THE MIND AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE

Author: Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887-1971)
Type of work: Metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology
First published: 1925 (Tarner Lectures, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1923)

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Principal Ideas Advanced

Of the three theories advanced to account for differences in material objects -- vitalism, the theory of emergence, and mechanism -- the emergence theory is the most satisfactory: new wholes are formed in nature the behavior of w could never have been predicted from knowledge of the parts.

The mind-body problem (What are the relations between body and mind?) has been made difficult by confusion concerning the meanings of "mind" and "body"; but the solution probably is that mind affects body, and body affects mind.

There must he a center of consciousness which is more than a mere ordering of sense data, but this center may be nothing more than a mass of bodily feelings.

Memory traces are neither purely mental nor purely physiological; they are psychic factors.

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C. D. Broad shares the realist standpoint of his Cambridge colleagues, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and his work combines the former's meticulous habits of analysis with the latter's respect for the findings of the particular sciences. The present volume deals with the problems which confronted the new realism when it had passed beyond its early polemic phase and was faced with the task of formulating the details of its own position. It is a patient, at times wearisome, ransacking of modern knowledge for clues as to the ultimate constitution of the world. From an overall point of view it presents a single, sustained inquiry into the place of mind in nature, concluding in favor of a kind of emergent materialism. But the argument takes second place to the definition and analysis of problems which arise along the way, so that the work may be profitably consulted in a topical manner.

Among the questions dealt with are those pertaining to mechanism and vitalism, mind and body, perception and matter, the unconscious, and the evidence of man's survival of bodily death. Broad makes no claim to give original solutions to these problems. His method, which is more memorable than his conclusions, is to bring the widest possible range of hypotheses under investigation. Some of these he eliminates on the grounds of linguistic confusion and logical inconsistency, others for want of empirical evidence, until only two or three are left. Of these, he observes with diffidence that the evidence slightly favors one above the others.

Broad holds the particular sciences in high regard and believes that our understanding of the world is entirely dependent upon them. But in Broad's view the construction of a philosophy of nature is hampered by the failure of scientists to check their hypotheses with the findings of men in other fields of investigation. Thus, physicists have too long undertaken to give an account of matter without attending to the findings of biologists; similarly, epistemologists have traditionally discussed mind only in the context of knowledge and have neglected its relation to man's bodily life. Broad sees it as the function of the philosopher to take the lead in helping overcome this departmentalism. By formulating precisely what presuppositions and consequences a given explanatory theory entails, the philosopher seeks to help the scientific worker to see the limits of his evidence and thus to save him from committing himself to a more general hypothesis which, although suited to his purposes, may be rendered dubious by findings in another field. The philosopher must often take it upon himself to bring up alternative possibilities which experimenters have neglected, and to focus evidence upon them from widely separate sources. But the test of rival hypotheses is always the available evidence; and where this is inconclusive, the philosopher must be content to leave his questions unanswered.

Since many of the difficulties which are encountered in explaining "the mind and its place in nature" stem directly from wide-spread preconceptions about unity, substance, and causation, Broad begins his book by considering these matters at what he calls "the level of enlightened common sense."

The argument between monists and pluralists he finds confused by the failure on both sides to make clear whether their claims apply to substance, differentiating attributes, or specific forms. Spinoza, for example, claimed that there is one substance, but he supposed that there are many differentiating attributes, whereas Leibniz held that there is but one differentiating attribute but many substances. In our day, according to Broad, there is no serious question of our being anything other than substantial pluralists: what is in dispute is whether there is more than one specific form of being.

