"Seeing an eye that sees a sun"
Below: in philosophy: the picture of
the soul as a man within a man.
We say: The picture is not quite as you have drawn it. But then how exactly is it? We are really too careless with the word 'picture'.
The picture of "the mind" as a man inside my head. But is my mind only in my head? Or is the "human body is the best picture of the human soul" (PI II, vi, p. 178h)? Saint Paul the Apostle could think of none better: he wrote that the resurrection would not be of the fleshy body. But, then, doesn't my mind also extend beyond my body -- e.g. Wittgenstein's example of feeling the hardness of an object in the stick that touches the object, not in the hand that holds the stick (ibid. § 626)? And sometimes doesn't my mind leave my body altogether? -- e.g. when I night dream, for then my body remains in bed but my mind may go anywhere -- even in time. And when I day dream about walking on the moon -- doesn't my mind leave my body as my eyes glaze over and ...? (And I don't mean: 'doesn't it seem as if' -- because there is nothing for 'seem' to contrast with here. The picture is that the mind does leave.) So that, 'mind' and 'body' are not even co-extensive concepts -- i.e. the mind often occupies different space. Even sometimes less space than the body: for if the dentist drills a tooth, or if I bang my elbow hard -- doesn't my entire mind go to just that point -- i.e. to my tooth or my elbow? If I loose a limb, I might not say that I have also lost a part of my mind -- but I would have every right to say just that.
But if the above picture doesn't give us the correct idea of the use of the word (PI § 305) 'mind' -- then have I, while describing this picture, been chattering nonsense? For I have been using the word 'mind'. What shall we say: that I have not been using our word 'mind' (same sign, different grammars, etc.)? A very strange thing to say! But nonetheless true. In the picture, I have given the word 'mind' the grammar of the part of speech ghost-word or spirit-word. But don't we also use the word 'mind' that way? In the concerns of everyday life -- No! (Only examples will show.) Only in the pictures of philosophy -- i.e. grammatical day dreams -- do we use the word 'mind' this way. Then it is a use of the word -- and not nonsense? Of course. The word 'elf' is not nonsensical -- in fairy tales. We might say: these pictures -- this use of the word 'mind' -- do no harm so long as we remember that a picture is just that -- i.e. a picture. Our philosophical pictures are not explorations of the "really real"; -- they are fairy tales. (cf. "A thought experiment is no experiment.") Which is all we may need to see for these pictures to loose their charm for us. "But elves don't exist!" Neither does "the mind", but only the word 'mind', and if we want to know the meaning of that word, we have to look to the "language-game that is its original home":
When philosophers use a word ... and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used this way in the language-game that is its original home? (PI § 116)
Is the word 'mind' the name of something?
If one says that the word 'mind' is the name of an object, then one gives a false account of the grammar of that word, a false account of its use in the language of every day. There would, however, be nothing to stop one from inventing a new use for the word, e.g. 'The phenomena that we call 'mental' have as their source an intangible object called 'the mind''. But one could not then say: "I have invented a theory about mental phenomena." For all that one would have invented would be a new way of speaking -- a new rule of grammar; and while this rule could serve as a "picture", it would not be an hypothesis -- i.e. there would not be any question of testing whether or not it is true; those words would have no sense in this context. But the question is: why would one invent this picture -- what purpose could it serve? For it could in no way add to our knowledge; what cannot be true or false cannot be known either. Perhaps one could believe in this picture -- and what would belief look like here? Perhaps the believer would not seek physical remedies for mental disorders (e.g. headaches) or would be perplexed by the body's apparent tyranny over the mind. Language can indeed be invented -- new grammars, new (in this case) "unverifiable pictures", myths; but these picture-grammars are not theories.
We fancy that we are exploring "the really real", when all we are exploring is what we are inclined to say. And yet there remains a temptation to say that this new picture might be important, as a corrective to another picture -- i.e. the picture-grammar 'The mind is really the brain; mental phenomena are really brain phenomena'. -- But isn't that an hypothesis, that picture? Yes and no. It is the "principle of enquiry" (OC § 87, 670) of a science. But the concept 'mental phenomena' -- i.e. the grammar of the expression 'mental phenomena' -- is not fixed with respect to source in the language of every day. And therefore 'really' above makes this hypothesis a new grammar, one justified by a theory (CV p. 44). However, trying to put forth a "counter theory" shows the philosopher's fundamental misunderstanding of the logic of language; because it is to imagine that one is inventing an alternative explanation of a phenomenon -- whereas one is only inventing an alternative grammatical rule. The correct procedure when confronted with a scientific hypothesis like the one above is to remind oneself of the way we use the word 'mind' in the language (and that means: our life) of every day; then it will be clear whether what is involved is a question of fact or of rules.
What are we calling 'the brain'?
Once upon a time we might have been tempted to say that we look through our eyes (as we look through a telescope); we might have imagined the eyes as holes in the skull, the cornea of the eye being simply a window pane. But now Drury has introduced "the highly complicated nervous and photo-chemical structure of the retina, the optic tract ... and finally the radiation of the calcarine fissures of" -- of, in a word, all that non-descript gray matter. So that, now the metaphysical-I seems frighteningly isolated, cut off from reality by the mediating barriers of sensory organs. So, to this "picture of the mind and its place in nature" we have been led -- the mind buried in the brain? No, writes Drury, for he then goes on to consider the various levels of physical investigation:
[We] have been basing our conclusions [-- recall: "if we are to base any conclusions on physiology"] on the certainty that we know a good deal about the anatomy of the sense organs and the nervous pathways to and in the brain. How did we acquire this knowledge? (DW p. 67)
The anatomist mapped what we find when we open the skull; the physiologist used a microscope to show what cannot be seen with the naked eye; the geneticist "passed out of the field of even microscopical vision" -- "I am sure the geneticist really believes in" the double helix he draws on the blackboard; but now the physicist comes along and cuts even the helix's solid bits of carbon and sulfur etc. into sub-atomic particles -- so that, Drury exclaims: "what has happened to that nice solid brain we saw in the anatomy room?" (ibid. p. 67-9)
And what has happened to the mind along with it? The "relation of mind to brain" -- but now what does the word 'brain' refer to -- i.e. what really is this brain that the mind is hidden away in? A buzzing hive of sub-atomic particles?
