, then there are genes — and “the four or five genes” can’t be tokens, as there are many more tokens, so the four or five must be gene types. (Wetzel, 2009, p. 24; added italics mine) Another example she mentions is the chess opening known as the queen’s gambit. Because we can truthfully say, for instance, that Bobby Fisher used the queen’s gambit opening in several of his games against Spassky, the type

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“queen’s gambit” exists. Hence, types exist. To her credit, Wetzel realizes that making ontology dependent on language might for some readers require further convincing: But, it may be asked, why think that because certain sentences are true, certain objects exist? The answer is: the sentences say or imply the objects exist, and the sentences are true, so (absent overriding objections) the objects exist. I think this intuition is so powerful that it should carry the day … (Wetzel, 2009, p. 24) I, for one, do not share this intuition. In fact, the idea that semantics precedes existence and that we can infer ontological truths from language is not only counterintuitive, it is the definition of what some call the linguistic fallacy, and what Heather Dyke aptly refers to as “the representational fallacy”: [I]t is a fallacy to argue from facts about language to conclusions about the fundamental nature of reality, one that is widely committed. I call it “the representational fallacy.” … It refers to a general strategy of reading metaphysics off language. (Dyke, 2007, p. 1, 14) In a similar vein, philosopher John Wilkins writes:2 It is a widespread error in philosophy to think that because we have, say, a clear and distinct idea of something, there must be a something to go along with it. It’s a kind of Word Magic. The world doesn’t much concern itself with matching our linguistic categories — in fact the causal arrow is, or at least should be, entirely the other direction. (Wilkins, 2010) However, the type-realist might respond as follows. She might claim that it is not the truth of our sentences that matters here, but that which makes the sentences true, that is, some way the world is, regardless of what we have to say about it. Types must exist, not because otherwise some of our sentences wouldn’t be true, but because some matter of fact would not obtain: without the existence of types, it couldn’t be the case that two different things nevertheless share one and the same property. And this is a fact about the world, not about our language. This line of argument, which of course goes back at least to Plato, seems to be perfectly in line with David Armstrong’s defense of type realism. Armstrong, who uses the term “type” interchangeably with “universal,” writes:

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I think that the main argument for the existence of universals is Plato’s “One over Many.” I do not think that it proves straight off that there are universals. But I think that it shows that there is a strong preliminary case for accepting universals. (Armstrong, 1980, p. 440) Following Plato, Armstrong thinks that positing the existence of types not only explains why numerically different particulars can nevertheless be the same kind of thing or of the same type; it also provides, in his opinion, the best explanation for this fact. Two or more particulars are in some respect the same because they instantiate or realize one and the same type. This is what, according to a type realist like Armstrong, best explains the One over Many or — as I prefer to call it — Sameness over Difference. “Sameness” refers here, of course, to numerical sameness, not to mere similarity. Now, is this explanation an empirical explanation, in the sense that we can find evidence for it? Not at all, for the simple reason that we are yet to be told how to make empirical sense3 of, first, what this instantiation or realization relation is supposed to be and, second, how it is supposed to account for the fact that two or more objects can share one and the same kind of property. Armstrong agrees that “this is the central difficulty in the Realist position” (Armstrong, 1980, p. 445). However, as long as this central difficulty isn’t solved, it is also not clear what it would mean to find empirical evidence for the claim that types explain Sameness over Difference. So far, then, the only reason for assuming that these entities have such explanatory power — and that they must therefore exist — is because we are told that they do. They explain by default. This, however, is not empirical theory; it is metaphysical doctrine. Yet, Sameness over Difference is not the only thing types are traditionally supposed to explain. There is another reason for why invoking these Platonic entities has been felt to be necessary. Not only are types supposed to account for why different things can nevertheless be, in some respect, the same; types are also relied upon to explain why a particular entity is the kind of entity it is. The particular entity inherits its essence (its whatness) from its relationship with the type of which it is an instantiation or realization. In other words, postulating types also allegedly solves the problem of why something is the kind of thing it is. Types, then, perform a double duty: on the one hand, they are said to account for Sameness over Difference; on the other hand, they are invoked to explain why a particular entity is what it is. I shall refer to these two aspects as “Plato’s double blind” because it has, with one stroke, managed to keep us from seeing two things. On the one hand, it has kept us blind to the fact that (numerical) Sameness over Difference does not exist outside of our human identificatory practices; numerical identity should be understood not from an entity’s relation to a numerically identical type or universal but to our practices of reidentification over time;

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on the other hand, it has kept us from seeing that an entity does not inherit its whatness from a Platonic Type or Idea, but that “whatness” constitutively involves a socionormatively regulated evaluative relation to the entity. Both ideas will be elaborated on subsequently. First, however, it’s time to return to our discussion of the functionalist thesis of multiple realization and its alleged status as an empirical thesis. I have just used the term “doctrine” to describe the type-realist’s idea that types explain Sameness over Difference. Notably, we find this characterization reappearing in one prominent definition of functionalism. In Janet Levin’s entry on functionalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, we read: Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. (Levin, 2021) Functionalism itself is here and elsewhere correctly presented as a doctrine4 and not, as Putnam originally suggested, as an empirical hypothesis. Why not? Because its central idea, that is, the idea that what makes a mental state the kind of mental state it is depends on its functional role, is not itself an empirical idea. It is a metaphysical idea. Saying that something is what it is because of what it does is not the kind of claim that belongs in empirical science. In precisely the same way, the thesis of multiple realization is, at least in its standard formulation, a metaphysical doctrine and not an empirical thesis. One can find evidence for the hypothesis that two creatures are in pain, but one cannot find evidence for the claim that two numerically different pain occurrences are the realization of one and the same type. This is a way of metaphysically framing the evidence, not itself something for which evidence can be cited. More importantly, however, even if we accept the idea that all mental states are functional states and that they are multiply realizable, this still doesn’t warrant the claim that the states are not dependent on their “internal constitution” (as Levin puts it) or that, more generally speaking, matter doesn’t matter. As I will argue subsequently, the idea that being a functional entity somehow stands in opposition to the relevance of the material substrate is a false dichotomy. 2.3 Matter doesn’t matter (much) To recapitulate: according to the standard interpretation of the multiple realizability of mental state types, types are conceived of as abstract entities that are being made concrete by the physical tokens that realize them. What the term “multiple” adds here is the idea that some types (not all) can be

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realized by physical structures of a different type. However, the basic metaphysical idea is that both psychological and physical particulars are to be regarded as tokens, which is to say, they are to be regarded as the realizations of abstract types. This idea has, as we’ve already seen, an unmistakable Platonic flavor (second Platonic mark). However, the idea of multiple realizability is Platonic in another sense, namely in its attitude toward the role of the material substrate. On the standard interpretation, saying that something is multiply realizable comes down to a claim about the relevance of the material substrate. The idea that matter is of no significance when it comes to our mental states has probably never been expressed more radically than by Putnam himself: Strange as it may seem to common sense and to sophisticated intuition alike, the question of the autonomy of our mental life does not hinge on and has nothing to do with that all too popular, all too old question about matter or soul-stuff. We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter. (Putnam, 1975, p. 291) As is well known, in later work, Putnam has changed his mind on much of his earlier writings. Yet when it comes to his ideas about the irrelevance of matter for our mental lives, he never budged. This becomes clear in the introduction of his book Representation and Reality, a book which is largely devoted to a criticism of his own earlier functionalist views: My “functionalism” insisted that, in principle, a machine (say, one of Isaac Asimov’s robots), a human being, a creature with a silicon chemistry, and a disembodied spirit could all work much the same way when described at the relevant level of abstraction, and that it is just wrong to think that the essence of our minds is our “hardware”. This much — and it was central to my former view — I shall not be giving up in this book, and indeed it still seems to me to be as true and as important as it ever did. (Putnam, 1988, p. xii) Again, Putnam conflates abstract description with what is being described, resulting in an unwarranted dismissal of the potential significance of our material bodies for our psychologies. This tendency to deny matter any intrinsic significance is just as Platonic as the idea that particulars are to be seen as the instantiations (tokens) of abstract entities (Forms, types). Plato expert Gerd Van Riel, for instance, concludes a recent paper on the role of matter in Plato with lines that apply just as much to Putnam: “Ultimately, to Plato, matter does not matter” (Van Riel, 2020). This idea reverberates further with more contemporary functionalist authors. David Chalmers, for instance, writes:

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Functionalist theorists of consciousness hold that what matters to consciousness is not biological makeup but causal structure and causal role, so that a nonbiological system can be conscious as long as it is organized correctly…. Consciousness is an organizational invariant: that is, systems with the same patterns of causal organization have the same states of consciousness, no matter whether that organization is implemented in neurons, in silicon, or in some other substrate. (Chalmers, 2010a, pp. 44, 48) Others, as we’ve already seen, prefer the terms “substrate neutrality” (Dennett) or “medium-independence” (Piccinini). Subsequently, we will return extensively to the functionalist’s depreciation of matter in general and our material bodies in particular. For now, I merely want to emphasize the fact that the thesis of multiple realization is metaphysically laden, not only in its (implicit) commitment to type-realism, but also in its assumption of a dichotomy between mind and matter, where matter is regarded as a mere contingency. In essence, minds are conceived as abstract entities existing at the level of the realizable type, not at the level of the particular realization, which is always contingent since one and the same mind could have also been realized in another substrate (in a silicon computer, say). It should be noted here that, despite functionalism’s Platonic character, the idea of multiple realization also adds something which we don’t yet find in Plato: the idea, namely, that one and the same type can be instantiated or realized by relevantly different particulars. And here, “relevantly different” refers first of all to relevant differences in the realizing material. In other words, compared to classic Platonism, the thesis of multiple realization places a different emphasis. The thesis also revolves around Sameness over Difference, but it is crucial that “difference” is understood here in more than a numerical sense. “Difference” is here, but not with Plato, to be understood qualitatively and, more specifically, as referring to the material qualities of the realizing token. After all, if all the thesis of multiple realization had to say was that one and the same kind can be realized by tokens that are merely numerically different, than it wouldn’t be saying much more than that a type can have more than one token-realization, which is analytically true. It is part of the definition of a type that it can in principle have indefinitely many realizations, just as it is part of the notion of a category that it can in principle have indefinitely many members (as long as they satisfy the right criteria). In other words, the thesis of multiple realization claims that at least in some cases, particular physical entities that are relevantly different in a qualitative sense (and obviously also in a numerical sense) can nevertheless be the realizers of one and the same type.

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2.4 Multiple realizability: a thesis with identity issues All of this of course begs the question: what counts as relevantly different? As we’ve just seen, on the standard interpretation of multiple realization, the relevant differences between the tokens all appear to be differences in the materiality of the substrate, that is, what the tokens are made of. But then the next question becomes: when is the difference in material constitution big enough? In Putnam’s foregoing quote, for instance, the type ‘Pain’ is claimed to be realizable by physical structures that are, at least according to Putnam, relevantly different. Pain can be realized in “a mammalian brain, a reptilian brain and a mollusc’s brain.” Curiously enough, however, Putnam’s own example may just as well be taken to point to the exact opposite of what he is trying to show. For doesn’t the idea that pain can be realized in a mammalian, a reptilian, and a mollusk’s brain precisely point to the relevance, rather than irrelevance, of the realizing material? After all, they’re all examples of organic brains. Because of such considerations, in the more recent literature on multiple realization, discussion has arisen about whether a difference in material constitution can at all be admitted as a relevant criterion for identifying genuine cases of multiple realization. Authors like Lawrence Shapiro and Thomas Polger, for instance, claim that the difference-inmaterial criterion is too weak because it threatens to render multiple realization ubiquitous. According to these philosophers, a more apt criterion would be not a difference in the substrate but a difference in the way two or more physical structures causally realize their function. Shapiro illustrates his point by means of the mundane example of a corkscrew (Shapiro, 2000; see also Polger & Shapiro, 2016). There are different kinds of corkscrew that we distinguish not based on what they are made of but based on the distinct ways in which they causally contribute to the unscrewing of corks. There are so-called waiter corkscrews, but there are also winged corkscrews which remove corks differently. Nevertheless, despite their causal differences, they are all just as much realizations of one and the same type, that is, “Corkscrewness” (as Shapiro calls it). According to his causal criterion, then, the corkscrew-type can legitimately be said to be multiply realizable, not because corkscrews can be made of different material (iron, aluminum, steel, etc.) but because they manage to perform their function in causally distinct ways. Shapiro sums up: The moral of this example is that multiple realizations count truly as multiple realizations when they differ in causally relevant properties…. To say that a kind is multiply realizable is to say that there are different ways to bring about the function that defines the kind. (Shapiro, 2000, p. 644)

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Now, the reason why I’m mentioning this discussion about “what the satisfaction conditions for MRT5 actually are” (Shapiro, 2000, p. 636) is not because it is, in and of itself, so interesting. It is, as far as I can see, a discussion entirely based on stipulation. After all, what could possibly be the basis on which to decide which criterion manages to separate the true from the false cases of multiple realization? Within this context, a discussion about criteria seems as good as arbitrary. The only reason why one might want to prefer Shapiro’s criterion to Putnam’s is purely pragmatic-semantic in nature: if we would only take into account differences in the materiality of the substrate, we would be demarcating a territory which would exclude too many intuitive cases and include too many counterintuitive cases. The point is, however, that these intuitions themselves are not the result of what we already know about the allegedly empirical phenomenon of multiple realization, nor of any other empirical considerations; they depend entirely on what “relevantly different” means in a semantic sense. And this can differ from case to case. In case of two corkscrews, we perhaps feel that a mere difference in the material does not semantically warrant the term “relevantly different,” yet in the case of Putnam’s example of pain sensations, being made of organic material or Swiss cheese does seem to indicate a relevant difference. But there is no neutral, context-free position from which to settle this matter once and for all. And nor are there empirical facts about a way the world is that could help us out here. We might find empirical evidence to decide whether or not something satisfies a criterion, but we can’t come up with evidence to prove that a criterion is the true criterion, regardless of whether we are talking about multiple realization or any other phenomenon. So, if the discussion about the true criterion for multiple realization is in a sense pointless, why then am I mentioning it? Because it lays bare something important, which we otherwise might overlook. As said, the idea of the multiple realizability of the mental is very influential within philosophy of mind. What the foregoing discussion clearly shows, however, is that the idea of multiple realization as such is completely independent from issues pertaining to the mind and its relation to the material body. After all, we’ve just seen that the idea applies just as much to mundane objects like corkscrews. Other oft-used examples in the literature on multiple realization include mousetraps, carburetors, pumps, and, of course, computers (see, for instance, Kim, 1996). And the examples exceed the domain of artefacts. Biological objects too are claimed to be multiply realizable. The standard example here is that of a heart. A heart is, as it is typically presented, simply a kind of pump which can in principle be replaced by an artificial heart.6 As long as it manages to pump blood through our bodies, it’s a heart. Incidentally, blood itself is sometimes being put forward as an example of a multiply realizable kind. John Heil, for instance, writes:

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Note that blood, too, is a functional kind. A substance counts as blood, not in virtue of its material makeup, but in virtue of its functional role in a complex system. (Heil, 2012, p. 96) Daniel Dennett gives another interesting example coming from biology: that of Mendelian genes. Dennett writes: Mendelian genes are a paradigm case of substrate neutrality; they are pure data structures, whose material composition is irrelevant just so long as they obey the combinatorial rules Mendel laid down. The field of population genetics thrives to this day in almost complete independence of any concern with the nitty-gritty biochemistry of the substrate — just the way software engineering is conducted by people who need know little about the electronics or physics of their silicon substrate. (Dennett, 1996) Dennett points out (correctly, of course) that Mendel’s notion of a gene was an abstract notion in that it was defined not in terms of what it was made of but in what it was supposed to do. Anything that manages to fill the role specified by Mendel qualifies as a gene, regardless of what it is made of. Mendel didn’t live to see the moment when Crick and Watson discovered in 1953 that what realized Mendel’s genes in organic systems was DNA. But, according to Dennett, the fact that DNA realizes Mendel’s abstract notion of a gene is supposed to be seen as a contingency. Since the abstract functional role of a gene may just as well be realized by other physical structures, genes too provide an instructive example of multiply realizability — and, of course, of substrate-neutrality. In short, then, multiple realizability appears to be a property of an extremely wide variety of entities, ranging from ordinary household tools like corkscrews and mousetraps, over biological objects like hearts and genes, to mental states like pain and, allegedly, all other mental states. As long as we are dealing with functionally defined entities, that is, entities that are what they are in virtue of what function they perform, multiple realizability and the irrelevance of the material seem to follow naturally. There are, however, serious worries with this view. First, the fact that multiple realizability paradigmatically applies to such ordinary objects as mousetraps and corkscrews, which have in no obvious way even the slightest connection to mental phenomena, should make us suspicious about how much this idea can contribute to our investigations concerning the nature of the mind. The second worry, however, is more serious. Remember that the basic idea of multiple realizability is always presented in conjunction with the contingency of the material, the, the idea that

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“matter doesn’t matter.” This means that, a fortiori, the “matter doesn’t matter” principle should also apply to the paradigmatic cases like mousetraps and corkscrews. Just as for mental states like pain, in case of things like mousetraps and corkscrews, matter doesn’t matter. The long overdue question here is, of course, matter for what, exactly? We would do well to remember here that expressions like “x doesn’t matter,” or “x is irrelevant,” or “x is not important” are, as such, intrinsically elliptic. The most pertinent example here is Putnam’s claim that “we could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter.” But, again, matter for what? It is high time, then, to introduce some crucial distinctions that should help us see through the conflations that characterize this discussion. 2.5 Matter doesn’t matter … for what? The question of the relevance of matter with regard to functional-causal systems (including, presumably, minds) can be approached from at least three different perspectives7 that should never get lumped together. First, there’s the perspective of the abstract causal description or, what Chalmers would call the abstract causal organization. Next, there’s the perspective of the specific causal-functional system considered as the kind of system it is. Third, there’s the perspective from which the causal system is considered in its physical particularity, that is, regardless of what kind or type it can be said to instantiate or realize. 2.5.1 The system considered in its abstract causal organization

Let’s start with the first perspective, which is the most abstract. This is the perspective of Chalmers’ abstract causal organization or, as he also calls it, the causal topology of a system.8 The elliptic claim that “matter doesn’t matter” should at this level of abstraction be completed by “… for the abstract causal organization of the system.” There are two serious problems here, one which applies to functionalists (and others) in general, and one which is particularly problematic for Chalmers’ theory of consciousness. The first problem is that the idea that matter is irrelevant at the level of the abstract causal organization is completely trivial. Of course matter doesn’t matter from this perspective, for that’s what it means to abstract away from the implementation details. Note, by the way, that this applies to all causal systems, functional or not. An abstract causal description of a hurricane will be just as much substrate neutral as that of a mousetrap or a computer. Presenting the idea that matter doesn’t matter here is like pulling a rabbit from a hat which you just put there yourself. To think that this utterly trivial fact can be of interest to the study of the phenomena themselves can only be due to a conflation of the abstract level of description with what

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is being described, a conflation which I earlier dubbed the functionalist fallacy. Let me now turn to the other problem, which — as said — I think is pernicious to Chalmers’ theory in particular. I have just said that at Chalmers’ level of the abstract causal organization of a system, matter indeed, and quite trivially, doesn’t matter; the bigger problem, however, is with the very notion of the abstract causal-functional organization of a system itself (with emphasis on the definite article), and especially when it is applied to functional systems. There is some irony in the fact that precisely the multiple realizability of functional systems exposes the very idea of the abstract causal-functional organization as a myth. For the paradigm examples of functional systems like mousetraps, corkscrews, carburetors, pumps, and, indeed, Turing machines, precisely show that there can be no such thing as the abstract causal-functional organization of a functionally defined system. After all, their defining functions can be implemented not only in indefinitely many different material substrates but also in indefinitely many different causal ways. And as we’ve just seen, authors like Shapiro and Polger argue that it is precisely this latter fact which ought to be considered the true criterion for deserving the multiple realization label. In any case, it’s clear enough that all paradigmatic cases of multiple realizability conflict with the idea of the abstract causal organization of a functionally defined system. There is, for instance, no such thing as the abstract causal organization of a computer; there are indefinitely many because there are indefinitely many causal ways to implement the same kind of computations. This, at least, is what every functionalist (including Chalmers) will have to agree to. 2.5.2 The system considered as the kind of system it is

What about the second perspective? In what way can we make sense of the contingency of matter when we direct our attention away from our abstract descriptions, and instead, toward the particular causal-functional systems themselves? Here, the claim that “matter doesn’t matter” needs to be completed by the phrase “… for the functional system being the kind of functional system it is’. Otherwise put, the question is: does matter matter for some causal system to qualify as the specific functional system it is? For instance, does it matter what some system is made of to qualify as a corkscrew? Yes, it does, but only relatively. It matters to the extent that the material allows the function to be performed in the right way. Corkscrews can be made of all kinds of material, but to perform their function or, better, for us to use them to remove corks from bottles via a screwing motion, they can’t be made of any old material. There is leeway here, but not ad infinitum, which is to say that there is no such thing as substrate neutrality here. A corkscrew can’t be made from Styrofoam or helium gas. Similarly, a heart

Multiple realizability and the irrelevance of matter  37

can’t be made of gingerbread, and human beings can’t be made of Swiss cheese, regardless of what Putnam thought about this. The rationale here is that for functional entities, that is, entities that are classified based on the kind of function or functions they perform, the degree to which the material composition matters is constrained by the purpose or what the system is supposed to bring about (this, at least, is one way of putting it). There is no a priori way of deciding to what extent matter matters, but we can decide a priori that it will always matter to some degree. There is no such thing as a materially unconstrained causal system. Moreover, it stands to reason that the more complex the function is, the smaller the degree of material freedom will become. In addition — and this is often overlooked — since a causalfunctional system is always part of a larger system, it is also to a relative extent constrained by the materiality of the bigger system of which it is a part. So when I say that we can’t be made of Swiss cheese, I am not merely saying this because of the astronomical causal complexity of our bodies (including, of course, our brains), but also of the complexity of the causal relations with the environment these bodies have to engage with. To give just one example, the fact that we’re not made of Swiss cheese causally matters for our relations to Swiss cheese (digesting it, for instance). Seen in this light, Dennett’s view that DNA is just one of many possible role fillers of the abstract gene-role and that the “nitty-gritty biochemistry of the substrate” is of little importance here is highly contentious. Again, it may be (trivially) irrelevant for our abstract descriptions, but the substrate neutrality of our functional descriptions does not spill over into the described causal-functional structures. 2.5.3 The system considered in its material particularity

This brings us to the third perspective, where we again consider the particular causal-functional system itself instead of our abstract descriptions of the system. Yet this time, we no longer consider it as an instance or a realization of this or that kind of functional system (a mousetrap, a Turing machine, a pain-realizing neural system, etc.) but as the particular physical structure it is. That is, we consider the system in its material particularity, regardless of how we further classify the system (perspective B) and regardless of how we further abstractly describe or model the system (perspective A). Consider, for instance, the particular corkscrew that’s lying in one of your kitchen drawers. It can indeed be seen as a realization of the corkscrew-type, although we don’t have to see it that way (I’ll return to this). But we can also consider it in its particularity, that is, as this individual shiny object which we can use to open bottles of wine, but which is also simply there, occupying some portion of space-time regardless of whether or not we use it to open bottles, and regardless of whether we call it “a waiter’s corkscrew,” “a winged

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corkscrew,” or “a gift from my mother.” Well, then, does it matter for this particular object that it is made of whatever it is it is made of ? Yes. From this perspective, it makes no sense to say that this particular object could also be made from other material because the particular object just is this material, regardless of how this material can be further specified physiochemically. This particular corkscrew, which is now lying in my kitchen drawer and which my mother gave me for my birthday, cannot be made of other material than it is actually made of. It just is this material, even if I don’t know what kind of material it is, that is, how it is to be specified physiochemically. Even if we conjure up the contrived philosophical device of possible worlds, there is no possible world in which this particular corkscrew can be made of other material and still be this corkscrew, just as Kripke’s wooden table can’t be made of plastic and still be his wooden table.9 How, then, shall we complete the elliptic “matter doesn’t matter” here? Well, clearly, matter does matter here. It matters for what I will call the particular identity of the physical entity. The only sense in which matter doesn’t matter is in the sense that the physiochemical kind of matter doesn’t interest us here. It doesn’t matter what kind of matter it is, as long as it is this particular matter.10 But since it can’t be made of any other material, it follows that it also can’t be made from any other kind of material. In this sense, the kind of material indirectly matters, and it matters absolutely. So, with respect to our evaluation of the claim that “matter doesn’t matter,” it seems that only the second perspective can be of interest here. After all, seen from the other perspectives, the claim is either trivially true or absolutely false. Let us therefore take a closer look at the second perspective, where the idea of the irrelevance of matter is to be spelled out as: “matter doesn’t matter for the functional system being the kind of system it is.” Clearly, this is also the perspective in which the idea of multiple realization is to be situated, since it is only here that the notion of kinds or types is introduced. Now, as we’ve already seen, the functionalist who endorses the thesis of multiple realizability of functional (and mental) types as an interesting empirical thesis frames the “matter doesn’t matter for the functional system being the kind of system it is” in a very specific way: one and the same type of functional system can be realized by relevantly different material substrates, and therefore, matter doesn’t matter. But, as said, this way of metaphysically framing the idea is a choice. Nothing forces us to think of it in terms of a mysterious realization relation holding between a numerically identical type and relevantly distinct tokens. For there is a much more natural way of reformulating the claim that matter doesn’t matter for being a kind of functional system. All that this requires is that we reintroduce the classifying subject into the equation. Instead of speaking in terms of realization, we can simply speak in terms of classification and say that, when it comes to our classification of functional systems, matter doesn’t matter.

Multiple realizability and the irrelevance of matter  39

Another way of putting this is that, when it comes to the classification of functional systems, matter is not part of the classificatory criteria. And it is in this sense, and only in this sense, that we can correctly say that matter indeed doesn’t matter. I’ll elaborate on this subsequently. First, however, we need to consider a possible objection. A functionalist à la Chalmers might disagree with my portrayal of multiple realization as a metaphysically laden thesis. He might say that perhaps there is a Platonic reading which brings on board the whole metaphysical machinery of types, tokens, and realization relations, but that this is not the reading he endorses. And indeed, on closer inspection, there seem to be two different interpretations of multiple realizability in circulation. On the one hand, there is the Platonic interpretation which commits itself to a specific metaphysical picture which understands particulars as token realizations of abstract types. On the other hand, however, there is also an interpretation which is not in any obvious way committed to such a metaphysical picture. I will call this second interpretation the causal-structure interpretation. Here, there is also talk of realization. Crucially, however, on this interpretation of MR, the realization relation does not hold between abstract types or categories and concrete tokens. It holds between an abstract causal structure and the actual implementation of this causal structure, regardless of any considerations of types, kinds, or categories. Accordingly, from the second perspective, the elliptic claim that matter doesn’t matter cannot be completed in the way I did previously. I said that, from this perspective, matter doesn’t matter for the functional system being the kind of system it is. The causalstructure interpretation, however, does not need to refer to kinds or types at all. Here, the claim that matter doesn’t matter can be completed by saying that it doesn’t matter for the implementation of the abstract causal structure. On this reading, the thesis of multiple realizability says that a certain abstract causal pattern is multiply realizable because it can be implemented in different materials. On the causal-structure interpretation, and in contrast with the Platonic interpretation, the notion of realization only pertains to formal abstract causal structures, not to abstract kinds or types. In fact, “realization” may very well be substituted here for “implementation.” Instead of multiple realization, we might simply speak of multiple implementation. And indeed, some authors use the terms interchangeably (see, for instance, Polger & Shapiro, 2016, p. 11). The standard example of a multiply implementable system is that of a computer. As Putnam, Chalmers and many others have argued, it doesn’t matter in which material the abstract causal structures of the computer are implemented. All that matters is that the relevant causal patterns, which ensure that a certain input yields a certain output, are preserved. With Putnam, we could say that computers could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter. The problem here is, of course, that this claim is simply false. As I’ve said above, for the actual

40  Multiple realizability and the irrelevance of matter

implementation of a given causal structure, to some extent, matter always matters.11 This goes for functional artefacts in general, and a fortiori for highly complex machines like contemporary computers. Try making one from Swiss cheese and see how far you’ll get. And for all we know, some organic entities might only be replaceable by other organic entities. I would in any case certainly advise against building an artificial heart out of cheese, regardless of whether it’s Swiss cheese, gouda, or Danish blue. Where, then, does this idea that “matter doesn’t matter” come from, seeing that we have at least as much reason to claim the opposite? Clearly, what makes the “matter doesn’t matter” idea ring true can’t come from considerations pertaining to the actual physical systems themselves. We know very well that mousetraps, pumps, corkscrews, and computers can’t be made from any random material. What is true, however, is that in case of functionally defined entities, the nature of this material doesn’t interest us. And because of this, it does not acquire the status of a criterion. What we care about is what these entities manage to do for us, that is, what they mean to us. And it is based on this that these entities acquire their categorial identity, that is, what they are. The categorial identity of functional entities indeed seems to involve no reference to the materiality of the objects, regardless of the extent to which the material is relevant for the causal functioning itself. And this is why reference to the materiality of these entities does not show up in our defining abstract descriptions of them. But saying that matter doesn’t matter for the entity’s categorial identity is something very different from saying that it doesn’t matter for the entity itself. My claim, then, is that proponents of the “matter doesn’t matter” principle trade on this confusion. Two very different ideas are getting tangled up here: on the one hand, the rather trivial idea that the same abstract causal structure can be implemented in relatively different materials (so matter does matter); on the other hand, the idea that the specific materiality of a functional causal structure doesn’t interest us, and that it is therefore irrelevant. In case of functional entities, matter doesn’t matter because it doesn’t matter for the object’s categorial identity, which it gets from us. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter for the implementation of the causal structure. So let’s keep these distinct ideas distinct. 2.6 MR and identity theory: where’s the rub? Besides the fact that the idea of the irrelevance of the material loses all ground, there are still other problems with the causal-structure interpretation of multiple realizability. A prima facie attractive aspect of this reading is that it seems to succeed in ridding itself from the metaphysical ballast which burdens the Platonic interpretation. No recourse has to be made to abstract types and mysterious realization relations between the realm of these abstract entities and the

Multiple realizability and the irrelevance of matter  41

world of concrete particulars. As said, on this second interpretation, realization simply becomes synonymous with implementation. All that is claimed here is that abstract causal structures can in principle be implemented in different materials, as long as that material manages to preserve the relevant causal patterns. Here, we do seem to have a genuinely empirical thesis. Yet, as we’ve already seen, the problem is not that this thesis is false, but that it is obviously true. Of course an abstract causal structure can in principle be implemented in different materials if these materials manage to preserve the causal patterns. And of course matter doesn’t matter for the abstract description of the causal structure. When it comes to the claim that “matter doesn’t matter,” the causal-structure interpretation seems to be caught in a fork: either the claim is trivially true (the system considered abstractly), or obviously false (the system considered concretely). There is, however, a bigger worry still. On the causal-structure interpretation, it is no longer clear how the thesis of MR can still be used as an argument against the identity theory, which is how the idea of MR got introduced in philosophy in the first place. If the thesis of MR wants to work as an argument against the identity theory, the discussion must be put in terms of types and tokens. In other words, one has no choice but to fall back on the Platonic reading of MR. At least according to the standard functionalist interpretation of the identity theory, the identity theorist à la Smart and Place claims that types of mental states can be identified with types of physical states. It is only because of the assumed fact that one and the same mental state type can be realized by relevantly different physical tokens that the identity theory becomes untenable. In fact, without reformulating the identity theory in terms of types and tokens, the thesis of MR would not have any traction here. To my knowledge, however, none of the classic identity theorists ever framed their theory in terms of types and tokens, nor did they ever commit themselves to a specific “mental type = physical type” identification. The widespread idea that a classic identity theorist would ever have insisted on there being a strict identity between pain and C-fiber activity is a myth, which finds its origin in inaccurate representations of commentators. Roland Puccetti quotes William Lycan: “Consider the much-touted version of the identity theory according to which pains or pain events are strictly identical with C-fiber stimulations” (Lycan, 1974, p. 667). Puccetti rightly points out that Lycan’s assertion is strange, because the attitude of most philosophers debating the mindbrain identity hypothesis has been that (a) nothing much hangs on what particular neural mechanism is supposed to be identical with a kind of psychological state or event, and (b) in any case the choice of a specific neural process is best left in the hands of neurophysiologists. (Puccetti, 1977, p. 303)

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Indeed, for the classic identity theorists, the key issue has always been to defend the relation, not the specific relata the identity relation is supposed to hold between. In any case, without invoking the notion of “type,” the argument from MR against the identity theorist can’t be reconstructed. And indeed, the causal-structure interpretation of MR, which doesn’t need to fall back on the notion of “type,” appears to be perfectly compatible with a strict identity between the physical and the mental. The identity theorist might for instance come up with the following analogy: yes, an abstract causal structure can in principle be implemented in different physical structures, but that doesn’t mean that the actually implemented causal structure and the implementing physical structure couldn’t be one and the same entity. After all, from the perspective at which we consider the structures themselves, in their particularity (the third perspective previously discussed), there is just one physical system with a certain causal structure which may or may not be characterizable as functional. But whether we are talking about causal structures that capture mice, pump blood, compute sums, or generate pain experiences, nothing prevents the identity theorist from saying that, just as is the case for a particular mouse trap and a particular computer, a particular mental phenomenon just is a particular causal pattern in a particular physical structure. And nothing forces the identity theorist to put this idea in terms of tokens, which logically entails a commitment to types. In fact, the identity theorist doesn’t even have to assume that there is any recurring one-to-one mapping relation at all, regardless of whether we are talking about types or tokens. In principle, it is possible that qualitatively identical mental phenomena (my headache today and my headache tomorrow) can be identified with qualitatively different physical structures. Just as relevantly different causal structures can realize the same function (think of Shapiro’s example of a corkscrew), it is not impossible that different causal structures can realize a qualitatively identical mental state (think of brain plasticity). But all of this — and this is the point — doesn’t mean that the realized causal-functional structure and the physical structure which realizes it can’t be identified with each other. At the level of the particular phenomenon itself (which is after all the fundamental level of empirical inquiry), a strict identity between mental phenomenon and physical structure remains a perfectly legitimate possibility.12 After all, didn’t David Lewis’s 1966 functionalist paper An Argument for the Identity Theory argue, as the title suggests, pro rather than contra an identity relation? It is both a historical and a philosophical curiosity that the idea of functional roles which is introduced by one philosopher (Lewis) in defense of a philosophical theory (identity theory) is almost simultaneously used by another philosopher (Putnam) to demolish that very same theory. In any case, the identity theorists never put forward specific type–type identifications. At bottom, the identity theory is a theory that first of all wants to get away from dualism by putting forward the hypothesis that every

Multiple realizability and the irrelevance of matter  43

particular mental phenomenon can always be identified with a particular physical phenomenon. I’ll leave aside the issue of whether this is a claim worth defending. What is clear, however, is that the causal-structure interpretation of multiple realizability is in no way incompatible with an identity theory. The presumed dichotomy is a false one. Rounding up our discussion of the elliptic “matter doesn’t matter” claim, it turns out that this claim doesn’t stand a chance on the causal-structure interpretation of multiple realizability. The only sense in which the claim has some nontrivial truth to it is in relation to the categorial identity of a functional system (what kind or type of system it is). In the functionalist literature, this is typically expressed in terms of the realization of an abstract type, which brings us back to the Platonic reading. However, if we decide not to opt for the Platonic reading, other interpretational options become available. When we bring our own identificatory practices back into the picture, a much more natural way of interpreting multiple realization becomes available. All that is going on here is that we in some cases identify things as the same kind of thing, based not on what they are made of but on the function they perform. In what sense, now, does this entail an irrelevance of the materiality? In the sense that it doesn’t matter for class-membership. Put otherwise, it doesn’t matter for our acts of identifying-as. Whether a chair is made from wood, steel, or plastic, its correct identification as a chair is indeed entirely independent from considerations about the materiality.13 Note, however, that we have now introduced the identifying and classifying subject as a key player. This goes against the Platonic idea that particulars acquire their categorial identity (their whatness) from the types they are said to realize. And this is a good thing, because this Platonic classification theory (the second leg of Plato’s double blind) which is implicitly endorsed by functionalism, is completely untenable, as I’ll further show in subsequent chapters. Notes 1 Wetzel, L. (2009). Types and Tokens: On Abstract Objects. MIT Press. 2 See https://evolvingthoughts.net/2010/02/21/the-ontological-fallacy 3 By which I mean that the hypothesis is still to be given a meaning which can be empirically assessed, that is, which can be proven or disproven by means of empirical evidence. 4 See also Thomas Polger’s entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://iep.utm.edu/functism/ 5 Multiple realizability thesis 6 Although it is an oft-heard claim in textbook chapters on functionalism that an organic heart is in principle replaceable by any other kind of entity that manages to perform the heart’s blood-pumping function, in medical practice, we are still far removed from replacing the heart with an artificial equivalent. 7 I prefer to speak here of different perspectives rather than levels to emphasize the observer-dependent nature of the issue at hand, that is, the relevance of matter.