The issue between the vitalists and mechanists in biology is illustrative. "Are the apparently different kinds of material objects irreducibly different?" As Broad defines it, mechanism, when strictly interpreted, includes four related assumptions: one kind of stuff, one intrinsic quality, one kind of change, and one fundamental law of change. These assumptions provided an adequate framework for Galilean physics, but they have never been quite satisfactory for chemistry or biology, or for recent physics. When a modern scientist claims that he is a mechanist, he uses the term in a modified sense. According to Broad, there are three possible ways of accounting for apparent differences in the behavior of physical bodies: vitalism holds that they are due to a peculiar component, a soul or "entelechy"; emergence denies a peculiar component but maintains that new "wholes" are formed in nature the behavior of which could never have been predicted from a knowledge of their component parts; and mechanism, denying both of these contentions, holds that there is never anything in the behavior of the "whole" that is not determined by the parts and, in principle, deducible from a knowledge of them. Of these three hypotheses, Broad finds vitalism the weakest, both because of its obscurity and because of its non-verifiability. It was plausible only so long as it was thought to be the sole alternative to mechanism. Mechanism has in its favor the tidiness which it enables us to bring into our view of the world: since it seems highly probable that living cells are composed of chemical atoms, and that atoms are composed of electrified particles, one has only to suppose that these obey the same elementary laws and that they are compounded according to a single law to open up the possibility of a purely theoretical deduction of the behavior of any body from a knowledge of the number and arrangement of the atoms. But in our present state of knowledge, the facts suggest that there is less unity in the world than is postulated under this ideal. All the sciences present instances of wholes which are not intelligible in terms or their elements. For example, vectors cannot any longer be treated as sums in the ordinary sense of the word; organic compounds composed of identical elements in identical proportions are found to manifest distinct characteristics depending on the structure of the molecule; and, most obvious of all the data of consciousness -- colors, smells -- have no intelligible relation to the physical vibrations or chemical changes which we take to be their causes. Such considerations weigh in favor of an emergent theory of nature, according to which each level of phenomena must be dealt with in terms of laws peculiar to itself. Broad believes that vitalism arose because of real defects in the mechanistic explanation of biological facts, and that the emergent theory corrects the errors of mechanism with minimum loss to the ideal of unity, order, and law. While continuing to hold to one differentiating attribute, its proponents are pluralists when it comes to the question of special forms, which, they hold, are not illusory.

It is useless to ask whether mental facts are reducible to material or are to be treated as existing in their own right until one has considered what, in the light of current knowledge, these terms can signify. Broad reviews at some length the traditional debate over the mind-body question, but expresses grave doubts as to whether the debate serves any useful purpose. The arguments, he says, have been incredibly bad, making it difficult to see how they have imposed on so many learned men. If anything can be concluded from them, it would be in favor of the theory of two-fold interaction, rather than of psycho-physical parallelism or epiphenomenalism -- mind and body reflecting each other's activities. But in Broad'd opinion, the notions "body" and "mind" are so badly in need of clarification that it is doubtful whether the notion of interaction is suitable to describe the relation between them. The bulk of the book, therefore, is devoted to investigating the notion of mind in its various contexts.

We can get at it most directly by considering the mind in the knowledge situation. Broad enters the contemporary epistemological controversy and devotes separate chapters to perception, memory, introspection, and our knowledge of other minds. Especially important for understanding the constitution of the mind are such questions as: What is the status of sense data? Are they components of the physical object? Are they components of the perceiving mind? Or are they in some way distributed between mind and the physical object? Broad leans away from those theories which regard sensa (that is, sense images) as independent of mind and which interpret perception as a selective relation between two physical regions. The difficulty of accounting for illusion on these grounds causes him to favor the view that sensa are peculiarly related to the mind. On this theory, which is closer to critical realism than to neorealism, a distinction must be maintained between the epistemological object and the physical object. The former is made up of sensa -- color, size, shape -- together with a mass of bodily feelings and quasi-beliefs. The physical object is otherwise determined: extension and geometrical properties actually do characterize it, but they are never more than analogous to the size and figure which, as sensa, are present to mind.

But Broad's problem, in this book, is not primarily to give a theory of knowledge. Rather, it is to single out the elements in the knowledge processes which must be described as mental, and to ask whether these mental events presuppose a single substantive mind. Against the neorealists, Broad holds that there must be a center of consciousness which is more than a mere ordering of sense data in a field; but he leaves open, at this point, the question of whether the center need be conceived as a pure ego and develops the alternate possibility that it is no more than "a mass of bodily feelings." This latter, he believes, is sufficient to account for our conviction that there is a continuing, abiding self which is present as the knower in every cognitive act, particularly if it is allowed that the feelings are "causally dependent on the traces left by past experience."