In the Mind and Outside the Mind
Schopenhauer said that what we know "is not a sun, but only an eye that sees a sun". Now, what knows this eye is the mind. So that, we have a three-part picture -- the mind, intervening sensory organs, the external world. But Drury points out that this picture leads us to "complete subjectivism" (p. 67): for how did we ever imagine our way from affected receptor organs to external stimuli; indeed, where did we ever get the notion of "receptor" organs at all (p. 64)? The only way this picture is drawable is if -- we take up a position right outside it and imagine ourselves looking down on its three parts. But how did our mind -- buried away as we have said it is in "the brain" -- ever get to that privileged position? Whence did the mind get the notion of an external world if it is locked away behind the barriers of "receptor organs"?
(All these double quotes -- The expression 'so-called' would serve as well -- mean that, since we are using the picture that has been suggested to us, it is no longer clear what these expressions are to mean.)
Imagine that you always had a box over your head. You see changing images on the inside walls of the box. Very well, now, let's suppose you hypothesize: somewhere in the walls of the box there is a hole that admits these images from someplace outside the box; -- so that, the images you see on the walls of the box are only shadows from a world outside the box.
We are imagining a kind of camera obscura such as was constructed during the Renaissance -- with the difference that the Renaissance artists knew where the hole was and were able to step outside the box -- i.e. room.
But where did you ever get the notion of a box -- for if we imagine the images on the walls of the box to be like the world we perceive, then the walls resemble the backdrops, scenery and actors in the theater -- though, as varied -- indeed as varied as the actual world itself. (Imagine e.g. the sky to be a backdrop for the stage.) Now, but remember, we have so far only got as far as the "receptor organs" (which are what the box is supposed to represent); hence, our hypothesis that there is a hole to admit the images from an "external world". But why go on to ask about this "external world" -- for it could, after all, only be a picture, not even an hypothesis, that an external world exists: verification is out of the question.
We are left, then, with the mind and its "receptor organs". But those organs too are only a picture now, for that they "received" anything from an external world was only a picture. So that, in the end, we are left with only the mind and its perceptions. But why speak of "perceptions", for to perceive is to perceive something, and it is only a picture that there is anything to perceive (cf. receive: for the receptor organs in the original picture, after all, belonged to us, not to the external world; if the receptor organs belonged to the external world, then they would be receiving us rather than the external world, for we would have turned them around, reversed their direction.) So that, we are left with the mind and its world -- though what 'world' is now to mean isn't clear.
So that, we are left with the mind and "it". But what is this mind? It is simply "what stands in opposition to it" -- for the eye is not in its own visual field, etc. We are left with the subject and the object; and remember: the subject is a bare subject. For if we perceive only receptor organs, then the "body" -- i.e. the receptor organs -- are completely in the visual field. There is no longer any basis for an inner-outer distinction: -- the stove, the blister, the heat, the pain, are all on the same level. There is no longer any basis for objectivity (for a what-belongs-to-the-world, what-belongs-to-the-observer distinction): to be real is to be "perceived", full stop.
The expression "other minds" will have no meaning either. For the subject is not to be identified with mind; for a mind is an individual character (personality), whereas the subject is not. Indeed, the most appropriate name for the-subject-and-the-it is "the mind". The mind. For another mind would be another world; but if the world is all that is the case, then there can be no "other" minds. The subject and its world -- the TLP picture: "what the solipsist means is quite correct" (5.62b).
Idealism is a speculative position" (Fichte) -- i.e. don't try to visualize it. No, the Realist and the Idealist see exactly the same world (e.g. if asked to draw what they see when they open their eyes, their drawings would be identical). "A philosopher is not a man out of his senses, a man who doesn't see what everybody sees." (BB p. 59) Wittgenstein asked if they did not merely talk differently -- i.e. merely employ different grammars.
From which there is no exit
For Idealism, Drury's "complete subjectivism", there exists only the mind. And why? Because of Descartes' "new way of ideas": the direct object of perception is an idea in the mind. And if we begin "in the mind" (cf. the box above), we never find a justification for getting out of it (nor indeed even a justification for thinking that there is anything outside it).
Or again: 'How are we to get outside the circle of our ideas and sensations?' Can one ask: 'How are we to get inside it?'? (An equally strange question.) If a child chalks a circle on the pavement, we know what 'inside the circle' and 'outside the circle' mean in this context. But although 'inside the mind' and 'outside the mind' suggest a picture, it is never explained how (grammatically) this picture is to be applied. Again: 'The direct object of perception is an idea inside the mind.' -- Let us imagine that a box is placed over our heads: it delimits our visual field. An opening, not within our visual field, in the box (So we "hypothesize" -- the quotation marks mean: there is no way to test this) allows light reflected by objects outside the box to enter the box and cast images on its walls. We see the images. Here we can say: the direct object of perception is an image inside the box. But we do not know if the box itself produces the images or if it only transmits them from outside itself. Now, the Idealist (i.e. idea-ist) wants to say that the mind is like our head-inside-the-box: we perceive ideas within the mind but do not know if they originate inside or outside the mind. -- But how are we to apply this simile? If we take away the box, then what are the words 'inside' and 'outside' any longer to mean? It is as though someone were to say: Imagine an elephant, but without a trunk or a tail, without ears or a head, without legs, -- indeed, without a body. Well, yes, but now what is the word 'elephant' to mean? (cf. DW p. 16) If you take away the grammar of a word -- the rules that give it meaning -- then you end up with a meaningless sign.
'If we start in the mind, we cannot get out into the world; but if we start in the world, we cannot get into the mind.' -- This is like a house without a door: you are either inside or outside. But if a house has no door, it is because we have not given it one. A place you can 'be in, but not out of', is a place you cannot be in either. The only 'can' in philosophy is grammatical.
You say: the Idealist and the Realist only talk differently. But haven't they also got different pictures? (They have different picture-grammars.) The Idealist: the subject and its world; the Realist: mind -- receptor organs -- external world. Are they talking nonsense? No, I think we have shown what their pictures are; and so, I think that Fichte was wrong, and that it was important to show that he was wrong by inventing a picture of Idealism. "Only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do can you solve their problems" (CV p. 75). Then are we simply denying that the pictures of the Idealist and the Realist have a corresponding reality? No. "What we deny is that the picture ... gives us the correct idea of the use of the word" (PI § 305); or as Drury put it: we are rejecting a picture "of the mind and its place in nature ... which is of no use at all" (DW p. 79).
