DOUGLAS C. LONG

DISEMBODIED

EXISTENCE, PHYSICALISM AND

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

(Received 13 July, 1976)

I

The idea that we may continue to exist in a bodiless condition after our death has long played an important role in beliefs about immortality, ultimate rewards and punishments, the transmigration of souls, and the like. There has also been long and heated disagreement about whether the idea of disembodied existence even makes sense, let alone whether anybody can or does survive dissolution of his material form. It may seem doubtful that anything new could be added to the debate at this late date, but I hope to show that this is not so. I will explore the problem of disembodiment from a somewhat different direction than has been tried before, one that leads to what seem to me more interesting and more definite conclusions about its unintelligibility. Furthermore, the approach I will be taking puts both the traditional mind-body problem and the competing claims of dualism and physicalism in a fresh light that can help us to understand better the nature of our embodied existence. The apparent ease with which the experience of disembodied existence can be imagined is neatly expressed by P. F. Strawson in his well-known essay on persons. One has simply to think of oneself as having thoughts and memories as at present, visual and auditory experiences largely as at present, even, perhaps - though this involves certain complications - some quasi-tactual and organic sensations as at present, whilst (a) having no perceptions of a body related to one's experience as one's own body is, and (b) having no power of initiating changes in the physical condition of the world, such as one at present does with one's hands, shoulders, feet and vocal chords. Condition (a) must be expanded by adding that no one else exhibits reactions indicating that he perceives a body at the point which one's body would be occupying if one were seeing and hearing in an embodied state from the point from which one is seeing and hearing in a disembodied state. 1 On the basis of this description of apparently disembodied experience Strawson concludes that we can conceive of a 'pure individual consciousness',

Philosophical Studies 31 (1977) 307-316. All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1977 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland

308

DOUGLAS

C. L O N G

a nonbodily entity which has psychological but no physical properties. I will refer to this conception as Philosophical Disembodiment to distinguish it from another form of nonsubstantial existence to be described presently. It seems so easy to imagine ourselves continuing to be conscious after dissolution of our bodies in the way Strawson describes that it is difficult to believe that any philosophical objections to this conception could ever be convincing. Nonetheless, there is a fatal error in the Strawsonian argument for the intelligibility of nonphysical existence, and exploitation of this error leads us ultimately to a clearer understanding of the emptiness of what I have called the philosophical conception of disembodiment. Strawson apparently assumes that to give a coherent description of an experience which does not include the usual perceptions of a body of one's own is, in itself, to give coherent expression to the hypothesis of Philosophical Disembodiment. But this assumption is not justified because someone's having the experience Strawson describes is compatible with his being in conditions other than Philosophical Disembodiment. It is possible, for instance, that the subject of the experience in question has a body but is prevented from having perceptions of it, perhaps by an especially disconcerting form of hysteria. 2 Another much more important alternative, however, is that the 'self' having the experience in question, far from being a 'purely mental' subject of consciousness, is a physical structure having a spatial location but whose constituent elements either are too small or are of insufficient energy or have the wrong kind of energy to register upon the senses of human beings or animals. Instead of being a Platonic nonphysical soul, a person might exist as a 'diaphanous' entity, as some kind of electromagnetic phenomenon, for instance, or as a field of energy or a sentient cloud of hitherto unknown particles. Anthony Flew calls this 'the Shadowman doctrine' of a 'corporeal' but 'ethereal and an elusive' soul. a I will refer to this view as the hypothesis of Diaphanous Existence since, although the conscious subject is a physical entity, it is not in the ordinary sense solid or material as are human beings and other animals. The significance of this hypothosis of Diaphanous Existence for our critique of Strawson's defense of the intelligibility of disembodied existence is that an invisible, intangible, but physical subject of conscious experiences might well have exactly the sort of 'bodiless' experience Strawson describes. Like a magnetic field, such a subject's structure would be detectable with the right equipment; but in the absence of such equipment its presence would go

