Impairment of parts and wholes

Aristotelians tend to find the following argument plausible:

1. Every disability includes the impairment of the proper function of one or more body parts or aspects.

2. If a part or aspect is impaired, the whole is impaired.

3. It is bad for one to be impaired.

4. Hence, every disability includes something that is bad for one.

The argument is compatible with a disability not being on balance bad for one (e.g., because maybe it is instrumentally good, for instance because it might contribute to personal growth in various ways, or make one a member of a particularly valuable community, etc.), but it implies that a disability is always bad for one in some respect. I don’t know that I have seen the argument expressly formulated as above, but I think something like this argument has always been at the back of my mind when thinking about disability.

There is philosophical literature challenging premise (3). But (3) is central to Aristotelian eudaimonism, so challenges to it did not seem very plausible to me.

However, it occurred to me yesterday that premise (2) may well be false. Think about cases of redundancy. Suppose toothies are a species of organisms that, unlike humans, have a variable number of teeth. The minimum number of teeth for the first-order proper functioning of a toothy is 60. With fewer teeth, a toothy can’t chew its food sufficiently well to function properly. However, typical healthy toothies exhibit significant redundancy in their dentation, and have anywhere between 70 and 100 teeth. Toothies that have from 60 and 69 teeth either do not have any redundancy in their dentation (at 60) or have insufficient redundancy (from 61 to 69). We can think of redundancy as a second-order proper function. Furthermore, toothies that have more than 100 teeth have the teeth crowded too much in the jaw, which isn’t good for them.

Toothies constantly grow need teeth and wear out old teeth. The worn-out teeth become flaky and weak, and eventually break and fall out. Now suppose that Alice is a toothy with 85 teeth, one of which is well on its way to wearing out. That tooth is impaired. However, Alice is not impaired by virtue of having an impaired tooth, because any number of teeth between 70 and 100 is sufficient for proper first-order (chewing) and second-order (redundancy) functioning of the organism. When that tooth falls out completely, Alice won’t be impaired, and when the teeth has partial function, as it does now, she isn’t impaired either. This, premise (2) is false.

We might suppose that even if Alice isn’t impaired by having an impaired tooth, she would be better off if that tooth weren’t impaired. But that need not be true. For it need not be true that having more teeth is better for one. Having more teeth makes for more redundancy but it also makes for more crowding in the jaw. When the tooth is wearing out, crowding may be decreased (the tooth may be thinner), even though redundancy is also decreased. So it need not be the case that the tooth impairment is in any way bad for Alice.

Now, it may seem that typical impairments of human bodies or aspects are unlike Alice’s tooth impairment. However, this is not clear. Consider intellectual aptitudes. These include reasoning aptitudes in the domains of the spiritual, moral, emotional, intuitive, interpersonal, spatial, logical, arithmetical, artistic, linguistic, kinaesthetic, etc., etc. But different humans have different social roles. Perhaps what is normal for humans is proper functioning of a sufficient number of these aptitudes, not of all of them, so that each human being can find a good niche in society. Furthermore, the sufficient number of these aptitudes may be one that is sufficient to ensure redundancy. In that case, if someone has more than enough redundancy, a severe impairment of one of the aptitudes need not imply a lack of proper function of the human as a whole. But we might, nonetheless, count someone with such a severe impairment of an intellectual aptitude as disabled. If so, being disabled in that respect need not imply being impaired on whole, or badly off in any respect.

However, in the intellectual aptitude case, shouldn’t we say that having more of the aptitudes is better? It isn’t like teeth, where having too many can be harmful, is it? Well, that isn’t completely clear. After all, it can be harder for a kid with many talents to specialize. But even if we grant that one is better off for having more of the aptitudes, this does not mean that lacking one or more is bad. It can be just less good. If Alice’s having 70 teeth is enough for her toothy nature, but 71 is better, then having only 70 isn’t bad, just less good.

That said, there are doubtless some parts or aspects of a human being such that proper function of the part or aspect is necessary for the proper function of the whole. The most obvious cases are the moral and spiritual: someone whose moral or spiritual aspects are impaired is indeed impaired as a person.

