Book Review
General Psychiatry
Physicalism and Its Discontents. C Gillett, B Loewer, editors. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press; 2001. 369 p. US$60.00.
Reviewer rating*: Very Good
Review by Dorian Deshauer, MD, FRCP
Ottawa, Ontario
During the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in the fundamental nature of the mind and consciousness, and, with intense psychiatric participation, several interdisciplinary symposia have taken place. Physicalism views the real world as nothing more than the physical world. It is opposed to the ontological existence of abstract objects, such as possibilities, universals, or numbers, and to mental events and states, insofar as these are thought of as separate from physical things (1). Physicalism and Its Discontents is a scholarly work, compiling 17 essays by distinguished experts in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind. This is not an easy book to understand thoroughly. It invites exploration of an area of profound theoretical relevance to each psychiatrist and researcher in the neurosciences. Exploring a wide range of issues, the multiple perspectives provided in this volume mirror its subject’s complexity. These perspectives cover the historical development and methodological implications of physicalism and their relations to consciousness and mental causation.
Much cogitation has gone on in the 350 years since Descartes’ assertion, “I think therefore I am.” In fact, his substance dualism—the basic assumption that there are 2 types of “thing” in the world, physical stuff and thinking stuff, both capable of an independent existence—has been eclipsed. Now, the prevailing doctrine among scientists is physicalism and the basic assumption—that only physical stuff exists. This goes hand in hand with another basic assumption that all enquiry can be ultimately reduced to the discipline of physics. Yet, even hard-line physicality may find it unpalatable to view every life experience as mechanistic epiphenomena. The individual experience of existence in time, in a cultural tradition with its various esthetic pleasures, richness of personal experience, and at least an illusion of free will, must, in the face of modern neuroscience, come to grips with an overwhelming body of evidence that there is nothing measurable in the universe other than physical stuff.
Thinking clearly about physical explanations for the most complex of events, such as consciousness and free will, is age-old, and the authors have chosen the emergence of energy conservation theories in the 17th century as a point of departure. Descartes believed that the mind nudges moving particles of matter in the pineal gland, causing them to swerve without losing speed, thus allowing the physical and nonphysical to interact without violating his theory of conservation of motion. Leibniz, on the other hand, upheld the conservation of linear momentum and kinetic energy—in effect, barring causal interaction between mental and physical. Mind and matter were, according to his theory, each causally closed systems, linked temporally by divinely preordained harmony. This would have been the end of the mind–body story were it not for the acceptance of Newtonian forces capable of acting at a distance. With gravity as a paradigm, along with magnetism, pressure, and centripetal force, the concept of mental forces as entities in themselves seemed credible for almost 200 years. It was not until the second half of the 19th century that converging lines of arguments from physics and physiology began to trump beliefs in vital or mental forces per se.
While physicalism owes much of its success to the empirical sciences, it must still answer to the problems inherent in our imperfect knowledge of the world. “Textbooks concern themselves only with setting up the set of physically possible worlds, as far as we can learn from quantum mechanics—and in these worlds, metaphysical necessities and laws of nature hold equally” (p 177). The challenge is that theoretical necessities hold also in a wider class of worlds, but our ability to differentiate between metaphysical possibility and physical possibility, conceivable and inconceivable, will ultimately call on metaphysical models. And in these models, what we allow to be metaphysically true is similar to what we allow to be true in stories we tell about imagined situations (p 187). Thus, the methodological role of physicalism is double-edged. On the positive side, when we have some body of facts and causal explanations that we are convinced are correct, we tend to look for a physical foundation. Conversely, when we are faced with a body of doctrine that we are convinced can have no physical foundation, we tend to reject it outright (p 227).
Despite its pitfalls, physicalism has indisputably yielded tremendous advances in the neurosciences, and it promises to continue these advances into the foreseeable future. But some thinkers have begun to ask about the limitations of physical enquiry in clarifying the relation between psychological processes and the brain, citing the seemingly infinite material contingencies underlying each mental state. While empirical scientists raise practical concerns stemming from the technical limitations of neurological investigations, philosophers tend to raise theoretical problems related to the conceptual irreducibility of qualities to quantities.
Because the arguments in these 17 essays aim at providing a state-of-the-art account of physicalism, the authors have had to assume some prior familiarity with philosophy. Because of the specialized arguments, the language and style are at times dry but never incomprehensible. Each essay stands on its own and is easily readable in a single sitting. For those enthusiasts who are interested in the implications of physicalism for mental causation, free will, and consciousness, the effort that this work demands will be more than balanced by the insights gained.
Reference
1. Blackburn S, Oxford dictionary of philosophy. Oxford (UK): Oxford University Press; 1996.
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