44  Multiple realizability and the irrelevance of matter 8 See, for instance, Chalmers (2012). 9 See Kripke (1980). 10 It could be argued we have an example of an analytic a posteriori truth here. But note that it is a truth about our experience, that is, our experience of particular identity. 11 In his book Beyond Physicalism, philosopher Daniel Hutto lays bare in what sense functionalism’s noncommittal attitude with regards to the material should be considered a fundamental weakness. The problem is that it leaves the functionalist unable to answer a crucial “How”-question, the question namely of how mental states are produced by neurophysical activity (a widely shared assumption). Hutto puts it as follows: “Strictly speaking, the idea that experiences are nothing but the occupants of specific, formally characterised, functional roles is compatible with both a physical or non-physical characterisation of these occupants. The only a priori constraints on the proposed ontology is that whatever occupies the role is able to actually discharge the function in question. For example, certain earthly materials do not make serviceable drains because they are too porous. This is an empirical fact which rules out the possibility that we might construct a drain out of sponges. But many other materials might do. This matters because the ontological openness of abstract functionalism leaves it without the internal resources to address the how-question. For the only way to answer that question is precisely by making an ontological commitment. Metaphysical fence sitting is not an option here.” (Hutto, 2000, p. 85). 12 For the record, I am not arguing for a revival of classic brain-state identity theory, for I think the idea of identifying mental phenomena with brain phenomena is a mistake. Nevertheless, as Erik Myin and I argue elsewhere, the very idea of a strict identity between phenomenal experience and what from one perspective appears as physical is for various reasons still appealing. We argue not for a neurocentric identity theory but for what we call an embodied identity theory, which takes into account not just brain activity but the activity of the whole organism in interaction with its environment. See Myin and Zahnoun (2018). 13 As an anonymous reviewer has pointed out to me, an interesting parallel can be drawn here with Alan Costall’s notion of “canonic affordances,” which are described as “the conventional, normative meanings of things, notably in relation to human artefacts” (Costall, 2012, p. 90). With incidentally the same example of a chair in mind, Costall rightly emphasizes that the correct identification of the object as a chair is embedded within a wider social framework and cannot be explained “in terms of the individual-object dyad” (Costall, 2012, p. 90). This point will remain relevant in our later discussion of categorial identity. I am grateful to the reviewer for having drawn my attention to this concept.

Chapter 3

The embodiment of meaning

3.1 The myth of the self-differentiating object As argued in the previous chapter, the standard thesis of MR is metaphysically laden. The thesis says that some types can be realized by relevantly different material structure tokens. At the same time, these material structure tokens are what they are because they realize this and not some other type. In other words, they inherit their categorial identity (their “whatness”) from the type they realize. It is clear, then, that the thesis implicitly commits itself to a certain theory of classification, which is Platonic through and through. Things are what they are because of their relation to an abstract type (the second component of Plato’s double blind). In Plato, this relation was conceived of in terms of participation (μέθεξις); within functionalism, the relation is thought of in terms of realization. In any case, in Plato’s classification theory, all particulars inherit their categorial identity (what they are from a classificatory point of view) from their relation to an abstract entity with a mind-independent existence outside of us. This what I will call vertical theory of categorial identity, which is dual in nature and which completely ignores the constitutive role of the identifying subject, is implicitly endorsed by the thesis of MR. Particular functional structures (and presumably, all other particular entities as well) inherit their categorial identity (or whatness) from the type or kind they realize. A particular corkscrew is what it is because the object is a physical realization of the type “Corkscrew.” Seen in this way, the thesis of MR provides a nice illustration of what David Wiggins refers to when he speaks of “the realist myth of the self-differentiating object (the object which announces itself as the very object it is to any mind, however passive or of whatever orientation)” (Wiggins, 2001, pp. 150–151). By physically realizing a certain abstract type, the realizations are automatically labeled. Carrying their label on their sleeves, the role of the identifying subject is reduced to one of registration. Things already are what they are. All that’s left for us to do is take note of it. In this way, the neuroscientist can unequivocally identify a certain brain activity as “pain,” because this

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-4

46  The embodiment of meaning

physical state is assumed to realize the abstract type “Pain.” Furthermore, since different neural structures appear to realize this exact same abstract type, pain can be said to be multiply realizable. As I will argue, this metaphysically laden background theory of classification is completely untenable. To the extent that the thesis of MR relies on this theory, it inevitably goes down with it. The Platonic reading of MR depends on a theory of classification which is, as I just said, untenable. However, it is not untenable because it offers an implausible explanation of categorial identity, that is, where an entity’s “whatness” comes from; it is untenable because it starts off from a fundamentally distorted picture of what categorial identity is in the first place. Something is what it is not because of some mysterious relation to an abstract entity, but because of its relation to us. Outside of this relation, there simply is no “whatness.” Speaking or asking about “whatness” (e.g., “What is this?”) only makes sense in relation to practices of classification, and these don’t occur outside of us, that is, outside of our socionormatively governed practices of identifying-as. It is not that we can identify things as this or that because they have a certain “whatness”; it is exactly the other way around: they have a “whatness” because of our practices of identifying-as. They acquire their categorial identity from our relations to them. Crucially, since we can relate to one and the same object in various ways, this object can have various identities. It is therefore an illusion to think that there is such a thing as the object’s “whatness” or the categorial identity. There is no such thing as the identity of a physical structure (which can then be said to be inherited from the identity of the abstract type which is being realized). Otherwise put, the question of what something is can always be answered correctly in various ways. For instance, one and the same entity can correctly be identified as an animal, a feline, a cat, or a pet. To be sure, we might feel that, at least in this case, it is the third answer (“a cat”) which correctly answers the “what is this?” question. But this is a contingency which is determined not by the object and its properties but by certain conventions about how the “what is that” question is to be answered in the most proper way. And there is always contextuality involved here. Let me give just one example. Rumor has it that after Gallimard published Sartre’s L’être et le néant in 1943, the publisher noticed that the book was selling surprisingly well. Was this perhaps because of an increased interest in existentialist ideas among the French population during German occupation? If the story is true, this had nothing to do with it. The reason apparently was because the book weighed exactly 1 kilogram and could therefore be used as a replacement for the copper weights that had become scarce (the copper weights were confiscated by the army to reuse for ammunition). What interests me in this example is not Sartre’s unexpected 700-page bestseller, but the copper weights it is said to have replaced. For these weights provide as good as any an

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example of a functional, multiply realizable object. To fulfill their functional role on the weighing scale, it doesn’t matter whether these weights are made of copper, Swiss cheese, or, indeed, the material out of which a philosophy book is made. However, in a different context, the specific materiality of these objects apparently can become important. Qua copper objects which can be used to make bullets, their materiality matters quite a lot. Yet, these are the very same objects! Also note that the difference can’t come from the fact that the objects are functional in one context but not in the other. In the context where they are used for ammunition, they serve a purpose as well. It seems, then, that there does not have to be any conflict between an object being functionally defined on the one hand and being relevant in its specific materiality. My point for now is mainly to again emphasize that the whole idea that particular entities are tokens of a single type is a myth. Qua token of the type “Weight of 1 kg,” matter doesn’t matter and the type is, at least according to Putnam’s standard interpretation, multiply realizable. However, qua token of the type “Copper object,” matter matters very much, canceling out the multiple realizability. What this shows, however, is whether or not a particular object is a token of a multiply realizable type is not decided on the basis of the nature of the particular object (the realizer). How, then, can multiple realizability have ever anything interesting to say about the nature of particular entities (e.g., particular mental states)? It seems that multiple realizability depends entirely on our perspective on an entity, not on the nature of the entity itself. And again, nothing forces us to think in terms of types and tokens here. A much more natural way of expressing the foregoing ideas is to simply say that we can correctly identify one and the same object in indefinitely many ways because how we identify it depends on our purposes. Put otherwise, one and the same object can match indefinitely many descriptions, functional or otherwise. Saying that one and the same object can be of indefinitely many types is just a metaphysically laden way of expressing this same fact. The only difference is that the Platonic interpretation leaves no room for the evaluating and identifying subject, whereas the relationalist interpretation, which understands categorial identity as relational to the identifying subject, does. And one of the advantages of seeing it from this relationalist, subject-inclusive perspective is that all of a sudden, a lot of perennial metaphysical puzzles seem to evaporate. Intractable questions pertaining to the nature of eternal types or essences can now be substituted for much less metaphysical, much more psychological questions pertaining to human meaning. And, as we’ll see later, much of the answers to these questions will contain a reference to the body and the material particularity it coincides with. As I’ve just argued, the idea that an entity has just one categorial identity or “essence” is a myth. With this in mind, let’s look back at Putnam’s original example, which, after all, got the whole thing started. Putnam speaks of

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“pain,” plain and simple. According to him, pain can be realized by relevantly different brain structures. However, saying that certain neural activity is identifiable as “pain” is always to some extent arbitrary. Why can’t the neuroscientist observing some neural activity answer the “What is this I’m observing here?” question with “headache” or “tooth ache”? Now, would the thesis of MR still seem plausible if we were to make our identifications (classifications) a bit more specific, for instance, by preferring to speak of the realization of tooth ache rather than pain in general? After all, nobody ever has “pain,” plain and simple. The pain is always of a specific kind. Suddenly, the idea that one and the same pain can be realized by a mammalian brain or an octopus’s brain loses a lot of its attractiveness. Obviously, the idea that “tooth ache” can be realized in an octopus is completely implausible (octopi don’t have teeth), just as the idea that “tentacle pain” can be realized in humans is completely absurd.1 It makes a crucial difference, then, at which classificatory level we determine the “whatness” of the mental phenomenon. Yet it is precisely because functionalists fail to acknowledge the fact that categorial identities are determined in relation to us, not to abstract types, that this problem with Putnam’s argument from MR has remained under the radar. The point is that, when it comes to the question of what type an entity realizes, there is no final truth in the matter, which is precisely what the underlying metaphysics of types, tokens, and realization keeps us from seeing. What becomes clear here is just how much the thesis of MR depends on a metaphysics of predetermined, fixed, and eternal identities. Yet, as soon as we confront this metaphysics with the fact that it is built on the illusion that particular objects have just one categorial identity, waiting for us to be discovered, the standard thesis of MR loses all ground. After all, if there is no such thing as the categorial identity of a physical structure, that is, if a particular object is never simply of one type, what is it, then, that this structure is realizing? The conclusion I am working toward is this: although the thesis of MR (in all its guises) and the affiliated idea that matter doesn’t matter present themselves as interesting ontological claims, that is, as claims pertaining to the nature of functional states and, by stipulation, thereby also to the nature of mental states, the claims are really about something else. As soon as we get rid of the Platonic classification theory underlying the standard formulation of MR, and replace it by an empirically adequate theory which reclaims territory for the classifying subject, the thesis of MR can be reformulated as follows: because we primarily classify certain entities not based on the kind of material they are made of, but on the kind of function they perform, matter doesn’t matter for the primary categorial identity of these entities2 (how we would usually answer the question “What is this?”). Notice, however, that this changes the idea of “mattering” itself. When we now say that matter doesn’t matter, we are not talking about mattering in the sense of making a

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causal difference. We are talking about mattering in the sense of being relevant or significant for the meaning of the terms we use to designate entities. To put it differently: for some kind of entities, it doesn’t matter to us what they are made of, whereas in case of other entities, it does matter. But saying that it matters or doesn’t matter for what they are to us just is another way of saying that it matters or doesn’t matter for what they mean to us. And this brings us back to the point I already made above: if there is a nontrivial sense in which the claim that matter doesn’t matter can be true, it is in the sense that it doesn’t matter for the meaning of the entity. But this is, of course, precisely not how the functionalist wants to be understood. The functionalist wants to have something interesting to say about the nature of mental phenomena, not about what things mean to us, nor about what does and doesn’t matter to us. The functionalist wants to contribute to an understanding of what things are in themselves, not what they mean to us. Yet, as I will aim to show below, the functionalist has never done anything else. She has been talking about meaning instead of being all along. She just didn’t realize it (no pun intended). To make my case, I will introduce an important yet almost completely overlooked contemporary philosophical distinction that will further clarify in what sense the thesis of MR is actually a thesis about human meaning, not about the way the world is irrespective of our relations to it. Before introducing this pivotal move, however, there is one last thing we need to consider. If it is true that some types of entity can be said to be multiply realizable, this obviously must mean that some types are not multiply realizable. What, then, would count as cases of non-multiple realizability? In other words, when does matter matter for the functionalist? 3.2 Multiple realization and the relevance of matter According to the Platonic metaphysical presuppositions underlying the standard interpretation of multiple realization, particular functional entities (including, presumably, mental entities) are to be seen as tokens, that is, realizations of an abstract type. In case of these functional entities, the materiality of the token is irrelevant in the sense that this is not what determines the (categorial) identity of the object, that is, what the object is. This suggests that we would have an example of non-multiple realization or, as I will call it, unique realization3 when the opposite is true, that is, in case the material does matter for what the object is. One example in particular comes to mind, an example, furthermore, to which Putnam himself returns several times in the course of his writings: water. Water can’t be made of anything else and still be water. Saying that “Water could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter” is absurd on all counts. Water, then, is not multiply realizable. Water is not what it is because of the functional role it can play (quenching thirst or

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showering, for instance); to be truly water, it must be made from H2O molecules. In case of water, then, but not in case of chairs, mousetraps, or mental states, matter matters. It is the H2O molecules that make water water. In other words, the categorial identity of water is determined by the material which constitutes it. Water wouldn’t be water if it wasn’t made of H2O, and this is why, in case of water, matter matters. This, at least, is one way to think about it. It is also the wrong way to think about it. That there is something off about this whole line of reasoning comes out clearly from the fact that, long before we discovered the chemical composition of water, the specific materiality of water already mattered for water to really be water. Even though we didn’t have the slightest idea how to specify the materiality physiochemically, it has always been the case that for something to count as water, the materiality mattered. It is important, however, that we avoid the following thought, the thought namely that the discovery of the molecular structure of water provided the scientific justification for something we were already suspecting, namely that the specific materiality matters for something to count as water. This thought is misguided, for it suggests that we could have been mistaken in our assumption that the materiality of water matters for being actual water. It suggests that, had we discovered that water didn’t have a unique molecular structure (we can easily imagine tap water having a different molecular structure than rainwater for instance, with tap water being made of H2O and rain water consisting of Putnam’s XYZ molecules, or whatever), we would have been forced to conclude that water is multiply, not uniquely, realizable and that, furthermore, we were all this time mistaken in thinking that the material particularity of water matters for the substance actually being water. According to this misguided logic, the relevance of the materiality is assumed to be somehow dependent on how much objective scientific knowledge of the material we have gathered. This, however, is simply not how the relevance of matter is being determined. It is not how matter comes to matter. For even if we had discovered that what we ordinarily call water can be made of different molecules (H2O, XYZ, or whatever), we would therefore still not say that what the stuff is made of is irrelevant. Rather, we would say that water can have different chemical make-ups, but that these make-ups still matter for water being water. This is not a theoretical fact about water, it is a pre-theoretical fact about water, or rather, about our pre-theoretical engagements with water. The category of water depends not on molecular structures, but on our embodied relations to it. That the materiality of water matters cannot be understood independently of these relations. And the scientist too relies on this pre-theoretical notion. After all, before she can even begin her scientific investigations, she already must have determined what she’s trying to discover the chemical properties of, that is, water. But the relevance of the material is already accepted as a given. It is not something that is discovered afterward. So the discovery that water consists of H2O simply can’t be what

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“fixes the referent,” to use the technical vocabulary. The referent of “water” must have already been fixed in a different way, yet in a way which included the relevance of the particular materiality of water. So even if the scientist would have discovered that water is multiply realizable from a physiochemical point of view (i.e., if we had discovered that different samples of water have different molecular structures) this would not at all imply that we would now be entitled to say that the material is irrelevant. All this does is point to the fact that, contrary to what is usually assumed, there does not have to be any discrepancy between multiple realizability on the one hand and the relevance of matter on the other. Again, if we would have discovered that water can be both H2O and XYZ, and that therefore one and the same kind (water) is multiply realizable, we still wouldn’t have to say that matter doesn’t matter here. It still matters just as much. In light of this, it should also become clear why Putnam’s sample theory doesn’t work as an explanation for why the specific materiality matters for the identification of things like water. In Putnam’s writings on the extension of terms like “gold” and “water” (see, for instance, Putnam, 1975), Putnam thinks he is offering an account for why the materiality of these entities matters for the extension. On closer inspection, however, Putnam does not so much explain this relevance; he presupposes it. After all, according to Putnam, the correct identification of something as water or gold is determined by its relation to a “sample” of which experts have established that these samples are instances of real gold or real water, based on scientific investigation. But again, this can’t be what fixed the referent of these terms, nor what explains why the materiality of the referent matters. This was already the case long before any experts entered the scene. In addition, the very idea that a comparison to a material sample could be relevant to begin with already presupposes that the materiality is relevant for the categorial identity of the substance. After all, in case of objects of which we already know that the materiality doesn’t matter, a comparison to a sample is completely useless. To figure out whether something is really a corkscrew, it is simply ridiculous to refer to a material sample. In other words, in case of the identification of water or gold, the sample is only relevant because we already know that the materiality of water and gold matters for their categorial identity. The sample theory can at best provide a sociological account of why this and not another kind of materiality (e.g., H2O and not XYZ) is relevant for correct identification. But the theory is circular when it comes to the question of why samples came to matter in the first place for the correct identification of things like water and gold. Understanding this latter fact can no longer be a matter of investigating the physical, chemical, or other properties of things, but by looking at what these things are for us, which is to say, what they mean to us. Interestingly, in case of the meaning of water, this meaning is first of all functional: water is to drink, to wash, to clean, to swim in, to water the

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crops, to baptize with, and so on. So it is functional, but it is precisely functional in its materiality. In other words, matter matters here precisely for the function. This again (i.e., in addition to the example of the copper weights) illustrates that there does not have to be any discrepancy between functionality and material relevance (in the literal sense of something being relevant in its materiality). But, of course, how this material can be further specified in physiochemical terms is not important, at least not from our nonscientific evaluative perspective on the world. By comparison, from the scientificobjective perspective of the scientist (which should not be mistaken for a nonevaluative perspective), the ordinary functional meaning of water is bracketed. Here, the focus does come to lie on what water consists of. And because water turns out to consist of H2O, we say that the materiality also matters for the scientific notion of water. But it matters in two very different ways. For the pre-theoretical ordinary notion of water (which, again, the scientist also relies on), the materiality matters at the macroscopic or, to use Sellars’ term, manifest level.4 For the theoretical notion, the materiality matters at the microscopic or scientific level. But whichever level we consider, the relevance of the materiality is always a relevance for someone. It is never relevant for the water itself, also not in a causal sense. What we pre-theoretically call water and what the scientist further specifies as H2O is one and the same thing. I am emphasizing this to safeguard against the idea that water, at the manifest level, is somehow causally realized by specific molecules, and that the material is in this causal sense relevant. This, in any case, is how the functionalist tends to speak of these matters: a computer can be realized in different materials and therefore the material is irrelevant for a computer, whereas water can only be realized by structures of H2O molecules, so therefore, the molecules are relevant for water. But how can the material literally be relevant for a computer or water, regardless of whether we are talking about types or tokens? The material doesn’t realize the thing, it just is the thing, but seen in another way and from another perspective. At best, we realize the thing (a computer, say) by using certain material, and because of the material constraints involved, the material acquires relevance. But it is never relevant for the thing itself, for it just is the material structure. With all of this in mind, it is now time to open up the discussion. As we’ve seen, it seems that the crucial element that is missing from the functionalist story is we ourselves as cognitive agents. Instead of persevering in the Platonic view, we should adopt a different perspective in which our own perspective on the world, which is first of all an evaluative and embodied perspective, is taken into account. From this evaluative and embodied perspective, meanings become attached to things in our environment. In case of some of these things, matter matters, whereas for others, it does not, or much less. But it always does so in light of what these things mean to us. Fortunately for our endeavor, the idea that materiality can to a varying

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degree matter for the meaning of things has already been elaborated in recent philosophical work. As I will aim to show in the following sections, the notion of multiple realization and the related idea that, in case of functional entities, matter doesn’t matter, becomes much more intelligible when considered in relation to this work. 3.3 Strong and weak embodiment of meaning Within the contemporary philosophical literature, there exists a theoretical distinction which shows a remarkable overlap with the distinction between multiple and unique realization. This distinction is all the more relevant for our discussion because it directly deals with the topic of the relevance of matter, the central theme of this book. The distinction I’m referring to is that between strong and weak embodiment of meaning. This philosophical concept, which is supposed to pick out a specific psychological phenomenon, originates in the work of philosopher Arnold Burms yet has roots in Wittgenstein.5 And as said, the idea of multiple realization can be made more intelligible in light of this other, more fundamental distinction between strong and weak embodiment of meaning. These theoretical concepts, which form a common thread throughout the work of Burms, are explicated by Burms himself mainly by means of examples. And in fact, this indeed seems to be the most appropriate way to make the conceptual distinction intelligible, for it seems difficult to clarify the distinction by means of a definition. I don’t mean to say here that the distinction between strong and weak embodiment of meaning escapes all definition, only that such a definition would probably not be very instructive. One could, for instance, define weak and strong embodiment of meaning in terms of the degree to which the material particularity of an entity matters to this entity’s meaning. In accordance with this definition, weak embodiment would then imply that the meaning of an entity is to a relatively large degree independent of the concrete materiality of the entity, whereas strong embodiment would entail the opposite, that is, that the meaning of an entity is very tightly connected to the entity in its material particularity. But, as said, such defining descriptions are in all likeliness not very helpful, since they rely on certain ideas which themselves require elucidation. I shall therefore follow Burms’ lead and try to explain the distinction by way of examples. However, there is one thing that the foregoing “definitions” should already make clear. The distinction apparently pertains to the meanings certain entities have, not to the entities themselves. At first glance, then, there seems to be a crucial difference with the distinction between multiple versus unique realization, in the sense that the latter distinction does seem to pertain, not to meanings, but to the entities themselves (albeit abstract entities). In what follows, my point will precisely be that this difference is negligible, and that the idea of multiple

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realization does in fact pertain to meanings as well. In fact, I will argue that the idea of multiple realization simply reduces to an instance of weak embodiment of meaning. My strategy here will be to argue that a function, which is said to be multiply realizable, only exists as a meaning, not as a token. 3.3.1 Strong embodiment of meaning: examples

An example Burms often uses to explicate the phenomenon of strong embodiment of meaning is that of the poem. As Burms himself indicates, this example is inspired by a short but nonetheless important passage in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In §531, the latter writes: We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.) In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem.) (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, pp. 143–144)6 As Burms explains: The meaning of a poem is entirely interwoven with particular words in a particular order: what the poem means can never be replaced by a translation or a paraphrase in prose. (Burms & Breeur, 2008, p. 331; my translation) This strongly contrasts with the weak embodiment of, for instance, a scientific exposé, which is highly paraphrasable and easily translatable without loss of meaning. To translate the meanings expressed in a math book, one can probably rely almost entirely on an automatic translation program. The reason is that these meanings are perfectly detachable from the specific symbols that express them. This is not the case for poems or, to give another example, the specific words one uses to express one’s love or gratitude to another person. These words are meaningful in themselves, not because of the paraphrasable or translatable content they carry. With such examples in mind, Burms concludes: If a meaning is strongly embodied, then the particular material embodiment cannot be replaced without there occurring an impoverishment or a change of meaning. (Burms & Breeur, 2008, p. 331; my translation)

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Of crucial importance for my present purposes is that, although the foregoing examples seem to point to the contrary, the notion of meaning is not to be understood as necessarily connected to words or sentences. This is neither the case in Burms nor in Wittgenstein. A few paragraphs earlier, the latter writes: Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think. What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme. (§527) And the paragraph directly preceding this one (§526) opens with the question: “What does it mean to understand a picture, a drawing?” It is clear, then, that for Wittgenstein the notion of meaning should not be restricted to the realm of words or sentences. Indeed, this restriction does characterize standard analytic philosophy. Here, meaning is something which exclusively pertains to propositions, not to objects. Mark Johnson speaks in this regard of “a narrow view of meaning,” that is, a view of meaning which is exclusively “conceptual and propositional in character” (Johnson, 2007, p. 11). And further, he adds: I submit that if you want to understand human meaning-making, you should probably not start with theories of meaning put forth in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and language. You will find there treatments of concepts, propositions, and various language-like structures, but you will not find any awareness of deep, embodied, vital meaning. (Johnson, 2007, p. 52) This broad view of meaning is also unambiguously underwritten by Burms. Another example Burms often uses to illustrate the notion of “strong embodiment of meaning” is that of a relic, where “relic” is not necessarily to be understood in a religious context. There exists quite stunning video footage of Elvis who, during one of his Vegas shows, is continuously handed scarfs which he puts around his neck for a few seconds, to then throw the objects, which have now acquired a sacral status, into the fanatic and frantic crowd. Something of the significance of revered persons (saints, popstars, loved ones) appears to be transmitted to material objects that have been in close physical contact to these persons, and which thereby acquire a special status.7 How we should understand this transmission is at this point not yet important. What is important is that these objects possess a meaning or meaningfulness in their material particularity, regardless of how this materiality is

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further specified in physiochemical terms. And because it is the material particularity itself which is meaningful, this meaning cannot be embodied or, if you prefer, realized by any other particular. And although there seems to be no a priori restriction on which kind of objects can come to matter in their particularity, for the phenomenon of strong embodiment the human body seems to count as the paradigm case. Other objects typically derive their particular material relevance via a material bond with a human body. This observation will become important in our later discussion of Putnam’s claim that the materiality of the body is irrelevant for our mental lives. Before we continue, it should be noted that, despite a prima facie similarity between strong embodiment of meaning and what I have previously called unique realization, both notions should not be conflated. This is because Burms’s idea of strong embodiment has nothing to do with the realization of kinds or types. Referring back to our three different perspectives in the previous chapter: whereas claims about multiple realizability are situated within the second perspective, the phenomenon of strong embodiment of meaning is always connected to the third perspective. It is connected to objects considered in their particularity, not to the kind of material the object consists of. Otherwise put, the phenomenon of strong embodiment of meaning occurs outside of considerations about categorial identity or practices of identifying-as. 3.3.2 Weak embodiment of meaning: examples

In contrast with strongly embodied meanings, “weakly embodied meanings are highly independent of their concrete embodiment” (Burms & Breeur, 2008, p. 331; my translation). As was the case with strong embodiment of meaning, here too, examples can be found both within and outside of language. Burms’ example of the latter is the scientific exposé, which contrasts with the poem in that the former is precisely highly translatable and paraphrasable. Here, the particular words can easily be substituted for other words expressing the same meaning. However, it is the examples coming from outside of the linguistic domain that are especially of interest here. These include ordinary objects like chairs, tables, corkscrews, computers, and so on — in short, objects which have a meaning to us, but this meaning does not depend on their particular material embodiment. Indeed, the category of objects which form examples of weak embodiment of meaning overlaps with those entities that the functionalist puts forward as cases of multiple realization. And this is not a coincidence. For what the functionalist calls functional entities are entities that are characterized not by a functional nature but by a functional meaning. And functional meanings are, in Burms’s terminology, weakly embodied. The crucial move, which we have to be very clear about, is the move from being to meaning. We’ll return to this

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later. First, a more urgent task awaits us. We have just seen that the distinction between strong and weak embodiment of meaning pertains to both linguistic and nonlinguistic entities. This, however, presupposes something which some philosophers, and especially those schooled in the analytic tradition, might find hard to accept. The presupposition is, of course, that there is no essential difference in the way meaning is attached to linguistic entities and the way we attribute meaning to nonlinguistic objects. After all, without this presupposition, one could easily retort that the distinction between strong and weak embodiment of meaning does not pick out one homogenous phenomenon. By contrast, if one assumes that “meaning” means something very different in case of objects like paintings, melodies (Wittgenstein), or relics (Burms) than in case of the words or sentences of a poem or a scientific treatise, then the conceptual distinction between weak and strong embodiment of meaning loses much of its power. We would then mistakenly be assuming that we are talking about a single phenomenon, whereas in fact, we would be talking about different things which need to be understood independently from one another. In any case, Burms, for one, is convinced that we are in fact dealing with one and the same kind of meaning,8 which can be attributed to both sentences and objects alike and which scaffolds and holds together the weak/strong embodiment of meaning distinction. In the next sections, I will try to defend this idea and argue that there indeed is a continuity of meaning that extends from the things themselves to the words and sentences we use to speak about them. 3.4 The continuity thesis of meaning The subject we are touching on here cannot be given exhaustive treatment within the confines of the present work. After all, the subject we are dealing with is nothing less than a general theory of meaning, and a theory which far exceeds the borders of traditional analytic philosophy of language. As indicated previously, the focus of the analytic approach to meaning lies entirely on meaning connected to linguistic entities, that is, words, sentences, and propositions. The idea, however, that there could be a continuity between linguistic meaning and the sense in which the linguistically represented entities have meanings themselves is rarely defended.9 Even more rarely do we find an argument for the idea that there is not merely a continuity, but a kind of dependency relation in the sense that linguistic meaning is actually reliant on this more direct “object meaning.” Indeed, there are tendencies toward such a view in, for instance, Wittgenstein or Burms, but the explicit formulation of a continuity thesis of meaning is hard to find. An important exception, however, can be found in the work of philosopher Mark Johnson, one of the authors of the influential Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson: 1980). In his recent contribution to the Oxford Handbook of 4E

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Cognition, Johnson reaffirms the close connection between body and concept, thereby drawing our attention to the fact that language does not have a monopoly on meaning. Johnson takes as his starting point James Gibson’s notion of affordance, the key concept in Gibson’s ecological psychology. Johnson writes: The origin of meaning and thought is the activity of a bounded, embodied organism as it engages its various environments in ways that allow it to maintain the basic conditions for life and growth…. Depending on the specific bodily makeup of the organism, particular situations will provide for the organism what James Gibson (1979/1986) called affordances— patterns for meaningful perception and action relative to the nature of the organism, its needs, and its purposive activity in the world that it inhabits. (Johnson, 2018, p. 626) Indeed, we also find this entanglement between “affordance” and meaning in Gibson himself. In the introduction to his third chapter of his seminal The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which is tellingly titled “The Meaningful Environment,” Gibson writes: “The world of physical reality does not consist of meaningful things. The world of ecological reality, as I have been trying to describe it, does” (Gibson, 1979/1986, p. 33). And later in the chapter, we read: Water causes the wetting of dry surfaces. It affords bathing and washing, to elephants as well as to humans. Streams of water can be dammed, by beavers as well as by children and hydraulic engineers. Ditches can be dug and aqueducts built. Pots can be made to contain water, and then it affords pouring and spilling. Water, in short, has many kinds of meaning. (Gibson, 1979/1986, p. 38; m.e.) For Johnson, there can be no doubt that the meaning things can have for us (their affordance) is not fundamentally different from propositional meaning, and that there is both a continuity and a dependency relation between object meaning and linguistic meaning. This becomes very clear in the following section, which I will quote at length: It is not just words and sentences that have meaning, but also any affordances within our environment. Conceptual/propositional meaning depends on, and emerges from, this much deeper and broader embodied process of meaning-making…. Conceiving of meaning in this embodied, experiential manner enables us to go beyond the narrower confines of language-based meaning to embrace the full range of human meaning-making