"They only talk differently" -- but not only from one another, but also from the rest of us -- and even from themselves -- when we -- and they -- are using language to do its work of every day. According to Malcolm, G.E. Moore saw that difference in itself to show the philosopher that he ought to suspect that he is confused:
But I think a philosophical problem can take this form only if one sees the soundness of Moore's defense of ordinary language. One is tempted to say that certain ordinary expressions cannot have a correct use: at the same time one realizes that of course they do. Then one knows that one is in a muddle. [Note 4]
You recall that as we looked at our box picture we kept coming across expressions that have an ordinary use but that in the context of the picture had become meaningless. Of course, Moore's remark does not in itself show the philosopher how he has gone wrong, but it does show him that if he is tempted to say something like 'There cannot be immediate perceptions of the external world' he is confused. He should recognize this because: "our naive, normal, way of expressing ourselves does not contain any theory ... does not show a theory but only a concept" (Z § 223) -- i.e. the use of a word. And the philosopher cannot reply that perhaps the concept is false, because it is nonsense to apply the words 'true' and 'false' to concepts.
Of Realism and Idealism all we say is that all they are -- is pictures: possible grammars: rules for using the word 'mind', where the words 'mind' or 'metaphysical-I' are the "name" of some intangible something somewhere, as in a fairy tale. Of course, in saying that they are only pictures, we are saying that they are not hypotheses -- i.e. not real possibilities to be tested -- and so that they tell us nothing about reality. Very well, a picture exists.
Yes: one can make the decision to say 'I see an eye that sees a sun' instead of 'I see the sun'. But that is all. -- What looks like an explanation here ... is in truth an exchange of one expression for another which, while we are doing philosophy, seems the more appropriate one. (cf. PI § 303)
Now, of course, Drury was not trying to invent a rival picture -- an alternative "metaphysical theory of reality". Rather: he is rejecting any picture, in favor of our ordinary, everyday use of a word. In a word, our mistake was to ask what the mind is, rather than asking how the word 'mind' is used.
Part IV
Levels of Investigation - What is Ultimate Reality?
Back aways we left the brain cut into sub-atomic particles. Drury had asked: "what has happened to that nice solid brain we saw in the anatomy room?" We had looked to the anatomist, the physiologist, the geneticist, the physicist -- and we had thought to ask: but what is the brain really?
No one of the pictures that these various investigators build up to direct them in their work has any claim to priority over the other. All are necessary for a full knowledge of the subject ... At no level of investigation can we say, "Ah! now we have reached the real thing in itself ..." (DW p. 80)
Everything that comes to us by way of the senses is part of reality and worthy of attention at times, what aspect we choose to study in detail is a matter of choice.
... the advances in natural science have been due to wise and deliberate selection of certain aspects of the total given whole, and the ignoring of others. (ibid. p. 78-9, 78)
Aspects or levels of reality. We may imagine Socrates objecting, as in Plato's Meno: I asked you for reality whole, and you bring me selected parts. -- But if Drury is correct -- and remember: this is a conceptual question -- we have not given any sense to the words 'reality whole'. (This should be remembered whenever a philosophizing physicist is heard to speak in the reductionist manner of "ultimate reality".)
Note: that in science 'picture' means 'hypothesis', whereas in philosophy it means only a possible grammar or concept (logical possibility).
But in showing the ambiguity of the scientific term 'brain', Drury has pointed out another way in which the meaning of the expression 'the relationship of mind to body' is unclear.
[Professor] Eccles, you will remember [-- Drury has large quotes from Eccles' The Neuro-physiological Basis of Mind in his paper], spoke of the rudimentary nature of Descartes' [1596-1650] physiology, making it impossible for him to solve the problem of the relation of mind to body. [But Eccles (1956)] was in no better position than Descartes, and we or any subsequent generation will not be in any better position than Professor Eccles, to solve a problem to which the notion of a "solution" does not make sense. (DW p. 74)
"What is the relation of mind to body?" Before we rush off to conjecture, shouldn't we first try to get clear about the meaning of our word 'mind'? What is there that "anyone knows and must admit" (Z § 211; PI § 599) here? That we do not learn, nor could we teach anyone, how to use the word 'mind' by pointing to anything. The word is not learned the way the name of any object is learned; it has, therefore a different role in our language. (Anyone who knows our language of every day, knows this. Further evidence (facts) will not make us any more certain of it.)
Of course, we are convinced of the sound judgment of beginning this way. But how do we justify it to anyone else -- e.g. how do we answer Gilson's charge of logicism: that philosophical problems must be handled with methods appropriate to philosophy, not to logic, for otherwise these very real problems become "a mere question of words"? But, of course, precisely what Wittgenstein did deny is that philosophical problems are "philosophical" problems rather than logical confusions -- i.e. that there is any difference between philosophy and what we call 'logic'. And, of course, to call Wittgenstein's work in this context 'logic' as opposed to 'philosophy' is utterly wrong: we are here looking at a philosophical question and we are looking at it as students of philosophy.
"Philosophical investigations: conceptual investigations." (ibid. § 458) It simply happens that we also call conceptual clarifications 'logic', because conceptual investigations are clarifications of "the use of a word" (PI § 383).
Drawing pictures of the mind - A sound philosophical method
"What is the relationship between the mind and the body?" It sounds -- the syntax even looks -- as though we were asking about the relationship between two objects. So we should try to picture it that way. This is a good method in philosophy, because our heads are cluttered with vague and confused pictures that need to be brought into the light, i.e. questioned for their application to reality, and in this way be made harmless. So it is that I can use the expression 'our heads' fully aware that this is no more a statement of location than is the expression 'the notebooks of the understanding'. Where are these pictures located? In a moment they will be located on these pieces of paper; at present it makes no sense to say that they are located anywhere -- i.e. the word 'location' has as yet no application to these pictures. (BB p. 7)
Below: the mind perceives the activities of the body.
How does it "perceive" -- does it have eyes and hands? But then how do I apply this picture? How do I compare this picture with what it is said to be a picture of? (LC p. 63)
I say that I am thinking, but I cannot point to this thinking. (Why -- aren't I clever enough -- or is this language not defined?) Yet, I think, there must be something going on somewhere. So I say that it is going on "in my mind" -- that it is going on in an unknown somewhere in an unknown something: I postulate the existence of an unperceived "something" and call it 'my mind'. -- Or is it unperceived?
... no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference ...