DISEMBODIED

EXISTENCE

309

unnoticed. A diaphanous person's sense perceptors, therefore, might be unable to perceive his own subtle substance even where they could detect other 'solid' objects and persons. Hence, the occurrence of the 'bodiless' experience Strawson so readily imagines could be explained either by the hypothesis of Philosophical Disembodiment or by that of Diaphanous Existence. From this it follows that he is not justified in concluding that the first hypothesis is intelligible simply on the grounds that the extraordinary experience in question can be coherently described. The coherence of that description is one thing; the coherence of a particular hypothesis explaining why the experience has the character it does is another. II

Having argued that Strawson's remarks do not establish the intelligibility of Philosophical Disembodiment, I will now begin constructing my case for the stronger claim that such a conception of bodiless existence is hopelessly confused. Ironically it will first be necessary to bring the notion into focus as sharply as possible, a task which is greatly facilitated by comparing it closely with the idea of a diaphanous entity outlined in the previous section. We have already noted, for example, that such an entity might be invisible and intangible because its constituents are too small to register upon our sense organs. Ho~v does this differ from the invisibility and intangibility of a disembodied spirit? One important difference is suggested by P.T. Geach's test for the existence of 'subtle' physical bodies. The existence o f subtle bodies is a matter within the purview of physical science; evidence for it should satisfy such criteria of existence as physicists use, and should refer not only to what people say they have seen, heard, and felt, but also to effects produced by subtle bodies on physicists' apparatus. The believer in 'subtle bodies' must, I think accept the physicist's criteria of existence; there would surely be a conceptual muddle in speaking of 'bodies' but saying they might be incapable of affecting any physical apparatus. For what distinguishes real physical objects from hallucinations, even collective hallucinations, is that physical objects act on one another .... If, therefore, 'subtle bodies' produce no physical effects, they are not bodies at all.*

There is a serious ambiguity, however, in the necessary condition Geach suggests for an entity's being a physical object. He cannot mean that a genuine, albeit 'subtle', body must be capable of affecting the instruments available to physicists at the present time, for it is conceivable that there are physical entities in existence that are not detectable by even the most sophisticated and sensitive instruments available. Nor can this condition on what is physical

310

DOUGLAS

C. L O N G

be restricted to what physicists here on earth will encounter in their investigations. A 'black hole' far beyond our causal horizon certaintly counts as a physical entity. So does any entity whose structure eludes detection for reasons that have a scientific explanation, whether or not we happen to know what that explanation is. Therefore, if the conception of a nonphysical particular is to be distinguished from that of a merely undetected or contingently undetectable phenomenon, such a particular must be somehow in principle undetectable and incapable of influencing scientific instruments no matter how sensitive they become through future technological developement and it must have this character for reasons that it is not the business of science to provide. The absolutely crucial importance of this radical distinction between a 'subtle body' and a truly nonphysical conscious subject is easly overlooked when we try to imagine disembodied existence. It is tempting to think of the soul as an invisible and intangible locus of conciousness which, though elusive, may also influence materal objects directly, as in psychokinesis or in the misbehavior of poltergeists. In our casual and unsophisticated talk of the soul no serious doubts are likely to be raised about the assumption that spirits can affect objects in 'this' world while being themselves utterly beyond discovery and detailed examination by science. Even Strawson permits himself to think that a disembodied person could have the power of initiating changes in the physical condition of the world, although he dismisses this possibility as a 'rather vulgar fancy, in the class of the table tapping spirits with familiar voices', s Yet, robust worldly activity by an entity would cast doubt upon its alleged nonphysical character, for if it can alter physical states of affairs, this indicates that it is open to science to try to detect and measure such effects and to draw inferences concerning the location and nature of the being producing them. If the presence of a conscious entity could so much as deflect the pointer needle of a meter, we could no longer pretend that we understood what was meant by denying that such an entity was a species of physical phenomena. The mere fact that it had psychological properties and was in this sense a 'subject' or 'personality' would not support such a denial. Nor would the fact that its substance was so attenuated as to be very difficult to detect. Such explanations are appropriate to account for the 'hiddenness' of diaphanous entities, but not "genuinely" disembodied spirits. The substance of an individual that is not physical in a philosophically interesting sense must represent an alternative, not merely to grosser forms of matter,

