Merleau-Ponty Meets The Kripke Monster Redux: The Essential Embodiment Theory Now, #1.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

0. Introduction

1. The Essential Embodiment Theory Briefly and Compactly Re-Presented and Re-Motivated

2. Three Later Significant Elaborations and Extensions of The Essential Embodiment Theory: Natural Libertarianism, The Neo-Organicist Worldview, and The Metaphysics of Liberal Naturalism

3. One Cheer, But Only One, For Analytic Panpsychism

00. Concluding Semi-Autobiographical Quasi-Whiteheadian Postscript

This essay will be published in five installments; this first installment contains section 0.

You can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay, including the REFERENCES, HERE.

Merleau-Ponty Meets The Kripke Monster Redux: The Essential Embodiment Theory Now

It is never our objective [and fundamentally physical and mechanical] body that we move, but our phenomenal [and fundamentally living and organic] body, and there is no mystery in that, since our body, as the potentiality of this or that part of the world, surges towards objects to be grasped and perceives them. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962: p. 106; square-bracketted material added)

[S]omeone who wishes to maintain that the brain state and the pain are identical must argue that the pain A could not have existed without a quite specific kind of configuration of molecules. If A=B, then the identity of A with B is necessary, and any essential property of one must be an essential property of the other…. In sum, the correspondence between a brain state and a mental state seems to have an obvious element of contingency…. Here I have been emphasizing the possibility, or apparent possibility, of a physical state without the corresponding mental state. The reverse possibility, the mental state (pain) without the physical state (C-fiber stimulation) also presents problems for the [mind-brain] identity theorists which cannot be resolved by appeal to the analogy of heat and molecular motion. (Kripke, 1972/1980: 147-148, 154, square-bracketted capitalization added)

The Necker Cube Argument.

(1) Our conscious visual perceptions of the two enantiomorphic, or mirror-image-reversed, representations of the Necker Cube—call them the subjective experience of Necker aspect A and the subjective experience of Necker aspect B respectively—occur spontaneously.

(2) Now suppose that in the actual world brain state α partially embodies the subjective experience of Necker aspect A. It is … conceivable and therefore logically possible …, assuming that all physical properties in the natural world, including functional and behavioral properties, are held fixed, that brain state α might have partially embodied the subjective experience of Necker aspect B.

(3) So mental properties do not logically strongly globally supervene on fundamental physical properties.

(4) Therefore both explanatory reduction and ontological reduction are false, and PIM [i.e., the physical irreducibility of the mental] is true. (Hanna and Maiese, 2009: p. 281, square-bracketted material added)

0. Introduction

Almost fourteen years ago, Michelle Maiese and I published a 400-page book in the philosophy of mind with Oxford University Press, called Embodied Minds in Action (Hanna and Maiese, 2009). That book worked out what we thought was—and still continue to think is—a radically original and paradigm-shifting theory of the mind-body relation and mental causation.

Sadly, however, like David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, our book “fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots” (Hume 1776/2022: p. 6). In other words, it was completely ignored by the leading mainstream Analytic philosophers of mind—including David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett, Jaegwon Kim, and John Searle—not to mention also being completely ignored by all other philosophers, whether Analytic philosophers or so-called “Continental” philosophers. The only exception was a short review by a young and relatively unknown Analytic philosopher of mind, who merely described its basic contents and then said that the book was “highly ambitious,” which is an Analytic philosopher’s dog-whistle or coded speech for “not to be taken seriously; safely ignored.” Relatedly, more explicitly, and more negatively, someone else, another young but more professionally ambitious and nowadays better-known mainstream Analytic philosopher of mind, wrote in his personal blog at the time that he was “amazed” that this book was actually published by OUP, since he literally didn’t understand a single word of it, especially all that long-discredited Kantian stuff. Really? Not a single word? Not even the title? And what’s so bad about Kantian philosophy anyway? But over and above the all-too-familiar anti-Kantian dogmatism and prejudice that’s characteristic of what I’ve called “the Kant wars” (Hanna, 2020), and in order to be rationally extra-charitable to the blogger, one could, I suppose, from a mainstream Analytic philosophy of mind point of view, be officially “amazed” at OUP’s audacity, or temporary idiocy, in actually publishing a book that creatively and critically updates, re-works, and re-deploys Kant’s “highly ambitious” cognitive semantics and transcendental idealist modal metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason (Hanna, 2001, 2006a), for the specific purpose of rethinking the foundations of the philosophy of mind. What a scandal.