... the mental activity of the part of the world constituting ourselves occasions no surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be -- or, rather, it knows itself to be ... Our bodies are more mysterious than our minds ... Our view is practically that urged in 1875 by W.K. Clifford --
"The succession of feelings which constitutes a man's consciousness is the reality which produces in our minds the perceptions of the motions of his brain." [Note 5]
Testimony varies here. According to some people consciousness is felt behind the eyes (too much reading or sinus trouble); according to others it is felt in the throat -- William James [PI § 413] -- (too much tobacco smoking or lecturing). (And how strange that there could be any dispute about the location of "the first and most direct thing in our experience ... known to us by direct self-knowledge".) Clifford's "perceptions of motions of his brain", however, sounds like a pathological condition; I have never felt my brain move, and hope I never shall. However, suppose that whenever we thought we could feel our brains pulsating, as whenever we chew we can feel our jaw working; and suppose that other people, by touching our heads, could feel our brains pulsate too; or that our heads visibly pulsated when we thought. -- Perhaps then we would have a very different concept 'thinking'; it would still be a matter of correlating the physical and psychological; but remember: we do not doubt that without eyes we would not see -- though the basis of that certainty is only a correlation. Clifford says a "succession of feelings ... constitutes a man's consciousness"; -- but is that how we learned to use the word 'consciousness'? But even if it were, 'consciousness' would still not be the name of something, for the same reason that the word 'pain' is not a name-of-object. And that 'mind' is not a name.
However, we do have a picture of our minds being located in our heads; correlations are also made between the sense organs in our heads (eyes, ears and so on). Don't I say that I "see through my eyes" and the I "hear through my ears"? That without eyes and ears I would neither see nor hear? The picture: my body is a tool, or collection of tools, which my mind makes use of.
Do I have a picture of a little man inside my head who, like the engineer of a train, pulls my body's levers?
There is a person in my head. When he wants to talk to the world, he uses my mouth. When he wants to talk to me alone, he uses his own mouth.
Yet if my mind is to feel with my body's hands, then mustn't this little man also be in my hands -- indeed, mustn't he be co-extensive with my body? Such that: "The human being is the best picture of the human soul" (CV p. 49)? And a good thing, too, because the little man inside my head is an absurd picture: it leads to infinite regress: the fellow in my head, my mind, must have a fellow in his head, his mind. So let us consider, instead, a purely mechanical picture of the mind.
Below: When the gears move, I am thinking.
But suppose I have a thought when the gears are not turning? I open my head and look through a mirror at my insides -- that's how I know that the gears are not turning. (Could a doctor be imagined to examine a prosthetic brain this way? (Z § 607) But, now, which would he be checking -- the soundness of the mechanism or the soundness of e.g. my reasoning?) And I cannot say that this cannot happen, that I could not think without the gears turning; -- because don't I still have yet another picture: a picture of a disembodied soul or mind or ghost with ethereal eyes and ears and hands and thoughts?
Pictures often best explain the meaning of our words
But my pictures are silly? They do not convey the sense of these notions? I cannot imagine what other sense these notions might have.
In general, there is nothing which explains the meaning of words as well as a picture. (LC p. 63)
And why should such a picture be only an imperfect rendering of a spoken doctrine? Why should it not do the same service as the words? And it is the service which is the point. (PI II, iv, p. 178g)
The truth is that even if there were an ethereal little man in my head, or metal gears, a beehive of electrons, or whatever, none of these would be what we mean by the word 'mind'.
... the famous English physiologist Sherrington ... recalls that as a student in Germany the Professor put one of the Betz cells from the cerebral cortex under the microscope, and labelled it "the organ of thought". A few days later a tumor of the brain was being demonstrated in the pathology department and one of the students asked: "And are these cells also engaged in thinking, Herr Professor?"
Now this I think was a really witty remark. For it made a piece of concealed nonsense obvious nonsense. (DW p. 58-60)
Parallel Vocabularies
We have a physical vocabulary (e.g. 'brain', 'neuron') and a psychological vocabulary (e.g. 'mind', 'thought'), and, not only can't the language of the one be translated into the other -- but even if it could (in the way that doctors "translate" the word 'pain' to 'affected nerves' e.g.), it would do nothing toward resolving the mind-body problem: because a redefinition of the word 'mind' is not what we want. When we ask about the mind-body relationship, we mean 'mind' in its everyday sense. And metaphysicians, unlike scientists, realize this. Their mistake is to make this analogy: physical language has to do with a physical body and, therefore, psychological language must have to do with a psychological, or, spirit (ghost-like), body. This is simply the ancient mistake of taking all words for names, whereas words (nouns) may be something else entirely. (The entire dispute between "materialists" and "dualists" is over picture-grammars: neither has a "theory of mind".)
But the logician can go on saying the words 'mind' and 'brain' are not used the same way, that they are different concepts, belong to different conceptual systems -- but the logician cries this in the wilderness. A nominal (substantive) still makes us look for an object (substance), and since 'mind' must be the name of an object -- and since it obviously isn't applied to any object we can see -- it must be the name of an ethereal object ... So, very well then, let us postulate the existence of an ethereal something. But where does that get us? Does it in the least help us to understand mental phenomena, does it make the relation of mind to body any clearer -- indeed, does it make anything any clearer?
When we learn the word 'God', don't we learn this rule: 'God is the name of an invisible person'? So then why shouldn't we make just this rule: that the word 'mind' is the name of an invisible human organ? Or is there already such a rule -- for haven't the confusions of the philosophers become commonplace; hasn't every student heard of the "ghost in the machine"? But people had myths about the soul long before there were philosophers (e.g. a picture I did not describe: The soul is a person's breath, and consequently it is dangerous to exhale: one's soul might be stolen). So how then can we speak of bringing this word "back from its metaphysical to its everyday use"? Because this is a case where metaphysics is not nonsense but rather: pointless myth-making; and the metaphysical use of the word 'mind' is the role of a word in a fairy tale. These myths ("unverifiable hypotheses"), contribute nothing to our knowledge; they only create the illusion that we are investigating a phenomenon when we are doing nothing more than drawing idle pictures.
What is the Meaning of a Word? (What work does it do?)
When we learned language, were we taught that we had two bodies -- a physical one and a spiritual one (soul)? Were we taught that there was a body we can touch and another that was the essential us (our soul)? The meaning of a word, however, is what work is done with it, not the myths that we are taught when we learn to use the word. Words are tools.