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in such practices as painting, sculpture, music, architecture, dance, spontaneous gesture, and ritual practices, in a way that no merely linguistically centered account of meaning can. No traditional understanding of signs as having meaning only through some conceptual/propositional content grounded in reference to states of affairs in the world could even begin to capture the richness of body- based meaning that is experienced in all of these varied forms of human meaning- making and communicative activity. (Johnson, 2018, p. 627; m.e.)10 In short, Johnson unambiguously endorses the continuity thesis of meaning. As with Wittgenstein and Burms, meaning transgresses the distinction between word and object. Remarkably enough, Johnson also refers to art objects (paintings, music) and ritual practices, examples which are also presented by Burms as illustrations of strong embodiment of meaning. The fact, then, that we find the phenomenon of weak and strong embodiment of meaning in connection to both linguistic and non-linguistic entities (e.g., relics) is hardly coincidental. After all, in both cases, we are dealing with the same kind of meaning. Observing the fact that we use the term “understanding” both in connection to nonlinguistic objects (like paintings) and linguistic entities (sentences), Wittgenstein asks himself: “has ‘understanding’ two different meanings here?” (PI: § 532). In as far as we are dealing with the same kind of meaning, the answer has to be: no. We are dealing with the same kind of understanding here. I’ll make this idea more intuitive by means of an example. Suppose one night, you wake up thirsty and go downstairs to get a glass of water. While standing in your kitchen, you look outside one of the windows overlooking your garden. There happens to be a full moon that night, so you have little difficulty discerning all the familiar shapes: the trees in the back of the garden, the bushes in front of them, a soccer ball in the middle of the lawn. However, among the dark shapes, you detect one contour in particular, right there in between the trees, which you can’t immediately identify. You keep staring at the dark silhouette for a few minutes, trying to figure out what it could be. Suddenly, you realize what it is: to your shock, you have been staring at the silhouette of a man all this time. Now, what has changed before and after you realized there’s a man standing there? What has changed is the meaning of the scenery, going from safe and familiar to threatening and terrifying. Compare this scenario to the following similar situation. Again, you are in your kitchen at night, having a glass of water. You notice there’s a piece of paper on the sink with some scribbling on it. You stare at the letters for a few minutes until you realize they spell the sentence: “There’s a man standing outside.” Again, there is a transition from safe and familiar to vulnerable and, indeed, terrifying. And again, what has occurred is a change in meaning, this time brought about not by a perceptual

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scene but by a linguistic object (the sentence on the paper). But in both cases the meaning is the same. And it is experienced or lived meaning. This meaning can be expressed in language or embodied in objects and events. Phenomenologically speaking, however, it is of one and the same kind. This idea that there is no essential difference between the experience of meaning related to objects and events on the one hand, and linguistic entities on the other, appears to be confirmed by neurological data. In an oft-cited study, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and his collaborators detected the same neural activity in patients when they are shown a picture of a person and when they are presented with the written name of that person. This suggests a neural correlation with what we at the experiential level refer to as meaning and which is invariable with respect to linguistic or nonlinguistic stimuli. I’ll return to Quiroga’s experiments in more detail subsequently. The foregoing observations open up a language theoretical path which we unfortunately cannot follow very far here. More in particular, the continuity thesis of meaning invites us to investigate the following idea: if things are first of all what they are (whatness) because of what they are to us, and if they are in this sense embodiments of meaning, shouldn’t we say, then, that our words not so much refer to the things themselves, but to the meanings these things embody? In other words, couldn’t it be the case that language does not so much refer to things, but to meanings? And isn’t it possible that the classic Fregean distinction between sense and referent is much less rigid in that the sense and referent can coincide? To know what a chair is is to know what this object means to us or, in Gibsonian terminology, what it affords.11 Shouldn’t we then conclude that the term “chair” refers to this meaning — which in a sense is the chair — rather than to the thing itself ? As said, however, these are thoughts we can’t pursue here very far. What is at this point especially relevant is the idea that both ordinary objects and linguistic entities can have meaning, and they can have meaning in the same sense. It follows, then, that the distinction between weak and strong embodiment of meaning also applies to objects, as had always been assumed by Burms. With these thoughts in mind, we can now return to our discussion of the functionalist idea of the multiple realizability of functional entities. 3.5 Multiple realizability and weak embodiment of meaning As we’ve seen, the idea of weak embodiment of meaning claims that the meaning of an entity (linguistic and nonlinguistic) is to a high degree independent from the material embodiment of that entity. The idea of multiple realization bears a striking resemblance to this idea, with one difference: the latter idea does not seem to pertain to meaning, but to things themselves, regardless of what they mean to us. The central point I am trying to make is

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that, on closer inspection, the idea of multiple realization does pertain to meaning, despite interpretations to the contrary. The easiest way of seeing this is by reminding us of the fact that, within the functionalist literature, functional entities are said to be functionally defined. Saying, however, that they are functionally defined simply comes down to saying that these entities get their definitional meaning from the function they perform. What hovers over and above the various instantiations is not some type, but a (functional) meaning, expressible in a defining description (e.g., a pump is a mechanical device using suction or pressure to raise or move liquids, compress gases, or force air into inflatable objects such as tires). It is this meaning that is being realized, not some abstract entity, whether we think of it as a type or a causal topology. And the reason why the materiality doesn’t matter is, again, not because it doesn’t matter at the level of the particular instances, but because it doesn’t matter at the level of this meaning. Putnam conflated functional meaning with functional object. This is what I have earlier called the functionalist fallacy, and it pervades the whole functionalist literature. The embodied-meaning approach also allows us to explain a phenomenon which we have so far been brushing aside, yet which is nonetheless important. As we’ve seen, standard interpretations of the multiple realizability of the mental all assume that the irrelevance of matter pertains just as much to functional artefacts like mousetraps, carburetors, and computers as it does to nonartefactual entities like hearts, blood, or mental states. The “matter doesn’t matter” principle is taken to apply to the artefactual and the biological alike. Nevertheless, everyone feels that there is a difference in saying that matter doesn’t matter for what it is to be a pump and saying that matter doesn’t matter for what it is to be a human heart. The claim that as long as something manages to pump blood through our body in the right way it qualifies as a heart, seems not at all obviously correct. For something to really qualify as a human heart, matter does seem to matter. The same goes for blood. Perhaps blood can be understood functionally in the same way as the fluids going through an insect’s body, but there seems to be something wrong with the idea that this is all there is to being blood. We feel that the stuff really does matter for what it means to be blood. However, we do not have this intuition when it comes to functional artefacts like pumps or corkscrews. Here, matter really doesn’t matter. We are now in a position to better understand where this difference comes from. The difference has something to do with the extent to which the primary meaning of an entity coincides with its functional meaning. In case of functional artefacts like pumps or computers, we are dealing with entities who have a function, that is, who have a job to perform within our own goal-directed activities. And this latter qualification makes, I think, all the difference. There is a clear connection here between the old existentialist idea of essence preceding existence. Sartre’s formulation is especially relevant here:

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If one considers an article of manufacture — as, for example, a book or a paper-knife —one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it; and he has paid attention, equally, to the conception of a paper-knife and to the pre-existent technique of production which is a part of that conception and is, at bottom, a formula. Thus the paperknife is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the paper-knife that its essence — that is to say the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible — precedes its existence. The presence of such and-such a paper-knife or book is thus determined before my eyes. Here, then, we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence.12 (Sartre, 1946, in Kaufman 1960, pp. 289–290) A number of elements are important here. First, note that Sartre is relating the “essence preceding existence” idea exclusively to artefacts, not to objects or things in general. Second, Sartre speaks of a conception of an artefact being, at bottom, a formula, which easily translates to functional description or functional definition. And, as we’ve already seen, such functional descriptions are weakly embodied or, in functionalist terms, multiply realizable. Third, and most importantly in case of functional artefacts, the object “serves a definite purpose.” The reason why the material doesn’t matter for an artefact’s categorial identity ultimately derives from this third aspect. It is the definite nature of the purpose that provides the definite meaning of the artefact. We understand perfectly what the artefact is, that is, we understand its meaning completely, simply because we have determined it ourselves. And because of this, the materiality of the object can fully disappear behind its meaning. There is no material rest. This, however, is not the case for biological entities such as a human heart. The reason why the materiality of the heart, despite its undeniable functional nature, remains important for what a heart is (its categorial identity) is because this functionality, that is, what the heart is doing within the larger body-system, has no meaning to us. What I mean to say is that the heart and, of course, other biofunctional entities, serve no function within an instrumental and teleological meanspurpose structure where we in principle perfectly understand the meaning of the purpose. Artefacts, however, are from the moment of their “conception” to the moment they become useless taken up in and absorbed by an instrumental purpose-directed structure. What they are is what they are for, and what they are for exhausts their meaning. Since their materiality is not part of that meaning, it is not relevant for the categorial identity of these entities. Again, it may be highly relevant for the proper causal functioning of the

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functional entity, but not for its correct identification-as. By contrast, the biological functioning of the organic body cannot be understood in this instrumentalist, teleological sense. The heart (and, of course, other organs) can indeed be understood functionally, but what these organs are causally doing happens, to put it figuratively, behind our backs. I think we are dealing here with an important distinction that is nevertheless almost always overlooked in the literature (with at least one important exception, as we’ll see in a minute) on functions: the difference between a biological function and an instrumental function. Only in case of instrumental functions can there be such a thing as a determinate functional meaning. For although the causal activity of the heart should be understood functionally, it has no functional meaning for the body. In the same way, the stomach performs all kinds of digestive functions, but these functional activities do not themselves have any further determinate meaning. In contrast to artefacts which have an instrumental function, we cannot understand these biological entities (organs, activities, processes, etc.) in light of a specifiable goal or a purpose. This, of course, flies in the face of teleofunctionalism, to which I shall return in the next section. The point I’m making can be made clearer in connection to an interesting distinction we find in the work of John Haugeland: The liver is supposed to secrete bile; if it doesn’t, it is not just atypical but malfunctioning and defective. But livers do not secrete bile because they’re supposed to; the propriety of it has no effect on the actual secretions. (Haugeland, 1990, p. 415) There is a sense in which we can attribute “supposedness” to artefacts that we cannot attribute to biological organs like livers or hearts because there is a normativity that applies to instrumental functions that does not apply to biological functions. And although Haugeland claims that the liver is “supposed to secrete bile,” strictly speaking, it isn’t supposed to be doing anything. Secreting bile is just something (among many other things) it does. “Supposed” is here at best a statistical notion. In any case, whatever it is doing, it isn’t supposed to be doing this in light of some determinate goal or purpose. In a similar vein (no pun intended), the heart pumps blood through the body, but this activity is not itself serving a specific purpose. Or if it does, we certainly don’t know what it is. And to be clear, simply keeping the species going is not a purpose, it’s an effect. At best, we can determine for ourselves what we consider to be the purpose of a biological function (e.g., pumping oxygen to the brain), but we can also always specify this purpose differently (e.g., contributing to the survival of the organism). There is always some arbitrariness involved here.

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This problem takes on rather big proportions in the study of gene functions, where discussions rage about how to determine the proper function of specific genes. By contrast, this problem does not arise in case of artefacts because here, we determine the purpose ourselves. Of course, we could use an artefact for other purposes. If necessary, a corkscrew can be used as a weapon, but in this case, we can perfectly well say: “That is not what the thing is made for!” In case of biological entities, we simply can’t do this, despite what many still think.13 And this is why biological entities like hearts or livers do not, for their categorial identity or whatness, disappear behind their functional meaning: there simply is no such thing. Hence, their specific materiality remains important for what they are, that is, for their proper identification. In the case of functional artefacts, where meaning coincides completely with instrumental function (use), there is no longer such a material rest. In case of a pump, we could indeed say with Putnam that (at least in some sense) it could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter. Here, the material is indeed irrelevant, not for the causal execution of the function (it makes a difference in the sense of making a causal difference), but not for the meaning (it makes no difference in the sense of being insignificant for us). We shall examine this important relation between biological function and meaning in more depth in the following paragraphs. 3.6 Teleofunctionalism and the functionalist fallacy Within philosophy of biology, so-called teleofunctionalist theories claim that, in order to explain the presence of a functional biological trait, we need to refer to this trait’s “proper function” (see, for instance, Millikan, 1984) or “purpose” (see, for instance, Neander, 1991), that is, why the trait was selected or, as it is more commonly put, what it is selected for. All these theories, then, proceed from the same assumption that, in order to accurately characterize and explain the existence of a biological functional phenomenon, we have no choice but to postulate in addition to the causal story a specific functional role description which the phenomenon can then be said to realize or instantiate. I think this assumption is flawed. Indeed, we do have to invoke notions like “proper function” and “purpose” in case of explanations of the existence of functional artefacts, that is, in cases where we can accurately speak of the reason for a thing’s existence. Contrary to what the teleofunctionalist claims, however, I want to maintain that this does not hold true for explanations of biological functional phenomena. The main reason for this is that abstract functional role descriptions are just that, namely abstract descriptions. In other words, they are conceptual entities which exist as meanings, not as themselves causally relevant entities that explain why what they describe is there. I’ll explain this with an example. Take the following lines from Karen Neander. Referring to evolved biological functions, she writes:

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We have here, in common with other teleological explanations, an explanans that explicitly refers to something that postdates the explanandum. In this case the explanans is a biological function attribution, so it explicitly refers to what the trait is supposed to do. (Neander, 1991, p. 461; m.e.) There are at least two serious problems with this view. The first problem has already been discussed and relates to the normative notion of “supposedness” that is attributed to biological phenomena here. As we have just seen, artefacts can literally be attributed with the propriety of “being supposed to do something,” where this propriety has an explanatory relevance. In case of biological phenomena, and pace Neander, this is not the case. As Haugeland just showed us, the liver does not secrete bile because it is supposed to be doing so, nor do koalas have pouches (to use one of Neander’s examples) because they are supposed to protect their young. The alleged “supposedness” has no explanatory relevance. The second problem is related to Neander’s idea that our “function attribution” (which is said to come temporally after the explanandum) has an explanatory power for the occurrence of the explanandum. However, it is not because we can correctly say that the koala’s pouch protects its young that this specific meaningful attribution has itself any explanatory relevance in explanations of the existence of the phenomenon. The general problem is that, when it comes to biological functions, functional role descriptions or proper functions only exist as ideas, not as themselves causally relevant entities. As said, however, these semantic entities can be said to have an explanatory role to play in accounts of the existence of purposefully designed artefacts. Here, the proper function exists as an idea that we need to refer to in order to account for the existence of the artefact. In other words, the notion of a specific functional role or of a proper function only applies to entities to which the notion of a raison d’être applies as well. In case of artefacts, but not in case of biological functions, there is, in addition to a “how,” also a “why.” So unless we want to defend that, after all, biological phenomena do occur for a reason, there is no need for a reference to semantic entities like functional roles or proper functions to explain the phenomena. In fact, thinking that we do need to invoke these abstract entities to account for the existence of particular biological functional phenomena seems to be just one more instance of the functionalist fallacy. Moreover, the idea that we would need to fall back on ideas like “the proper function of a trait,” or “the trait’s purpose” or “what the trait is supposed to do” to explain its existence goes radically against the nature of Darwinian explanation, which precisely shies away from the notion of purpose and its cognates. The question again is: what, in addition to the Darwinian story, could possibly be the explanatory relevance of such notions? It seems that all they are doing is generating pseudo-problems. Take, for instance, the discussion about the

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frog’s snapping behavior. For years now, there is debate about what, exactly, the frog’s fly-catching traits (e.g., long, sticky tongue) got selected for. Is it to catch a certain kind of flying insects? Or to catch small, dark flying objects (the frog also latches out its tongue at BB gun bullets)? The mistake does not lie in the idea that the behavior of the frog is not functional; the mistake is to think that, in order to understand the behavior, we need to understand it in terms of a unique proposition describing an instrumental function (which is then, by postulating an internal representation with that propositional content, located somewhere within the organism itself). It is as if the behavior is only explicable by virtue of this unique description. The description, however, lies with us, not with the biological system we’re investigating. The frog (or a postulated representational subsystem of the organism) does not need to contentfully specify what goes on in its environment to exhibit specific behavior.14 We do the specifying. The frog, on the other hand, can manage perfectly well without. By analogy, to explain why humans have an avoidance reflex when, for instance, something is thrown at their head (we tilt our head back, we raise our arms and hands in front of our face, we close our eyes, etc.), we don’t need to come up with a specific proposition describing the reason for why we exhibit this behavior. First, there is no one unique proposition that correctly describes why we behave as we do in such cases, simply because there are indefinitely many propositions that correctly describe one and the same thing (regardless of whether it’s an object, an event, or a function); second, even if there would just be one unique propositional description that manages to completely capture the reason for our avoidance behavior (which there isn’t), this would still not add anything to the causal story. Our propositional descriptions of biological mechanisms are not themselves part of the mechanisms and have therefore no causal relevance. In a sense, then, the teleofunctionalist projects the logic of our reason-explanations of artefacts onto biological reality.15 Put in Sellarsian terms, teleofunctionalism projects the space of reasons onto the space of causes. And one crucial factor contributing to this error is the fact that teleofunctionalist philosophers (and others) persist in thinking of natural selection in terms of selection for. We find this tendency for instance in Neander’s work, but it is particularly pervasive in the work of Millikan. Her central notion of a proper function is actually defined in terms of “selection for.” In her 1993 book White Queen Psychology (largely a revision of her influential Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories, which appeared nine years earlier), Millikan writes: To say that trait t has function f is to say that t had a history during which it was selected for doing f. So if you want to know why current members of a species have t the answer is, very simply, because t has the function f, that is, because t was selected for because it did f. (Millikan, 1993, p. 40; m.e.)

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Decades of discussion about how the proper function of a given biological trait is to be specified have bypassed the more fundamental question of whether we are entitled to assume that, first, there are proper functions independent of our specifications to begin with, and second, what their explanatory relevance could be. I am very skeptical about both assumptions. As I’ve tried to make clear previously, the notion of a proper function only makes sense within an instrumental teleological structure, where we have selected the purpose and, thereby, what the artefact is for. But once we give up on the idea that natural selection is a process of selecting-for (which it really isn’t) and realize that this is a useful heuristic at best, the notion of a proper function loses all explanatory relevance. In any case, and as already emphasized, it is still not clear what the notion of a proper function is supposed to contribute to the Darwinian story. There is, however, yet another reason why I think the idea of a proper function can at best be a useful heuristic, not a notion picking out a causally efficacious phenomenon. The clue lies in Millikan’s first sentence in the previous quote. She presents natural evolution here as if it can be represented on a timeline on which constitutive events can be pinpointed. This seems unavoidable given her assumption that traits are selected for. Such “selections” must obviously occur at specifiable points in time and space. But if we get rid of the idea that there is, in addition to the processes described by evolutionary theory, a process of “selection for,” what, then, remains to be pinpointed on the timeline? Of course, we can retrospectively point to certain historical conditions which co-explain why a trait has flourished rather than perished. And in hindsight, we might then heuristically refer to it in terms of a proper function. But to think of this proper function as part of the historical causal story itself is anachronistic. Indeed, it seems to present us with another good example of what Dewey called the historical fallacy. Summarizing the discussion of teleofunctionalism, the root problem seems to lie with a faulty interpretation of the idea of natural selection itself. Interpreting it in terms of selection for is at best misleading, at worst fundamentally mistaken. In a recent paper, philosopher Rosa Cao wonders: For one thing, it is difficult to assess evolutionary function empirically: how can we know what was really selected for? (Cao, 2022, p. 6; m.e.) It’s not just difficult: it’s impossible, simply because there is no “selection for.”16 This idea is anachronistic. Saying that something is performing a function because it got selected for performing that function makes no sense in the biological world. In any case, natural selection is not a job application process in which the best candidate for the prespecified job is selected. Yet, the notion of a proper function is precisely this: a job description. And as

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emphasized, descriptions only exist as meanings. These meanings, however, we do not encounter at the level of biological reality itself. We find them in our conceptual relations to that reality. It is therefore a fool’s errand to go searching for that one specific functional description for which a biological trait got “really selected for.” It only exists in our interpretations, not in what is being interpreted.17 What does all of this mean for functionalism in general and the thesis of multiple realizability in particular? The problem is that speaking of the multiple realizability of a functional role presupposes the specification of that functional role. In the case of goal-directed instrumental functions, the rolespecification presents no problem since this role can be specified in relation to a specified purpose. The instrumental role an entity has is nothing but the meaning it has in light of the realization of the purpose. And it is of this meaning that multiple realizability can be predicated. The “one and the sameness” Armstrong and others attributed to abstract types is, in fact, a sameness of meaning. In case of instrumental functional roles, one and the same meaning can be realized by physically different entities. This, in turn, is what I’ve earlier referred to in terms of weak embodiment of meaning. So the thesis of multiple realizability does in the end not so much pertain to entities themselves, but to the kind of meaning these entities have for us. A functional-role specification only exists as a meaning, not as a causally relevant entity within the system under investigation. And this specification comes from us. In the case of biological functional entities, such a functional-role specification can be heuristically useful at best, though always to some extent arbitrary. Again, biological functions can be seen as if they are there because they have a specific functional role to play, since they can be seen as if they are there because they serve a specific purpose, but strictly speaking, they are not. They are there because they somehow give the organism an evolutionary advantage. But this is not a purpose of evolution, it’s an effect. Steven Stich is therefore only half right when he writes: “Natural selection does not care about truth; it cares about reproductive success” (1990, p. 62). The claim needs to be understood within the context of the debate about the functional role of perception. Stich points out that the purpose of perception can’t be understood in terms of veridical representation. As said, this is only half right. It is also half wrong in that the claim still assumes that the representationalists are merely mistaken in the specification of the purpose of perception, not in the assumption that there is a specifiable purpose here to begin with. Indeed, natural selection does not care about the purpose of truth, because it simply doesn’t care about purposes full stop. All of this, however, does not imply that biological functions can never play such a determinate and goal-oriented role. If we, for instance, set as our goal to stay under water as long as possible, then our lungs serve a specific and specifiable function which can also (and better) be realized by an oxygen

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tank. But the instrumental role the lungs are playing here, they do not have in and of themselves. As said, such an instrumental role is essentially a meaning coming from us. We have in this scenario selected our lungs for something, but lungs themselves have never been selected for anything, despite what is still — as we have seen — the orthodox way of looking at biological functions. Take another example. When I set myself the goal of learning to play one of Chopin’s Nocturns, my hands and fingers, including my opposable thumbs, thereby acquire specific and specifiable functional roles, which is to say, they acquire a functional meaning. They are supposed to be doing specific things. They serve a purpose. But of course, saying that our opposable thumbs are there because of this purpose is ridiculous. The mistake of the teleofunctionalist, however, is to think that the error lies in mischaracterizing the purpose. But the error is not that the purpose should be specified as “grasping objects” (as Neander claims) instead of “playing a Chopin Nocturn.” The error is assuming that we need to refer to a specifiable purpose here at all. What is most important for my present purposes is that the foregoing should have made it more clear where the remarkable similarity between the idea of the multiple realizability of functional roles and Burms’ notion of weak embodiment of meaning comes from. On closer inspection, it turns out that the functional role of which the functionalist predicates multiple realizability just is a kind of meaning. What is being realized is a functional role or a meaning, which is another way of saying that something now satisfies a description or definition. And indeed, a functional-role meaning usually does not entail reference to materiality (as we’ll see next, however, it sometimes does). Matter doesn’t matter because it doesn’t matter for the functional meaning, and this is why we can speak of multiple realizability, or weak embodiment. But this applies only ever fully to entities that are defined by their instrumental function. Since biological functions can at best heuristically be seen as performing instrumental functions, here, the material never fully disappears behind the functional description. What the biological entity consists of materially remains relevant for proper identification. A heart made from plastic is not a real heart, even if the materiality wouldn’t matter for the causal functioning of the entity.18 This principle applies a fortiori to biological organisms as a whole. Let’s assume that a biological creature (a cat, say) is entirely definable in terms of causal-functional relations (which indeed is a large assumption), and that these causal-functional relations can all be realized or implemented in nonorganic material (again, quite a big assumption). Suppose, furthermore, that to the naked eye, these artificial creatures would look indistinguishable from real cats. Then we still wouldn’t say that matter doesn’t matter to be a cat. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter for the artificial cats, but it would still count as a criterion for “being a cat.” Matter still matters here because, even if we could give a full functional analysis of

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the creature, the creature does not reduce to the functional descriptions of the analysis. Neither the creature as a whole nor its parts can be inserted within an instrumental teleological structure, and therefore, the entity’s material particularity still matters, even if we don’t know how to further specify this materiality in physiochemical terms. And this relevance of material is reflected at the level of the categorial identity of the biological creature: it matters for what it is to be a cat. Or a human, for that matter. Notes 1 Of course, the functionalist will nevertheless argue that, assuming that tentacle pain is just a multiply realizable brain state, it can via some neural modification also be realized in a human brain. Yet, my point is precisely to question this assumption. “But,” so one might argue, “what about phantom pain?” Doesn’t this show that the body is irrelevant, and that only the brain matters? Not at all, it shows precisely the opposite. Phantom pain is only ever pain in a phantom human limb which was once attached to the rest of the body, affirming rather than denying the importance of the body for experience. Saying that one feels a pain in one’s nonexistent sixth tentacle is an entirely different issue (a pathological issue, in fact). 2 Note again the potential link with Costall’s notion of canonic affordances. See Costall (2012). 3 I am following Polger and Shapiro here, who occasionally speak of “unique realizers.” See Polger and Shapiro (2016). 4 See Sellars (1962). 5 This conceptual distinction is not to be confused with the terminologically similar distinction Newen, de Bruin, and Gallagher make between strongly and weakly embodied cognitive processes. See Newen, de Bruin, and Gallagher (2018, p. 6). 6 The original German version reads: “Wir reden vom Verstehen eines Satzes in dem Sinne, in welchem er durch einen andern ersetzt werden kann, der das Gleiche sagt; aber auch in dem Sinne, in welchem er durch keinen andern ersetzt werden kann. (So wenig, wie ein musikalisches Thema durch ein anderes.) In einem Fall ist der Gedanke des Satzes, was verschiedenen Sätzen gemeinsam ist; im andern, etwas was nur diese Worte, in diesen Stellungen, ausdrücken. (Verstehen eines Gedichts).” 7 See Burms (2015). 8 Private conversation. 9 For an important contemporary exception, I refer the reader to Malafouris (2013), especially Chapter 5. Malafouris explicitly endorses the idea that material objects can have preconceptual meaning (he speaks of “material signs” and “material semiosis”), a meaning which can be conceptually integrated: “For material semiosis, meaning is not the product of representation but the product of a process of ‘conceptual integration’ between material and conceptual domains” (Malafouris, 2013, p. 90). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to Malafouris’s work on material semiosis. 10 Johnson, M. (2018). The embodiment of language. In A. Newen, L. De Bruin, and S. Gallagher (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford University Press.

The embodiment of meaning  71 11 See again Costall (2012). 12 The original reads: “Lorsqu’on considère un objet fabriqué, comme par exemple un livre ou un coupe-papier, cet objet a été fabriqué par un artisan qui s’est inspiré d’un concept; il s’est référé au concept de coupe-papier, et également à une technique de production préalable qui fait partie du concept, et qui est au fond une recette. Ainsi, le coupe-papier est à la fois un objet qui se produit d’une certaine manière et qui, d’autre part, a une utilité définie, et on ne peut pas supposer un homme qui produirait un coupe-papier sans savoir à quoi l’objet va servir. Nous dirons donc que, pour le coupe-papier, l’essence - c’est-à-dire l’ensemble des recettes et des qualités qui permettent de le produire et de le définir - précède l’existence; et ainsi la présence, en face de moi, de tel coupe-papier ou de tel livre est déterminée. Nous avons donc là une vision technique du monde, dans laquelle on peut dire que la production précède l’existence.” The English translation comes from Walter Kaufman (1960). 13 I am especially thinking of Ruth Millikan’s notion of “proper function,” which to this day remains highly influential. I’ll return to this in the next section. 14 For further discussion, see Hutto and Myin (2013), especially Chapter 6. 15 Even Peter Godfrey-Smith can’t at times resist the urge of referring to biological traits in terms of reasons. In his book Other Minds, we read: “The original function of cephalopod color change — the reason it evolved — is thought to be camouflage” (Godfrey-Smith, 2016, p. 124). 16 This point is vividly made by Alex Rosenberg in his critique of Fodor’s later work on Darwinism. In his 2013 paper, Rosenberg puts it succinctly as follows: “The first and biggest mistake Fodor made, along with a lot of other people, is to suppose that according to Darwinian theory, there is any such thing as selection for in nature. No. There is only selection-against” (Rosenberg, 2013, p. 5). 17 Philosopher Emanuele Ratti and neuroscientist Pierre-Luc Germain have recently claimed that the notion of a proper function in biology is best seen as “relic of design,” meaning that the notion stems “from a time when organisms were thought to be designed” (Ratti & Germain, 2022). Indeed, as we’ve seen, making sense of the notion of proper function seems to presuppose goal-directed design. This would in principle allow us to specify a trait’s proper function, as well as the idea of “selection for.” Unfortunately, both ideas go radically against the core tenets of evolutionary theory. 18 Note, by the way, that we are still far from artificial hearts that can satisfactorily replace an organic heart, again emphasizing that, also from a causal-functional point of view, the material seems to matter to a great deal. To be compatible with an organic system, the causal constraints are typically incredibly complex. Replacing parts of a heart with artificial material is one thing, but how would this work for, say, a liver? And what about the brain?

