From Peter Millican, Hertford College, University of Oxford
The day before I saw Amanda Gefter’s article on the mind/body controversy (25 October, p 46), I presented a first-year general philosophy lecture covering the “thinking matter controversy” of the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes’s book Leviathan stirred up a hornets’ nest with his claim that minds are material. He provoked many notable philosophers to insist against him that “thinking matter” is impossible.
Passion over this was understandable – and remains so even today – since material minds would obviously cast serious doubt on immortality and associated religious doctrines. The main objection raised to Hobbes was essentially the same as the “hard problem” that Gefter cites as the nub of the issue: the unintelligibility of any physical explanation of subjective experience. You thus nicely illustrate the continuing relevance of the history of philosophy, as so many problems are rediscovered while too often the lessons from past discussion are forgotten.
David Hume argued (in 1739 and 1748) that we should not anyway expect causal relations to be intelligible: if they are not, the alleged “hard problem” is not such a problem after all.
That lesson proved indigestible to philosophers before the 20th century, seduced as they were by an apparently intelligible Newtonian science, but quantum mechanics beautifully confirms how Hume was right. Opponents of “intelligent design” who want to learn more from this history could go to www.philocomp.net/ai/thinkingmatter.
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From Alex Charles
Whereas most consider David Hume to have discredited “intelligent design” as early as 1776, the argument between materialism and the dualism that holds that mind is separate from matter has had no such resolution. This is partly because neither can be considered an “empirical” theory. The dualist will not be convinced by empirical evidence, since in the dualist’s view this evidence presupposes a disembodied “thinking” soul.
Fremantle, Western Australia
Oxford, UK