We cannot ask a question about the object, because there is no object that goes by the word 'mind'. And we don't get around this by saying the 'mind' is the name of "suprasensual object"; for 'Zeus' too is such a name, yet nothing obliges us to believe in its referent -- as if the "existence of Zeus" had ever been an hypothesis. Metaphysics creates a myth about "the mind", but such a myth has no more connection with reality than any Olympian myth has.
But has it any -- less? Who has not in times of illness regarded his body as a nightmarish prison? But that again is a picture -- and not one we are inclined to employ when in the grips of sensuality -- e.g. when there is something beautiful to see or hear, least of all in the rutting season, when the body indeed fills us full of lusts and loves and fears and fancies of all kinds (Phaedo 66b; quoted by Drury, DW p. 83). It is an important picture to us, but so was Zeus. The "theory" -- the notion that the picture explains something --, not the picture itself, is the mistake.
J.J.C. Smart, if I remember aright, wrote that there was an "unacknowledged verificationism" in Wittgenstein's work. And it might look that way above. For don't we require (PI § 107) that names be names of "physical" objects -- things we can point to and touch or whatever, and don't we require that hypotheses be verifiable? The question is: what else are the words 'name' and 'hypothesis' to mean? We fix the grammars of words in certain ways not because we have a "theory of reality" or a "theory of intelligibility" -- but because we use a logic designed to make the meaning of language clear -- by making distinctions. We have not so defined 'metaphysics' as to make metaphysics nonsense. Not all metaphysics is nonsense (although neither is it theoretical).
"Nihil est in intellectu ..." (Z § 262) -- How do you know? Had E.T.A. Hoffmann ever seen an old woman metamorphose into a coffeepot? No, and no one has ever seen that. "But the elements of this picture -- i.e. old women, coffeepots, and transformations (the caterpillar into a butterfly e.g.) -- have been seen. The writer only rearranged them." This shows that 'Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses' is a tautology (i.e. that nothing will be allowed to count against it), and therefore that it is idle. (Any statement that can be "proved true" by means of an "argument by analogy" is tautological, because everything can be shown to be similar to everything else -- in some way or another.)
It may also be said that logic makes nothing but destructive criticism. But this assumes construction to be an alternative role for philosophy. Whereas if philosophers only construct "houses of cards, buildings of air" (PI § 118), then perhaps philosophy has been misconceived. Perhaps Socrates' ultimate goal was not destruction, perhaps destruction was only a first step along the way -- but perhaps this notion is Plato's corruption of Socrates' teaching; it was not the goal assigned to Socrates by the Delphic oracle. Perhaps the goal of philosophy is destructive criticism: to destroy the illusion of knowledge, to destroy the illusion that philosophy can know.
Exactly how is the mind dependent on the body?
Back to Drury's "to solve a problem to which the notion of a "solution" does not make sense" (DW p. 74). For many pages now we have been looking at why it does not make sense. Yet Drury was after all a clinical psychiatrist -- no one in a better position to know just how "disastrously" related or dependent mind can in some sense be on body (ibid. p. 59). Nor, of course, is he denying that:
All that I am criticizing is the vagueness and the misleading interpretations which that phrase "dependent on" can give rise to. I want to fix a more precise meaning to that phrase, to determine its limits. (p. 77)
You remember Professor Eccles' original program. He said he was going to investigate ...
"Investigate". This is indeed a great word. We live in an age ... when everything is investigated, both in the heavens above and the earth beneath ... So what could be more natural than to investigate perception and memory ... "in the same way". There is no more dangerous phrase in philosophy than that one "in the same way". Are you sure that this same way is still open? Perhaps there is a limit to what can be investigated by science.
One of the main tasks of philosophy is to show the limits of what at first sight seems limitless. So let us enquire more closely into the real nature of scientific investigation. That means taking a concrete example and seeing what we really do when investigating. (p. 70-71)
But now notice what we are completely dependent on, what we assume to be perfectly valid, in such investigations. We depend entirely in every one of these procedures, even the most recondite laboratory ones, on perception and memory. Sight, touch, hearing, memory, language, these are the instruments of [each and every] scientific investigation. Therefore they themselves cannot in turn be investigated. (p. 71)
Now, of course, there is an obvious sense in which perception can be investigated. Consider the case of the study of perspective and color as used by artists to create the illusion of fore, middle and backgrounds in their paintings, or even Wittgenstein's remarks about the duck-rabbit drawing that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. (But also note how different these studies are from the "theoretical investigations" our metaphysicians above tried to undertake.) So that, how can Drury say that perception "cannot in turn be investigated"? A telescope (ibid.) can after all be made the object of a separate investigation. But now, suppose the telescope were the only instrument of investigation we had -- such that we had no other instrument with which to investigate the telescope. We think: well, suppose then that we point our telescope at a mirror. But then we are still looking through our telescope into the mirror. I think Drury is saying that human sight is just such a telescope as we have imagined: for human sight will be used to investigate human sight (and similar remarks can be made about memory). So that, "in every enquiry there will always be that which is not enquired into" (ibid. p. 72). Ultimately, my own sight must stand fast for me ... unless I abandon it. But then I would be like one born blind, who --
... could by reading Braille answer correctly all questions concerning the structure of the eye and the optic tract, but would never come to an understanding of what was meant by sight. (ibid. p. 72-3)
The Difficulty of Explaining something Simple
I said before that Drury was looking at sight religiously. And this comes out in his saying:
[The] difficulty is not one of explaining something very complicated and profound, but of showing the immense importance of something so simple that it continually escapes our notice. (p. 69-70)
I want to say that every time you open your eyes a miracle occurs ... Every time you wake up in the morning and return to consciousness a miracle occurs. (p. 73)
Logically, it makes no sense to say that the experience of sight itself can be explained by the physiologist -- because we have given no sense to the word 'explain' in this context; -- and because we would reject any possible sense which might be suggested to us. It is as though Drury said: Stand in reverence of this, and let your reverence be the end of the matter. Recall Drury's remark:
Philosophical clarity then arises we see that behind every scientific construction there lies the inexplicable ... Philosophical clarity puts a full-stop to our enquiry ... by showing that our quest is in one sense mistaken. (p. xii)
"Why do you demand explanations? ... They cannot get you any further than you are at present." (Z § 315)
An explanation will not explain what we want explained; -- because what we want is the "ultimate explanation", what doesn't exist.
... the difficulty -- I might say -- is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it ... the solution of the difficulty is a description [of a form of life], if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell on it, and do not try to get beyond it.