Acknowledgment: I feel that some of what I say is influenced in various ways by conversations I had with my superb student Hilary Yancey, but where I have failed to absorb her ideas at the time.

A physicalist argument for proper functions in biology

1. We have beliefs.

2. A belief is a mental state with the proper function of reflecting reality.

3. Our mental states are biological states. (Follows from standard physicalism)

4. So, some biological states have a proper function.

Another problem with evolutionary accounts of teleology

The crucial thought behind evolutionary accounts of proper function or teleology is that organisms succeed in reproducing because they are fulfilling a function, and wouldn’t have reproduced otherwise. In a paper with Koons, I offer a Great Grazing Ground objection to all such accounts.

Here, I want to offer a perhaps neater objection. Imagine Twin Earth just like Earth, with a biological history just like ours. But there is an extremely powerful alien, akin to Frankfurt’s counterfactual intervener, who has a script for all the details of biological history on that planet. That script, completely by chance, matches all the events on both Twin Earth and Earth. But the counterfactual intervener has the following immovable policy: if there is any deviation from the script on Twin Earth, the alien restores conditions to the same ones that would have resulted according to the script. Moreover, the alien’s restoration would occur before there is any deviation in reproduction or survival. But, by good fortune, no intervention is ever needed: everything actually follows the script.

Imagine, for instance, that a bird is attacked by a predator. On Earth, it escapes on its wings and reproduces. The same happens on Twin Earth. But on Twin Earth, had the bird not flown, the alien would have intervened, moved the bird out of danger, and then restored everything to the post-flight situation in the script. Consequently, on Twin Earth, it is false that had the bird not flown, it wouldn’t have reproduced. Indeed, apart from trivial cases like “Had x not reproduced, it wouldn’t have reproduced”, on Twin Earth the counterfactuals allegedly defining proper function or teleology hold. Yet events on Twin Earth are just as on Earth, and the alien doesn’t do anything but watch. And it is deeply implausible that simply by watching the alien destroys proper function or teleology.

The Bayesian false belief pandemic

Suppose that a credence greater than 95% suffices to count as a belief, and that you are a rational agent who tossed ten fair coins but did not see the results. Then you have at least 638 false beliefs about coin toss outcomes.

To see this, for simplicity, suppose first that all the coins came up heads. Let T_n be the proposition that the nth coin is tails. Then the disjunction of five or more of the T_n has probability 96%, and so you believe every disjunction of five or more of the T_n. Each such belief is false, because all the coins will in fact come up heads. There are 638 (pairwise logically inequivalent) disjunctions of five or more of the T_n. So, you have at least 638 false beliefs here (even if we are counting up to logical equivalence).

Things are slightly more complicated if not all the coins come up heads, but exactly the same conclusion is still true: you have 638 disjunctions of five or more false single-coin-outcome beliefs.

But it seems that nothing went wrong in the coin toss situation: everything is as it should be. There is no evil present. So, it seems, reasonable false belief is not an evil.

I am not sure what to make of this conclusion, since it also seems to me that it is the telos of our beliefs to correctly represent reality, and a failure to do that seems an evil.

Perhaps the thing to say is this: the belief itself is bad, but having a bad belief isn’t always intrinsically bad for the agent? This seems strange, but I think it can happen.

Consider a rather different case. I want to trigger an alarm given the presence of radiation above a certain threshold. I have a radiation sensor that has practically no chance of being triggered when the radiation is below the threshold but has a 5% independent failure rate when the radiation is above the threshold. And a 5% false negative rate is not good enough for my application. So I build a device with five independent sensors, and have the alarm be triggered if any one sensor goes off. My false negative rate goes down to 3 ⋅ 10⁻⁷. Suppose now four sensors are triggered and the fifth is not. The device is working correctly and triggers the alarm, even though one sensor has failed. The failure of the sensor is bad for the sensor but not bad for the device.

Another move is to say that there is an evil present in the false belief case, but it’s tiny.