Chapter 4

Categorial and particular identity

4.1 Categorial identity (quidditas) Several times now, I have used the term “categorial identity” in relation to an object, thereby referring to “what” an object is from a classificatory point of view. For discussions about multiple realizability, the notion of categorial identity is crucial because, at least according to the standard interpretation, it is of categorial identity that (multiple) realizability is predicated. We’ve already seen how this categorial identity — which in case of functional entities coincides with their functional role description — tends to get ontologized and reified in the idea of a universal or type. On this what I’ve called Platonic interpretation, the constitutive role of the classifying subject is completely ignored. Contrary to this metaphysically laden interpretation, I have claimed that the “whatness” of objects, or their quidditas, to use Duns Scotus’s old notion, always needs to be understood in relation to us. Nothing is what it is in and of itself. And as I’ve also emphasized, there is always more than one way to correctly answer the question what something is because there simply is more than one way in which we can relate to one and the same entity. The categorial identity of an object, or the quidditas, can therefore only exist in virtue of conventions. When a young child asks us what this thing is, thereby pointing to a corkscrew, we shall as a rule reply by saying that that thing is a corkscrew. We will not answer the child’s inquisitiveness by answering that it is, for instance, a piece of metal, or a tool, or an object, or a gift, and so on. We answer with “a corkscrew” because that is how we should answer, in a socionormative sense. And that this is what we should do is something we have learned. So, again, it is an illusion to think that there are free-floating types which may or may not be realizable in different materials. The categorial identity, and therefore also the functional role, is a socionormative construction, not an additional (abstract) object (remember Wetzel’s claim that types are objects) which somehow manages to relate to other (nonabstract) objects.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-5

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What is of particular importance here is that, although there are various ways of correctly identifying an entity as this-or-that, determining the whatness of an object is something we first of all do from an evaluative perspective. I have touched on this before. What I mean to say is that we first classify objects based on what they are to us, not based on what we can come to know about these things from a disengaged and objectifying scientific perspective. In other words, whatness or quidditas is first of all a matter of meaning or relevance, not a matter of objective properties. And when I say “first of all,” I mean this quite literally, that is, in its temporal sense. Nobody has learned as a child what things are based on their physiochemical properties. And in fact, it seems very difficult, if not downright impossible, to decouple the idea of whatness or quidditas from a more original evaluative perspective. After all, the objectifying perspective of the scientist — which, again, should not be confused with a nonevaluative perspective — might tell us all we can ever hope to know about the objective properties of the object, but even a complete description in, say, physiochemical terms will bring us not one step closer to the question of what something is. This kind of determination only makes sense in relation to us. Put differently, the fact that the question “What is this?” can have any meaning at all seems to presuppose our interested and evaluative relation to the object. Outside of this relation, there is no whatness and therefore also no categorial identity. The object therefore does not inherit its categorial identity from the type it instantiates or realizes (as the Platonic interpretation would have us believe), it is rather the other way around: the type or category only exists in virtue of our worldstructuring activities, which are first of all based on what things mean to us. Something is not what it is because it is of a certain type; rather, something is what it is because of what it means to us, and because of this, it is of a certain type. The two-term relation the Platonic view expounds makes the crucial error of ignoring the essential third relatum: our evaluative and interested relation to the world whereby things can only first acquire meaning, and thereby a categorial identity. If one prefers to put this in terms of realization, one could say that something is what it is not because it realizes a type but because it realizes a meaning. Equally important for our discussion now is that, in the case of categorial identity, the realized meaning is always by necessity a shared meaning. To be sure, things only acquire their categorial identity in light of an evaluative perspective. It is crucial, however, to keep in mind that we are always talking about the shared perspective of a group here, not the unique perspective of the individual. However, characteristic for our secularized and individualistic societies is that the kind of meaning that gives an entity its categorial identity rarely coincides with the kinds of meaning that are strongly embodied. Put otherwise: it is almost never the case that a strongly embodied meaning also determines the categorial identity of an entity. This can be clarified

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again using the example of a relic. A scarf which was once worn by Elvis can have to some individuals an enormous significance that is inextricably tied to the object’s materiality (for this is the object), yet the object does not receive its categorial identity based on this significance. The object is first of all still a scarf. And the revering persons know this as well. They know that what the object is, is a scarf, and they don’t expect the rest of the community to share the particular significance the scarf has for them. More generally speaking, it seems to be the case that, at least in Western secular societies, strong embodiment of meaning appears to be mostly a personal and individual matter. The individual evaluative perspective from which strong embodied meanings arise rarely coincides with the evaluative perspective of the group from which categorial identities are determined. However, a quick glance at the ethnographic literature tells us that in traditional nonsecular societies this relation is different. In these communities, the fact that certain meanings are inseparably linked to objects in their material particularity is much more determined at the level of the whole community, and not at the level of one or several individuals. In other words, here, we do often find strongly embodied meanings at the level of the categorial identity (what the thing is), because the significance of the object in its material particularity is, compared to secular societies, more often prescribed.1 However, as said, examples in which strong embodied meanings are prescribed at the level of the categorial identity are rare in our societies, which means that they do exist. At least two important exceptions should be mentioned here, one of which is particularly relevant for our discussion. Two cases in which the significance of the material particularity does form a part of the categorial identity or “whatness” of the object are, first, works of art and, second, the human body. At this point, we will not dwell too long on the example of the human body, since we will return extensively to this subject in later chapters. In any case, in our secularized societies as well, the significance of the human body is, unlike the clothing-gear of popstars or the bones of some saint, a matter for the whole group. It is prescribed. And this appears to be an anthropological universal. Understanding what it means to be human involves understanding that the human body is significant and that we can’t simply modify or change the material body without altering this significance: interfering with or changing the material implies, to some extent, an interference with or change in meaning. So, in case of the category “human,” the strong embodiment is already part of the categorial identity. We’ll return to this. Yet, as said, there is at least one other noteworthy example where the relevance of the material particularity is already contained within the categorial identity or “whatness”: works of art. Because the meaning of a work of art is always strongly embodied, it is already part of the meaning of the concept “work of art.” Understanding the concept “work of art” implies understanding that we have to relate to objects that

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fall under this concept in their material and irreplaceable particularity. Because the meaning of a work of art is strongly embodied, it can never be replaced by a copy, regardless of how indistinguishable the copy might turn out to be. Of course, the copy can still have some value (we appreciate craftsmanship), but it can never equal the significance of the original, which is inextricably bound to its materiality. This explains why works of restoration always entail a certain risk; they interfere with the material and therefore also to some extent with the significance of the work. And no matter how well the restoration has been executed, we will always feel that something of the work of art is irrevocably lost. Much has already been written about the relation between a work of art and the significance it has in its particularity.2 It is certainly not my intention to treat this topic here as a subject in its own right. What is more important for my present purposes is that this topic raises the interesting question of why for works of art, but not for relics, the significance of the object in its particularity is in our secular society a matter for the whole community, not just for the individual. I don’t expect the wristwatch I inherited from my beloved grandfather to have a strongly embodied meaning for other people than myself, let alone that it could have the same meaning. Things are different for the work of art. The strong embodiment of meaning is supposed to count as a fact for everyone as it is part of the categorial identity of works of art. One might object here that, on second thought, there really is not that big a difference between works of art, of which I have said that the significance of the material particularity is determined at the level of the categorial identity (and therefore at the level of the community in the sense that what it is, i.e., a work of art, it has to be for the whole group) and the kind of objects that fall under the general category of “a relic.” One could for instance argue that, just as the strongly embodied meaning of a wedding ring or a lock of hair of a beloved person only exists in relation to certain individuals (the lover, the husband), so too does the strongly embodied meaning of a work of art depend on the relation of the individual spectator. And anyway, isn’t the whole idea of a work of art being significant for the whole group a naïve and obsolete fiction from bygone ages? Can’t an object count as a work of art with a strongly embodied meaning because it has this meaning just for me? And is there, then, still a difference in the way my wedding ring can have a strongly embodied meaning for me but not for someone else? Is there, qua strong embodiment of meaning, a relevant difference between works of arts and relics? The answer is yes, and it is vital for my argument that we get as clear as possible as to why this is the case. The essential difference between a work of art and the personal meaningful object (relic) is that in case of a work of art, but not in case of relics, the meaningfulness originates from the material particularity with which the work can be identified, that is, which

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the work of art simply is. And it is therefore, and in this sense, that the relevance of the material particularity is always a part of the categorial identity of the object as a work of art. In contrast with relics, works of art are themselves the original meaningful object. The relic on the other hand acquires its significance not in virtue of itself but in virtue of a (typically material) connection with an original meaningful object, which in practice can almost always be identified as a person — a loved one, a saint, a rock star, an artist (!),3 but also the hated or feared person.4 And the reason why we relate to both persons and works of art in their material particularity, and the reason why the relevance of the material particularity subsists at the level of the categorial identity, is because in these cases, the significance of the object not only correlates with the material particularity of the object (this is also the case for relics) but because it springs forth from these objects. To put it in terms of realization and realizability: persons, as well as works of art, realize their meaning in their own material particularity. This is why the meanings persons or works of art have are not multiply but uniquely realizable. In contrast with functionally defined entities, here, matter does matter for what the entity is, even though it doesn’t matter from an objectifying scientific perspective. I’ll come back to this. 4.2 Particular and categorial identity in relation to acts of identification Earlier, we have seen that the thought that matter would be irrelevant when it comes to functional objects is, in an important sense, incorrect. The material is always to some extent relevant because whether certain causal patterns can be materially implemented always depends to some degree on the material itself. A corkscrew can be made from aluminum or steel, but it can’t be made from helium gas. There is, however, a whole other sense in which the idea that matter doesn’t matter for functional objects is incorrect. Indeed, one could say that matter doesn’t matter for the categorial identity or whatness of a functional object. What matters is what the object does or allows us to do. But suppose now we are referring not to corkscrews in general, but to the particular corkscrew which is at this moment in one of my kitchen drawers and which I yesterday used to open a bottle of Château Cheval Blanc. For its identity as a corkscrew (its quidditas, to again use Scotus’s old term), it indeed doesn’t matter what this particular corkscrew is made of. I am pretty sure that it’s an aluminum corkscrew, but were I to discover that it is, in fact, made of steel, this wouldn’t make it any less of a corkscrew. However, it would be absurd to say that this particular corkscrew, which is now sitting in my kitchen drawer, and which happens to be indeed made of aluminum, can also be made of steel. And the same goes, of course, for any other material object considered in its particularity, or, using Duns Scotus’s

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old terminology again, its haecceitas. At the level of the object in its material particularity, where the object is considered ostensively, not as an instance of some general kind, but as this rather than that thing, matter always matters for the simple reason that at this level, matter and object simply coincide. As I’ve emphasized in our discussion of the three perspectives of the causal-functional physical system, this particular physical structure just is this material particularity, even if we don’t know how to specify the material in physiochemical terms. It seems, then, that we need to draw a distinction between two kinds of object-identity. Or, to put it more accurately, we need to draw a distinction between two different ways in which we identify objects and in virtue of which these objects acquire, relative to these two different forms of identification, two different identities. On the one hand, there is what we have so far been calling the categorial identity. And so far, the discussion has mainly revolved around this kind of identity. For instance, we have seen that, when Putnam proclaims the absolute irrelevance of matter, this elliptic claim needs to be understood as a claim about the categorial identity of an object (the type), and more specifically, the categorial identity of a functional entity, that is, the functional role. Here, the verb “identify” means first of all “identifying-as.” It is identification in the sense of determining an entity’s whatness or quidditas. And as I’ve also argued, identification in this sense is always related to an evaluative perspective. What an object is, is first of all what it is for us, that is, what it means to us (never just to the individual). However, we also identify in a very different sense. This second kind of identification is in an important sense more fundamental in that every classification or determination of categorial identity already presupposes this second kind of identification or identity. As already mentioned, this second kind of identity will be called the particular identity. The kind of identification aimed at determining an object’s categorial identity (or whatness or quidditas) is the kind of identification that has the “What-is-this?” question as its linguistic correlate. However, this form of identification, which is aimed at answering the what-question, is always both logically and phenomenologically preceded by another kind of identification, which is constitutive in nature. After all, before we can even raise the what-is-this question, before we can even begin to determine an object’s categorial identity, some object must have already presented itself, some whole or unity without which the what-is-this question would be without a subject. It is at this level, where entities present themselves as individual particulars, that the entity acquires its particular identity or haecceitas, of which the categorial identity is sometimes still to be determined. However, in our experience, both forms of identification/identity typically occur, as it were, all at once, without us being aware that there are two different acts of consciousness involved here. We usually don’t first just see “an object” of which we then, in a second step, determine its whatness. We experience the objects in

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our environment immediately as chairs, tables, houses, music, but also as pain, sadness, joy, and so on. Yet, in some cases and under some circumstances, both acts can quite clearly be distinguished. This happens for instance when we are confronted with something of which we can’t immediately make out what it is (a thing in the environment, say). The first identification has already occurred (some object already presents itself to us), but the second identification (identification-as) is delayed. There is still something expected from us here. The fact that we also (i.e., as with categorial identity) have an active and creative role to play at the level of the first identification (particular identity), which is the level of object-constitution, becomes clear, for instance in cases where our senses fool us into thinking that we are looking at one single object, whereas in fact we are looking at a constellation of two or more objects. Seen from one angle, it seemed as though there was just one thing, but in fact, this was just an illusion of sorts. Perhaps we were already wondering about the object’s categorial identity (what is this?), only to conclude a few seconds later that there was no “one thing” to begin with. In other words, we were already asking about the object’s categorial identity, even though we were mistaken about the object’s particular identity. But without the latter being in place, the former makes no sense. Relevant for our discussion now is that at the fundamental level of the particular identity, matter always matters, but not in the same sense in which it matters at the categorial level. And again, the reason why matter matters at the level of the particular identity is simple: the object just is this material particularity. This is all there is for us to relate to. And as long as we are forced to remain at this level (for instance because we can’t figure out what the object is, that is, how it should be classified), we cannot yet relate to this object’s meaning. The object remains the material particular it is, and because we don’t yet know what it is, we don’t know how to relate to it. But regardless of the meaning this object might have, we know that if it were to be made of anything else than it is actually made of, it wouldn’t be this but some other object. Before continuing, a quick note on the distinction between particular and categorial identity. To avoid misinterpretations, I want to stress here that, despite there being a relation, the distinction does not overlap with the more traditional distinction between numerical and qualitative identity. Starting with the latter, qualitative identity refers exclusively to relative sameness or similarity. In this sense, the term “qualitative identity” is a misnomer, for there is no identity. In contrast with categorial identity, qualitative identity always involves two or more sufficiently similar objects, which begs the question of who should determine what counts as sufficiently similar (cf. the discussion of genuine versus nongenuine cases of multiple realizability). Furthermore, two things can reasonably be said to be qualitatively identical without therefore sharing the same categorial identity (alligators and

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crocodiles, for instance). In fact, judgments of qualitative identity can happen independent of any considerations about the objects’ categorial identity. Simply put, we don’t need to know what two things are in order to judge them to be qualitatively identical. The notion of particular identity, in turn, is not synonymous with numerical identity, although the relation is tighter here: numerical identity presupposes particular identity, but not all things to which we can attribute particular identity can also be attributed with numerical identity. Numerical identity is first of all related to acts of reidentification over time. As we’ll see in later chapters, the very idea of reidentification over time does not pertain to all entities we do attribute with a particular identity. 4.3 Rigid designation and definite descriptions: Kripke and Russell It is worth making a small side-step here. In light of the distinction between these two different yet related forms of identification (and the respectively two different forms of identity), Kripke’s theory of the proper name acquires an almost obvious character. In that same light, however, Russell’s theory appears to rest on a confusion. As is well known, Kripke argues that proper names, unlike Russell’s definite descriptions, are rigid designators. This means that proper names refer to one and the same individual in all possible worlds. Russell’s definite descriptions, however, do not seem to share this property. To use Kripke’s own example, the sentence “Aristotle liked dogs a lot” refers to one and the same person, namely Aristotle, in all possible worlds (Kripke, 1980, pp. 6–75). In a possible world in which Aristotle did not like dogs, the sentence would be false, but the term “Aristotle” would still refer to one and the same individual. Russell’s definite description, “The last great philosopher of antiquity loved dogs” does not. In our world, “the last great philosopher of antiquity” (arguably) refers to Aristotle, but in another possible world, in which Aristotle had for instance never learned about Plato’s work, this would probably have been different. In light of the foregoing distinction between categorial identity and particular identity, it is now easy to understand why proper names do indeed refer “rigidly” whereas definite descriptions do not. The essential difference lies in the fact that proper names are applied to particular identities, that is, to entities in their material particularity, whereas definite descriptions concern categorial identities. The pen I currently hold in my hand coincides completely with its materiality, and it is simply absurd to say that this pen — whether in another possible world or not — could not have the materiality that it actually has, or better, is. That thought makes no sense. Now when I decide to give that pen a name, let us say, Penelope, it cannot but be that “Penelope” refers to this and only this object, in the same sense that “Aristotle” refers to the same

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particular in all possible worlds. For that is what the name is supposed to do, that is, to designate this particular object in its material particularity. And in fact, we don’t even need to know anything here about the possible categorial identity of the object (in this case, that it is “a pen”). I feel at this moment that there is something in my pocket, although I do not know what it is. However, I do know that this particular thing, in its material particularity, does not also exist in another possible world. Now when I decide to give the thing in my pocket a name,6 it cannot be otherwise than that this name designates this particular object, which can only exist in this particular and actual world. It cannot be otherwise because it is the logical function of this proper name, and because it is the logical function of proper names in general: they serve to designate, or rather mark, particular identities. They are not used to refer to categorial identities. Russell’s definite descriptions, on the other hand, have a different function. They do find their application base at the level of categorial identity. The description delimits a category, even if it only picks out just one individual: “the last great philosopher of antiquity” is and remains a category, and it is simply part of the logic of the category that it can potentially include different entities, provided they meet the criteria. The fact that in reality only one entity falls under it does not change that logic. And herein lies the crucial difference: responding to a Russellian definite description means satisfying criteria. Answering to a proper name does not. All that is relevant to the proper name is that one and the same object is designated or marked, in its concrete materiality, and throughout its concrete material history. Russell made the mistake of identifying the logic of particular identity with the logic of categorial identity. It is again important to note here that the relevance of the materiality at the level of the particularity should not be understood as a theoretical interest in, say, the chemical composition of that materiality. The relationship to materiality we are talking about here precedes any further determination in terms of chemical or physical structure kinds. In other words, the objective knowledge we have about the materiality is not what is relevant here. What matters is that at the level of the particular object, every object is what it is (that is, this and not that object) because it consists of this, and not some other materiality, even though we lack any further scientific knowledge of that materiality. The interesting thing now is that, at the second level of identification (determination of categorial identity), in some cases, the material does remain relevant, but not in the same sense as it is relevant for the particular identity of an object. Since this is the level of categorial identity, where the what-question takes center stage, this implies that in some cases the materiality can also be relevant for the “whatness” or quidditas, not just the “thisness” or haecceitas. Now, if my reasoning is correct that categorial identity is determined first and foremost relative to the meaning of the object (what the

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thing means to us), then it is to be expected that only for those objects who matter to us in their materiality, the materiality will also be relevant for the categorial identity. To put it simply: some objects have to be made from a certain kind of material to count as the kind of object they are. These objects would not be what they are if they consisted of a different materiality because if they did, these objects would no longer have the same meaning for us. In terms of multiple realizability: the categorial identity is in these cases not multiply realizable in the sense that it cannot be realized in relevantly different physical structures. Perhaps the most important kind of objects that have meaning to us in their materiality are objects that fall within the general category of “food.” As for all particular objects, it matters for the particular apple, which I am now holding in my left hand, that it consists of the specific material it is made of to be this and no other object, just as it matters that this corkscrew that I hold in my right hand consists of this specific material to be this and no other object. The particular objects just are their materiality. However, for the apple, but not for the corkscrew, the materiality also remains relevant at the level of the categorial identity because the materiality of the apple, but not of the corkscrew, remains relevant at the level of meaning. The materiality matters to qualify as a certain kind of food. Again, note that there need not be a contradiction between the importance of materiality and functionality. We could say with the functionalist that “food” is a functional category, but it does not follow that materiality would not matter. On the contrary, it is of crucial relevance for the function. Something similar goes for gold, a classic example of both Kripke and Putnam. The meaning of gold is functional in some sense, in the same sense that paper money is functional. It is a medium for monetary exchange. But gold can only perform that function only because of what it is made of (and not, for example, because of certain properties such as being a good electrical and thermal conductor). That it can do this is, of course, something conventional, just as economic transactions in general are conventional. But the point is that, unlike functional objects such as corkscrews or mousetraps, in the case of “food stuff ” or “gold-qua-currency” (and not, say, qua electrical conductor), materiality does not disappear behind functional meaning. It matters that apples are made from what they are made of, whatever this may be, to serve as this particular kind of food. It matters that gold consists of what it consists of, whatever this may be, as long as it is the same for all individual gold pieces. And this was already the case long before we learned of the chemical or physical properties of gold. The fact that we later discovered that gold appears to be a pure substance (gold is an element) should not therefore be seen as confirming or justifying the fact that materiality matters for the categorial identity of gold. The materiality was already important, independent of any considerations in terms of atoms or molecular structures. The discovery of the atomic structure of gold is merely a further

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determination of that materiality, not the justification of its relevance for the categorial identity of gold. If we had discovered that gold was not a pure substance, it would have made no difference to the fact that what it is to be gold is a matter of matter. And as already mentioned, Putnam’s sample theory does not explain why the specific materiality of things like gold or water are relevant for their categorial identity; it presupposes it. 4.4 The contextual nature of multiple realizability Let us, in light of the foregoing, now return to the functionalist idea of multiple realizability. When we ask if something like gold is multiply realizable, something peculiar stands out. We have just said that gold must consist of gold atoms to be gold. The idea that gold could be realized in, say, plastic and still be gold is impossible. So, in this sense, gold does not appear to be multiply but uniquely realizable. However, we also know that the meaning of gold is related to its role in economic transactions. Moreover, the functional role that gold plays here can be fulfilled, and is de facto fulfilled, by other materialities (paper money, for example). Paradoxically, then, we can say that gold is and is not multiply realizable. It seems that the materiality of gold is and is not important from a functional perspective. Qua currency, gold is and is not multiply realizable. However, there doesn’t have to be a contradiction here. Explaining why this is so immediately exposes a serious limitation of the thesis of multiple realizability, namely its contextual character. The paradox results from a false Platonic assumption, namely that there is such a thing as the function of gold. Thinking that there is such a thing results from reifying “the function” into an abstract object (the type) with an objective existence and that can be realized in one or more materialities (tokens). What this Platonic interpretation overlooks is that the functional meaning of something like gold can be correctly determined in several ways. When we determine the functional role of gold as a “means of payment,” we are determining that role in such an abstract way that it can indeed be fulfilled by other materialities (e.g., paper money). Means of payment are indeed multiply realizable (how multiply realizable they are is of course conventionally determined). Or to put it another way, the meaning of what it is to be a means of payment does not depend on any material particularity. However, when we move to a less abstract level, materiality suddenly does become relevant. For the meaning of what it is for gold to be a means of payment does depend on materiality. Means of payment in the abstract sense can indeed be multiply realized, but gold as a means of payment cannot. And the same is true of paper money or coins, for that matter. It does matter what paper money consists of (and how it is made) to count as real, and not counterfeit money.

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Moving more closer to the functionalist literature, perhaps we can, as in the case of gold, come up with a functional definition of a mental state like pain which entails its multiple realizability, but for all we know, we may come up with a description which, as with gold, defeats multiple realizability. For instance, if we describe pain purely qualitatively instead of functionally (which is, as far as I can tell, still the most natural way of describing it), who’s to say whether it is multiply realizable or not? More generally, what the previous example makes clear is that whether or not a function is multiply realizable depends on how abstractly we determine that function. Since this is always context relative, this means that the thesis of multiple realizability is itself context dependent. The contextual nature, however, is masked by the metaphysical assumption that, independent of any human determinations of meaning, there exist well-defined prespecified function types that can then be realized or not by certain materials. Note, by the way, that one does not escape the element of contextuality by reformulating, as Shapiro does, the thesis of multiple realizability in terms of relevant causal difference rather than relevant material difference. The problem here is the same: in order to determine in a noncontextual way whether a function is multiply realizable or not, an external point of view is needed from which it can be decided how the function should then be determined once and for all. There is no such point of view. In the case of artefacts, we solve this “internally,” by linking the functional meaning to the purpose-for-us. In this way we can determine the functional role of both a winged corkscrew and a waiter’s corkscrew as “uncorking bottles,” and not, for example, “uncorking bottles via a lever system.” So we agree that “the specific way of uncorking” is irrelevant for the categorial identity of the object, and the reason we will give for this is because this “way of uncorking” is irrelevant for the purpose. After all, what matters is the uncorking of bottles. This is what the object owes its raison d’être to, after all. Yet, an immediate objection can be made here: we might just as well say that the raison d’être of something like a winged corkscrew precisely lies in the different, more practical way we use it to uncork bottles. The purpose of this type of corkscrew is not so much to simply uncork, but to “uncork in a much more practical way.” So we might as well say that the functional role in this case should not be determined as “uncorking bottles” simpliciter, but “uncorking bottles in a more practical way.” When we do so, however, the multiple realizability of the type “Corkscrew” disappears. Indeed, we now have not one functional role that can be realized by two different causal structures, but two different functional roles that are each realized in only one causal way. The point here is that there is no external fact of the matter that can settle this discussion for us. It depends on our evaluations. What becomes clear here, above all, is that the thesis of multiple realizability cannot possibly be an empirical thesis about the nature of reality

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itself, that is, independent of our determinations of meaning, but at most a way of looking at that reality based on nonempirical metaphysical assumptions. The fundamental error of the thesis of multiple realizability is that it projects the logic of our meaning-based classifications onto causal reality itself. 4.5 Relevance and irreplaceability The concepts that have been central up to this point are materiality, function, meaning, embodiment, relevance, and two different kinds of identification (particular and categorial identification) with two corresponding notions of identity (particular and categorial identity). We have seen how these things can be related in different ways. At the level of particular identity, where the meaning (or rather, meanings) of the object can still be undetermined, material embodiment is relevant because here the object simply coincides with its materiality. It is to this materiality that we attribute particular identity. And it is also this materiality that we designate with a proper name. As for categorial identity (how to answer the question “What is this?”), we have seen that materiality remains relevant in some but not all cases. It remains relevant to categorial identity in case the materiality has a relevance for us. So far, however, this notion of “relevance” has remained underexplored. In the examples of food and gold, that relevance was at least partly functional in nature. Here, the materiality has a relevance, but it is still extrinsic and determined by its instrumental value within the larger structure of human activities (eating, economic transactions). Thus, materiality is not intrinsically relevant and is therefore, in principle, replaceable. However, a third configuration is possible where materiality and meaning are also inextricably linked, but where meaning is not extrinsic, as in the foregoing examples, but intrinsically related to matter. Unlike food and money, in this third configuration, the specific materiality is in some sense irreplaceable. I will try to clarify this, again using the example of gold. That the significance of the materiality of a piece of gold is extrinsic can be easily demonstrated by pointing out that qua medium of exchange, any piece of gold is replaceable by another piece of gold (as long as it has the same monetary value). Unlike corkscrews or chairs, in the case of gold, materiality does matter for categorial identity, but in terms of replaceability there is effectively no difference. An iron part of a corkscrew can be replaced by a part made of aluminum while replaceability in the case of gold indeed requires that the replacing part also be made of gold. But — and this is the crucial point — the replacement itself does not lead to a change in meaning, which indicates that the specific materiality, that is, that material particularity with which the object coincides at the level of particular identity, is not itself significant. Interestingly enough, however, in some cases it is. In those cases, the materiality

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cannot simply be replaced by another piece of matter (whether of the same kind or not) without this being accompanied by a change in the meaning of the object. We have already seen examples of this phenomenon, which seems to occur only when the meaning cannot be understood in an instrumental sense, that is, within a functional structure. From a functionalist perspective, this phenomenon therefore remains invisible. Nevertheless, often the things that have the most meaning to us matter to us in their irreplaceable material particularity. Here, meaning can no longer be understood functionally in the sense of usefulness or in the sense of having a practical value. Gold may be valuable in a functional economic sense, but it is not meaningful. Yet, as we’ve already seen, what is truly meaningful to us and, indeed, what is most real to us, is irreplaceable, which is to say that matter matters here intrinsically, regardless of how the material is to be scientifically specified. What, then, are examples of objects that are meaningful in their material particularity? In Burms’ terminology, these are of course objects whose meaning is strongly embodied. And as I’ve indicated earlier, the paradigmatic example here is the human body. There is a connection between the meaningfulness of an object and the degree to which its particular identity (thisness or haecceitas) matters. There is no such link in the case of functional objects. In the case of functional objects, we focus primarily on the categorial identity of the object. In this sense, the object is replaceable by any other object with that same categorial identity. But its particular identity which coincides with its concrete materiality does not interest us. In the case of meaningful objects, the exact opposite is the case. Here, the categorial identity is of no interest, only the particular identity (this and not that object). Hence, meaningful objects can be of any kind. What they are from a classificatory perspective is irrelevant. Whether it is a photograph, a ring, a lock of hair, a garment, a handkerchief, or whatever, what matters is that it is this particular photograph, this particular ring, this particular lock of hair, this particular garment, and this particular handkerchief. In principle, with the meaningful object, we do not even need to know how to answer the question of what the object is. After all, the categorial identity is irrelevant, only that it is this specific object. It is therefore irreplaceable. And since the meaningful object is meaningful in its particularity, and since this particularity is constituted by the materiality of the object (this object is this materiality) it is the materiality itself that is meaningful. This is why, when something of that materiality is lost, by definition something of the meaningfulness of the object is lost as well. After all, they are one and the same. So the fact that meaningful objects are strongly embodied is itself due to the fact that meaningful objects are to be situated at the level of the particular identity, and at this level, matter always matters (this pen is only this pen because it consists of this and no other material). But again, we don’t need to know anything else about this concrete materiality from an objective-scientific perspective.

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After all, the particular identity of the object does not depend on this. We know that this object must consist of a specifiable materiality in order to be this particular object, but this does not mean that we need to actually specify this materiality further. The only occasion on which the physiochemical specification of the material might become relevant is in relation to problems of reidentification (looking at DNA to reidentify a person, for instance). Note, by the way, that the objective properties of the object do not act here as classification criteria (categorial identity), but rather as marks (particular identity). Indeed, against the background of our distinction between categorial and particular identity, a peculiar relationship between marks and criteria emerges. Those properties that at the level of categorial identification determine the “whatness” (classification criteria) are precisely those properties that can make reidentification difficult. When we want to know whether the violin on the table is mine, it makes little sense to consider only those properties that make the object a violin, that is, those properties that allow us to correctly apply the concept of “violin” here. After all, these are precisely the properties that the object has in common with all other violins. Conversely, those properties that we focus on to reidentify the same object (my, not your violin) are precisely those properties that are irrelevant to categorial identity. The specific inscription on the back of my violin is a mark and precisely not a categorial property. In other words, a property that simultaneously functions as a mark and as a criterion seems logically impossible. Notes 1 One example comes from the Gikuyu tribe, the largest ethnic group in Kenya. The Gikuyu attribute great significance to cooking pots, as they are associated with the mother’s womb. When a pot is broken, a special ritual has to be performed to appease the gods and to purify the person who has broken the pot. The strongly embodied meaning of the particular pot, as well as the rules and prescriptions that come with it, are shared and observed by the whole community. For a classic study, see Hobley (1910). 2 See, for instance, different work by Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim, Mark Sagoff, and Robert Hopkins on the subject of the irreplaceability of artworks in their material particularity. 3 I emphasize this point because often, the significance of the work of art is to a large and sometimes full extent determined by the origin, that is, the artist who created it. The contemporary art economy is largely structured around this contingency. 4 In particular, I am thinking here of Paul Rozin’s experimental research on disgust, in which it is demonstrated that people refuse to wear a sweater after they are being told that it once belonged to Hitler. See, for instance, Nemeroff and Rozin (1994). 5 See Kripke (1980). 6 Note, by the way, that we only attach proper names to things which have a certain significance over and above a potential functional significance. They must in some sense be irreplaceable.