The difficulty here is: to stop. (ibid. § 314; cf. § 220)
Kierkegaard's definition of 'Socratic ignorance'
That is to point out the limits of investigation, or to begin to look at life the way Kierkegaard described in his Journals:
The majority of men in every generation ... live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, and that if it were granted to them to live longer, that life would continue to be one long continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever [discern] that there comes a critical moment when everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood. That is Socratic ignorance and that is what the philosophy of our time requires as a corrective. (Quoted by Drury in "Letters to a Student of Philosophy", in the journal Philosophical Investigations, Volume 6 (1983), p. 164)
What does Drury mean by 'consciousness'?
I think that is what Drury is aiming at with his remarks. I simply wonder whether Drury gives his description, e.g. of "those subtropical times ... when the coal measures were laid down", at the right point in his considerations. Recall that he said:
You see, what we picture when we construct in imagination the theory of geological evolution, is how the world would have looked to a mind capable of being a spectator of all time and existence. So once again you can't bring consciousness in right at the end and say that it itself is the product of evolution. (DW p. 109)
Consciousness cannot be a product of evolution, because evolution is a product of consciousness. Consciousness is the "instrument" with which this theory is constructed: everything pictured in the theory is a construction of human consciousness; without that consciousness there could be no theory. Or again: If our sole instrument is a telescope -- i.e. if we view the world through a round aperture --, then we cannot say that the shape of the world is round: we cannot attribute a round border to what we see through a round aperture. (Drury couldn't find the comparison that would make his meaning clear either.)
Drury is not likening the human mind to the mind of God ("Who was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be") and, therefore, saying that it is nonsense to say that the human mind evolved into being. Drury does not say that the human mind is a spectator to "all time and all existence" -- though it would be perfectly correct to say that, since it would only mean that we can imagine ourselves being spectator to "all time and all existence". He is not saying that 'Consciousness is the product of evolution' is nonsense in that way. For in that way, the sentence would be false, not nonsense. But why does Drury say: 'So' -- i.e. therefore?
Ask yourself: what do we need to know in order to determine whether or not "consciousness is a product of evolution"? (In a way, we are fighting a tautology: for everything, according to the picture of evolution, is a product of evolution; -- but then the picture of evolution must also be, and where did it evolve but in human consciousness.) Certainly we don't need additional facts, e.g. from the fossil record. But what do we need? Drury says: 'you can't'. Now what kind of impossibility is this?
Does Drury mean that the sentence 'Consciousness is a product of evolution' is nonsense -- or that it is false? But if a sentence is meaningless, it is only because we have not given it a meaning (-- and that means that we do not know what it "means" (Human beings mean things by words; words (ink marks, sounds) in themselves do not mean anything) --) and not because its meaning is, as it were, meaningless (PI § 500). But why, then, doesn't Drury try to give it a meaning -- and by this technique show that it is nonsense (ibid. § 464)?
What do we need to know in order to determine whether ...? What we need is a rule. So, then, why not state the rule that Drury seems to be following: 'The instrument (Here: consciousness) that is used to construct an hypothesis (Here: evolution) cannot be an object in the hypothesis (Here: cannot be placed in the series of evolutions).' This could belong to a Rules for Reasoning in Science; but then it would only be a matter of method, not of sense and nonsense.
Is this rule arbitrary? Not if it follows from other rules of grammar, e.g. those of the word 'hypothesis'. Does it? (Is this correct: 'Since -- as a grammatical rule -- every object must have a weight [color, size, space-time, etc.], we cannot say that weight [color, size, space-time, etc.] itself is a feature of reality'?)
Can a machine think? It can calculate. And isn't calculating one of the things we call 'thinking'? But a machine isn't aware that it is calculating -- and isn't that awareness what we call 'consciousness'? But suppose the machine flashed a red light whenever it was calculating (e.g. as opposed to a blue light whenever it was not calculating); -- could we then say that the machine was aware that it was calculating? This shows why the notion of a physiological explanation of consciousness is absurd. Suppose a correlation -- an isomorphic: one to one correlation -- were made between the statement 'I am aware that I am calculating' and neural activity; -- very well, would consciousness have been explained? (Mightn't this also be done with a parrot's brain?) The notion of an explanation makes no sense here, because there is no way to translate the psychological-word 'consciousness' into physiological language. So that, even the fullest correlation imaginable between mind and brain doesn't take us one step in the direction of an explanation. (Psycho-physical parallelism? Parallel lines don't meet. It is our concepts that run parallel, unintersecting.)
What is the difference between a calculating machine and a calculating human being? The word 'consciousness' -- and all that the life of a word involves -- is applied to human beings and not to machines. If a machine uttered the words 'I have consciousness', this would have no more consequence than if a parrot uttered them -- unless the machine behaved the way human beings do (and parrots do not). (PI § 360)
[Consciousness is a matter to] which the notion of "explanation" is not applicable ... something that the notion of explanation as to how it came, and comes to be, does not make sense. (DW p. 92, 76)
Whatever Drury means by 'consciousness' -- it is not the behavioral criteria we can give for applying the word 'consciousness'. It is not behavior that concerns him here.
Do we know that dogs are sighted? We observe their behavior, study their anatomy; -- in an important sense we do know. But I think Drury would say: we no more know what sight is for a dog than a blind man understands what we mean by sight. Perhaps we would be unwilling to call anything 'understanding' or 'knowing' in this context.
And Drury is not asking how anyone learns to use the word 'consciousness' either. (That is only one technique we use toward getting clear about the meaning of a word.) Faust writes "In the beginning was the deed" (CV p. 31), rather than the all too indefinite "word" [as if the meaning of a deed were not itself indefinite]); but about the beginning, Drury is not asking here. The notion that "the reflections inspired by a thoughtful philosophy" (Philebus 67b [translator not named], quoted by Drury, DW p. 56) -- that mature reflection must bow to the behavior of the child -- where is that written in logic?
How do I know what Drury means by 'sighted'? Only from my own case -- by introspection? "... then I know only what I call that, not what anyone else does." (PI § 347) But Drury is not writing autobiography.
As soon as we prescind from the normal circumstances in which we use the word 'sighted', we don't know what we are to say. And this is because there are no rules of grammar here to contrast with statements of fact; our utterances are neither -- i.e. we talk nonsense. We utter a lot of words and think we know what we are saying -- even though we have no criteria for distinguishing sense from nonsense here. As soon as the beginning is not the deed, we no longer understand the logic of our language. And of course we don't -- because it no longer has a logic.
