- Thoughts have privileged access.
- Physical things do not have privileged access.
- Therefore, thoughts are not physical things (1, 2).
- Thoughts are caused by minds.
- Physical things cannot cause nonphysical things.
- Therefore, minds are not physical (3, 4, 5).
By privileged access, what is meant is that thoughts are only accessible to the first-person subject having the thoughts. For instance, I (and God) alone have direct access to my inner thoughts. Nobody else can directly access my inner thoughts. Physical entities, however, do not have privileged access. They are “public” phenomena. In principle, anyone can access the properties of a physical entity “from the outside.” This is true, in particular, of my brain. In fact, a neuroscientist analyzing my brain would know far more about the properties of my brain than I would. Yet no matter how much the neuroscientist analyzed my brain, such analysis by itself would not be sufficient to know the contents of my thoughts. This is true even in the face of the neuroscientific endeavor of finding correlations between brain states and mental states. For such correlations cannot even begin to be conducted without initially relying explicitly on the first-person testimony of the test subject. This fact underscores the point that one’s inner thoughts are not publicly accessible phenomena even though one’s brain states are.
I think that the key premise is (5) Physical things cannot cause nonphysical things. Property dualists would reject this premise. (Property dualists think that there can be nonphysical properties that inhere in a physical substance. Many would say that thoughts have nonphysical properties but nevertheless inhere entirely in the physical brain.) But even apart from property dualism, the premise implies that our brains can have no effects on our minds (assuming that our minds are immaterial), which is clearly and demonstrably false. So, the argument appears to be self-defeating. If sound, the argument establishes that the mind is immaterial. But, if the mind is immaterial, then premise (5) is false given that the brain affects the mind. But if premise (5) is false, then the argument is unsound. So, the argument is sound just in case it isn’t. Thus, the argument, as it stands, does not work.
I do think, however, that (1)-(4) are sound, and thus the argument is enough to show that materialism (the mind and all of its related phenomena are entirely physical) is false. Showing the immateriality of the mind itself, though, will require a further argument.
There are issues with (2). "By privileged access, what is meant is that thoughts are only accessible to the first-person subject having the thoughts. For instance, I (and God) alone have direct access to my inner thoughts. Nobody else can directly access my inner thoughts." There are two ways I know of to interpret your definition:
ReplyDelete(A) S and only S (and God) can know what S thinks
(B) S and only S can assert propositions about what S thinks in the grammatical first person present tense indicative without providing evidence
(See Anscombe "Mental Events" in the second volume of her collected papers (Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind) for the second definition (although this is called "first person authority" rather than "the privileged access of the mental"). Suppose that by "thoughts are only accessible to the first-person subject having the thoughts" means (B) instead of (A). The first issue is that the (2) is false under that definition (however that's if I reinterpret (2) to be "physical" rather than "physical thing", which I don't think is too big of a problem since presumably you don't think that thoughts are physical properties or actions either), as first person present tense indicative action reports also have this property, not just propositional-attitude reports, and the same goes for observational-reports (and sensations are clearly not "immaterial" in the sense which it is Catholic doctrine that the mind is immaterial, since they have a determinate location, are caused by physical processes, are a communication of a material form, etc.). If I am raising my hand, I have privileged access to what I am doing with my arm and my hand, but raising it is nothing more than it going up, which is clearly physical.
If you mean (A) then the privileged access to the mental is not just false, but clearly false, as we can know what thoughts other people are expressing all the time (and that is one of the purposes of language).
Thank you for the comment! There is a lot here to think about. What I had in mind with respect to “privileged access” was that only S (and God) can know S’s thoughts without any reliance on S’s testimony. If I want to know S’s thoughts, then S must communicate them to me or to someone else who then communicates them to me. I cannot know S’s thoughts in the direct way that he knows them. This differentiates thoughts from arm-raising as I can easily know that S is raising his arm without any reliance on his testimony, but the same is not in general true (or so it seems to me) of S’s thoughts.
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