Intermezzo Six honest serving men

“Whoness” and “whatness”

Before starting the second part of the book, as a kind of interlude, I want to make a small detour here into philosophy of language. For some of the things we’ve seen so far, allow us to elucidate a certain linguistic phenomenon which is characteristic of many if not all natural languages, namely that a fundamental distinction is being drawn between a what-question and a who-question. I will try to bring this phenomenon better into focus by drawing inspiration from a familiar poem. At the beginning of the last century, Rudyard Kipling inserts these lines into one of his children’s stories. Nevertheless, their apparent childish nature should not fool us. Kipling writes: I keep six honest serving-men; (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Where and When And How and Where and Who.1 This deceptively simple rhyme manages to reveal in just a few words an insight the philosophical relevance of which can hardly be overestimated. The short poem thematizes the uniquely human activity of asking questions and points out that, although we can formulate an infinite number of different questions, we have only access to a very limited set of kinds of questions to interrogate the world. These questions are, at least in English, referred to as the “wh-questions.” What is most important here, however, is Kipling’s emphasis on the all-too-often overlooked fact that an answer (and thus potential knowledge) is always constrained by the kind of question that precedes it. The kind of question we ask already demarcates the kind of answer we can expect. A where-question usually asks for a location; a why-question typically asks for a reason; a how-question asks for a cause or a “way-inwhich,” and so on. Given this constraining power of the question, it is DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-6

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surprising that, historically speaking, so little philosophical attention has been paid to the nature of the question itself. After all, the question is the philosopher’s tool par excellence. And as with other tools, the result is only as good as the tool one has used. No doubt, many of the otiose discussions within academic philosophy result from a lack of attention to the questions that precede them. In any case, when we take a closer look at the kinds of questions people (philosophers, scientists, and laymen alike) can rely on, it turns out that, regardless of the specific language, the linguistic expression of questions is limited to, on the one hand, the so-called yes/no questions, and on the other hand, to the so-called “content questions” which are formed via a small set of certain interrogative pronouns (who, what, where, when …). These second kinds of questions, correctly presented by Kipling as both a constraint and a condition for knowledge (which in Germanic languages often begin with a “w” and in Romance languages often with a “qu”), are the kind of questions that are of interest here. Within linguistics, these wh-questions are also referred to as content questions, because they allow for more than just the affirmation or denial of a given content (yes/no questions). They allow for new content. Now, on closer inspection, among the list of different content questions are two questions that claim a special status: the what-question and the who-question. The what-question stands out in that every other content question can be reformulated as a what-question, with just one exception: the who-question. Through hypostasis, a where-question can be rephrased as “What is the location?” A why-question can turn into “What is the reason?” A how-question becomes “What is the way in which … ? ‘ or ‘What is the cause of … ?’ A when-question can be rephrased as “At what point in time did such and such happen?” or “What is your estimated time of arrival?” and so on. We seem to be able to do this for all wh-questions except for the who-question. Now, the reason we can paraphrase most content questions in terms of a what-question is directly connected to the fact that natural languages, and presumably all natural languages, hypostasize. That which is asked about, regardless of its ontological status, ends up via hypostasis within the grammatical category of the noun or “thing” (the reason, the location, the time, the way, the cause …). This way, the whatquestion can be applied grammatically to non-things like abstract entities with, as Wittgenstein notes, a series of philosophical pseudo-problems as a result.2 However, this hypostasis does not occur in case of the who-question, which always asks about a person or a personified entity. The who-question does not allow itself to be paraphrased as a what-question, indicating that humans make a fundamental cognitive distinction between persons and nonpersons. Only persons seem to escape hypostasis and reification. What is above all interesting here is that this is equally true of the human body. This material object allows itself to be represented correctly, never by a

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what-question but by a who-question, even in the case of the dead body. The proper question here still is “who is that?,” not “what is that? Some of the things we’ve seen previously allow us to clarify this grammatical and psychological phenomenon further. In its ostensive usage, a who-question differs fundamentally from a whatquestion and cannot be reduced to a what-question because it is directed and remains directed on entities in their material particularity. And these entities are always persons (including personified beings). The ostensive who-question (who is this?) is a question of identification, not in the categorial sense, but in the particular sense: we want to know which specific meaningful description, or which unique significance can be identified with this concrete object. And this concrete object is the body, in its material particularity. The ostensive what-question (what is this?) on the other hand, is a question of categorial identification (identification-as). For although both questions are ostensible and presuppose a “this” presenting itself in experience (the particular identity has already been established), in another respect, they are opposed to each other in that they have an opposite “sense” or direction. Both questions set out from the object in its material particularity, but what is asked for, that is, what the questions are set out uncover, lies in opposite directions. The what-question asks for a categorial identity. It wants to lift the identifiable object from the level of its material particularity to the level of the general category. Ostensively asking what something is, is asking how the object should be classified. It is, in other words, a question for the name of the category to which it belongs. Only when we manage to establish the proper category do we feel the what-question to be satisfactorily answered. But no amount of knowledge about the object will in itself determine this. To make my point clearer, consider the following situation: you are for some reason stranded on an island, where you encounter a strange and, at least to you, unidentifiable animal. It reminds you a bit of a monkey, but it is definitely not a kind of monkey you have seen before. Luckily for you, you need not worry about food or water, and since you have nothing better to do with your time, you decide to study the creature and its various behaviors. After a few months, it’s safe to say that you now know far more about this animal than the average person. In fact, you have become something of an expert on it. Yet, for all the scientific knowledge you’ve gathered, you still wouldn’t be able to answer the question “What is this?” Now suppose that a cruise ship with tourists boards the island. Walking through the island jungle, they stumble upon your animal. They take out their travel guide from their backpacks, which contains pictures telling them that this animal happens to be a lemur. They need not know much more about the animal, but nevertheless, unlike you, they “know” what it is. My point here is, of course, that the what-is-this question is not a question that

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can be settled by objective knowledge. Categorial identity and scientific knowledge are different matters all-together. Determining what something is, is in principle a social affair. It depends constitutively on the sharing of concepts, which themselves depend on the sharing of an evaluative perspective. Whether the beetle is in, or outside the box, no amount of knowledge about the insect will tell us that it is a beetle (or an insect, for that matter). The ostensive who-question, on the other hand, obeys a different logic. Here, we are not at all concerned with the categorial identity, which abstracts away from the entity’s material particularity. Here, we go in the opposite direction. In fact, the categorial identity is no longer relevant here. After all, it is already sufficiently determined since the who-question already presupposes the categorial identity of the object as a person (being able to ask the who-question thus already presupposes the categorial binarity of persons and nonpersons). Unlike the ostensive what-question, the who-question is interested in the object in its material particularity without wanting to elevate it to an abstract generality. Indeed, both the ostensive what-question and the who-question want to know what the object means, that is, what it is-to-us. The what-question does this by trying to situate the object in its relevant category. In this way, the object acquires the same meaning as all other members of the category. The who-question also wants to know what the object means, but it presupposes that what the object (the person) means is inseparable from the object in its material particularity. The who-question (but not the what-question) can therefore be answered with a proper name. Now, we have just seen that, in case of the what-question, the question is felt to be sufficiently answered when we are able to name the category to which the entity belongs. It is in any case not a matter of how much we know about the particular entity. The reverse is the case with the who-question: the who-question is insufficiently answered by giving the proper name, unless we already know enough about the particular object. Here, knowledge is crucial. The proper name means nothing if we have no knowledge about the object named. However – and this is important – what we want to know when we raise the who-is-this question, we want to know about this object in its concrete corporeality. Because of this, the who question, but not the what question, has only an answer that applies to this unique object in its unique material particularity. By contrast, the ostensible what-question is always answered in a way that could in principle apply adequately to an indeterminate number of other objects. Here, we expect an answer that we can also expect in other cases. In the case of the ostensive who-question, the opposite is the case. Here, we do expect an answer that manages to capture the object in its particularity because here, the object does interest us in its irreplaceable particularity. And, as a matter of psychological fact, this is how we are by default oriented toward human bodies. As a matter of socionormative fact, it is also how we are expected to stay oriented. As members of societies, we

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are expected to adopt an attitude toward human bodies which we shouldn’t take up toward other bodies. And as we shall see further, this distinction, which must be considered a basic fact of human psychology, becomes incomprehensible within a functionalist framework which claims that our bodies are irrelevant for our mental lives. Notes 1 See Kipling (1902/2008). The lines were intended to be read to his daughter Effie, who tragically died at a very young age. 2 Wittgenstein writes: “The questions ‘What is length?’, ‘What is meaning?’, ‘What is the number one?’ etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can’t point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.)” (The Blue Book, p. 1)

Chapter 5

Embodied experience

5.1 We could be made of Swiss cheese We have discovered that, in the case of an entity considered in its material particularity, materiality is in one sense highly relevant and in another sense irrelevant. It is highly relevant in the sense that it determines the particularity of the object: the object must consist of this and no other materiality in order to be this and no other object. What is irrelevant, however, is the categorial identity of the material (what kind of matter it is). It makes no difference to the particularity of an object whether an object consists of gold, silver, wood, organic matter, or, indeed, Swiss cheese. It must simply consist of the matter of which it is composed. But how the material can then be further specified doesn’t matter. And it is in this sense, and only in this sense, that Putnam’s statement “We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter” is not manifestly false. The statement has truth to it if Putnam would have wanted to say here that the materiality of our bodies is irrelevant in the sense that it makes no difference for the material particularity how this material can be specified categorially, from a scientific physiochemical classificatory point of view. But of course, this is not what Putnam wanted to express with this thought. What he did mean to say is that, just as it makes no difference to the Turing machine whether it is made of iron or aluminum, what we ourselves are made of makes no causal difference to “our mental life.” This idea is based on a number of assumptions that are, in light of the foregoing, difficult to defend. First of all — and we have touched on this several times before — “multiply realizable” does not mean the same as “irrelevance of matter.” After all, not all materiality allows for the realization of a particular function. Even a corkscrew cannot be made out of Swiss cheese, let alone a complete mental life (whatever that may mean exactly). Moreover, as we have seen, it remains unclear how we are to understand the idea that functionality in principle entails multiple realizability. Here it depends on how we determine the criteria for multiple realizability (when are the material differences and the functional similarities great enough?), and this is and remains a contextually

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-7

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determined matter. To make matters worse, we have also seen that in principle it does not follow from the functional nature of an entity that it can be realized in different materialities, let alone in any materiality (such as Swiss cheese, for example). Functionality and irrelevance of matter constitutes a false dichotomy. Putnam, however, seems to be saying with his radical and deliberately absurd example that materiality is indeed absolutely irrelevant. And as we’ve just seen, the only way to accommodate Putnam here is to suppose that what he meant with this was that the further determination of materiality does not matter, as long as the functions are realized. But then the issue is no longer the relation between function and realizing materiality, but the relation between our interests and materiality: for functional entities, the realizing material doesn’t matter in the sense that it doesn’t interest us. But whether or not we attach importance to materiality should not really matter to Putnam. After all, his allegedly empirical claim that functional types are multiply realizable must be understood explicitly outside of any human evaluative relation. However, as I have repeatedly stressed, with respect to the relation between function and realizing material, it is simply wrong to say that matter would be irrelevant. Depending on the function, matter is always to a greater or lesser extent relevant insofar as it makes a causal difference. There is no such thing as substrate-neutrality, except at the level of the abstract formal description (where it becomes trivial). Second, Putnam assumes that “our mental life” can be functionally defined. After half a century, it still remains unclear what exactly this might mean. Moreover, in all this time, no functionalist has yet succeeded in plausibly specifying the causal functional role of even one mental function at a nonarbitrary level of abstraction (which, in light of the foregoing, is no surprise). But even if we assume that our mental life is reducible to a set of functionally definable processes, it still does not follow that the materiality of the body would be irrelevant to our mental life. Why should the supposed functional nature of the mental imply the irrelevance of the material? After all, we have seen that functionality and the importance of materiality need not be mutually exclusive. For the functional category of food, for example, materiality does matter, both for its categorial identity and its functional role. And as I will aim to show in this second part, contrary to what the functionalist seems to think, for our mental life, it also matters very much what we ourselves materially consist of, even if every aspect of our mental life were functionally definable. If it turned out that we were composed of Swiss cheese it would most likely have an impact on our psychological relationship to mice, for instance. Likewise, some things are likely to change with respect to our propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires (e.g., we will suddenly have the belief that eating Emmental is tantamount to cannibalism). Silliness aside, the general point I am of course trying to make here is nothing other than the central insight of Merleau-Ponty and, in his

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footsteps, the embodied cognition movement,1 namely the insight that the concrete body is indeed of constitutive importance for our psychology. This fact remains at best undervalued by contemporary functionalist-inspired cognitive science, at worst simply ignored. To be clear, it is not my intention here to provide an exhaustive analysis of the various ways in which the body is constitutive for cognition. There is a rapidly growing literature which takes this topic as its central focus, especially within the so-called 4E approaches to cognition. What I do want to do is provide an original account of how the body matters in ways that are most relevant to our discussion so far. In a deconstructive fashion, I will show in the remainder of this book how the body shapes, structures, and gives meaning to the central concepts the functionalist relies on when she claims that minds are multiply realizable and that, therefore, the material body doesn’t matter. More specifically, I will try to show how the material body is, first, relevant for our notion of matter itself, second, relevant for our different notions of identity, third, relevant for our notion of the real, fourth, relevant for the notion of “having a mental life” and what it is to be a person. 5.2 The body as a condition of our evaluative perspective (qualitative relevance) I noted earlier that we structure our environment first and foremost from a nonscientific evaluative perspective, not from the objectifying perspective of the scientist. I also stressed there that the fact that things have a categorial identity or “whatness” is impossible to understand apart from this evaluative perspective. This evaluative perspective, now, is itself structured by our particular corporeality. As Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, it is thanks to our bodies that there is literally a perspective at all. And the kind of perspective we have is inextricably linked to the kind of body we have (including, of course, our brains). Our visual perspective, for instance, would not have the phenomenal characteristics it has if our eyes would not be located in the front. We have a field of vision of about 180°, whereas with rabbits, this is almost a full 360°. However, as authors like Merleau-Ponty and Gibson already pointed out, and as has more recently been reemphasized by the sensorimotor contingency theory of Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë, visual experience is not simply a matter of eyes and brains. It involves the whole actively exploring body. Perception in general is structured, not just by the activities of the sense organs and the brain, but by the various movements available to the perceiver. Human visual experience is the way it is because we can move our eyes, heads, and our whole body to explore the environment. The reduction of visual experience to reflected light falling on our retina is a psychologist abstraction, an error which Merleau-Ponty refers to as the “experience error” (Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002): 5). Interestingly, however, the bodily

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nature of perception also structures and determines so-called offline forms of cognition, that is, cognitive activity, which prima facie seems much less a matter of interacting with the environment (online cognition). A prime example of such offline cognition is imagination. Clearly, although imagination is typically felt to be more “in the head” than visual perception, it is nevertheless constrained by our bodily perception. Try all you want; you will never be able to imagine a visual field of 360°. Nor will you be able to imagine seeing ultraviolet light. Or let’s look at a few auditory examples. Although we hear major and minor chords all the time whenever we are listening to music, it is notoriously hard to imagine a chord of, say, three sustained notes (the C major chord, for instance).2 This must have something to do with the fact that our voices can only produce one single sustained note at the time (with the rare exception of some vocalists who manage to sing in two voices). When we try to imagine a chord, we “sing one note “in our heads,” and then try to build the other notes on top of them. But for some reason, as in actual singing, we can only do this diachronically, never synchronically. So we always end up with an imagined arpeggio instead of a chord. In a similar vein, it also seems impossible to speed up a song or a musical phrase in our minds to a rate that is no longer feasible for us to sing. Think, for instance, of the galloping horse theme of Rossini’s William Tell overture. Listen to it in your head and speed it up. The boundary you hit is determined by your body (throat, tongue, vocal chords, lungs, and so on), not by some disembodied mind. As said, however, I am mainly interested here in the ways our body structures and constrains our conceptual grasp of the notions most central for our discussion here. One fundamental notion is that of categorial identity or whatness, which, again, can only be understood in relation to an evaluative perspective. What is crucial now is that our evaluative perspective on the world is itself imbued with corporeality. Simply put, it matters to our evaluations that we have the kind of material bodies we have. Only because we have a body with a certain materiality can the objects in our environment have a material relevance, that is, a relevance inextricably linked to what these objects materially consist of. The most obvious example here is that of food. Despite being a functional category, whether or not something is food depends as much on the materiality of the object as on our own materiality. More generally speaking, what things are is what they are to our embodied selves. It is our bodily interaction with the objects which gives these objects a sense, and it is this sense which we then refer to with names. But the names themselves would mean nothing if it weren’t for our embodied experience. This point has been illustrated beautifully by the Ukraine-born writer Yuri Oljesya. In his short story “Liompa” written in1928, Oljesya tells us about a sick old man who, from his deathbed, witnesses how the objects in his environment rapidly lose their meaning. I quote Oljesya at length:

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For the dying man, things that went away from him left only their names. There was the apple in the world, reflecting sunlight in the foliage. (…) The apple became an abstraction for him. And the fact that the material thing escaped him while the abstraction remained was torture to him. “I thought the external world didn’t exist,” he thought to himself. “I was convinced it was my eye and my ear that ruled objects and I thought the world would come to an end together with me. But now … I see that everything is turning its back on me, while I am still alive. But don’t I continue to exist? Why then don’t these things exist anymore? I thought it was my brain that gave them their form, weight, and color, yet they left me all the same, and only their names—useless names abandoned by their master—swarm around my brain. But what am I supposed to do with these names?” (my English translation from the Dutch translation by G. van der Wardt) What is disappearing in front of this man’s eyes is the world in its material particularity, and therefore, the meanings of the world. Getting in touch with that world requires bodily interaction, which is no longer possible for the bed-ridden sufferer. Without such embodied experiences, however, all that remains are abstractions (names). What the dying man only now comes to realize is the point that Dewey failed to convey to Russell: our acquaintance with the world is not first of all a matter of knowledge, but a matter of embodied experience. And although we also relate to the world by means of abstractions (names, concepts), these abstractions no longer mean anything if they lose their association with our particular embodied experience of the non-abstract, historical world in its material particularity. 5.3 The notion of matter as dependent on our bodies As indicated previously, what I am particularly interested in here is to show how our bodily nature shapes not only our experiences but also the abstract concepts we use to reflect on them. The arguably most important notion for our discussion, which has so far remained largely undiscussed, is the notion of matter. So far, we have been proceeding as if we knew perfectly well what we were talking about when we used the notion of matter. In other words, we have been proceeding from an assumption which may not be warranted, yet which does appear to be almost universally shared: despite various disagreement, most participants in the discussion about the relation between mind and matter seem to share the presupposition that we all know perfectly well what we are talking about when we are using terms like “matter,” the “material substrate,” the “stuff,” and so on. And in a sense, we do understand well enough what these terms mean. Crucially, however, this understanding is

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based not on what physics or other sciences can tell us about matter but on our daily embodied interactions with the world. To put it in terms of Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and the scientific image, the notion of matter at play within philosophical discussions about the mind–matter relationship is firmly rooted within the manifest image, not within the scientific image. When we turn to particle physics, a very different picture of matter emerges. Here, the familiar qualitative descriptions (hard, soft, heavy, solid, liquid, and so on) quickly give way to quantitative descriptions which are much less relatable. And although the term “particle” still has some manifest connotations within elementary physics, it no longer picks out anything remotely similar to a “small material object.” Here, particles are understood as excitations of quantum fields. And although they are sometimes referred to as the “building blocks of nature,” this metaphor is highly misleading. They are anything but “blocks.” And in fact, how could they be? After all, if the elementary particles that ultimately constitute and explain material objects at the manifest level were to have the same kind of qualitative and quantitative properties as the objects they constitute, the explanation would be circular. Building blocks aren’t made from building blocks, that is, something does not consist of itself. In a similar vein, it doesn’t make sense to say that everything that exists is made of particles: what would the particles have to be made of ? In contrast to the quantitative concept of matter we find within the scientific image, within the manifest image, matter is first of all a qualitative notion. To be sure, it can be approached quantitatively, but our notion of matter is essentially based on our qualitative experiences with objects in our environment. And the nature of these experiences is just as much constituted by the physical nature of these objects as by the physical nature of our own bodies. It is through our bodily interactions, and especially through touch (a sense organ distributed over the whole body), that a qualitative concept of matter emerges. Yet, the nature of this qualitative concept depends on the nature of our bodies. If we would have been, as Putnam says, “gaseous substances,” we wouldn’t have the notion of matter we have. So when the functionalist says that the kind of matter our bodies consist of doesn’t matter for our mental life, he is relying on a notion of matter (which is a mental phenomenon) that is co-constituted by the kind of material bodies we have. This is a performative contradiction. The general point I’m trying to make is that it is on closer inspection far from clear what the term “matter” picks out exactly. Therefore, it is also unclear what one means when one is saying that one is a materialist. Clearly, as the term is typically used within philosophy, it relies for its meaning on our ordinary qualitative notion of matter, which is tied to our bodily senses and, in particular, touch. Conversely, what is immaterial is that which lacks any of the qualities of the material. It is defined entirely ex negativo.

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Needless to say, then, the notion of the immaterial is just as unclear as the notion of “material.” Furthermore, to the extent that “the physical,” or “being a physicalist,” is taken to be synonymous with “the material” or “being a materialist,” the exact same applies to “physical” and “physicalism.” If, on the other hand, “physicalism” is taken to mean that one accepts a view of the natural world based on what physics has to say about it, then one has to give up the notion of matter as it is anchored in the manifest image. To put it simply: within the scientific image, there is nothing particularly material or immaterial about matter. The take-home message here is that saying that our material bodies don’t matter for our psychology is intrinsically incoherent. The notion of “matter” the claim relies on depends for its meaningfulness on our bodily interactions with objects in our environment. It’s hard to think what the notion of “matter” could mean if we were gaseous substances. But how, exactly, do we relate to matter qua matter? Put otherwise, where, in our actual experiences, does a relation to the materiality of an entity show itself ? 5.4 Disgust as a relation to matter One particularly interesting example of how the materiality of our bodies structures and constrains our psychology can be found in the phenomenon of disgust. The example is all the more relevant because it doesn’t just show that we can and do in fact relate directly to objects in their specific materiality; at the same time, it manages to clarify the embodied origins of our notion of “the real.” Disgust, according to dominant psychological models one of our basic emotions, is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon that seems to intertwine with virtually all dimensions of human existence, including symbolic and ethical ones. And although in the not-so-distant past it was still referred to as “the forgotten emotion,” over the past 20 years, disgust has increasingly become a fully fledged subject of psychological and philosophical research. The philosophical and scientific attention that the emotion of disgust can now count on is justified, and for several reasons. The renowned Valerie Curtis, director of the Environmental Health Group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, distinguishes at least three reasons why a study of disgust matters in her article Why Disgust Matters: First, as one of our principal defences against infection, disgust can be harnessed to efforts at improving health…. Second, disgust has important implications for psychological welfare. It plays a role in obsessive compulsive and post-traumatic stress disorders (OCD and PTSD) and it is part of the emotional cost of caring for the sick, elderly and infirm. Stigmatization and self-directed disgust cause suffering in conditions

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such as obesity and fistula. Thirdly, disgust is a moral emotion that influences social behaviors. Its role in religion, justice, technological progress, caste, class, xenophobia and the politics of exclusion needs to be better understood if we are to create healthier and more humane societies. (Curtis, 2011, p. 3478) Beyond these rather pragmatic interests, however, there is also a more theoretical reason why the phenomenon of disgust deserves our attention, and especially within the framework of a philosophical inquiry into the relevance of the body to our mental lives. Indeed, disgust is a phenomenon where matter matters in a particularly pronounced way. Disgust is a reactive emotion where the evaluation is entirely focused on the materiality of the disgusting object. It is the materiality itself that is disgusting. This observation is particularly interesting from a philosophical point of view because it points out that, contrary to what is claimed in the intellectualist tradition which regards matter as inaccessible and unknowable (remember the dispute between Dewey and Russell), we actually do enter into a relationship with the materiality of things. Indeed, this is not the theoretical and epistemological knowing relation that we establish through conceptual thought; it is a relation from one’s own corporeality, that is, from one material object (one’s own body) to another material object (the disgusting object). And again, this relation is entirely independent from how much we actually know about the intrinsic or relational properties of that materiality, for example, whether it poses health risks, or what it consists of from a biochemical standpoint. What matters is that it is this and no other kind of materiality, even if we cannot further specify that materiality in chemical or other terms. It’s easy to show that it does matter what the disgusting object consists of in order to effectively qualify as a disgusting object and to effectively illicit a disgust reaction. For example, the feeling of disgust at the sight of (especially human) excrement disappears or at least diminishes significantly if it turns out that the object is a fake (a distasteful plastic joke item, for example). Among the various evaluative attitudes we can adopt toward things in the world, there is apparently also an evaluative attitude that takes materiality in a qualitative sense as its object. We apparently do have access to materiality, but this access is structured by the body. What I mean by this is that both the fact that we can relate to materiality and the specific ways in which we do so must be explained from our own specific corporeality, in a qualitative sense. It is no coincidence that those objects which are universally experienced as disgusting are produced by human bodily processes: excrement, vomit, blood, urine, and above all the body in decomposition. Often, too, the disgustingness is related to the degree in which the object is differentiated from the materiality of one’s own body, ingestion being the most extreme case of nondifferentiation. As mentioned, however, disgust is an extremely

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complex phenomenon which, although undoubtedly biological in origin, in humans can no longer be explained solely in terms of biological function. It is perhaps best understood by a theory that acknowledges the symbolic nature of the body. In any case, what seems clear is that no matter how we want to explain the phenomenon psychologically, any explanation will necessarily have to refer to the materiality of our own body and to our capacity to relate qualitatively to other materialities. One cannot get around the fact that for at least one fundamental component of human psychology, materiality is important (“matter matters”), both with regards to our own bodies and to the objects in our environment. How this fundamental fact of human psychology (and maybe even only human psychology) can be reconciled with Putnam’s idea that for our mental life the materiality of the body is irrelevant is unclear. 5.5 The body and the real As said, however, the phenomenon of disgust also allows us to shed more light on a notion underlying countless philosophical discussions. It also takes center stage in Chalmers’ work on virtual reality (see Chalmers, 2022). The question of what is real is probably as old as philosophy itself and should, at least in this form, not be expected to be resolved any time soon. It is, after all, an impossible question, because it asks for something that really isn’t there: the essence of the real. Like so many other concepts that inspire endless philosophical quests, its meaning is contextually determined. If there is semantic resemblance between the various uses of the word “real,” they can at best be thought of as Wittgensteinian family resemblances. From a developmental psychology point of view, however, the origin of the family resemblances can, like a family tree, be traced back to an origin. Already at a very young age, children are able to distinguish, in a certain sense, a real from a fake object. But this distinction is based entirely on an evaluative relation to the materiality of the object. Some object only counts as real if it is made from “the right stuff,” even though the child can’t specify what the “right stuff ” is. Indeed, this presupposes that the child possesses a notion of “stuff ” or “matter”. As has been demonstrated in several studies, already at the age of 3, and sometimes as early as 2, children clearly distinguish between objects and what they are made of.3 Crucially, however, this relation to the stuff, which is a precondition for the emergence of the concept of matter, cannot be explained without reference to the various perceptual interactions the child has with the object. But the qualitative nature of these interactions is just as much determined by the materiality of the object as it is by the materiality of the sensing, touching, probing body. And already at a very young age, the child learns that there is a connection between the materiality of an object and its categorial identity. To really be an “x,” it has to be made

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from a certain material that looks, smells, and feels a certain way relative to the body. In other words, what it is to be real is to have this but not another kind of materiality, even though the child does obviously not know how to further specify this materiality physiochemically. So when the child is presented, unbeknownst to her, with a fake piece of feces that elicits a disgust reaction (at around the age of 2 or 3, most children start to develop disgust reactions for core disgust elicitors such as feces), she understands that, when we say to her that it is not real, this means that it is not made from the right kind of material. Clearly, then, already from a very young age, human beings relate to objects in their materiality. So in reply to Russell, for whom matter is an unknowable, Dewey should have objected that, if we really have no access to matter, how, then, did this notion and its cognates (substrate, substance, stuff, “what-it-is-made-of,” etc.) come to enter our vocabulary? Clearly, these notions have meaning. But their meaning does not depend on abstract knowledge. It relies on bodily experience. And already at a very young age, human beings understand that what it means for some object to be real is closely connected to what the thing is made of. And despite what Chalmers wants to argue, tables and flowers can’t be “made of bits” (e.g., Chalmers, 2017, p. 311), again assuming that sense can be made from this idea. All of this means that our first and arguably most foundational notion of the real relies on having the kind of bodies we have. After all, this notion of the real presupposes an understanding of what it is to be made of some material, which in turn presupposes not some kind of abstract knowledge but actual bodily interactions with objects. And these, again, depend on the kind of bodies we have (including, of course, our brains). 5.6 Relevance and irrelevance of materiality Let’s return now to Putnam’s claim about the irrelevance of the materiality of our bodies for who we are as psychological beings. Previously, we have already highlighted two problematic presuppositions on which the claim is based. First, I criticized the idea that the irrelevance of matter is somehow thought to follow from the alleged functional nature of the mental. In connection to this idea, I have spoken of the functionalist fallacy, which conflates the irrelevance of the material for the abstract description with the relevance or irrelevance for the causal-functional system itself. At this level, matter always matters: it matters relatively for qualifying as the kind of functional system it is, and it matters absolutely for being the particular physical structure it is. Second, I have also argued that in some cases, the functional nature of an entity can consist in the specific material the entity is made of (food, gold), again showing that the distinction between matter and function is much less clear-cut than is often assumed.

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There is however still another, more profound presupposition being contained in the idea that matter has no relevance for who we are as psychological beings, and that all that’s really relevant is exhibiting the right multiply realizable causal-functional organization. This presupposition has to do with the notion of relevance itself. As we argued earlier, one problem with the use of this notion is that it often remains indeterminate what this idea of relevance pertains to. Putnam says: “We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter.” From what precedes the statement, we can infer that it pertains to “our mental life” (Putnam, 1975, p. 291). Here, Putnam seems to assume that there is some kind of neutral position from which to decide when something is or is not relevant, when something does or does not “matter.” He seems to suppose that when it is objectively scientifically shown that the same (or rather, similar) causal structure can be realized in two different materials, it is thereby shown that materiality no longer has any relevance. In effect, then, this means that if we did attach significance to that materiality, we would be mistaken. The relevance of materiality to our mental life is thus made dependent on the extent to which that materiality can realize our psychological states. It follows, then, that only if our mental life is uniquely realizable by our body can that body be of importance. If it is not (which Putnam and contemporary functionalists of course defend), then we really no longer have any reason to say that our body matters to our mental life. In other words, whether the materiality of the body is relevant or not is understood here as something in which we can be wrong: we thought that the body mattered, but now functionalism has shown us that we were fooling ourselves all along. This way of putting things is incorrect: that the materiality of the body matters is not some belief which can turn out to be false, but an essential part of our mental life itself which as such cannot be understood in functionalist terms, that is, in terms of multiply realizable functional structures. For example, from the functionalist perspective that regards the materiality of the body as irrelevant, how can we explain the psychological fact that we, as a matter of psychological fact, actually do attach importance to the particular and irreplaceable materiality of objects and, especially, other bodies? How can we understand meaningful relations directed at particular entities in their concrete materiality in general in functionalist terms that abstract away from materiality? Yet, aren’t these relations a fundamental part of “our mental life” too? If our mental life is a set of functions that in principle can also be realized in another materiality, then meaningful experiences must also be understood in terms of multiply realizable functions. However, how can psychologically significant experiences such as disgust, but also, for example, bodily attraction, be understood independently of our specific bodily materiality, even if we assume that these emotions have a functional character?

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To give another example: many of our fears would become completely incomprehensible if we did not have the fragile body that we in fact all have. How can the materiality of the body be irrelevant to mental phenomena if it is in many cases clearly constitutive of the mental phenomenon itself, even if these phenomena (disgust, sexual attraction, fear, hunger, thirst, etc.) can be said to be functional in nature? The error of functionalism, then, lies perhaps not so much in its emphasis on the functional character of the mental but in its assumption that this functional character can be separated from the concrete materiality of the body. What is clear, in any case, is that the importance we attach to the materiality of the other’s body is not related to how much we scientifically know about the actual connection between the body and its mental life. The material particularity of the other person’s body matters because the other person matters to us in his or her particularity. The other person is not a set of psychological functions that can be realized in another body possibly made of Swiss cheese: the other is that body, in its concrete materiality. That materiality is as relevant as the other person is. And, as I said, the fact that we relate to the other in this way is not the result of a theoretical belief, so it cannot be considered a mistake either. It is simply an indelible part of “our mental life.” Notes 1 For a seminal work, see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991). 2 There seems to be a crucial difference here with auditory hallucinations, where the hallucinator in some cases does report hearing a polyphonic song as if it were playing in the environment. But the phenomenon of hallucination is importantly different from imagination in that the latter, but not the former, is susceptible to our own control. One can be asked to imagine a melody, but one cannot be asked to hallucinate it. And it seems that it is especially in cases of controlled and active imagination that the bodily constraints are most apparent. Like perception, imagination too appears to be something we do (for the claim that “perception is something we do,” see Noë (2005); see also Myin (2016). And like perception, this “doing” is constrained by the kind of bodies we have. 3 See, for instance, the study by Susan Gelman and Ellen Markman (1987). See also Smith, Carey, and Wiser (1985).

Chapter 6

Psychology as strongly embodied

6.1 The curious case of Martin Guerre Previously, I have stressed several times already that even within a functionalist conception of the mental, materiality is never irrelevant insofar as it always to some extent matters to the causal patterns to be implemented. However, this is not at all the kind of relevance of materiality we are talking about when we say that the human body has a relevance. This notion of relevance has little or nothing to do with the extent to which a given body satisfies the conditions for implementing certain causal patterns. According to the functionalist, it is ultimately only the causal patterns that are relevant to the mental. The relevance of materiality is thus secondary, because it depends on the relevance of the causal patterns. But this is not how we actually experience the relevance of the material body for the psychological. We can easily demonstrate this by means of a simple thought experiment. When, after a serious accident, a friend suddenly seems to “have become someone else” or, worse, no longer exhibits any psychological functions, it does not seem unreasonable to claim that there are other people who better realize the causal patterns of the friend before the accident. To use Putnam’s term, the functional isomorphism between your friend before the accident and another person will be greater than that between your friend before the accident and your friend after the accident. Moreover, we can also imagine that the friend after the accident suffers from severe amnesia and in fact cannot remember anything about the earlier friendship. Well, if it is only the causal patterns that determine who someone is psychologically, then we have in fact more reason to say that some unknown person is more the friend before the accident than to claim that the person after the accident is that friend. After all, there is ex hypothesi more functional isomorphism between the friend before the accident and the stranger than between the friend before and after the accident. But to claim that the stranger is now more the friend is completely absurd. It’s never about the psychological properties tout court, it is about the psychological properties insofar as they are the psychological

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-8

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properties of this and not another individual. And to say that it is about this and not some other individual is to say that it is about this and not another body. Without a particular body, there is no particular psychology. We can reinforce this point by referring to real cases of so-called identity fraud. Perhaps the historically most famous example is the so-called Martin Guerre affair, a well-documented 16th century trial that took place in Toulouse, in which a man was put on trial for falsely impersonating Martin Guerre, a young man who disappeared several years earlier. The story goes that the imposter, whose real name was Arnaud du Tilh, knew the real Martin Guerre well and thus knew how to simulate his personality. Also because of a physical resemblance, for three years, du Tilh managed to fool Guerre’s family, as well as his wife, with whom du Tilh had two children. Yet, no matter how great the functional isomorphism may have been, this changes nothing to the fact that Guerre and du Tilh are entirely different persons, with their own particular psychologies. And that we see it that way is not something in which we can be mistaken: it is a fact of human psychology itself, that is, how we experience personhood. A similar example, of much more recent date, is the case of Nicholas Barclay, a 13-year-old boy from Texas who disappeared without a trace in 1994. Three years later, a young man turned up somewhere in Spain claiming to be the missing boy from Texas. And although this man bore little physical resemblance to Barclay (he has a different color of eyes, for example), he is welcomed with open arms by the overjoyed family members. After five months of living with the Barclay family, the imposter is unmasked. It turns out to be Frédéric Bourdin, a serial imposter who in the years to follow will several times again take on the identities of others. The point I want to make here is the following: even if the imposter succeeds in perfectly imitating the psychological profile of the disappeared person, and even if he is indistinguishable in appearance for the family members, this does not alter the fact that we are dealing with a completely different person. And as painful as this may be for the family members, they too will recognize this. This is so because they too know (or rather, feel) that it is not the psychological profile (including, as we shall see, memories) an sich that is relevant. It is relevant only insofar as it is the psychological profile of one particular body, with a unique material history. Contrary to what functionalism suggests, a psychological profile is not something free-floating that may or may not be realized in different materialities. A psychology is always strongly embodied. It is always the psychology of this and no other body, which also means that it is always situated in a particular environment (“embodied” and “embedded”). Whence then comes this persistent idea that the psychological is in principle separable from the body, an idea that 400 years after Descartes and 2,400 years after Plato apparently still dominates our philosophical theories,

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not least those within functionalism? This question will occupy us in the coming paragraphs. 6.2 The cobbler and the prince Western philosophy has a long history of arguments designed to show that the body can in principle be separated from the mind and, moreover, that what really matters for one’s identity is the immaterial mind, not the material body. In addition to the arguments of Plato and Descartes, especially Locke’s work has been influential here. In a famous passage from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he presents the reader with the following oftquoted thought experiment: Should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, everyone sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s action….1 In order to interpret Locke’s thought experiment correctly, it is important to keep two closely related issues separate here: on the one hand, the issue of the separability of body and mind (soul and consciousness); on the other hand, the issue of the importance of the body for personal identity. The criticism that Locke is here already presupposing what he wants to demonstrate, namely that the body is fundamentally separable from the spirit, is unjustified. Indeed, the thought experiment rests on this assumption, but that is not what Locke wants to demonstrate here. What he is concerned with is to convince the reader, relying on the premise of substance dualism, that it is not the body but only the mind that is important for personal identity. More specifically, Locke, as is well known, primarily advances memory as a criterion for personal identity. We will return to this in more detail. What I want to draw attention to at this moment, however, is that Locke chooses the example of a prince and a cobbler in his thought experiment. Indeed, Locke here indirectly and unintentionally points to a fundamental yet oft-overlooked fact of personal identity: who someone is, is closely connected to what someone does, or the function he or she performs within a society. When we want to know about someone who he or she is, we will usually first ask about what he or she does, that is, what his or her function is within the larger structure of society. Now there are two ways, one correct and one incorrect, of interpreting this fact. I will call the incorrect way the functionalist interpretation and label the other, for reasons that will become immediately apparent, as the Aristotelian interpretation. I have just said that who someone is as a person is in large part a matter of the function or functional role he or she fulfills within a larger structure.