... unreflective use of the words "outer" and "inner" ... compelled us to picture a boundary which had to be crossed ... There is no such boundary. (DW p. 78)
That is a grammatical remark. By 'unreflective' Drury means that a "thoughtful philosophy" is one that takes into account the logic of our language.
Part V
Is consciousness a fact of experience? Is it a phenomenon?
'Consciousness is the product of evolution.' -- If we say that a sentence is "nonsense", we are only saying that it is undefined.
'A is a physical object' is a bit of instruction we give only to someone who does not yet understand the meaning of 'A' or of 'physical object'. It is therefore instruction in the use of words, and 'physical object' is a logical concept. (Like color, quantity, ...) And that is why no such statement of fact as 'There are physical objects' can be made. (OC § 36)
Is 'sight' a logical concept? Is it like 'object', 'color', 'quantity', 'extension' (PI § 252), 'space'? Can we say 'Sight exists'? Doesn't the evolutionist want to say 'Before human beings existed consciousness did not exist'? A statement of fact cannot have less than two possible values: true and false. And what the evolutionist utters is a statement that cannot be falsified. Does the evolutionist talk nonsense -- or does he make an applicationless picture? But 'Physical objects exist' is not a picture.
I tried above to consider the notion that 'Consciousness is the instrument of all enquiry', likening it to 'All perceptions are space-time perceptions'. And to say 'The color red exists' is to say no more than that there are red objects, as opposed to objects of other colors. To say 'Quantity exists' or 'Extension exists' is to say no more than that there are techniques of counting and measuring etc. But to say 'Consciousness exists' or 'Human beings have consciousness' -- is that to say anything at all? Can we imagine these being used even as bits of grammatical instruction?
Is my having consciousness a fact of experience? (PI § 418)
The expression 'fact of experience' means 'statement of fact' -- i.e. something we learn and which might be false. But Wittgenstein asks a very strange question, for note that 'being conscious' here does not contrast with 'knocked over the head' or 'being asleep' (as opposed to 'being dead', which is not an instance of 'being in an unconscious state').
But doesn't one say that a man has consciousness, and that a tree or a stone does not? -- What would it be like if it were otherwise? -- Would human beings all be unconscious? -- No; not in the ordinary sense of the word. (ibid.)
I.e. in the sense I just noted above. (Is it a statement of fact or of grammar that trees and stones do not have consciousness? The latter. -- ibid. § 360) But Wittgenstein goes on to contrast 'having consciousness' with 'being an automaton' (ibid. § 420). So that, 'having consciousness' means 'having a soul'. So that, saying human beings have consciousness simply means that we treat each other e.g. with compassion, as e.g. we do not treat a tree if it loses a limb in a storm. Now that is a bit of grammatical instruction. And looking at 'consciousness' that way makes it lose its occult airs. But then Wittgenstein adds:
But I, for instance, would not have consciousness -- as I now in fact have it. (ibid. § 418)
Well, isn't it a fact that any individual is sighted e.g.? Yes, if we say it about him. But suppose he says to himself 'I am sighted'?
'Human beings agree in saying that they see, hear, feel, and so on ... So they are their own witnesses that they have consciousness.' -- But how strange this is! Whom do I really inform if I say 'I have consciousness'? What is the purpose of my saying this to myself, and how can another person understand me? -- Now, expressions like 'I see', 'I hear', 'I am conscious' really have their uses. (ibid. § 416)
Yes, they can be turned into moves in our everyday language-games and thereby lose everything that is philosophically perplexing about them. (OC § 622) Still, we want to say: 'Not only do we see, but we are also conscious or aware that we see.' Granted, sometimes. But "how can another person understand me" if I say this? Well, I say, we say, he says, she says, etc. Wittgenstein gives this picture of the "evolution of consciousness":
The evolution of the higher animals and of man, and the awakening of consciousness at a particular level. The picture is something like this: Though the ether is filled with vibrations the world is dark. But one day man opens his seeing eye, and there is light. (PI II, vii, p. 184e)
Now, is this the same as the notion Drury spoke against above: "the long centuries of evolution have at last produced a phenomenon "consciousness""? (DW p. 107) It looks the same. Wittgenstein continues:
The picture is there - but what is its meaning?
What this language primarily describes is a picture. What is to be done with the picture, how it is to be used, is still obscure. Quite clearly, however, it must be explored if we want to understand the sense of what we are saying. But the picture seems to spare us this work: it already points to a particular use. That is how it takes us in. (PI II, vii, p. 184f)
The picture-language "suggests a use" -- and we take it as a matter of course that we know what the use is. But the question remains: does the picture have any application to the facts? For presumably the suggestion is that the picture is to be compared with the facts -- that the picture is a picture of the facts. But how is it to be compared?
[There] is a picture in the foreground, but the sense lies far in the background; that is, the application of the picture is not easy to survey.
The picture is there ... But what is its application? (ibid. §§ 422, 424)
The picture of blindness as a darkness in the mind
Wittgenstein gives this example: "the picture of blindness as a darkness in the soul or in the head of the blind man" (ibid. § 424). So let us consider this picture. E.g. what is its source? A sighted man closes his eyes and tries to look: he sees blackness, as though he were in a completely dark room. So we think: That must be the world of the blind man -- an endless night of infinite extension. (Does his testimony matter to us? Can we anymore understand what blindness-from-birth is than he can understand what sight is?) "The picture is there"; it exists all right. But now, what is its application -- how is it to be compared to the experience of Drury's "one born blind"?
Now, a picture can be used to make a statement of fact: this is how things stand if the statement is true; e.g. 'If the tree over there is a silver maple, then its leaves are shaped like this [and here we point to a drawing in a book e.g.]' Or there is the Paris court case: a scale model of a railroad station e.g. 'Here is the platform, the tracks, the switches and so forth; if the train is at platform no. 1, things look this way'. In these two examples, there is a one to one correspondence between the elements of the picture and the elements of reality; and the two can be laid side by side: that is how they are compared. This is called a 'picture according to mechanics'.
This is obviously not the application the picture of blindness as a darkness in the blind man's soul or head has. It is not a mechanical description of the facts.