And yet another move is to deny that one should have a belief when the credence rises above a threshold.

The context problem for Lewisian functionalism

One problem for functionalism is the problem of defect. David Lewis, for instance, talks of a madman for whom pain is triggered by something other than damage and whose pain triggers something other than avoidance. Lewis’s functionalist solution is to define the function of a mental state in terms of the role it normally plays in the species.

Here is a problem with this. Suppose that in mammals pains is realized by C-fiber firing. But now take the C-fibers inside a living mammalian skull, disconnect their outputs and connect external electrodes to their inputs. Make the C-fibers fire. Since the C-fiber outputs are disconnected, causing them to fire does not cause any of the usual pain behaviors, the formation of memories of pain, etc. In fact, it seems very plausible that there is no pain at all. Yet according to Lewisian functionalism, there is pain, because it is the normal connections of the C-fibers that define their functional role.

This thought experiment shows that the physical realizers of mental states need to occur in their proper context. But this bumps up against Lewis’s madman, in whom the pain states, and presumably their physical realizers, do not occur in their proper context.

It seems that what the functionalist needs to say is that in order to realize a mental state, a physical state must occur in a sufficient approximation to its proper context. If it’s too far, as in the case of the C-fibers with severed outputs, there is no mental state. If it’s close enough, as in a moderate version of the madman case (I don’t know what to say about Lewis’s more extreme one), the mental state occurs.

But how is the line to be drawn?

Perhaps there is no problem. Pain is not in fact C-fiber firing. Perhaps enough of the brain needs to be involved in conscious states that one cannot plausibly remove the states from their normal functional context? Still, this is worth thinking about.

Moral failure and naturalism

Tripping while walking or acquiring an unjustified belief does not entail that we are in any way defective. It’s just not in human nature to walk steadily all the time—there is a tradeoff between perfect steadiness and the need to look for more distant dangers, or just the need to think about more important matters. Likewise, we sometimes need to acquire beliefs more quickly than checking the evidence carefully allows.

But a moral failure seems different. Acting immorally is always a defect. This tells us something interesting about nature: our nature has tradeoffs, but morality is never among the tradeoffs.

(A curiosity: If it is our nature never to act immorally, but it isn’t our nature never to trip, we would expect that tripping would be much more common than immoral activity. But it’s not like that.)

It is difficult, I think, to reconcile the special role that morality plays in us—the fact that moral failure is always a defect—with naturalism. On an evolutionary picture, we would expect tradeoffs to be everywhere in our nature. If we were meant by nature never to trip, we would expect to have an instinct that makes us always look down in front of us—but of course then we wouldn’t see distant danger, so instead we have a tradeoff where we scan the environment in all directions as well as looking down in front of us.

I have one worry about the above line of thought. Perhaps immoral activity is not always a defect. Maybe it is only a defect when isn’t innocently ignorant. Think of the extremely difficult cases that come up in medical or military ethics where one needs to act very quickly. In those cases, there just isn’t enough time to always figure out what the right solution is, and it does not seem to be necessarily a defect when the conscientious doctor or officer acts immorally, if she has given the matter as much thought and are as there was time for and innocently done what appeared right.

Maybe that’s right. It’s still surprising on a naturalistic picture of our nature and origins that it is always a defect to act knowingly immorally. We would expect our nature to exhibit tradeoffs even there.

And maybe the innocent ignorance cases aren’t a problem. Maybe in such cases, the action is to be described in terms that makes it right, like: “Performing an operation that after the due amount of investigation appeared most in keeping with the salient goods.”

Of course, some naturalists simply deny that there is any coherent concept of “defect” to be applied to us. The above line of thought may be grist for their mill. Another view might be to bite the bullet and say that we are riddled with tradeoffs through and through, and it is no defect when we occasionally act immorally. On the contrary, sometimes (say, when it causes great harm to one’s genes getting passed on) acting morally is a defect—but we should be guided by what is right or wrong, not by what is or isn’t a defect in our nature. This latter view is not, I think, very popular, but one finds it in Andrea Dworkin’s idea that “the God who doesn’t exist” (nature? evolution?) has designed us so that until recent times we could only reproduce by means that, according to Dworkin, are innately oppressive to women.