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Now the functionalist might interpret this as a confirmation of the irrelevance of the body. After all, we have just said that a person’s “whoness” is closely linked to the functional role that person performs within society. However, a functional role implies multiple realizability and material replaceability. In principle, the functional role (even that of a prince) can always be fulfilled by someone else as well. Therefore, and in accordance to functionalist assumptions, we should really say that the body is only relevant insofar as it allows the functional role to be fulfilled. What is really relevant is the functional role itself, which can in principle also be fulfilled by another body. It follows, then, that it cannot be the body we are interested in when we ask the who-question. The functional role is weakly embodied, and therefore also the “whoness” of the other person. It is clear, however, that this interpretation of the relevance of the functions a person performs for personal identity is inconsistent with the actual reason why we ask about professional occupations when we ask the who-question. When we ask what someone does to know who someone is, we are not simply interested in the functional role that someone performs; we are only interested in this because we know that the functional role someone performs tells us something about the personality of this and no other body. Not only does knowing someone’s occupation often give us information about this person’s interests and ambitions; we also know that what a person does on a day-to-day basis to a great extent shapes a person psychologically. Perhaps no one has ever expressed this more emphatically than Aristotle. In his Ethica Nicomachea he writes: Now not to know that it is from the exercise of activities on particular objects that states of character are produced is the mark of a thoroughly senseless person. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: III.5 1114a, lines 9–11) As Aristotle rightly emphasizes here, most of what people do in their professional lives consists of certain bodily interactions with other bodies (in the broad sense of the term), and not infrequently those interactions involve a high degree of bodily know-how. Most people — with perhaps the philosopher as an exception (!) — could not do the work they do if they did not have the bodies they have. Not coincidentally, but no less ironically, Locke’s cobbler is a good example of this. What the cobbler does, and therefore who the cobbler is, is inextricably linked to the body the cobbler has. The work has shaped him or her, as we say, both physically and psychologically. Well, it is largely for this reason that we want to know what someone does professionally when we want to know who someone is.2 We know that how someone uses their body on a day-to-day basis, and what physical know-how someone possesses, is inextricably linked to that person’s psychology. So in this sense, too, the body matters for the mental.

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Probably Locke would have been little impressed by the foregoing argument. After all, he would maintain that what ultimately matters for who someone is are memories, not bodily know-how, even if indeed we sometimes speak of bodily memory. Recall, however, that there is still a more compelling reason for why even Locke can hardly maintain that the body would not matter to the identity of the person. For even Locke will ultimately have to refer to a body in order to still speak coherently of “the soul of the prince.” After all, the prince’s soul is only that soul because it once belonged to one particular body and no other, namely, that of the prince. Similarly, Locke must also refer to a body when he speaks of the soul of the cobbler. So the body is not just empirically but also logically important here. And this point is closely related to what we saw previously, namely that one’s psychological properties have relevance only to the extent that they are the properties of this and no other body. A psychology is always strongly embodied. Similarly, one can speak meaningfully of one’s soul only insofar as this soul belongs to one particular body. And as various philosophers have pointed out, we conceive of the identity of the individual immaterial soul according to the model of the individual material body, an insight found in Wittgenstein,3 but also in Husserl, who is quoted at length by Merleau-Ponty:4 The reality of the soul finds its basis in corporeal matter, and not the other way around. More generally, the material world is, within the total objective world that we call Nature, a particular world closed in on itself, which does not need the help of any other reality. On the contrary, the existence of spiritual realities, from a world of real spirits, is linked to material nature, and this is not due to contingent reasons, but to questions of principle. When we interrogate the essence of the res extensa, this latter does not contain anything that depends on the spirit, nor anything that demands a mediated connection with a real spirit. On the contrary, we find that a real spirit, by its essence, cannot exist except as linked to materiality, being the real spirit of a body. (Husserl, Ideas III, in Merleau-Ponty, (1960/2008), p. 201) Of course, what applies to the mental in general also applies to memory. For even if we agree with Locke that the prince is who he is because he has certain memories that no one else has, these must be the memories of this and no other body. Reference to a body thus seems a necessary condition for identifying and attributing psychological properties, confirming a point famously emphasized by Bernard Williams. We will return to Williams’s work at length in further sections, for an essay on the importance of the body to our mental life can’t ignore this philosopher. There is, however, a more urgent issue that needs to be addressed.

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I have just said that a particular human psychology is always tied to a particular human body. There are no free-floating psychological profiles, souls, or personhoods. The question that arises, then, is: If it is indeed the case that the bond between body and person is not experienced to be a contingent but a necessary relation, why is it, then, that we can so easily imagine the two being disconnected? Why is it that although in reality we connect body and person, we have so little trouble with Locke’s bodyswapping idea in our imagination or in our stories or movies? Why is it that on the movie screen we have no trouble with literally seeing a body as “the wrong” body? The answer to this question is important because it reaffirms something we’ve seen earlier: human beings do not relate primarily to bodies (in the broad sense of the term) but to meanings. In addition, it is also relevant for our upcoming discussion of the ever more popular idea of “mind uploading.” 6.3 The soul as reified meaning Why is it that, for instance in movies, we have no trouble with watching characters change bodies? The answer, I think, is closely related to the fact that human beings do not relate to material bodies (in the broad sense of the term “body”) first and foremost as they are objectively, that is, as those things appear from a scientific-objectivist standpoint: we relate first and foremost to the meanings those entities have for us. And, as we’ve already seen, it is in this light that we need to understand categorial identity or “whatness”. The things in our environment are not what they are in virtue of their objective physical properties, but in virtue of what those things are to us, that is, what they mean to us. The importance of this insight, which only came to the fore with twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, can hardly be overestimated. And as Heidegger notes, the meanings things in our environment have often are of an instrumental or functional kind: most objects in our everyday surroundings acquire their meaning on the basis of the utility they have for us (they are, to use Heidegger’s technical term, “Zuhanden”). This is sometimes expressed simply by saying that those things have a “being-for” character: A chair is for sitting, a table is for eating at, a pen is for writing, a house is for living in, a glass is for drinking, a bicycle is for riding, and so on. And it is to these meanings that we relate in our experience of these things, not to their objective physical properties. We don’t, for instance, see a metal mass of about 16 kilograms with two rubber circular attachments; we see a meaningful unity called “bicycle.” We do not see a reed construction with soft surfaces, we see a meaningful unity called “chair.” That we so often overlook the fact that “what something is” is determined first and foremost by “what it is to us” has, according to Merleau-Ponty, everything to do with a tendency to

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overvalue the objective-scientific perspective and “to hold science and knowledge in such high esteem that all our lived experience of the world seems by contrast to be of little value” (Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p. 39). For our present discussion, however, it is more important to emphasize that not all material objects in our environment are characterized by such a Heideggerian “being-for” character. An often-used example, which we also find in Heidegger himself, is the work of art. As Kant famously noted, a work of art has no instrumental utility or predetermined function. In any case, this is not where the meaning of the work lies. To be sure, the work of art does have meaning in the sense that it has a significance, but that significance is impossible to understand in functional terms, that is, it does not stand in the service of something else, as most objects in our environment (other artefacts) do. In short, not all meaning is instrumental meaning. Yet, in addition to the category of the work of art, there is another category of material objects in our environment whose meaning is also not expressible in instrumental terms: the bodies of other people (e.g., our family members, our friends, our colleagues, our lovers, our enemies, etc.). To these bodies, too, we relate in the first place as unities or, better, constellations of meaning. Furthermore, only in the case of these meanings we speak of a “who,” not of a “what.” And we designate them with a proper name. Interestingly, the idea that who a person is refers to a constellation of meanings, not to some physical entity out there, seems to be empirically supported by recent neuroscientific research. In their paper “Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain,” Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and his collaborators discuss their experimental finding that when patients were shown different pictures of the same person (e.g., Jennifer Aniston), one and the same neuron (which they call “unit”) in the medial temporal lobe showed the same firing behavior to a statistically significant degree. Even more remarkable, and more relevant to my present purposes, is that the same neural firing behavior could also be detected not only in response to different pictures of the person, but even to the person’s written name. The researchers discovered another unit in the right anterior hippocampus of a patient which was selectively responsive to, in this case, actress Halle Berry: This unit was selectively activated by pictures of the actress Halle Berry as well as by a drawing of her. This unit was also activated by several pictures of Halle Berry dressed as Catwoman, her character in a recent film, but not by other images of Catwoman that were not her. Notably, the unit was selectively activated by the letter string “Halle Berry.” (Quiroga et al., 2005, p. 1104)5 What this suggests is that the similarity in neural response can’t simply be correlated to perceptual similarities. The relevant similarity, in my opinion,

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lies at a symbolic level. Both the various pictures and the written name are identical in a symbolic sense in that they symbolize one and the same meaning, or rather, meaning constellation. And this meaning constellation just is the person, in this case, the person Halle Berry. But this meaning constellation is not a set of abstract descriptions; it exists as an experiential whole. On the assumption, then, that experiential similarity corresponds to neural similarity, it is to be expected that there is a significant degree of invariance at the neural level corresponding to the invariance at the symbolic level. Note, however, that this interpretation does not commit itself to the idea of a “one cell–one meaning” mapping. For although the experimenters focused on the firing behavior of a single unit, this does not mean that this unit in isolation can account for the experience. It might have some necessary but not even a remotely sufficient role to play. Second, the representational interpretation the authors are clearly favoring is not supported by the data itself. In fact, the idea that the neurons are representing anything at all is — as is almost always the case — conflated with the perspective of the observer, for whom the single unit might indeed come to represent something. The conflation becomes paradigmatically clear in a commentary by the same authors on their own 2005 paper. In that paper, Quiroga et al. write: About 40% of the responsive units recorded in the MTL had such a selective and invariant representation. This combination of selectivity and invariance leads to an explicit representation, in which a single cell can indicate whether the picture of a particular person is being shown. (Quiroga et al., 2008, p. 88) In just two sentences, the locus of the representation is shifted from the level of the individual cell to that of the observer’s interpretation. Of course, because of a sufficiently high degree of causal invariance, the cell can now come to represent (in the sense of indicate) something for the observer. But this is something entirely different from the claim that the cell is itself, within a larger internal structure, in the business of representing.6 In any case, the claim that individual units “have representations” is not itself supported by the selectivity and invariance of the neuron’s firing behavior. Yet, regardless of whether one favors a representationalist interpretation or not, there does seem to be neural activity correlating with abstract meaning, which is in itself a remarkable finding. And this is perhaps indeed the best way to think of what, or better, who a particular person is to us, namely a unique constellation of abstract meanings. Apparently, this same constellation of meaning can be symbolized by various physical structures, for instance by pictures or by the written proper name. Unfortunately, Quiroga and his team have not investigated what happens at the neural level should the patient be confronted with the actual body of the person, that is, if the actual person (Jennifer Aniston,

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Halle Berry) were to really enter the room. If the same kind of response can then be detected, this might lend empirical support to philosopher Arnold Burms’s idea that the body is itself best understood as a symbol.7 This notion of symbol of course far exceeds the confounds of that of a conventional symbol, which is characterized by arbitrariness. For the purposes of this book, we can unfortunately not elaborate on this fascinating suggestion of the symbolic body. But whether or not the symbolic interpretation of the body is on the right track, the fact is that we are all at the same time also bodies in a nonsymbolic sense; we are all also physical structures with objective physical properties which can be studied by the scientist. In this respect, we are not essentially different from any other material object, and certainly not from other animals. In other words, in addition to being a “who,” we are also always a “what.” And between these two poles, there lies a certain tension. For our sexual relations, for example, it matters immensely who the person is with whom we have intercourse. But that “whoness” is impossible to grasp in terms of the objective properties of his or her body (e.g., that it is 55% water). From the objectifying perspective of the scientist, the “whoness” simply disappears altogether. What remains is only a “whatness.” But it is not with this “whatness” we want to have sexual relations. It is the meaning that this “whatness” has for us that matters. And that meaning, or rather, constellation of meaning, is the person. However, it is evidently also part of our human cognitive capacities that we can relate to a body in abstraction of the meaning or significance that body has to us (not “my husband” but “this particular organic system that consists of 57% water, that has a mass of 74 kg, that has blood type A+, and so on). As humans, we have the ability to adopt, using Peter Strawson’s term, an objective attitude.8 We can (temporarily) relate exclusively to the other person’s body, just as we can also examine the ink of a meaningful poem without relating to the meaning of the words coinciding with the ink. However, it is crucial that we recognize that this duality does not lie in the object of the relation; it arises solely from the “shift” in attitude. In other words, the duality lies in the relationship, not in the object to which we relate. I think it is against this background we should understand the notion of a soul. Bringing back to mind what I’ve earlier said about the human tendency for reification, I would argue that the idea of an independent soul is best understood as the reification of the meaning the other has for us. It is not a thing, but we make it into a thing through an act of reification. Yet, this meaning-constellation does not exist as a separate (material or immaterial) thing that can in principle exist independently of the body. It exists only in our non-objectifying relationship to the other, a relationship that we primarily have with other human bodies, but that we very often have with other “bodies” as well. Next to my dinner plate are not “spatially expanded metal bodies with atomic number 47,” there’s just cutlery.

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Returning to the theme of body swapping, we can now see that this fantasy (for that is what it is) in fact simply dallies with these two distinct attitudes we can take up toward another body (and toward our own body as well). The fantasy appeals to our capacity to disconnect the particular meaning-constellation from the particular body which we normally allow the constellation to coincide with. Simply put: we allow in our imagination a particular “whoness” (a particular meaning-constellation, perhaps correlating with specific neural activity) to coincide with a different particular “whatness” (a different particular body). How does this work more specifically? Well, take any body-swap film as an example. Such a film would not work at all if, prior to the moment of the body swap, we did not already know enough about who the character is (just as we already know something about the personality of a prince and a cobbler). Prior to the magical bodyswap moment, we always get to know the character better: we learn about her personality, about her problems, about her desires, about her beliefs, and so on. In short, we get to know the constellation of meaning that this character is. Or rather, we construct it for ourselves. In fact, theater and cinema precisely presuppose this capacity to relate to the other as a structure of meaning, abstracting from the actual correlations between the physical reality of the actors’ bodies and their psychological profile. These factual correlations simply can’t exist anyway, since fictional theater and films by definition involve fictional characters played by actors. This is why the bodyswap theme lends itself so well to this kind of fiction: we, as viewers, are assumed in advance to construct a constellation of meaning (i.e., the character) that by definition cannot coincide with a particular material body in reality anyway because the constellation simply does not exist outside of the fiction. This makes it precisely a character and not a person. The body-swap fiction thus asks and assumes from the viewer, within the context of the fictional narrative, to assign the interrelated meanings we previously attributed to one body, to another. The narrative thus asks us, on the one hand, to maintain our relation to our self-constructed constellation of meaning but to give up our attribution of that meaning to one body. Instead, we should attribute it now to another body, which we can easily do. At first, for us, this body corresponded to that constellation of meaning, but now the story expects us to attribute this same meaning-structure to another body. And as said, we are able to do this quite easily in certain contexts (those of play or fiction) and not just with human bodies. We can quite easily relate to a pebble as a chess-pawn in case one is missing from the game. We then attribute the constellation of meaning that is a pawn to the material body of the pebble. But again, the duality between meaning and material body lies in our relationship to the object, not in the object itself. There is no hidden pawn behind or in the pebble, just as there is no hidden soul behind or in the body.

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I will return at length to this fact of human signification and experience of meaning in what follows. The intuition, in any case, is that many philosophical problems disappear of their own accord, or at least dramatically change their import, when we bring back into focus the constitutive role of human experience, which is imbued with meaning. That our meaningful experience will prove to be fundamentally embodied will ultimately undermine the functionalist thesis that the body is irrelevant to who we are as psychological beings. And it is precisely this idea which has once again managed to take center stage in contemporary discussions of so-called mind uploading. 6.4 Locke and the idea of mind uploading As is usually the case with thought experiments, the argumentative power of Locke’s imaginary scenario of a soul traveling from one body to another depends entirely on our imagination. And indeed, substance dualism has imagination on its side. Not only is the “switching-body” theme a favorite subject in fictional literature, it is — as we’ve just discussed — also literally depicted in countless movies. The literal imaginability of such a Lockean scenario is therefore not in question. We have more than enough examples of this so-called “body-swapping.” Of course, all these examples expect us not to worry too much about the technical details. For how exactly this reincarnation of one particular soul or mind into a new body takes place remains, as a rule, a mystery (it’s no coincidence that in such movies the body-change is typically the result of a magical event). However, this in no way prevents the reader or viewer from considering the person in the new body as one and the same person. He or she is still one and the same, but now merely trapped in a new body. Moreover, not only do we seem to have no problem imagining that a mind can be transported to another body, according to some leading scientists and philosophers it is a principled possibility in reality.9 If we are to believe the predictions of these theorists, it is only a matter of time before we succeed in uploading a mind to a computer, and then downloading it from there into another, not necessarily biological, body. David Chalmers, who in one of his longer papers takes the trouble to go deeper into the technical details of such a mind-upload, writes: In the long run, if we are to match the speed and capacity of nonbiological systems, we will probably have to dispense with our biological core entirely. This might happen through a gradual process through which parts of our brain are replaced over time, or it [sic] happen through a process of scanning our brains and loading the result into a computer, and then enhancing the resulting processes. Either way, the result is likely

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to be an enhanced nonbiological system, most likely a computational system. This process of migration from brain to computer is often called uploading. (Chalmers, 2010b, p. 41) This idea of mind-uploading follows directly from the metaphysical assumptions of computationalist functionalism. Since the mental is said to be reducible to the abstract organization of computational functions, and since this abstract organization of computational functions is assumed to be multiply realizable, there is no reason to assume that the mental is not principally detachable from the body. As long as the functional organization of the relevant computational processes can be reproduced, psychology is preserved. Recall Chalmers’ views on consciousness: [W]e can say that consciousness is an organizational invariant: that is, systems with the same patterns of causal organization have the same states of consciousness, no matter whether that organization is implemented in neurons, in silicon, or in some other substrate. (Chalmers, 2010b, p. 48; my italics) In other words, the scenario Locke described long ago may become a reality in the near future. And note that what is at stake here has largely remained unchanged: not the immortality of the soul per se, but the persistence of the immaterial soul in a material body. For Locke’s thought experiment of the prince and the cobbler also ultimately turns not on the immortality of the soul, but on the theological problem of the resurrection of the body. In the lines preceding Locke’s thought experiment of the cobbler and the prince, we read: The body, as well as the soul, goes to the making of a man. And thus may we be able, without any difficulty, to conceive the same person at the resurrection, though in a body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here, — the same consciousness going along with the soul that inhabits it. (Essay, Book II, ch. 27, sec. 15) To put it in contemporary terms, the soul must in principle be “downloadable” in a body. The resurrection is, after all, the resurrection of the flesh. For despite what is often believed, in Christianity, but not in Platonism, the notion of a whole person presupposes having a body.10 However, in addition to its undeniable parallels with the contemporary transhumanist idea of mind-uploading, there is one important difference with Locke’s theologically inspired mind–body dualism: unlike contemporary

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computational functionalism, Locke does not attempt to hide his substance dualism behind a so-called physicalism. For the metaphysical assumptions of contemporary computational functionalism are well beyond the limits of a mere property dualism which is traditionally considered to be compatible with physicalism. I will clarify this in the next section. 6.5 Functionalism and substance dualism As is well known, the mind–brain identity theory championed in the 1950s by such people as Ullin Place and Jack Smart was motivated primarily by the idea that it is unlikely that physicalism should make an exception for the mental. When asked why Smart considers an identity relation more plausible than a form of dualism, he replies, “Mainly because of Occam’s razor.” And he continues: There does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of physical constituents. All except for one place: in consciousness…. So sensations, states of consciousness, do seem to be the one sort of thing left outside the physicalist picture, and for various reasons I just cannot believe that this can be so. That everything should be explicable in terms of physics … except the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbelievable. (Smart, 1959, p. 142) We have seen before that historically speaking, identity theory quickly lost out in favor of functionalism, not in the least because of Putnam’s argument of the alleged multiple realizability of the mental. His functionalist alternative, which was considered superior to identity theory for several reasons, became the dominant theory both within philosophical psychology and the cognitive sciences. And despite the strong advance of the various embodied cognition approaches (the so-called 4E Cognition movement), functionalism still remains the leading philosophy within these disciplines today. As it is standardly presented, functionalism, in all its variants, is said to be compatible with a general physicalism. Nevertheless, this philosophy simultaneously endorses the irreducibility of the mental to the physical. Mental properties, although they are as far as we know always connected to a physical substrate, are themselves not reducible to physical properties. Functionalism, it is said, does therefore not presuppose a Cartesian substance dualism, but only a property dualism. This, at least, is the story that made it into the philosophy of mind textbooks. However, as several authors point out, it remains unclear how exactly we should understand this property dualism, especially in light of the fundamental assumptions of physicalism. In fact, it can and has been argued that a property dualism is a step

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back rather than forward from classical substance dualism. In his article of the same name, philosopher William Lycan asks himself the question: “Is property dualism better off than substance dualism?”11 His answer is negative. Now, whether Lycan’s criticism is justified is at this point not all that important. What I do want to focus on here is the idea that, within functionalism, one conceives of the mental as a set of properties. What I want to claim is that, regardless of whether those properties are to be understood as physical or nonphysical (whatever this means), the idea of the mental as a set of properties seems incompatible with the idea of mind uploading. Functionalists who see mind uploading as a real possibility fall back, consciously or not, into a classical substance dualism and, as such, remain subject to all the criticisms that substance dualism has had to face over the past centuries. Why is the idea of the mental as a property incompatible with the idea of mind uploading? To understand this, we must first say something about the idea of a “property” in general. Properties are always properties of something. There are no free-floating properties. Property isolation happens only in theoretical analysis, not by some actual physical process. Now, within neurocentric cognitive science and philosophical psychology, mental properties are associated almost exclusively with the physical brain. The relationship between the brain and mental properties is then usually captured in terms of emergence: mental properties somehow emerge from specific physical processes (neural processes) yet are not reducible to such processes. In effect, then, this means that any particular mental property, like any other particular property, is a property of a particular physical entity, in this case presumably a brain process. Simply put: within a neurocentric view, an individual mind is the set of mental properties of one particular brain. This, then, means that when one wants to dissociate this individual mind from this particular brain, one is in fact saying that one wants to dissociate the specific mental properties of a particular physical object. This comes down to saying that one assumes one can somehow isolate the properties of a physical object by means of some physical intervention, which is absurd. The water in the glass in front of me is liquid, has a temperature of about 8°C, is transparent, and so on. But it is nonsensical to think that we can somehow isolate these particular properties (this fluidity and this temperature and this transparency) from this particular quantity of water. Of course, different substrates can have the same kinds of properties, but they cannot have numerically the same properties (in fact, as we shall see further, it is far from clear what the notion of numerical identity in relation to properties can still mean). In the same way, it is nonsensical to claim that on the one hand my particular feeling of a toothache is a property of a particular brain structure, and that on the other hand that property can be somehow isolated from this particular brain structure. Properties cannot be isolated from the thing of which they are the properties,

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regardless of whether they are mental properties or emergent properties. In other words, we encounter here again the mistake of thinking that psychological properties can be somehow detached from the particular person that exhibits these properties. Thus, in order to guarantee the numerical identity that the idea of mind uploading presupposes, one must give up the idea of the mental as a property. The properties really have to be things. At least implicitly, therefore, mind-uploading theorists seem to have reified the mental into a kind of free-floating substance to which logically numerical identity can be assigned. It is this free-floating substance, not the properties of a particular brain, that is assumed to be isolatable in mind uploading theories. However, this is no longer property dualism. This is substance dualism. I therefore agree with philosopher Massimo Pigliucci that the kind of dualism that mind uploading implies “should be unacceptable within modern philosophy”12 6.6 Model and modeled: a fundamental confusion Earlier, I said that the idea of multiple realizability, and the related idea of the irrelevance of matter, is best understood in light of Arnold Burms’s distinction between weak and strong embodiments of meaning. We have argued that Putnam’s original version of multiple realizability is actually concerned with meanings, and in particular with functional-role meanings. And we have said that in (most of) these cases materiality is indeed irrelevant because it is irrelevant for (most of) these meanings; the meaning of a functionally defined object does not usually commit itself to a kind of material (with exceptions, as we have seen). However, as we have also seen, this does not mean that materiality at the level of the causal process would not be important. I have repeatedly emphasized that at this level materiality is always to some extent important, because it matters for the implementation of the abstract causal structure: the materiality to some extent makes a causal difference. The absolute irrelevance of materiality cannot therefore be situated at this level. In other words, even if it is the case that the mental is reducible to an incredibly complex causal-functional structure, it still doesn’t follow that materiality would be irrelevant. We could just as easily argue that, given the complexity of the structure, materiality is likely to play a crucial role since there will be an extraordinary number of material constraints and implementation conditions at play; implementation conditions, moreover, which for all we know are satisfied only by organic biological systems. Whence, then, comes this widespread idea that, because the mental is assumed to be reducible to a causal structure with a functional organization, materiality would be irrelevant? We already know the answer to this question: the idea is based on what I have called the functionalist fallacy, that is,

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the confusion between the concrete functional-causal structure and our abstract representation of that structure. The irrelevance of materiality is at the level of the idealized abstract model, but it is at the same time also assumed to count at the level of the causal structures being modeled. One conflates the properties of the abstract model or representation with the modeled entity or represented. And because the representation (the idealized abstract model) is weakly embodied, this weak embodiment is also attributed, erroneously, to the modeled causal structure itself. Indeed, scientific models are pre-eminent examples of weak embodiment of meaning. After all, what the symbolic structures mean (their representational content) can easily be expressed in other ways and is not related to some materiality. The mistake now is to identify those idealized and weakly embodied representational structures of the model with the causal, nonrepresentational structures of the modeled object. More specifically, we can say that in the case of Chalmers and others, this involves a specific form of idealization and abstraction that philosopher of science Michael Weisberg with Ernan McMullin refers to as “Galilean Idealization”: Galilean idealization is the practice of introducing distortions into theories with the goal of simplifying theories in order to make them computationally tractable. (Weisberg, 2007, p. 3) What is interesting about this form of idealization is that it is specifically aimed at making a theory computationally tractable: Galilean idealization is justified pragmatically. We simplify to more computationally tractable theories in order to get traction on the problem. If the theorist had not idealized, she would have been in a worse situation, stuck with an intractable theory. (ibid.) Even more interesting for our discussion, however, is what immediately follows. Referring again to the work of McMullin, Weisberg writes: Since the justification is pragmatic and tied to tractability, advances in computational power and mathematical techniques should lead the Galilean idealizer to de-idealize, removing distortion and adding back detail to her theories. With such advances, McMullin argues, ‘models can be made more specific by eliminating simplifying assumptions and ‘de-idealization’, as it were. The model then serves as the basis for a continuing research program.” (Weisberg, 2007, p. 4; see also McMullin, 1985, p. 261)

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Even if we assume that the mental can be computationally modeled, and even if we assume that a mental system itself is literally a computational system, the defender of the “matter doesn’t matter” idea faces the following challenge: she must demonstrate that at no point during the “de-idealization” process will there ever be any question of the importance of materiality. In other words, it must show that, as the theory gets rid of “distortions” by adding more details, those details will at no time contain references to materiality. Only then can we say that we see the irrelevance of materiality at the level of the model also return at the level of the modeled. Note, by the way, that the common practice among functionalists to speak of the modeled structure (e.g., a neural structure) as the realization of an abstract idealized structure (the model) shows a reversal that we have encountered before. Indeed, once again we see here one of the pillars of Platonism returning, namely that one conceives of the particular in terms of the abstract rather than the other way around. What the modeled entity (the particular neural structure) really is, is what the model shows it to be. The model is the essence, the rest are just implementation details, or, in case of brains, “nitty-gritty biochemistry of the substrate” (Dennett, 1996).13 The actual particular entity is, in other words, seen as the imperfect realization of the model. The meaning of “model,” in the sense of (idealized) scientific model, thus shifts here to the meaning of “model” in the sense of the artist’s model. Indeed, the term “model” is characterized by this peculiar ambiguity. It can refer simultaneously to the original that is to be depicted or “realized,” as well as to the (imperfect) depiction or realization (“it is only a model”). And it is clear enough that functionalism, through its idea of multiple realizability, understands the relationship between model and modeled in this Platonic way: concrete physical structures are not the models for, but the realizations of abstract ideal (not idealized!) models. These ideal models are conceived of not as models of but models for concrete reality itself, which is a thoroughly Platonic idea. Clearly, however, this relationship is completely at odds with that of the scientific model with the modeled. Here, after all, the concrete entity itself should be a model for the scientific model, not the other way around; it is that of which the scientific model forms an always partial because idealized “image” or “realization.” In sharp contrast to the functionalist and Platonic interpretation, in the case of the scientific model it is the model that, in a sense, provides an (imperfect) realization of the particular being modeled. Indeed “idealized” here paradoxically means “imperfect.” And to the extent that this idealized realization abstracts away from any reference to materiality for pragmatic purposes, matter is indeed irrelevant here in an utterly trivial way. But once again, this in no way means that it would not be important to the modeled phenomenon.

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Notes 1 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, chapter 27, secs. 15, 16. 2 We may, of course, have other reasons for asking about a person’s occupation. 3 Wittgenstein: “The human body is the best picture of the human soul” (Wittgenstein, 1956/2009, p. 178). 4 I use the translation of Moya Cañas 2019. 5 It should be mentioned that Quiroga et al. conceive of the relation between stimulus and neural activity in terms of “coding for,” which is quite standard in theoretical neuroscience. However, for an important recent critique of framing the data in terms of coding coming from within neuroscience, see Brette (2019). 6 For an extensive critique of the overextended use of the notion of representation within cognitive science, see Zahnoun (2021). See also Zahnoun (2020a). 7 See Burms and Zuijdwegt (2022). 8 See Strawson (1962). 9 See, for instance, Moravec (1988); Kurzweil (2005); Chalmers (2010b); Wiley (2014). For an interesting discussion, see Cappuccio (2017). 10 This becomes especially clear in the letters of Paul. In general, although the gospels and other texts undeniable present us with a dualistic picture of man, the depreciation of the body we find in Plato, and especially Neo-Platonism, is entirely absent in these early Biblical sources. In any case, the soul is never to be identified with the whole person. 11 Lycan, W. (2013). Is property dualism better off than substance dualism? Philosophical Studies 64 (2): 533–542. 12 Pigliucci writes: “Indeed, substrate independence of the type envisioned by Chalmers implies a form of dualism that should be unacceptable in modern philosophy.” (Pigliucci, 2014: 19) See also Cappuccio (2017) for an elaborated critique of mind uploading from an embodied cognition perspective. 13 I’m reusing Dennett’s quote here merely for its formulation. As we’ve seen, Dennett says this not about brains, but about Mendelian genes.

Chapter 7

Embodiment and identity

7.1 Body image and body schema Our reflections in previous chapters have revealed the tension between, on the one hand, the functionalist claim that the materiality of the body would not be important for our mental life, and on the other hand, the fact that the material particularity of the body is of great significance for our mental life, and especially in our relations with other persons. Even if we agree that the psychological reduces to an organization of functional relations, we do not relate to these functional relations tout court, but to functional relations in so far as they belong to this and no other body. I have already said a few things about the interpretational problems concerning Putnam’s claim that our bodily materiality would be irrelevant to our mental life. We have seen that this claim is unsupported even within a functionalist framework within which the mental is understood as a functional category. Multiple realizability (regardless of which version we have in mind) does not imply irrelevance of materiality. However, I haven’t said all that much yet with regards to the positive claim which says that the materiality of the human body does have a relevance to our mental life. We will further clarify in the following sections the extent to which the material nature of the human body plays a constitutive role for our cognition, and in particular for one of our most fundamental cognitive activities, namely the attribution of numerical identity. For this purpose, as mentioned above, we will start from the work of Bernard Williams. Before we do, however, I want to say a few things about the general reasoning behind the following pages. The general claim is that human cognition, including the use of fundamental abstract concepts, is shaped, structured, and constrained by the kind of bodies we have. In this sense, I am threading in the footsteps of philosophical researchers like Merleau-Ponty, and closer to the present day, Shaun Gallagher. Gallagher famously distinguishes body image from body schema. It is especially the latter notion which is important to our discussion.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-9

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For Gallagher, the body schema refers, roughly speaking, to “a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring” (Gallagher, 2005, p. 23). He rightly notes that insufficient attention has been given to this idea of a body schema, a shortcoming which he relates to a too one-sided notion of intentionality in Husserl (which would be addressed later by Merleau-Ponty). This notion of intentionality conceives of it as a pure act of consciousness, uncontaminated by material constraints. Gallagher writes: The focus on body image, to the exclusion of the body schema, is due to the limitations of Husserl’s model of intentionality. Intentionality appears ex nihilo, a pure spontaneity that begins at the noetic act of consciousness and moves in the direction of the noema. Everything of importance happens in full phenomenological view, “out in front” of the noetic act. Husserl ignores the “from whence” of the act. What happens backstage, toward the rear of intentionality? Are there not factors that have an effect on us, that operate in a way that is “behind our back” and yet efficaciously anterior with respect to our experience? (Gallagher, 1995, p. 232) Now, as said, when Gallagher refers to experience, he is first of all thinking here of perceptual experience. And as we’ve already seen, the body certainly plays an at once enabling and constraining role for perception. Yet, I want to widen the intentional scope and examine how the body shapes not just perception but also our abstract thought. I’ve already tentatively done so in relation to our concepts of matter and, in close connection with this concept, the notion of the real. Both concepts depend on our bodily interactions with our environment, and the nature of these interactions is itself co-determined by the kind of bodies we have (the other co-constitutive part being played by what is being interacted with). I now want to show in what ways our bodies make possible and limit our notions of identity and identity attributions. And as mentioned, I will do so in relation to Bernard William’s work on personal identity. 7.2 The body as a necessary condition for personal identity In “Personal identity and individuation” (1957), perhaps his most famous paper, Williams argues against the traditional Lockean view that the body would be irrelevant to personal identity. The argument is made in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. The traditional view, which Williams contests here, says that

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there is no conceivable situation in which bodily identity would be necessary, some other conditions being always both necessary and sufficient. I take it that Locke’s theory is an example of this latter type. I shall try to show that bodily identity is always a necessary condition of personal identity. (Williams, 1957, p. 229) We need not dwell much further here on Williams’s emphasis on the importance of the body. I have already sufficiently emphasized earlier why the body is indeed a necessary condition of personal identity. Speaking of a particular psychology always already presupposes a connection to a particular body. There are no free-floating psychological properties or characteristics. These are always the properties or characteristics of a numerically identical body with a unique spatiotemporal career. Any claim to the opposite rests, it seems to me, on a conflation between the particular psychological being under investigation and the abstractions we make in light of a psychological analysis. But without the body, there is nothing to attribute a psychology to. What I still want to do here is, on the one hand, try to complement Williams’s necessary condition with a sufficient condition for personal identity; on the other hand, show that the body is not only important for assigning numerical identity to a person but for assigning numerical identity in general. This second point will only be dealt with later. With the first point, I will now start. By means of a fictional but nevertheless realistic story, I will try to show that the core of personal identity does indeed, as Williams argues against Locke, not lie in having certain memories, but in something that we will call for the time being the particular evaluative perspective of the person. Crucially, however, it can only be the evaluative perspective of a particular body, which is why we can refer to it as a “particular” perspective in the first place. So it must be kept in mind at all times that the body serves as a condition sine qua non. At the same time, however, it must be acknowledged that “being the same body over time” does not imply that claims like “He is no longer the same person he was” no longer make sense. In other words, the way we attribute sameness or difference to a body is not the same way in which we attribute sameness or difference to a person. Sameness of body can’t, therefore, be a sufficient condition for personal identity. What else, then, is required? I think the following fictional story contains a few important elements that might point us in the right direction when it comes to clarifying how we determine personal identity. And to be clear, the point I want to make in the following pertains first of all to our acts of identification, that is, our attributions of sameness and difference. I am not making any metaphysical claims here about the ontological status of personhood or identity itself.