DISEMBODIED

EXISTENCE

311

like that comprising our bodies, but to the most finely attentuated substances, to gases, to energy, to fields, and to any other kind of 'content' that science might postulate and incorporate into its intersubjective systems of explanation. Our central question then, is whether we can in the end make sense of the attempt to set limits to what counts as physical so as to define by contrast conceptual room for 'nonphysical' individuals. Is it intelligible to suppose that a conscious being could be incapable of interaction with anything we might regard as physical, not because it is too small or too remote but because .... Here words seem to fail us. A materialist will at once insist that the emptiness of the idea of something existing not merely beyond our physics but beyond the physical is only too apparent. We can conceive of no such limits to the physical. There is, however, one class of items which have traditionally been regarded as 'nonphysical'. Mental phenomena are said to be 'private', in the sense that they can be experienced only by the subject having them, unlike physical objects. Moreover, spatial locations do not seem to be assignable to thoughts and feelings, except insofar as the person having them has a location. Bodily sensations have a phenomenal place within one's body, but this does not count as an independently assignable location in space. For instance, the spatial location of a thorn in my f'mger can be given independently of its location in my f'mger, but the pain the thorn causes cannot be located in space independently of determining the bodily place where it hurts. Given these differences between ordinary objects and 'experiences' it is understandable that philosophers should mark the contrast by classing the latter as 'nonphysical' items. If such experiences are to pass all of the tests for counting as nonphysical, however, they must also differ from physical phenomena in being in principle undetectable by scientific instruments. Putting the point more generally, conscious experiences must be incapable of affecting any physical system if collections of them are to constitute genuinely disembodied personalities. If, like magnetic fields, for example, experiences could affect physical things, then their alleged epistemological privacy and lack of assignable location would be called into question. But can it be plausibly maintained that interaction between thoughts and feelings, on the one hand, and physical objects, on the other, is impossible? In what follows I will try to explain on behalf of the concept of Philosophical

312

DOUGLAS

C. L O N G

Disembodiment that this can be argued. It should be kept in mind, however, that I do this in order to be as generous as possible to the friends of 'nonphysical particulars'. Subsequently I will offer reasons for rejecting the assumption that experiences could conceivably constitute a personal subject. How then might one set about arguing that mental phenomena cannot act upon physical bodies and are therefore, in the required sense, 'nonphysical'? Consider some examples. It will be recalled that Geach draws a contrast between nonexistent objects represented in hallucinations and physical bodies, on the grounds that bodies act upon one another. Presumably what he means is that hallucinated objects, such as the dagger that appeared before Macbeth's eyes, do not interact with tangible, space-occupying bodies. Duncan's blood could not have been shed by means of that dagger. The point can be generalized in the following way. Not only are thoughts, feelings, and perceptions experienced exclusively by their respective subjects; they can affect directly only such subjects, not mere objects. For example, the only direct effect that a sensation can have is that of being felt by a particular subject. I can say that I feel a pain in my arm but not that my arm feels pain, since the arm is not properly regarded as a subject of experience. Again, it has been standard doctrine that another subject, say, my physician, cannot feel the pain I have in my arm, but it seems even more certain that nonsubjects such as his instruments cannot feel it either. Nor is there any other effect that pain, qua pain, could be said to have upon mere physical devices. The most the doctor's instruments can do is register the occurrences of certain electrical and chemical events which are correlated with my-feelingpain, or, if physicalism is correct, they would detect events which constitute my-feeling-pain. But do we not say that a pain can cause a wince or that a thought can increase the pulse rate? Are these not cases of direct causal intereaction between mental events and physical events? Here a defender of genuine disembodiment must insist that these examples rest on an elliptical description of the transaction. The pain is felt by m e , a personal subject, and my feeling it is said to make m e wince. But the pain cannot be said to trigger directly electrical and chemical events in my muscles independently of its effect upon me, even where the wince is not attributed to me as an action but is thought of as an involuntary muscle contraction. A sensation is not the kind of item that can by-pass a subject's feeling it and enter directly into causal relations with purely nonconscious physical items like muscle fibers,