In a more upbeat spirit, however, also circa 2009, some advanced graduate students at a university somewhere in the American South, who were doing a self-directed study group on Embodied Minds in Action, wrote that a super-short but accurate synopsis of the bookwould be:

Merleau-Ponty Meets The Kripke Monster

and I’ve always liked that witty microsynopsis of our book. Indeed, there’s definitely something bang-on-target correct about it, methodologically speaking, in that it’s absolutely true that Embodied Minds in Action combines (i) a set of thoroughly non-reductive existential-phenomenological descriptions and also (ii) a substantive appeal to evidence supplied by contemporary empirical psychology, both as per Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his 1945 masterpiece, The Phenomenology of Perception, together with (iii) the formally rigorous logico-semanticmethods of contemporary Analytic modal metaphysics, as per Saul Kripke in his 1972 masterpiece, Naming and Necessity. So we methodologically triangulate phenomenology, empirical psychology, and modal metaphysics. And then (iv) they’re all philosophically distilled, refined, and transmogrified in the alembic of a broadly Kantian approach to cognitive semantics and transcendental modal metaphysics that’s directly inspired by Kant’s 1781 masterpiece, the first Critique. So we methodologically triangulate and then kantify.

An excellent example of this triangulation-&-kantification method is our Necker Cube Argument for the physical irreducibility of the mental, as per the third epigraph for this essay and the image displayed directly above it, which utilizes (i) the phenomenology of multistable perception, (ii) the empirical psychology of multistable perception, (iii) a priori conceptual modal reasoning, and (iv) Kant’s famous “incongruent counterparts” argument for the essential non-conceptuality and synthetic aprioricity of geometry (Hanna, 2001, 2006a: ch. 2, 2015: ch. 2)—the two Necker Cube aspects are in fact topologically deformed mirror-reflected left handed <–> right-handed configurations in egocentrically-centered orientable space, i.e., they’re enantiomorphs, aka Kant’s “incongruent counterparts”—in order to show that mental properties do not logically strongly globally supervene on fundamental physical properties.

More precisely, however, in Embodied Minds in Action we claim that the mental-physical relation in minded living organisms like us is nothing more and nothing less than (i) a synthetic a priori two-way necessary complementarity relation, and also (ii) a neo-Aristotelian hylomorphic relation, that is, a mental-to-physical and also physical-to-mental entangled necessary equivalence of “fused” inherently activating irreducible formal or morphetic mental properties on the one hand, and complex non-equilibrium thermodynamic material or hyletic biological physical properties on the other, such that, (iii) as minded animals, i.e., as conscious living organismic animal bodies, we’re an indissoluble and physically irreducible form-matter composite, by virtue of which we’re always “minding our bodies” (Hanna, 2011), that’s (iv) inherently poised for causally efficacious intentional action, spontaneously initiated and creatively guided by our synchronous acts of desire-based willing (Hanna, 2020b). In short, our minds are physically irreducible forms of animal life and we’re essentially embodied minds in action; and this is what Maiese and I call the essential embodiment theory of the mind-body relation and mental causation.

In this connection, the two spontaneously flipping enantiomorphic aspects of the Necker Cube provide an especially apt imagistic diagram of the relation between mental properties and organismic physical properties, by not only demonstrating the physical irreducibility of the mental, but also displaying an iconic metaphor for the necessary complementarity of causally efficacious physically irreducible mental properties and organismic physical properties, the hylomorphic dual aspects of rational human minded animals.

As I mentioned at the outset, Embodied Minds in Action was published fourteen years ago; and much water has flowed under the bridge since then, both philosophically and sociopolitically. Indeed, even despite the darkness, depression, and despair of our present-day world, perhaps it’s finally the moment for Merleau-Ponty to meet The Kripke Monster redux and for the essential embodiment theory to find its place in the sun, just before the world ends (Hanna and Paans, 2020). So in this essay, I’ll do four things. First, I’ll briefly and compactly re-present and re-motivate the essential embodiment theory (section 1). Second, I’ll equally briefly and compactly present and motivate three later significant elaborations and extensions of the essential embodiment theory: (i) a radically original and paradigm-shifting theory of free agency that I call natural libertarianism, (ii) a correspondingly radically original and paradigm-shifting conception of nature and the formal and natural sciences that I call the neo-organicist worldview, and, as directly entailed by the neo-organicist worldview, (iii) the metaphysical doctrine of liberal naturalism (section 2). Third, I’ll even more briefly and compactly critically compare-&-contrast the essential embodiment theory with an increasingly popular contemporary theory of the mind-body relation that’s commonly known as Analytic panpsychism (section 3). And fourth and finally, I’ll conclude with something I call a semi-autobiographical quasi-Whiteheadian postscript (section 00).