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7.3 Personal identity coincides with the particular evaluative perspective: the story of S. A drinking and gambling addicted man — I will call him S. — has a wife and child whom he treats terribly for years. He uses what little money he earns almost exclusively to support his addictions. On the rare occasions that S. is at home he terrorizes his family with verbal and physical abuse. The wife wants to leave the man, but out of fear she stays with him. Despite the terrible home situation, his young daughter manages thanks to her mother’s unconditional support to get good marks at school. Moreover, she also shows great talent for music, and, with the help of the school’s music teacher, the girl can actually develop her passion for the piano. All this goes by unnoticed by S., for whom alcohol and gambling seem to be the only concerns. One night, during yet another drunken late-night argument, S. hits his wife so hard that she ends up in the hospital. Fearing legal prosecution, S. promises his wife that he will leave her and his then 14-year-old daughter, provided his wife does not press charges. She agrees, and the next day, to the relief of both wife and daughter, S. leaves the family he has been mistreating for years. The last thing his daughter says to him is that she will hate him forever and will never forgive what he did to her and her mother. Twenty years go by. S. has now passed the age of 65, and he has been told by the doctors that he probably does not have long to live. In those 20 years he has never had contact with his daughter, who must now be about 34. S. has since, however, turned his life around. He has given up drinking and gambling, goes to see a therapist every week and has found a better job in the meantime. He has also been living for a few years with another woman, whom he treats well. However, S. is torn apart by feelings of guilt because of what he did to his first wife and child in his previous life. Every day he wonders what has become of his daughter and whether she, despite a rough childhood, has been able to make something of her life. Above all, however, he hopes that his daughter will give him the chance to ask for forgiveness, although he understands perfectly well that he does not deserve it. Nevertheless, S. does not want to die knowing that he never tried, and a few weeks after his diagnosis, the father decides to call his estranged daughter, whose phone number he has managed to obtain. In fact, he doesn’t expect anything else but that the phone will immediately be disconnected when his daughter realizes who she has on the line. Strangely enough, something very different happens, which S. never expected. When he gets his daughter on the phone, her reaction seems to be one of pure delight. The man is stunned when he hears the voice on the other end say that he should definitely come over and visit because it has been so long since they have last seen each other. In any case, the daughter wants to meet her father as soon as possible to catch up,

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and a few days later, against all of S.’s expectations, they are sitting across each other at the kitchen table in the daughter’s home, who in the meantime has a family of her own. S. is stunned by the fact that his daughter seems genuinely happy to see her old father again. Moreover, she does not seem to blame him for anything at all. The confused man doesn’t understand a thing and wonders if the person sitting on the other side of the table is really his daughter. Or perhaps there is just something seriously wrong with her memory? The father, therefore, tries to see if she remembers anything at all from the first 14 years of her life. Strangely enough, this does turn out to be the case. She remembers that she was often beaten by him, that her father was never there when she needed him, that he was always drunk, that her mother was on her own, and that one night he even beat her mother into the hospital. She can also literally recall the last words she said to him on the day he left. When asked by S. if she can forgive him now, she laughingly replies, “Oh well, that was all a long time ago anyway. Let bygones be bygones.” And when S. asks if she still enjoys playing the piano as much as she used to, she replies that she hasn’t been interested in music for a while, but now mostly likes painting. She even sold her piano recently. A bit later, her husband enters the kitchen. After a brief introduction (the daughter has never told him about her father), the husband explains to the father that his daughter was involved in a serious traffic accident a few months back, resulting in serious brain damage. Although according to the doctors her memory was virtually unaffected, according to her husband, she had never been the same after that, to the point that he now feels she has become a stranger. She even stopped playing the piano. S. returns home unhappier than ever, knowing that the person who could forgive him no longer exists. He dies not much later, earlier than the doctors expected. The above story is, as noted, fictional. Nevertheless, the “thought experiment” escapes the criticism that is rightly levelled at many other thought experiments, namely that the scenarios described in those conceptual exercises constitute at the most a possibility for the imagination, not a real possibility. It therefore remains in principle unclear if such exercises can tell us anything about the way the world is, irrespective of our imagination. A particularly apt example of this comes from the work of Bernard Williams himself, who by means of a rather contrived scenario attempts to argue for the point I am also trying to make more intuitive here, namely — and pace the Lockean tradition — that personal identity cannot be a matter of memory or memory processes only. In his 1957 paper, Williams asks us to imagine a man named Charles who for some reason suddenly seems to have Guy Fawkes’s memories. In doing so, Williams also asks us to suppose that we can somehow verify that the things Charles remembers are effectively things that only Fawkes could remember. Williams then goes on to reason that, in

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line with the Lockean thesis that memory is a sufficient condition for personal identity, it follows that Charles now in fact just is Guy Fawkes. However, there is no principled reason, Williams argues, to assume that in addition to Charles, someone else, for example his brother Robert, cannot also suddenly possess Fawkes’s memories. However, if personal identity coincides with the memories, then we would logically have to conclude that two different persons (Charles and Robert) can be one and the same person (Guy Fawkes), which is absurd. It follows for Williams that personal identity cannot possibly be solely a matter of memory. As our story of S. has hopefully made clear, we agree with this conclusion: personal identity, or “whoness,” cannot simply be a matter of having certain memories. But as our story also makes clear, we do not have to resort at all to such implausible contrivances that appeal exclusively to what is imaginable to us (which is a vague category anyway). After all, the scenario that unfolds in S.’s story is also factually possible. There are cases of people who seem to have developed a very different personality after brain injury without this having to be accompanied by memory loss.1 Thus, a person can indeed possess the same memories and yet, in a very substantial sense, no longer be the same person he or she has been. The daughter in S.’s story remembers almost everything after the accident just as well as before; that is, she can still veridically describe the things that happened to her in her youth, based on memory. Thus, insofar as the notion of memory coincides with the ability to recall a certain propositional/informational content that represents something factual (e.g., an event) from the person’s life, the daughter possesses the same memories before and after the accident. Nevertheless, there is a substantial sense in which the woman is no longer the same person. She is, for instance, no longer the person who can forgive S. What does this tell us? What has changed that makes us say that the woman is no longer the same? What makes the woman, despite the continuity of her body (again, a necessary but not sufficient condition for personhood), no longer that person who can forgive her father? The answer is this: what has changed is not the descriptive content of the memories, but the significance of the memories; what has changed is the way the woman evaluates the remembered events of her former life. What this demonstrates is that personal identity (who a person is) is not so much about having certain unique memories but primarily about the ways a person evaluates things. More specifically, it relates to the patterns in one’s evaluations of objects and events, that is, of the world. But we are talking here about evaluation in a specific yet hard to specify sense. It would perhaps be best to speak here of semantic evaluation, were it not for the fact that the term “semantics” has such a language-specific connotation. We are talking here about meaning in the sense of meaningfulness or significance. At the same time, the evaluation at play here is also different from moral or aesthetic evaluations. Rather, we are dealing here with

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a more encompassing form of evaluation in light of which things can only acquire a moral or aesthetic significance but also other forms of significance. When I say to my girlfriend that she means the world to me, this is not a kind of significance that can be captured in terms of moral or aesthetic evaluations. And in fact, we have encountered this kind of significance before, namely in our discussion of examples of strong embodiment of meaning. A relic too has a kind of significance which can hardly be explained in moral or aesthetic terms. Perhaps we can best speak here generally of patterns within a structure of significance, of which moral and aesthetic significances are only a part. And I would argue that personal identity, or who a person is, has everything to do with patterns in this person’s structure of significance (the different yet interrelated ways in which this person evaluates the world). Who we are, as unique personalities, seems to be inextricably linked to the specific ways in which each of us evaluates reality for significance, and the patterns we can discern in those evaluations. And when these patterns change too radically and too abruptly, we feel we can no longer speak of the same person. We then say that the person is no longer the same, which is expressed in extremis in the fact that the person can no longer offer forgiveness, as in the story of S. Crucially, however, the fact that we can say at all that the identity of the person has changed (fundamentally or not) is paradoxically only made possible by the numerical identity of the body. After all, it is precisely because we are dealing with one and the same body that we can make statements about personal identity in the first place (claims like “she hasn’t changed a bit” or “she is no longer the person she used to be” still presuppose a numerically identical entity, which is the body). The body is indeed a necessary, but not yet a sufficient condition for personal identity. Insofar as by personal identity we refer to “who” someone is, there is, as Williams acknowledged, more at play. That “more”, however, is not to be found in the unique set of memories, but in the unique structure of significance that person embodies, that is to say, in the unique patterns which we discern over and across that person’s evaluations. Moreover, how we in turn evaluate the other person as a person depends to a large extent on how this person evaluates the world. Personal identity exists within this reciprocal dynamic of evaluation. Based on the foregoing, and with a little overstatement, we could say that, rather than homo rationalis or homo oeconomicus, human beings are first of all homo evalorans in the sense that humans, but not other animals, constantly evaluate their actions for significance, something which can only be understood in connection to the typically human preoccupation of “trying to make something of one’s life” Moreover, it is in relation to our evaluations that not only “whoness” can come into existence, but “whatness” as well (categorial identity). With this, I want to conclude our first addition to Williams. I will now turn to the second point already announced previously, a point which was

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never elaborated by Williams, nor — to my knowledge — by anyone else: our body plays a structuring and constraining role for our attributions of numerical identity. As we shall see, the attribution of numerical sameness concerns a particularly fundamental aspect of human psychology which we can’t properly understand without reference to our bodies. It therefore constitutes one additional argument against the functionalist’s intuition that the body would be irrelevant to our psychological life. 7.4 Numerical identity as relatively applicable Before anything else, it should be noted with Bernard Williams that the notion of personal identity is inherently ambiguous. Sticking to our terminology of particular and categorial identity, we can say that “personal identity” means something different depending on whether we are talking about one kind of identity or the other. When by “personal identity” we refer to someone’s personality, or “what kind of person someone is,” we are at the level of categorial identity. If, on the other hand, by “personal identity” we want to refer to the numerical identity of the person (what makes this person this and not another person), then we are dealing with particular identity.2 Now on closer inspection, discussions of the relevance of the body to personal identity seem to be about both kinds of identity, and not infrequently these get mixed up. Obviously, to avoid unnecessary philosophical problems, it is crucial to keep them separate. Previously, for example, we argued that a person’s physical know-how is important for her personal identity, in the sense of “who” she is. Here we were talking about categorial identity, in the sense of what kind of person someone is. But I also said that the body is important in the sense that, without reference to a particular body in its unique material spatiotemporal continuity, we can no longer talk coherently about someone’s personality or “whoness.” So here we are concerned with the identity of the body in the sense of particular and numerical identity. And it is for the particular and numerical personal identity that we can say with Williams that the body is a necessary condition. The point we want to make subsequently, however, goes further: as said, I want to argue that the notion of numerical identity is itself determined and limited by the fact that we have the kind of body we have. In other words, we want to argue that the body matters not only for numerical personal identity but for the cognitive activity of assigning numerical identity, full stop. The first step in this direction begins with an undeveloped thought that we find in Williams (but also with other authors), namely the idea that private or numerical identity does not always allow itself to be applied unproblematically. Williams writes: In the case of material objects, we can draw a distinction between identity and exact similarity; it is clearly not the same to say that two men live in

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the same house, and that they live in exactly similar houses. This notion of identity is given to us primarily, though not completely, by the notion of spatiotemporal continuity. (Williams, 1957, p. 240) Williams goes on to note that while the attribution of numerical identity to simple material objects is usually unproblematic, this is not the case for “things” like memories. He notes: “There is … an extreme difficulty in saying these things about memories at all” (ibid.). Although we often overlook this (and Locke with us), it is in fact far from clear what it would mean to speak of numerically one and the same memory or to attribute to a memory the kind of spatiotemporal continuity that we unproblematically do attribute to everyday material objects. The same is true of consciousness. Locke speaks in the same breath of “sameness of the body” and “sameness of consciousness.” But is it really that clear that we can attribute this notion of sameness, which we unproblematically attribute to bodies (in the broad sense), also to consciousness? In the case of consciousness, what might numerical identity even mean? What are we talking about when we are talking about one and the same consciousness? As noted previously, Williams does not elaborate on this critical thought, but it is therefore no less important. For it puts us on the track of the following important question: why is it that we can unproblematically ascribe numerical identity to certain particulars (a particular body), but not to others (a particular memory)? To answer this question, we must first examine in which cases the attribution of numerical identity is unproblematic, and in which cases it does pose problems. And as we shall see, the fact that we have the kind of body we have acts as a sensitive principle here. First, however, it is important to make explicit a specific idea that has remained implicit up to now, the idea that, contrary to how identity is often thought about in philosophy, neither categorial identity nor particular identity should be thought of as an intrinsic property. It does not exist outside our different acts of identification. 7.5 Categorial and particular identity as inextricably linked to practices of identity attribution When it comes to “identity,” once again, our everyday speech puts us on the wrong track. We say that objects “have an identity,” just as they have a form, color, weight, and so on. Through such linguistic expressions, we risk completely overlooking the fact that identity (both categorial and particular) cannot be understood apart from certain identificatory practices, that is, practices of identity attribution. One of the merits of David Wiggins’s work on identity is precisely that he emphasizes that in thinking about questions

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of identity we must always take into account our everyday practices of identity attribution. Thus he writes: Let the philosopher elucidate same, identical, substance, change, persist, etc., directly and from within the same practices as those that an ordinary untheoretical human being is initiated into. (Wiggins, 2001, p. 2) That we cannot separate categorial identity (“whatness”) from specific human practices of classification should by now be quite clear. Categorial identity only makes sense in light of classificatory practices which, as I have emphasized, must be understood first and foremost in relation to human evaluations. It is only in relation to classificatory activities that objects acquire their “whatness.” Nothing is what it is in and of itself. Anyone who does presume such a thing is guilty of what Wiggins describes as the realist myth of the self-differentiating object (cf. supra). Categorial identity is not a matter of passive registration, as if things carried their categorial identity label on their sleeves and we only had to read it off. But neither is categorial identity something that we can discover, just as we can, for example, discover the objective properties of some entity. We have seen this before in our example of the lemur. One can discover as many properties one wants; this in itself does not tell you what the object is. The latter simply isn’t something one can discover: it is something that has to be told to us by others. Strictly speaking, then, we are mistaken when we say that something is gold because it has atomic number 72. The concealed premise here is that the property “atomic number 72” acts as a classificatory criterion for gold. It is only when properties are given the status of a criterion that they become relevant to categorial identity, but no property is in and of itself a criterion. This status is conferred to it by us. However, that also numerical identity must be understood in relation to practices of identity attribution (“This object at point in time t2 is one and the same object as the object at t1”) is less obvious. Traditionally, the question of numerical identity is formulated in terms that suggest that the answer should be sought solely at the level of the object. For example, one asks: “What makes this object at t2 the same object at t1?” where (as for categorial identity) one looks for objective properties that can function as a criterion, this time not a criterion for the quidditas, but for the haecceitas. That the identifying subject also has a constitutive share here is usually not seen. This constitutive share is partly at the level of the object constitution, where the particular identity gets established. After all, before the attribution of numerical identity is even possible, there must already be some objective whole that presents itself and to which numerical identity can be attributed.

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Well, that to which we assign numerical identity, or the referent of “it,” as in the question “Is it one and the same object?” is co-determined by our particular and historical relationship to the object, not simply from the properties of the object itself. When we drop a glass and it shatters, we can paradoxically say that one and the same object is now a number of different objects (pieces of glass). It is no longer a glass but nevertheless still the same object which now, paradoxically, consists of dozens of different objects to which, if we wish, we can also assign individual numerical identity. For example, we can start to keep track of the material history of one specific piece of glass. Perhaps it becomes part of a new glass, perhaps it gets further shattered itself. In any case, there is a new “it” here to which we can attribute numerical identity just as unproblematically as we could to the glass of which it was once a part. But instead of looking forward, we can also go back in history. Let’s consider the original glass again. It took eons for the molecules that make up the glass to come together. The individual components that make up the object at t1 also existed at t1 –n. But we wouldn’t attribute numerical identity to the countless individual components for the simple reason that these never appear to us as a whole, except in the form of a glass. In the same sense, we don’t assign numerical identity to the collection of shards of glass after it has shattered, but rather to one specific shard as far as this does appear to us as a whole. The referent is fixed in relation to its appearing to us as a whole. But there is no view from nowhere, nor a view from never, from which we can consider the object as what it really is, irrespective of its appearing to us as a whole. Our theme, however, is not numerical identity per se, but the role of the body in relation to the attribution of numerical identity and related practices of reidentification. The double point I want to make, here and in the next section, is on the hand that numerical identity cannot be understood independently of the practice of assigning numerical identity and, on the other hand, that the latter in turn cannot be separated from a phenomenological and historical moment of object constitution. And it is with respect to the latter that our body plays a crucial structuring and constraining role, as will be argued subsequently. 7.6 Attributing numerical identity A brief reflection on the subject of numerical identity attribution and reidentification quickly leads to the following observation: to the vast majority of “things” — which we nevertheless refer to with a noun — the notion of numerical identity simply does not clearly apply. In addition to the previously cited example of memory or consciousness, we can also refer here to any other mental phenomenon. Take, for example, various forms of perception. Looking at a chair, do I have one and the same visual experience before

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and after I blink my eyes? When I am in the forest and say, “There is that same peculiar sound again,” do I mean that it is one and the same sound, or two very similar sounds? Or do I mean something else still? Do I feel the same pain when someone pokes me twice in a row with the same force with a needle in the same spot? And can it still be the same spot? And what do I mean by “the same force”? When I have the flu, I know, based on the flu-like feeling, that I probably have the flu. Is that flu feeling one and the same feeling over time? If so, where did it go to when I wasn’t feeling it? These questions are, of course, rhetorical, for they seem to be undecidable. However, the undecidability of numerical identity assignment extends far beyond the realm of perceptual states. What about fictional characters in a book, or a film or a video game? Is the Sherlock Holmes from the A Study in Scarlet story one and the same as in The Hound of the Baskervilles? What about a movie? If I watch the same DVD twice in a row, have I seen one and the same movie? The numerical identity that we will easily attribute to the material carrier (the DVD disc) is apparently much less naturally attributable to the film itself. And what about material substances such as gases or liquids? Think of Heraclitus’s river, for instance. The example of liquid is all the more interesting because here, in a sense, it does seem possible to preserve numerical identity. One way to argue that we can, at least in principle, speak of one and the same river is by emphasizing that the water of the river ultimately consists of distinct and, at least in principle, detectable and individuatable atoms. But — and this is crucial — when we say this, we imagine those atoms as admittedly microscopic yet solid particular units whose individual spatiotemporal history we could in principle follow. Apparently, we need this reference to solid material units in order to speak of numerical identity. But such atoms only exist in our imagination. Atoms are not tiny solid spherical objects. Nietzsche’s reflections on numerical identity are particularly relevant here, and he explicitly refers to the notion of an atom as a fictional entity that first of all serves the purpose of accommodating a conceptual need for some material unit, a single “thing” or “substratum.” It is worth quoting Nietzsche at length here. In section 19 of his Human, all too Human, he writes: Number. – The invention of the laws of numbers was made on the basis of the error, dominant even from the earliest times, that there are identical things (but in fact nothing is identical with anything else); at least that there are things (but there is no “thing”). The assumption of plurality always presupposes the existence of something that occurs more than once: but precisely here error already holds sway, here already we are fabricating beings, unities which do not exist. – Our sensations of space and time are false, for tested consistently they lead to logical contradictions. The establishment of conclusions in science always unavoidably involves

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us in calculating with certain false magnitudes: but because these magnitudes are at least constant, as for example are our sensations of time and space, the conclusions of science acquire a complete rigorousness and certainty in their coherence with one another; one can build on them – up to that final stage at which our erroneous basic assumptions, those constant errors, come to be incompatible with our conclusions, for example in the theory of atoms. Here we continue to feel ourselves compelled to assume the existence of a “thing” or material “substratum” which is moved, while the whole procedure of science has pursued the task of resolving everything thing-like (material) in motions: here too our sensations divide that which moves from that which is moved, and we cannot get out of this circle because our belief in the existence of things has been tied up with our being from time immemorial. (Nietzsche, 1878/1986, p. 22) This last sentence is the most crucial, for here, Nietzsche seems to underwrite the central point I want to make, namely, that our very notion of a numerically identical thing is relative to “our being,” which, “from time immemorial,” has always been an embodied being. Before I’ll return to this, we must still look at another important category of objects that we have not yet discussed and of which it is not yet clear how they relate to numerical identity: abstract objects. This deserves a separate treatment. 7.7 Numerical identity in relation to abstract types We cannot possibly deal with all those cases that can be brought under the heading of “abstract object.” However, there is one kind of abstract object that is of particular interest for our exposition because it is central to the functionalist thesis of multiple realizability. I am talking, of course, about the “type.” I have already pointed out in earlier sections some of the problems this notion raises. However, not much has been said about the relationship between type and numerical identity. Yet, the thesis of multiple realizability stands and falls on the possibility of assigning numerical identity to a “type” (whatever it may be). After all, the thesis says that one and the same type must be realizable in relevantly different material tokens. Thus, it is crucial that the defender of multiple realizability clarifies what she takes types to be, such that the attribution of numerical identity (one and the same type) becomes intelligible. However, we have just seen that numerical identity does not seem to apply at all to indefinitely many things. In the case of everyday objects (Austin’s “moderate sized dry goods”3) we can still rely on spatiotemporal continuity. But how exactly does this work for abstract objects such as types which, although they are supposed to exist independently, lack such spatiotemporal continuity? The history of philosophy shows us

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that this problem has been addressed in very different ways. I’m referring here, of course, to the nominalism-versus-realism debate and the different forms that this debate has taken over the past centuries. I do not want to repeat that history — which is, by the way, still in full swing. However, I do want to reemphasize the following here: people speak in terms of “things” all the time, “things” that then get, at the linguistic level, numerical identity attached to them. We do this regardless of whether or not we are literally referring to material objects. As we’ve already seen, it is a characteristic of our language (and of natural languages in general) that we hypostasize: we place “things” that do not literally belong in the ontological category of “substance” in the grammatical category of the noun or substantive, and we refer to these “things” in a way that suggests numerical identity. Simply put, in language we constantly turn non-things into things, and we just as often assign numerical identity to these “things.” And this almost never creates problems. When I say that I’m going to take a walk, there is no one who then thinks that I intend to grab some odd object called “walk” (except of course someone with a very limited knowledge of the English language). And when we say that we took “one and the same walk” (yesterday and today), everyone understands what we mean. It would be a lame joke to then insist on explaining in what sense the walk could have been numerically the same. For indeed activities and, more generally, events are another important example of “things” to which numerical identity does not seem to apply. However, when we are confronted with things whose ontological nature we don’t exactly understand (e.g., a type, or a category, or a concept) but to which we nevertheless refer in language with numerical identity terms (“one and the same type,” “one and the same category,” “one and the same concept”), we tend to do more than just linguistic hypostasis: we tend to reify. Because we do know in which cases we can apply “one and the sameness” without difficulties (that is, in the case of sufficiently solid material unities with spatiotemporal continuity) we turn the “thing” (with scare quotes) whose ontological nature we do not actually understand but whose numerical identity is assumed into a thing (without scare quotes). “Type realism,” as defended for example by David Armstrong, seems to rest on exactly such a reification (cf. supra). Armstrong writes: We (that is, everybody) are continually talking about the sameness of things. And most of the time when we talk about the sameness of things we are talking about the sameness of different things. (Armstrong, 1980, p. 441) This is, of course, correct. Next, Armstrong argues, also correctly in my view, that the kind of “sameness” at play when we say that, for instance, two animals belong to the same type (“dog”) is numerical identity:

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[S]ameness of token and sameness of type is sameness in exactly the same sense, viz. identity. (ibid., p. 442) And indeed, when we say that two tokens belong to one and the same type, we linguistically attribute numerical, not qualitative, identity to the “type” via the notion of “one and the same.” Immediately following this sentence, however, something peculiar happens in Armstrong’s reasoning. The passage continues as follows: [S]ameness of token and sameness of type is sameness in exactly the same sense, viz. identity. This Realist view seems to be nearer the truth of the matter. I think it is a bit crude as it stands, because it appears to require recognition of a universal wherever we recognize sameness of type, a universal corresponding to each general word. (Armstrong, 1980, p. 441) From the recognition that we do indeed speak in terms of numerical identity (one-and-the-sameness) with respect to types, for Armstrong, an ontological fact immediately follows, namely that types must exist (type realism). I think that this reification based on our use of language is unfounded and that, moreover, it is generally a methodological mistake to make ontological truths dependent on linguistic contingencies. In other words, here too we find an example of what Heather Dyke calls the representational fallacy (cf. supra). In any case, the question remains how exactly, within the context of functionalism and the thesis of the alleged multiple realizability of mental types, we should understand ‘types’ so that we can intelligibly assign numerical identity (one and the same mental type) to them. The question is all the more pressing because, as we’ve already seen, attributing numerical identity to mental tokens is already problematic in itself. Yet, if it’s already a problem at the level of the particular token, what hope is there of making sense of numerical identity at the level of the corresponding abstract mental type? In any case, as long as the question of the numerical identity of types is not answered, the question of how to understand the idea of the multiple realizability of mental types remains itself an unresolved issue. 7.8 The importance of the body for numerical identity in general Above we’ve already seen how our body is important in our relation to materiality in a qualitative sense. The qualitative nature of other objects is inseparable from the kind of materiality we ourselves are (even if we

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cannot further specify that materiality in a science-theoretic sense). The emotion of disgust, for example, is a relation that is preeminently concerned with this qualitative character of material objects (although more is needed to explain the actual occurrence of disgust). What I want to argue now is that our body plays a constitutive role in our relation to material objects in not only a qualitative but also a quantitative sense. How things appear to us in a quantitative sense (as one unity, as several unities, or not as a unity at all) depends on, and is structured by, the kind of body we have, this time not in a qualitative but in a correspondingly quantitative sense. It is not by chance that objects that are easily individuated are objects whose spatial and temporal body(!) is similar to the human spatiotemporal body. Well, it is precisely these kinds of objects (Austin’s “moderate sized dry goods”) to which we can easily assign numerical identity and which can therefore become the object of reidentification (sameness over time). They are objects that appear to us as one specific material whole to which we can attribute a unique spatiotemporal history (a “life”) that we can, at least in principle, keep track of through time and space. The attribution of numerical identity is thus first and foremost indebted to the following phenomenological principle, namely that something must always appear as a whole before there can even be any question of numerical identity. We have seen this before in our discussion of particular identity. As we’ve seen, this “appearing as a whole” is not something purely passive, but something in which we ourselves, as the kind of embodied cognitive beings we are, have a constitutive role to play. My current thesis is that the way in which, and the extent to which, things appear to us as spatiotemporal wholes is itself structured by the kind of body that we ourselves and (especially) other persons have. We experience those other bodies immediately, and no doubt on an evolutionary biological basis, as material units, although these “units” are themselves actually composed of billions of other biological unities, which are in turn composed of other units. But this mereology, however, is utterly irrelevant for the assignment of numerical identity to another human body. It is irrelevant because it plays no role at the level of experience, that is, at the level at which things appear to us as a material whole. The body, and first and foremost that of the other, is from an objective-scientific perspective not one single material object, but we experience it as such. The point now is that we would not experience other, nonhuman “bodies” the way we do (that is, as material wholes) if we did not have the kind of body that we have. What does this mean more specifically? In the constitution of those kinds of material objects to which we attribute numerical identity (a unique spatiotemporal history; a “life”), our visual, tactile, and kinesthetic capacities seem to play a determinate role. Merely seeing something as a whole is not enough. After all, what appears

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visually as a whole is not always the kind of whole to which we ascribe numerical identity. Consider, for example, visual phenomena such as hallucinations, things we “see” in our dreams, or “things” such as afterimages, phosphenes, so-called eye-floaters, and so on. Although in a sense we can speak of objects here, we will not attribute an independent spatiotemporal history to these objects, so issues of reidentification do not arise. Another interesting visual example is that of the rainbow. Here, after all, unlike the previous examples, we seem to be dealing with an object outside of us, with its own unique spatiotemporal identity. For example, young children think that the rainbow is somewhere in the sky and that we can walk under it or travel to its points of origin (where treasure awaits). But when we have learned that this is not the case, and that a rainbow is in fact a relative phenomenon in which the position of the object depends on our own position, we will also seize to assign numerical identity to the object. We have learned that rainbows are not so much objects as phenomena, which means that the question of whether it is one and the same rainbow is no longer applicable, or at least thoroughly changes its meaning. After all, a phenomenon is an event, and to events numerical identity simply does not apply (even though we talk as if it does). In short, appearing visually as a whole is not sufficient for the constitution of those kinds of objects to which we attribute numerical identity. At the very least, as mentioned previously, the tactile and the kinesthetic also come into play. The latter we have in fact just seen in the example of the rainbow: we must feel that we can walk around it, past it, under it, or more generally, that we can position our bodies in different positions in relation to the object. As several researchers have pointed out in the last decades,4 the role of the moving body is crucial here. In addition, the possibility of a tactile experience also seems to be a fundamental condition. Bodies (things) that our bodies cannot actually or potentially touch are not bodies to which we attribute a spatiotemporal history and to which numerical identity attributions do not apply. This emphasis on the visual, in combination with the tactile and the kinesthetic, is also found in Husserl’s classic reading on the genesis of the object concept: A body is constituted as a sensuous schema by the sense of touch and the sense of sight, and every sense is a sense through an apperceptive conjunction of the corresponding sense-data with kinaesthetic data. (Husserl, 1907/1973) Ein Körper ist als sinnliches Schema konstituiert durch den Tastsinn und Gesichtssinn, und jeder Sinn ist Sinn durch eine apperzeptive Verbindung der entsprechenden Sinnesdaten mit kinästhetischen Daten. (Husserl, 1907/1973, p. 298)

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It is no coincidence, by the way, that the kinds of objects to which we readily assign numerical identity are also objects that are prone to become personified. They are objects of which we say, for example, that, like ourselves, they have a front and a back, even if this description is often absurd in a non-relational sense. This phenomenon, known as body-parts projection, has been investigated by, among others, Georg Lakoff and the afore-mentioned Mark Johnson. The latter writes: We use our own body-part relations to make sense of objects and spatial relations in our surroundings. A good example of this is the way we experience our own bodies as having fronts and backs, and so it seems natural for us to project these front/ back relations onto other objects, such as houses, TV screens, automobiles, signs, refrigerators, and lines of people, none of which have inherent fronts or backs. (Johnson, 2018, p. 627) However, the central message I want to convey here — that our attributions of numerical identity in general, and therefore the notion of numerical identity itself5 is structured by the kind of body we have — has perhaps never been approximated more closely than by Merleau-Ponty, who in the following quote points out not only the correlation between body and thing but also the anthropomorphization of nonhuman bodies. The passage, which should remind one of the previously quoted lines by Oljesya, reads as follows: [T]he thing is correlative to my body and, in more general terms, to my existence, of which my body is merely the stabilized structure. It is constituted in the hold which my body takes upon it; it is not first of all a meaning for the understanding, but a structure accessible to inspection by the body, and if we try to describe the real as it appears to us in perceptual experience, we find it overlaid with anthropological predicates. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002, p. 373; m.e.) [L]a chose est le corrélatif de mon corps et plus généralement de mon existence I mon corps n’est que la structure stabilisée, elle se constitue dans la prise de mon corps sur elle, elle n’est pas d’abord une signification pour l’entendement, mais une structure accessible à l’inspection du corps et si nous voulons décrire le ens tel qu’il nous apparaît dans l’expérience perceptive, nous le trouvons chargé de prédicats anthropologiques. (Merleau-Ponty, 1976, p. 369) However, that all this has immediate relevance for a better understanding of our practices of identification and reidentification, and that in it, moreover, an explanation can be found for the structure of our ascriptions of