DISEMBODIED

EXISTENCE

313

neurons, and chemical substances. If we trace back the 'causal chains' from the neurological events leading to my wincing we may think of ourselves as exploring the physical events 'underlying' my-feeling-a-pain-that-makes-mewince, but we cannot suppose that we might uncover a pain linked directly to a succession of physical events. We seem then to have found paradigms of the nonphysical which cannot conceivably interact directly with physical systems, even where the system happens to be a person. This impossibility is not due to a physical elusiveness but to the 'conceptual' restriction that mental phenomena in their capacity as experiences can be said to affect only subjects of experience and only in their capacity as subjects. A mind-body transaction must be described as proceeding by way of the person qua subject. It is not unreasonable to see this point as a vindication o f the traditional objection to mind-body interaction on the grounds that thoughts and feeling are 'too unlike' physical events for us to fired their interaction intelligible. 6 If these claims are correct, then a 'bodiless' stream of consciousness would seem to satisfy all the criteria for genuine disembodiment, including its being inaccessible to scientific detection devices, however sensitive they may be.

III

We are now in a position to assess the core thesis of the disembodiment hypothesis. We have said that a 'stream of consciousness' satisfies the criteria of the nonphysical. The question remaining is this: Can we use this concept of a stream o f consciousness to make intelligible the concept of a nonphysical subject o f experience? Two traditional philosophical views about the way persons are constituted are relevant to this question. The first is the Humean idea that a disembodied individual is a 'bundle' o f the sort of items we have singled out as paradigms o f the nonphysical, i.e. particular thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. It is reasonable to assume that if each element of the bundle is nonphysical then the whole collection will be. But the Humean account fails as a conception of a subject of experience for reasons that are by now familiar. The thoughts and feelings which are candidates for the class of nonphysical items are 'objects' of a subject's awareness and are not the kind of item to which the subject itself can be reduced. If such mental phenomena were to constitute the subject they would have to be independent particulars in their own right,

314

DOUGLAS

C. LONG

which would permit them to be contingently related to the group making up the subject. If they had this status, however, it would make sense to say, for example, that the particular pain Smith is suffering now might have afflicted Jones instead of Smith. But this kind of remark does not make sense because we distinguish sensations of different persons by identifying them as the experiences of different individuals, not by identifying them as distinct particulars in their own right. Hence, the experiences of different persons are not independent particulars which happen to come together to constitute a 'self'. The second view we have to consider, the Cartesian conception of persons, attempts to meet the foregoing objection to the Humean analysis by postulating a mental substance that is a unifying subject of conscious states. But this addition harbors two fatal difficulties. First, if there could be such a nonphysical substance, the dualistic conception of disembodiment would require that it be incapable of interaction with physical systems, including the human body. Thus a radical dualism of substances could distinguish Philosophical Disembodiment from Diaphanous Existence only at the price of rendering mind-body interaction and, hence, embodied existence, conceptually impossible. Second, according to traditional dualism a person is a nonphysical res cogitans that exists over and above its thoughts and feelings. But this point neatly cancels the very feature that made the Humean analysis appear to satisfy our criteria of the nonphysical. For if the subject is not constituted by nonphysical mental phenomena then we have no way to explain what it means to claim that it might be nonphysical. Perhaps it will be suggested that what is meant is simply that it exists, not diaphanously, but beyond all conceivable interaction with physical phenomena. But this will not do because the only way we have been able to draw an intelligible contrast between what is physical and what is not has been in terms of the salient features of thoughts and feelings. There is no reason whatsoever to think that this contrast can be extrapolated so as to render comprehensible a similar distinction between physical and nonphysical substances. This critique of Philosophical Disembodiment runs counter to the long acceptance of its intelligibility even by those who think dualism is false. Superficially it seems coherent to suppose that a mental substance might exist that is incapable of physical influence because it can only think and feel. But the point is that while the phrase 'because it can only think and feel' is intended to explain why the substance is incapable of physical effects, in