We may think: 'Still, it might be verified in another way. -- We ask for the blind man's testimony.' If we are imagining a man born blind, then how are we to understand his testimony; e.g. suppose he uses the word 'darkness' -- what shall we take him to mean by this? "Oh, so you contrast 'darkness' with 'lighted', 'black' with 'white'?" There is no criterion for saying that he uses the words 'in the same way' the sighted man does. What does the word 'silent' mean to one born deaf -- what does it contrast with (The deaf Goya's paintings of people with their mouths open e.g.)?
What is the picture's application? Does the picture give us a correct idea of the use of the word 'blind' or 'blindness'? On the contrary: "We say that this picture ... stands in the way of our seeing the use of the word as it is" (PI § 305). Are we to say, though, that the picture has no application to the blind man? What do we call an 'application'? Suppose an artist in his studio draws various cross-sections of trees for us; he has never if fact seen the inside of a tree, but he makes drawings of what he imagines it may look like. Very well, then we take him to the forest and look; we make comparisons: here are felled trees, here the drawings. In such a case, a picture's possible application is clear. But in the case of the blind man? There is not even a possible application. We may think: Well, but God sees.
[The] form of expression we use seems to have been designed for a god, who knows what we cannot know ...
A picture is conjured up ... The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied. [It seems as though in] the actual use of the expressions we make detours, we go by side-roads. (ibid. § 426)
So that, we have this picture of blindness as a darkness in the blind man. Of course, we cannot (as if this were a factual, not grammatical, possibility) apply this picture, though it seems to us that surely it is what a god would mean by 'blind'. Meanwhile, we have circumlocutions, e.g. we have behavioral criteria for applying the word 'blind' -- because we cannot see the thing in itself, which is what it seems the picture shows us: the reality of blindness, blindness in itself.
But the picture has no application: the reality -- our actual use of the word 'blind' and, so, what we really mean by 'blindness -- is given in our language-games. (Yet, though we see that the picture has no application, yet how hard it is for us to accept that it has none. Pictures have charm.)
The picture of evolution as "the awakening of consciousness at a particular level" (PI II, vii, p. 184e). The first thing we notice is that: as a statement of fact, this picture is very strange indeed.
[Does] reality accord with the picture or not? And this picture seems to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and how -- but it does not do so, just because we do not know how it is to be applied ... Asking whether and how a statement can be verified is only a particular way of asking 'How do you mean?' The answer is a contribution to the grammar of the statement. (ibid. §§ 352-3)
How does one verify that: "Though the ether is filled with vibrations the world is dark. But one day man opens his seeing eye, and there is light" (PI II, vii, p. 184e)? Surely it is not this way:
You see, what we picture ... is how the world would have looked to a mind capable of being a spectator of all time and all existence. (DW p. 109)
For then our picture would be designed for a god who sees what we cannot see (PI § 426). No, that is not the picture's application; that is not what justifies it. But then how is that picture justified? In the same way as the picture of "those sub-tropical times ... when the coal measures were laid down" (DW p. 108). I.e. circumstantially. The circumstances we know -- and even these are "already facts in some theory" (Goethe: "All fact is already theory"), are "the geological formations and the fossil record" (DW p. 111). From these circumstances we proceed to build up our imaginative picture of "those sub-tropical times" or of "man opening his seeing eye". But these pictures have no application to reality; they are not a picture of any known reality -- otherwise they could be compared with reality. They are extrapolations from the evidence, children of the human imagination.
Very well, but how does that show that "you can't say that consciousness itself is the product of evolution" (ibid. p. 109)? By 'can't' Drury means: because you would be making a category mistake (ibid. p. 107: "Animal, vegetable, mineral, and -- consciousness"). You can point to the anatomy of the human eye, and on the basis of analogies, say that it is the product of evolution -- but you cannot do that with human consciousness (i.e. by analogy to what can it be said to have evolved?) Saying that 'consciousness' or the 'seeing eye' evolved is like saying that the number three is green -- i.e. 'consciousness' does not have the grammar of a product-of-evolution word, because it does not have the grammar of name-of-object. Now, is that clear? (I do not know. And perhaps I cannot know. Because we have divorced the word 'consciousness' from any use I am familiar with, I have no idea what we are talking about; I am only uttering a sign.)
Recall the picture of the blind man as a man with a darkness in his soul or head. We could find no application for it to have to the blind man. Now, have we a similar picture of the sighted man -- i.e. of a man with light in his eyes? Neither has that picture any application. "In the same way" the picture of consciousness as a product of evolution has no application. Now, is that clear? Hardly.
Why do we never question whether Drury might not be writing nonsense. We think: once upon a time, so we believe, there were no human beings. Therefore, if human beings evolved into being, then human perception -- which we are using as the defining criterion of 'human being' -- evolved into being. Now, what is wrong with this? We return to the different concepts: 'eye' versus 'sight'. Why is it correct to say that the one, the eye, evolved, but not the other, sight? And that has to be the notion involved: 'correct reasoning', and not 'meaning' (for we can give any sign a meaning). So, why isn't it correct? Or, why would it be correct? Under what conditions would it be correct -- if e.g. we avoided certain misunderstandings? Which would these be? Drury wrote:
The data of every natural science are data for consciousness. You cannot then bring consciousness in as one of the items of the hypothesis. The material used in the foundations cannot at the same time form the coping stone of the roof. Consciousness is not just one of the [many] things we are conscious of. (DW p. 108)
The Absence of a Rule - but of which Rule?
What does the metaphor nested in there mean -- what is this picture's application? Consciousness differs from the "many things" in the way a telescope differs from the many heavenly bodies; but how does the basement differ from the roof, for both of those can be made of the same material (there are e.g. concrete roofs)?
But don't the words 'I perceive' here show that I am attending to my consciousness? -- which is not ordinarily the case. -- If so, then the sentence 'I perceive that I am conscious' does not say that I am conscious, but that my attention is disposed in such-and-such a way. (PI § 417)
I do not see Wittgenstein's point any more than I see Drury's. So that, I end up where I began, still perplexed about what Drury was saying. In order to determine whether of not "consciousness is the product of evolution" we need, not facts, but a rule. But which rule?
"Concerning Mind and Body" - Parts 1-2
Note 3: The World as Idea, quoted by Friedrich Waismann in his essay "How I See Philosophy" (in Contemporary British Philosophy, London: 1956). [BACK]
Note 4: Norman Malcolm, "George Edward Moore" in Knowledge and Certainty (Ithaca: 1963), p. 183. [BACK]
Note 5: Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, [Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, January-March 1927] (Ann Arbor: 1958), Chapter XIII, p. 276-8. [BACK]
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