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numerical identity is not theorized by Merleau-Ponty. For it is precisely those “things” (Fr.: choses) that our body can take “hold upon,” to which we attribute numerical identity in the most unproblematic sense. Moreover, the — especially tactile, visual, and kinesthetic — perception of the human body, meaning here first of all the body of the other, seems to function as a gravitational center around which our notions of thing, object, and substance gravitate. We are in all likeliness biologically predisposed to single out, and keep track of, other human bodies. This predisposition can be thought of as a gravitational center for other objects. As such, it does not really create a clear demarcation (”thing” versus “non-thing”)\ but rather a spectrum. The assignment of numerical identity seems to depend on where the “thing” is in the spectrum. 7.9 Functional and nonfunctional reidentification Even more comes to light when we dwell a little longer, not so much on the question of the kind of “things” we attribute numerical identity to, that is, things we can reidentify over time, but on the very different question of why we reidentify in the first place. Simply put: why does it matter at all that we reidentify things correctly as one and the same thing? Answering this question will further clarify two things: on the one hand, the extent to which human cognition should be understood in terms of evaluations of significance, that is, evaluations that relate to the meaningfulness of things; on the other hand, the extent to which our bodies matter for these evaluations. First of all, it should be noted that there is a difference between objects that we can theoretically reidentify (i.e., objects to which we can in principle assign numerical identity) and objects that we reidentify in practice. And as will be clarified subsequently, when we focus on the latter type of objects, something important stands out: in practice, we primarily reidentify objects because they have meaning for us in their material particularity. In other words, in practice people primarily reidentify objects that have a certain meaning which is inextricably linked to their particular material embodiment, regardless of what these objects are from a classificatory perspective. Using Burms’s terminology, the objects in question are primarily those with a strongly embodied meaning that does not coincide with the meaning from which they acquire their categorial identity. I will elaborate on this point in the following sections. To start off, however, it is important to make a fundamental distinction between functional and nonfunctional reidentification. The question of why living beings reidentify is complex and cannot possibly be dealt with exhaustively within the confines of a few pages. What I want to emphasize here above all is that reidentification in humans takes a specific form that we do not find in other animals, or at least not to the same extent. It is this specific human form of reidentification that I want to bring

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more clearly into the picture because here, too, our bodily nature will turn out to play a central role. I will try to do this by comparing human reidentification to the ways in which, and the reasons why other animals reidentify. It goes without saying that we will have to limit ourselves to a partial comparison. There can be no doubt that very many different species of organisms have developed the capacity to reidentify things (in the broad sense of the word, i.e., including other organisms), when by reidentification we mean something like being able to distinguish the object from similar objects over time. As is well known, birds of the crow family (Corvidae) are particularly adept at this. They succeed effortlessly, within both very short and longer periods of time, in finding a particular pebble in a pile of pebbles that are virtually indistinguishable to our eyes. And although this is pure speculation on my part, it seems plausible that this capacity is to be explained in reference to behavior that we no longer find in most crow species, but which we still observe in at least one member of that family. The American Yellowstone Park is the natural habitat of the so-called Clark’s nutcracker bird (Nucrifaga columbiana). Like other animals, this bird builds up a winter stock. It does this by making holes in the ground with its relatively long beak in which it then stores about 5 to 10 pine seeds. An individual bird hides about 30,000 seeds every autumn on an average surface of 250 km2. No less than 70 percent of the stores are recovered during the winter. From the remaining 30 percent grow“ among other kinds” the lodgepole pines that give Yellowstone Park its distinctive appearance. In a sense, then, these birds are the landscapers of the park. What is especially interesting is the way Clark’s nutcracker manages to retrieve so much of its stored supplies. Although this capacity for retrieval is partially explained by the bird’s exceptional memory, a crucial contributing factor here is the extraordinary fact that the bird marks its storage locations.6 Specifically, it places a pebble on top of each hole which then acts as a marker. Of course, this assumes that the bird must have the capacity to reidentify the pebbles it used before. So it is not inconceivable that this capacity, which we also find in other members of the crow family, has its origins in such evolutionarily useful behavior. Of course, this is only one of many examples within the animal kingdom where we can speak of a form of reidentification. Nevertheless, the example already brings to the surface something important that we may not find in all but nevertheless in the vast majority of forms of animal (and thus human) reidentification: the reidentification serves a functional purpose and is in that sense itself functional. For functional reidentification, the reidentification of the object is not important in itself. It is only important in light of something else. The reidentified object (the pebble), however, remains irrelevant in its material particularity. After all, it makes no difference to the bird whether it is the

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pebble that the bird itself placed on top of one of its storage locations, or another pebble, indistinguishable to the bird, put there by someone as an experiment. As long as it allows the bird to find its seeds, it does not matter whether it is the same pebble or not. And herein lies the characteristic of functional reidentification: the object is not irreplaceable in its material particularity. Against this functional reidentification I will subsequently put nonfunctional reidentification, a form of reidentification where, with respect to the reidentified object, there is indeed irreplaceability; here, it does matter in its own right whether the identified object is numerically the same object. And this form of reidentification we find preeminently in humans. In case of people, but not in the case of (most) other animals, instrumental relevance is rarely, if ever, the only reason for reidentification, and certainly not the main one. However, compared to the question of why living beings reidentify functionally, the phenomenon of nonfunctional reidentification is much more difficult to explain. Before tackling this issue, I must first say something more about the phenomenon of nonfunctional reidentification itself. I will do this by comparing and contrasting it with two different reasons why (especially) people reidentify functionally. 7.9.1 Functional reidentification in relation to properties and ownership

A first reason why reidentification of a particular object may be important in a functional sense is because the object is assumed to have certain properties that other similar objects are assumed not to have. An example here is the musical instrument of the professional musician. After years of playing the same instrument, a unique physical familiarity with the object develops that makes the object, in a sense, irreplaceable. Here, the instrument in question acquires a certain relevance in its material particularity, and it is because of this relevance that the possibility of reidentification becomes important. Note, however, that this is an instrumental and thus functional relevance. The object is only relevant in its material particularity in light of a goal (e.g., to bring the best possible performance of some violin sonata). Since we assume that the object, because of its properties, helps realize the goal best, it becomes important to be able to reidentify it. Viewed in this way, the reidentification is only important insofar as there are no other objects that help to better realize the purpose. Strictly speaking, therefore, there is no question of irreplaceability here. The relevance of the object remains instrumentally or functionally defined. However, the fact that the violinist will still want to reidentify his instrument, long after the object has lost its qualities, points us to something else. We will return to this in a moment.

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A second reason why reidentification is important to us in practice is related to notions of ownership. We must be able to distinguish, and continue to distinguish, “what is mine” from “‘what is yours.” In order to facilitate correct reidentification, marks can be applied that help to distinguish the object from other similar objects. Recall here the peculiar relationship between marks and properties. As was mentioned earlier, properties can’t at one and the same time serve as classificatory criteria and as marks. When we are interested in determining whether some object is my property, it makes no sense to consider those properties that make the object the kind of object it is. These properties are precisely irrelevant here. In any case, what I am mainly concerned with here is to emphasize that when an object acquires the status of possession, it acquires a new meaning that cannot be explained in terms of the properties of the object, but only from the relationship that connects that object to the owner. Because of its association with a unique individual or group, the object acquires a unique meaning (my, not your property). And it is because of this meaning we are interested in reidentification in the first place. Note, however, that reidentification here is also still instrumental. It is still in the service of something else, namely the delineation of ownership. Nevertheless, this form of reidentification is almost always accompanied by nonfunctional reidentification. This is so insofar as the property relation also typically implies a material relation between body and object. What this means exactly can again best be clarified by means of an example. 7.9.2 Nonfunctional reidentification

Suppose one comes across an old children’s book in the window of a second-hand store that closely resembles one of the books you had as a child. In this case, I suppose virtually everyone will enter the shop to take a closer look at the book, that is, to examine it for marks. And almost everyone will want to buy the book at any cost when one recognizes one’s own scribblings in the margins. This form of reidentification is not instrumental: it does not serve anything else. Here, it is the numerical identity of the object itself that matters. There is a kind of interest here which can’t be explained in terms of useful properties or in terms of ownership relations. What matters is the irreplaceable object itself, in its material particularity, because it is only with this and no other object that we have a certain unique relation. That relation seems to grow stronger with time, but it can emerge quite instantaneously. To stay with the example of the children’s book: almost simultaneously with the moment we are handed the book for the first time, the object acquires a new meaning that no other object will ever be able to have. It is for this reason that when that book is then, for example, stolen, and we

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then say that someone stole “my” book, we mean more than that someone took away a part of our property. For even if the book were replaced by another copy (in better condition perhaps), we will still say that something has been irrevocably lost. What has been lost is not a set of replaceable properties but an irreplaceable constellation of meaning embodied only by the original book. Only the original, stolen book embodies in its concrete materiality a certain meaning that no other object can ever embody (= strong embodiment of meaning). The replacement book is materially and functionally equivalent, but different according to its meaning. And the meaning we are talking about here does not, to be clear, arise directly from the abstract relationship of ownership. In other words, the object isn’t just meaningful simply because its technically ours. The meaningfulness arises from the material bond between one’s own body and the object,7 a bond which, although in practice often accompanies ownership, can also be completely separate from it. What ultimately matters is the material bond between material object and material body, which immediately explains why especially objects with which we literally have close physical contact can easily acquire a meaningfulness in their material particularity (a musical instrument, a book, a stuffed animal, an article of clothing, etc.).8 Through this material relationship, something of ourselves seems to be transmitted to the object which – and this is important – is also preserved by the object. It is especially the latter that may explain why the meaningfulness of the object usually increases with time. When, after thirty years, I find my old book again in a second-hand store, it is like finding a part of myself again. Something of the person I was then still clings to the object and has not changed with me into the person I am now. This psychological dynamic in which part of one’s self is materially passed on to an inanimate object is indeed the one we find in the example of the relic mentioned several times already, with this difference that no venerated other needs to be involved here. In our example above it is after all about the material bond between an object and one’s own body, not that of someone else. And we can have this material bond with other kinds of entities as well, like particular places one has visited, for instance. For some reason, even the spaces our bodies have occupied in our lives can acquire a meaningfulness that they could not have by themselves, that is, if we ourselves had not been physically present in that place. And here again there is the parallel with the example of relics and personality cults, in that places too can acquire a significance through the prior bodily presence of the person being venerated (to stay with the example of Elvis, think of Graceland, for example). The logic here, however, is the same as with the significant object. What ultimately determines the significance of the location or object, and thus what ultimately explains why numerical identity and reidentification become important, must be sought in the material contact between the body

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(whether one’s own or not) and the location or object. Note, by the way, that ‘location’ should not be understood too abstractly here, for example as a spatial point with certain geographical coordinates. ‘Location’ here should be understood as a particular materially bounded entity with its own spatiotemporal history, that is, a particular environment. The connection between meaningful environment and meaningful object is therefore not far-fetched. After all, what is at stake here is first and foremost ‘location’ as a configuration of different particular material objects (for example, this land, these walls, these houses, these streets…). In short, location here is first and foremost meant to indicate a configuration of material entities with which the body can have a material contact. Because of this material connection, objects and locations as particular material configurations with their own spatiotemporal history (environments) can acquire a meaningfulness that cannot be understood in terms of what the object or the location has to offer or, to use Gibson’s words, ‘affords’. How this meaningfulness should be understood is a question which I will not attempt to answer within the framework of this book. In fact, it may turn out not to be an answerable question at all. Yet, that we have such experiences of non-functional meaningfulness with particular objects and environments, and that these objects and environments are therefore irreplaceable, is a fundamental fact of our ‘mental life’. And it is one that the functionalist can’t account for. Nor can it be accommodated in a virtual reality, for that matter. Notes 1 Oliver Sacks tells the story of Tony Cicoria, a 42-year-old man who, after being struck by lightning, develops an obsession with piano music, something which didn’t interest him before. He starts to play piano himself, day and night, which has an impact on his relationship with his family (he eventually divorces his wife). See Sacks (2007, pp. 3–8). Another example is that of Alan Cromer whose personality dramatically changed after a heart attack. His wife Janet Cromer wrote a book about her husband’s transformation, with the telling title Professor Cromer Learns to Read: A Couple’s New Life after Brain Injury. See Cromer (2010). 2 As already mentioned, particular and numerical identity are closely related notions, but they are not synonymous. Numerical identity is always attributed to entities considered in their particularity, but as we’ll see subsequently, not all particulars can be attributed with numerical identity, understood as sameness over time. 3 See Austin (1962). 4 E.g., Maurice Merleau-Ponty, James Gibson, Alva Noë, and Kevin O’Regan. 5 I do write “therefore” here to emphasize again that our notions of identity must be understood against the background of our practices of identification. 6 See Balda and Kamil (1992). 7 Throughout his work, Burms repeatedly emphasizes the fact that meaning can be transmitted via a material bond between body and object.

146  Embodiment and identity 8 There is a connection with the phenomenon of disgust. Here too, a material bond, which is in this context usually conceived of in terms of contamination, explains how some object, which in itself does not have the meaning of being disgusting, gets experienced as itself disgusting and contaminating via such a bond with an original object of disgust. This experience of contamination is, I claim, best understood symbolically, not functionally. I cannot explore this topic further here, but see Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966/2002) for what is probably still the most interesting analysis of our relations to the impure and the disgusting.

Epilogue The significant body

Our practices of reidentification show that, for one reason or another, human beings attach great and sometimes an enormous significance to the numerical identity of an object or a place, a significance which cannot be captured in functional-instrumental terms. As a matter of psychological fact, these entities are for their significance irreplaceable. This undeniably constitutes an important part of our mental lives. Indeed, it seems to be an almost defining fact of human psychology, since we find the nonfunctional reidentification in other animals either not at all or certainly not to that extent. Thus, a model of human psychology that is unable to account for this fundamental fact can at best be substantially incomplete. Moreover, the phenomenon of nonfunctional reidentification becomes incomprehensible without reference to the human body. That certain objects or places can have an enormous significance within our “mental life” is a psychological fact that needs to be understood from a material connection between body and object/place. Without this bodily relationship, those objects or places would not have the (sometimes very profound) significance that they do in fact possess for us. Thus, a functionalist model that preaches the irrelevance of the body falls short on at least two fronts: on the one hand, nonfunctional reidentification seems to elude any functionalist description or explanation, which leaves no room whatsoever for the irreplaceable; on the other hand, a fundamental fact of human psychology, in which the body plays a constitutive role, becomes entirely incomprehensible here. More generally speaking, it seems that psychological phenomena having to do with meaningfulness or significance are much more closely connected with the body than is usually assumed. The meaningfulness of the world (i.e., material objects and environments) presupposes the meaningfulness of one’s own body and that of others. But without such an ultimate reference to a bodily presence, much of the significance in our world would become incomprehensible. What we can derive here above all, and what I want to put forward here as the main conclusion of the book, can be formulated as follows: what is most significant to us is irreplaceable, and because of the latter, this DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-10

148 Epilogue

significance has to be situated at the level of material particularity. Moreover, we relate to this material particularity first and foremost physically, that is, with the material particularity that we ourselves are. Without this material particularity, that is, without our bodies, this relationship would be impossible. The functionalist assumption that the body would be irrelevant to our mental life is irreconcilable with my concluding thesis. I will elaborate on this thesis, which in fact consists of two parts, subsequently. The first point, which says that the meaningful is situated at the level of the world in its particularity, can be read as an extension of what Gadamer writes about one meaningful experience in particular (no pun intended), namely the experience of the beautiful. In his “The Relevance of Beauty” (Die Aktualität des Schönen), he writes:1 Now clearly in our experience of the beautiful, in nature and in art, we neither verify our expectations, nor record what we encounter as a particular case of the universal. An enchanting sunset does not represent a case of sunsets in general. It is rather a unique sunset displaying the “tragedy of the heavens.” And in the realm of art above all, it is selfevident that the work of art is not experienced in its own right if it is only acknowledged as a link in a chain that leads elsewhere. The “truth” that it possesses for us does not consist in some universal regularity that merely presents itself through the work. Rather, cognitio sensitiva [the term is Alexander Baumgarten’s] means that in the apparent particularity of sensuous experience, which we always attempt to relate to the universal, there is something in our experience of the beautiful that arrests us and compels us to dwell upon the individual appearance itself. (Gadamer 1986, p. 16; added italics mine) Gadamer emphasizes here the particularity of the significant object (in this case, an event). To express it in our terminology, the object (for example, a particular sunset) is not considered at the level of categorial identity, that is, not as an instance or “realization” of the “sunset” type. No, the meaningful experience relates to this particular or, as Charles Travis would say,2 “historical” sunset in its irreplaceable as well as unrepeatable being. And what Gadamer says here about the meaningfulness of the aesthetic can be extended to meaningfulness in general. That which is most meaningful for us is always situated at the level of the particular and, as such, is always irreplaceable, unrepeatable and, in the words of Burms, strongly embodied. It is therefore also never multiply realizable, regardless of which interpretation of multiple realizability one favors. Crucially now, our relation to particularity in general, and thus also to meaningful particularity, is structured by the bodily particularity that we ourselves are, that is, by the concrete material bodies we have. This relation would not and cannot possibly be the same if

Epilogue 149

we did not have the kind of bodies that we have (or better: are). And this is to be understood, as we have seen, in a both qualitative and quantitative sense. Furthermore, as we have just seen, the body not only plays a structuring role in our relationship to the world in its material particularity, it also almost always forms part of the explanation of why things (objects, places, but also events) have a significance. After all, it should be clear by now that the body is not simply one meaningful object among other objects. Unlike, say, a relic or a sacred place, it is itself a source of meaning from which the significance of other material objects, places, or events ultimately flows. These objects or places acquire their significance not because of an intellectual or spiritual connection with someone but more concretely because of a material connection with that other person’s body, which can also be one’s own previous self (my younger self who once was scribbling in the margins of some book). But it is above all the particular and irreplaceable body of beloved persons (e.g., one’s own children), as well as the nonrepeatable actions that emanate from or emanated from these persons, that count preeminently as the original source of meaningfulness and in which, in the most universal sense, an explanation must be sought for why certain objects or places are experienced as meaningful. Moreover, it is important to be able to reidentify these objects or places because, to put it with Gadamer, these meaningful objects and places invite us to “dwell” upon them, that is, to be physically present with them, which presupposes correct reidentification. What, then, in turn explains the status of the body as a source of significance? Whatever the answer to this question might be, we should not expect it to come from the functionalist, and certainly not from the computational functionalist who is, as the Platonist, theoretically unequipped to acknowledge the relevance of the world in its material particularity. In the virtual realities envisioned by Chalmers, there is no original but only a derived meaningfulness, which is parasitic on our embodied interactions with the world in its irreplaceable material particularity, that is, our nonvirtual environment. Perhaps now more than ever, we should turn our gaze rather than our backs toward this environment. Notes 1 I am using the 1986 translation of Nicholas Walker. In the original German, it reads: Es ist nun sicherlich nicht die Erfahrung des Schönen, weder in Natur noch in Kunst daß wir das uns Begegnende nur als das Erwartete verrechnen und als einen Fall von etwas Allgemeinem verbuchen. Ein Sonnenuntergang, der uns bezaubert, ist nicht ein Fall von Sonnenuntergangen, sondern ist dieser einmalige Sonnenuntergang, der uns “der Himmel Trauerspiel” vorführt. Im Bereich der Kunst ist es erst recht selbstverständlich, daß das Kunstwerk nicht als solches erfahren ist wenn es nur in andere Zusammenhänge eingeordnet wird.

150 Epilogue Seine “Wahrheit”, die es für uns hat, besteht nicht in einer an ihm zur DarsteIIung kommenden allgemeinen Gesetzlichkeit. Vielmehr meint cognitio sensitiva, daß auch in dem was scheinbar nur das Partikulare der sinnlichen Erfahrung ist und das wir immer auf ein Allgemeines hin zu beziehen pflegen, plötzlich angesichts des Schönen uns etwas festhält und nötigt, bei dem individuell Erscheinenden zu verweilen. (Gadamer, 1977, p. 21) 2 See Travis (2013).

Afterthought on sense-making

The enactivist speaks of the organism’s interactions with its environment in terms of sense-making. Doesn’t this overlook the fact that sometimes, the world makes its sense for us? When the things refuse to bow to our categories, and retain their material and particular significance, they bring their sense to us, over and above the categorial generality by which we think we master their meaning. This relation, this direction from the world to us, rather than from us to the world, is the original relation by which all of us, as newborns, come to know of the world. Long before we suppress it with language, it impresses us with its meaning. It is this material, these impressions of sense (not sense-­ impressions!) that we have no choice but to structure, and keep on structuring, even in our dreams, until we lose all consciousness. So we begin to structure, first by means of our bodily interactions, next by means of our concepts. But the work is never done as the world never loses its capacity to impress us with new material, that is, new meaning. In a way, then, we never simply make sense of the world. Rather, we make sense of the sense the world already makes for us. Yet, as soon as the day has come when we master our concepts, we think we thereby not only master the storm of significance, we place ourselves at the eye of it, declaring ourselves the sole origin of meaning, sense, and significance. From now on, it is our conceptual generalities to which the world must conform. Our concepts have turned into conditions which the world has to satisfy. What arrogance to think the world owes obedience to our concepts. What folly to claim the matter of the world no longer matters, simply because we are unable to temper matter with words. What hybris to identify the world with a perspective. Berlin, March 25th 2022

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439240-11

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Index

4E approaches 1, 2, 57, 70, 94, 116 abstract causal organization 35–36 Adams, F. 1 aesthetic evaluation 128 algorithm 14–15 Aniston, J. 110–111 Aristotle 79, 107 Armstrong, D. 27–28, 68, 135–136 art 59, 74–76, 86n3, 110, 148 artefacts 33, 40, 44, 61–66, 110 Asimov, I. 30 Austin, J. 134, 137, 145n3 Barad, K. 1, 15 Berry, H. 110 biological function 63–65, 68–69, 100 bodily turn 1 body: as condition for the attribution of numerical identity 129, 132–140; as condition for an evaluative perspective 94; as condition for a notion of matter 97; as condition for a notion of the real 100; as condition for personal identity 106, 108–109, 123–124; as constellation of meaning 113; as symbol 112 body image 122–123 body schema 122–123 body swapping 109, 113–114 brain state 22–24, 26, 70 brains in a vat 11 Brette, R. 121n5 Burms, A. 4, 53–57, 59, 60, 69, 70n7, 85, 112, 118, 121n7, 140, 145n7, 148 Butler, J. 1

Cao, R. 67 categorial identity 3–4, 40, 43, 44n13, 45–48, 50–51, 56, 62, 64, 70, 72–79, 80–86, 89–90, 92–95, 100, 109, 128–129, 130–131, 140, 148 categorization see classification causal role 31 causal topology 35, 61 causal-­structure interpretation of multiple realization 39, 41–43 cell division 15 C-­fiber activity 41 Chalmers, D. 1–2, 12–13, 16–18, 20n15, 21n25, 21n26, 30–31, 35–36, 39, 44n8, 100–101, 114–115, 119, 121n9, 149 Chemero, T. 2 Churchland, P. 13, 19n8 Clark’s nutcracker 141 classification 4, 10, 25, 38–39, 43, 45–46, 48, 77, 86, 131 classifying subject 38, 43, 48, 72 cognitive science 1, 2, 94, 117, 121n6 computational theory of mind 2 computer 5, 14, 17, 31, 35–36, 39, 42, 52, 114–115 conflation between abstract and particular 11 conflation between specific and specified 13 consciousness 5, 12–13, 20n16, 31, 35, 106, 115–116, 123, 130, 132 content questions 88 content view of perception 9 continuity thesis of meaning 57, 59–60 conversion of abstract and particular 8, 11, 15, 25 corporeality 90, 94–95, 99

Index 159 Costall, A. 44n13, 70n2, 71n11 Curtis, V. 98–99 Darwin, C. 14 definite descriptions 79–80 Dennett, D.C. 10, 14–15, 34, 37, 120, 121n13 depreciation of body and matter 3, 10, 31, 121n10 Descartes, R. 9, 105–106 Dewey, J. 7–9, 11, 13–15, 18, 19n1, 19n2, 19n5, 19n12, 25, 67, 96, 99, 101 disgust 98–99, 100–103, 137, 146n8 DNA 34, 37, 86 Douglas, M. 146n8 dualism 15, 42, 106, 114–118, 121n11; and property dualism 116–117; and substance dualism 117–118, 121n11 Duns Scotus 72, 76 Dyke, H. 27, 136 embodied cognition 1–2, 4, 20n13, 94, 116, 121n12 embodied experience 19, 101 embodied interaction 5 enactivism 1, 4 evaluative perspective 52, 73–74, 77, 94–95, 125 evolution 14–15, 67–68 Frege, G. 60 functional isomorphism 11, 104–105 functional meaning 52, 56, 61, 63–64, 69, 81–83 functional role 15, 29, 34, 42, 44n11, 47, 49, 64–65, 68–69, 72, 77, 82–83, 93, 106–107 functional state 23–24 functionalism 1, 3, 9, 10–11, 14–16, 19n9, 29–31, 43n6, 44n11, 45, 68, 102–103, 106, 115–116, 120 functionalist fallacy 3, 10–11, 15, 36, 65, 101, 118 Gadamer, H.G. 148–149, 150n1 Gallagher, S. 6, 70n5, 122–123 gene, genes 26, 34, 37, 64 Gibson, J. 58, 94, 145n4 Godfrey-­Smith, P. 71n15 gold 51, 81–84, 92, 101, 131

haecceitas see particular identity Haraway, D. 1 Haugeland, J. 63, 65 Heidegger, M. 109–110 Heil, J. 33–34 historical fallacy 14, 67 human body see body Husserl, E. 108, 123, 138 Hutto, D. 6, 13, 20n22, 44n11, 71n14 hypostasis 88, 135 identity attribution 131 identifying-­as 43, 46, 56, 63, 77–78, 89 identity theory 22–24, 40–44, 116 implementation relation 11, 35, 39–41, 118, 120 instrumental function 18, 63–64, 66, 68–69 intellectualism 8 intentionality 123 internal representation 66 irrelevance of the medium see medium-­independence irreplaceability 6, 17, 20n24, 75, 84, 85, 86n6, 90, 102, 142–145, 147–149 James, W. 14, 19n5, 58, 145n4 Johnson, M. 55, 57–59, 70n10, 139 Kipling, R. 87, 88, 91n1 Kripke, S. 38, 44n9, 79, 81, 86n5 Lakoff, G. 57, 139 Levin, J. 29 Lewis, D. 42 linguistic fallacy 27 Locke, J. 5, 106–109, 114–116, 121n1, 124, 130 Lycan, W. 41, 117, 121n11 Malafouris, L. 6, 19n7, 70n9 marks vs criteria 86, 143 Martin Guerre affair 105 material particularity 5, 6, 9, 15–19, 37, 50, 53, 55, 74–80, 82, 84–85, 86n2, 89–90, 92, 96, 122, 140–144, 148–149 material relation 6, 143 materiality 1, 3, 5, 16, 18, 23, 32–33, 37, 40, 43, 47, 50–53, 55–56, 61–62, 69–70, 74–75, 79–82, 84–86, 92–93,

160 Index 95, 98–104, 108, 118–120, 122, 136–137, 144 matter doesn’t matter 4, 10, 29, 35–36, 38–41, 43, 47–49, 51, 53, 61, 69, 76, 120 matter matters 1–3, 11, 37, 47, 50, 52, 78, 85, 100 McMullin, E. 119 meaningfulness see significance medium-­independence 12, 31; see also substrate neutrality memory 5, 106, 108, 126–127, 130, 132, 141 mental state 4, 22–24, 26, 29, 41–42, 83 Merleau-­Ponty, M. 20n13, 93–94, 108–110, 122–123, 139, 140, 145n4 Millikan, R. 64, 66–67, 71n13 mind as disembodied 2, 3, 30, 95 mind uploading 5, 11, 109, 114, 117–118, 121n12 mind-­independence 25 mind–matter relation 3, 4 model and modeled 118, 120 moral evaluation 128 MR see multiple realizability multiple realizability 4, 15, 19, 22–24, 30, 33–34, 36, 38–40, 43, 47, 49, 51, 56, 60, 61, 68–69, 72, 78, 81–84, 92, 107, 116, 118, 120, 134, 136, 148 multiple realization see multiple realizability Myin, E. 6, 13, 20n19, 44n12, 71n14, 103n2 natural selection 14, 66–68; as selection for 66–67 Neander, K. 64–66, 69 neural computation 12 neurocentrism 117 New Materialism 1 Nietzsche, F. 133–134 numerical identity 3, 6, 26, 28, 78–79, 118, 122, 124, 128–140, 143–144, 145n2; see also body as condition for the attribution of numerical identity object-­constitution 78 Occam’s razor 116 Oljesya, Y. 95, 139 One over Many 28 organizational invariance 12, 20n15, 31, 115

pain 22–24, 26, 29, 32–35, 37, 41–42, 45–46, 48, 70n1, 78, 83, 133 particular identity 4, 44n10, 77–80, 84–89, 129–131 personal identity 5, 106, 107, 123–124, 126–129 personification 139 philosophy of mind 9, 11, 22, 24, 29, 33, 55, 116 physical state 23, 41 physicalism 98, 116 physiochemical specification 5, 38, 52, 56, 70, 73, 77, 86, 92 Piccinini, G. 12, 20n17, 31 Place, U. 41, 116 Plato 3, 7–10, 15, 27–28, 30–31, 43, 45, 79, 105–106, 121n10 Plato’s double blind 28, 43, 45 Platonic Forms 9–10, 30 Platonism 3, 9–11, 31, 115, 120, 121n10 Polger, T. 19n10, 20n18, 32, 36, 39, 43n4, 70n3 possible worlds 38, 79, 80 proper function 64–67, 71n13 proper names 79–80, 84, 86n6, 90, 110–111 psychologist’s fallacy 14 Puccetti, R. 41 Putnam, H. 1–2, 10–13, 22–24, 29–30, 32–33, 35, 37, 39, 42, 47–51, 56, 61, 64, 77, 81–82, 92–93, 97, 100–102, 104, 116, 118, 122 qualitative identity 78–79, 136 quidditas see categorial identity Quiroga, R.Q. 60, 110–111, 121n5 raison d’être 65, 83 real: as irreplaceable 17; as opposed to fake 101 realization relation see multiple realizability reidentification 6, 28, 79, 86, 132, 137, 138–144, 147, 149; as functional 142–143; as nonfunctional 143–144, 147 reification 88, 112, 135–136 reify see reification relic 55, 57, 59, 71n17, 74–76, 128, 144, 149 Renfrew, C. 6, 19n7 replaceability 21n24, 84

Index 161 representational fallacy 27, 136 representationalism 68 rigid designation 79 Rosenberg, A. 71n16 Rozin, P. 86n4 Russell, B. 7–8, 17–18, 19n1, 19n12, 79–80, 96, 99, 101 Sacks, O. 145n1 Sameness over Difference 28–29, 31 sameness over time see numerical identity Sartre, J.-P. 46, 61–62 Sellars, W. 52, 70n4, 97 Shapiro, L. 19n9, 20n18, 32, 33, 36, 39, 42, 70n3, 83 significance 4–6, 15–16, 18, 30, 55, 74–76, 84, 86n6, 89, 102, 110, 112, 122, 127–128, 144, 147–149 silicon 20n15, 30, 31, 34, 115 Smart, J. 41, 116 socionormativity 25, 72, 90 soul 5, 30, 106, 108–109, 112, 113–115, 121n10 space of reasons 66 spatiotemporal continuity 129–130, 134 Stich, S. 68 Strawson, P. 112, 121n8 strong embodiment of meaning 53–57, 59, 74–75, 85, 128, 144; see also weak embodiment of meaning stuff 5, 21n24, 30, 50, 61, 81, 96, 100–101 substance 5, 34, 50, 81–82, 106, 114, 116–118, 121n11, 131, 135, 140 substrate 5, 12, 14–15, 29–37, 93, 96, 101, 115–116, 120, 121n12 substrate neutrality 14–15, 35, 37; see also medium independence

Swiss cheese 1, 2, 10, 30, 33, 35, 37, 39–40, 47, 49, 64, 92–93, 102–103 teleofunctionalism 63–64, 67 teleology 62–63, 65, 67, 70 tokens as instantiations 9, 23, 24–26, 29–32, 38–39, 41–42, 45, 47–49, 52, 134, 136 transhumanism 115 Travis, C. 20n15, 148, 150n2 Turing machine 12–13, 36 Turing, A. 12–13, 36–37, 92 type-­realism 25–26, 31 types as kinds 4, 9–10, 23–30, 38–43, 45, 47–49, 52, 56, 68, 72, 83, 93, 134, 136 universal 25, 27–28, 72, 74, 136, 148, 149 Van Riel G. 30 virtual reality 1–2, 4, 16–18, 21n26, 100, 145 water 49–52, 58–59, 68, 82, 89, 112, 117, 133 weak embodiment of meaning 4, 53, 56–57, 60, 68–69, 119 Weisberg, M. 119 Wetzel, L. 26, 27, 43n1, 72 whatness see categorial identity wh-­questions see content questions Wiggins, D. 45, 130, 131 Williams, B. 5, 6, 108, 122–124, 126–130 Wittgenstein 4, 53–55, 57, 59, 88, 91n2, 108, 121n3 Wollheim, R. 18, 86n2 Zahnoun, F. 20n21, 44n12, 121n6