DISEMBODIED

EXISTENCE

315

reality it only repeats the claim that it is. That a substance has psychological attributes, i.e. thoughts and feelings, tells us nothing whatever about the ontological structure of the subject of those attributes. A subject of experience may be visible and tangible as are human beings, for instance; and although it does not foUow from the fact that some subjects are physical that all must be, it does follow that the concept of a subject of experience is too inclusive to mark off a distinct class of nonphysical individuals. The illusion that a subject could be a 'purely mental' individual, a thinking substance that has no physical structure, arises out of a serious confusion concerning the mental/physical dichotomy. At the level of personal ascriptions, the words 'mental' and 'physical' merely mark a contrast between two somewhat vaguely defined classes of predicate that are applicable to persons, or between two aspects of persons which we talk about in terms of the dummy subjects, mind and body. 7 Unfortunately in the traditional discussions of the mind-body problem this familiar contrast between classes of attributes has come to be misguidedly applied at a deeper ontological level. Hence the invention of the philosopher's myth - mental, nonphysical, or spiritual substance - which is thought to exist alongside 'physical substance'. The truth is, however, that there is no mental alternative to physical individuals at this ontological level. A person, therefore, is not merely contingently physical but must be physical, in the peculiar philosophical use of that term which contrasts only with the utterly confused idea that persons might be identified with one or more 'unobservable', 'private', 'undetectable' mental items that they are said to have, i.e. visual images, sensation, and thoughts. Hence to be a 'physicalist' in this sense is not to place persons in one ontologial category open to individuals rather than another, but is simply to reject the idea that persons might be something other than relatively dense or relatively attenuated individuals. This essential physicalism, though modest, is nonetheless important because it eliminates some of the long-puzzling questions about mind-body interaction and personal identity. It shows in addition that traditional 'materialism' is only in part an empirical hypothesis. For instance, from what we have said it is clear that J. J. C. Smart's rejection of what he much too loosely refers to as 'ghost stuff 's has an a priori justification insofar as he means by this to deny the existence of independent nonphysical (mental)particulars alongside the atoms and molecules composing a person. On the other hand, the question whether a person's being in a particular type of psychological

316

D O U G L A S C. LONG

s t a t e c o r r e s p o n d s t o o r c a n be h e l p f u l l y e x p l a i n e d b y his b e i n g in this o r t h a t ' u n d e r l y i n g ' n e u r o l o g i c a l c o n d i t i o n a p p e a r s t o be o n e t h a t o n l y science c a n a t t e m p t t o answer.

The University o f North Carolina at Chapel Hill

NOTES

Individuals, London, 1959, p. 115. 2 This point is made by O. Max Hocutt in 'Strawson on "Disembodied Existence" ', read at the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago, April, 1973. The present discussion is developed from my commentary on his paper. 3 See Flew's article, 'Immortality', ed. by Paul Edwards, in The Encyclopedia o f Philosophy IV (1967), 140. 4 Godand theSoul, London, 1969, p. 18. s Strawson, op. cir., p. 115. 6 C.D. Broad discusses this and similar objections to mind-body interaction in The MindandIts Place in Nature, New York, 1951, p. 98. 7 I discuss the status of mind and body as paralled aspects of a person in 'The Bodies of Persons', The Journal ofPhilosphy LXXI (1974), 2 9 4 - 9 6 . 8 'Sensations and Brain Processes', The Philosophical Review LXVIII (1959), 153.