It is the question as to the nature of these "traces" that opens up the whole problem of The Unconscious, to which Broad devotes the third part of his book. His analysis of this ambiguous notion is worthy of being consulted for its own sake. He is not without appreciation for the clinical insights of the psychoanalysts and for the light they have shed upon the existence and activity of traces and groups of traces which are inaccessible to introspection. But he is not so ready to grant the claim that these hidden factors are mental. Two theories balance out about equally at this stage of the investigation: the memory traces which seem called for to explain normal memory as well as aberrant behavior can be interpreted as mental; but they can also be viewed as purely physiological. The fact is, we know nothing about them in detail, and we can predict nothing on one hypothesis that we could not equally well predict on the other; but considerations of simplicity would favor the latter account.

Here we have a further instance of Broad's rule that one must leave open the choice between rival hypotheses until other fields are heard from. If epistemology and abnormal psychology are inconclusive, it remains to consider evidence for human survival of bodily death. If the mind or any part of it persists beyond the death of the body, this is important evidence against the physiological explanation of memory traces.

The traditional arguments for immortality, including the one based on moral worth, Broad regards as specious. He is more impressed by the evidence collected by The Society for Psychical Research, particularly accounts of seances which disclose information presumably unknown to any but deceased persons. But granting the facts, it is another thing to conclude that the whole mind survives. The low intellectual and moral quality of the alleged messages weighs against the view that anything comparable to a pure ego survives. Broad thinks that it is sufficient to postulate the persistence for a longer or shorter time after death of a "psychic factor," which is "not itself a mind, but it may carry modifications due to experiences which happened to John Jones while he was alive." This gives us a third hypothesis by means of which to account for the memory traces; they are neither mental nor physiological, but peculiarly psychic. In the normal personality, on this view, the psychic factor combines with neural processes to form the mind. In abnormal conditions, it may be temporarily divorced from the brain, and may (as in the case of multiple-personalities) organize itself into two or more selves which alternately unite with the same brain. In the entranced medium, shreds and snatches of psychic stuff come into temporary union with an otherwise vacant brain and form a "little temporary 'mind'" or "mindkin."

In a final chapter, entitled "Status and Prospects of Mind in Nature," Broad formulates seventeen types of theory combining the various alternatives which he has turned up along the way. All of the principal historical positions, from pure materialism to pure mentalism, appear in this classification, along with some that are of purely theoretical interest. The extreme positions find little to recommend them -- neither behaviorism, according to which mind is an illusion, nor mentalism (wrongly called "idealism"), which regards matter with the same disdain. The various intermediate types are necessarily more or less sophisticated, since they have to combine "mentality" and "materiality" in one system. Three of these alone stand up under the crossfire of Broad's examination. The first is Samuel Alexander's theory in Space, Time and Deity (1920), which Broad calls "Emergent Neutralism." On this theory, the ultimate reality is neither mind nor matter, both of these being emergent characteristics. The second is Bertrand Russell's theory in Analysis of Mind (1921), which Broad calls "Mentalistic Neutralism." It resembles Berkeley's theory in regarding matter as delusive, but rejects Berkeley's mentalism and takes mind as no more than a field of neutral sensa. Broad, while he can find no conclusive reason for rejecting either of these, finds more reason to favor a third theory, which he calls "Emergent Materialism." On this view, reality is thought of as being truly material, and mind as an emergent characteristic depending upon the nervous system. Such a theory is sufficient to account for normal mental activity such as knowing, willing, feeling. The memory traces can be regarded simply as neural patterns, and the notion of unconscious mental states dismissed. But the view can be modified, as we have seen, to take account of abnormal and supernormal phenomena by recognizing, in addition to the neural factor, a distinct psychic factor with its own traits and dispositions. Such a modification of the view can be accomplished, Broad thinks, without abandoning the foundation of materialism, by allowing that the psychic stuff is itself an emergent, and that conscious mind is a compound of neural and psychic factors.

In a brief concluding section, Broad indulges in some speculative flights entitled "The Prospects of Mind in the World." Since mind, as we understand it, exists only in connection with the brain and nervous system, we cannot conceive that it is active in the evolution of the universe or of the human race. The claim of mentalists -- that the world is the unfolding of a Cosmic Mind -- Broad rejects in favor of the cosmology of modern physics, which conceives of the universe as composed of different systems, some in process of running down and others, presumably, winding up. His rejection of the Cosmic Mind of the mentalists does not rule out Theism, which, he says, is as compatible with materialism as it is with mentalism. But he has nothing to say in its favor, and he concludes with the humanistic refrain, that the prospects are good for man to modify the world favorably by the exercise of his own mental capacities -- in the use of which he has barely made a start.