Do we need two fundamental teleological concepts?

There are two teleological concepts: that of a telos and that of proper function. Each of them helps us make certain teleological judgments. Do we need them both? Could we, for instance, define the telos of a system as what is achieved when the system is properly functioning? Or define proper function as the achievement of the telos in a system and all its (relevant?) subsystems?

I don't know for sure that we need them both, but neither of the two specific proposals is correct. Consider the case of an excellent mathematician is striving to solve an extremely difficult mathematical problem, her mathematical faculties are all working properly, but she fails. It is not a necessary condition for the proper function of mathematical faculties that they be able to solve every mathematical problem there is. Both of the attempted reductions neglect the phenomenon that our teleologies can push us above our proper functioning. An excellent mathematician or athlete may already be functioning above our proper level of functioning, but nonetheless there will be telê that she doesn't have fulfilled. (Though, perhaps, we may want to say that all humans are mathematically and athletically defective, due to the Fall, in which case we could maintain that the mathematician is not functioning properly if there are any soluble problems she can't solve. But even if this view of humans is true, we could imagine that mathematicians of some other species are functioning properly and yet failing to solve problems.)

It seems that we need the concept of proper function to tell us what is good enough, what is normal. But we need the concept of a telos to supply us with comparisons between instances of proper function. The mathematician who solves and who fails to solve are both functioning properly, are both functioning sufficiently well, but the one who solves is functioning better--precisely because she achieves her telos in respect of that process. Or, alternately, we may say that both are functioning properly, but one is functioning merely normally and the other supernormally--again, a distinction that mere proper function does not seem capable of making.

Maybe there is a more clever way of relating the two concepts.

Going far beyond the normal operating conditions of humans

What should an ordinary household thermometer show at temperatures close to absolute zero? There is no answer to this question. The question asks about what should happen in circumstances too far beyond the normal operating conditions of the instrument.

I wonder if something analogous doesn't happen in ethics. We have our normal operating conditions. These are very broad, because we are very adaptable beings, but nonetheless they are limited. Are there always going to be answer to questions about what we should do beyond these conditions?

One way of going beyond the conditions is to consider metaphysically impossible situations. If you promised to bring three oranges to the party and you are in the impossible world where four is less than three, do you fulfill your promise by bring four? Would you be obligated to honor yourself as your parent if you were your own cause? These questions seem to make little sense, and even we philosophers rarely think about them. But analytic ethicists do, on the other hand, sometimes ask questions about nomically impossible situations, and certainly we ask questions about situations far beyond ordinary life.

I think we should, however, take seriously the possibility that as we depart far enough from the normal operating conditions of human beings, some of the questions (a) have no answer or at least (b) have no answer available to us. This possibility undercuts some arguments.

For instance, one can argue that utilitarianism gives deeply implausible answers (e.g., that every action is equally permissible) in cases where there are infinitely many people. But suppose that there aren't in fact infinitely many people, and the situation of there being infinitely many people is far beyond humans' normal operating conditions. Then the fact that utilitarianism predicts something that seems implausible to us beyond those conditions is not a problem for the utilitarian--as long as she is willing to modestly limit the scope of ethics to humans in or near their normal operating conditions (if she's not, the argument is fair game).

Or consider this argument against deontology: It seems permissible to kill one innocent person to save a billion. But circumstances where we choose between one life and a billion lives might well be so far beyond our normal operating conditions that they fall beyond the scope of ethics.

The last case is interesting. For it raises this question: Might we not actually find ourselves in circumstances so far beyond our normal operating conditions that ethics doesn't apply, much as someone could actually throw a household thermometer into liquid helium? After all, it is sadly all too easy to imagine how someone might end up choosing whether to kill one innocent to save a billion: it seems physically possible for someone to end up in that position. It seems deeply troubling to suppose that some people end up in circumstances that go beyond the presuppositions in the moral law.

I think Christians have reason based on revelation to think this doesn't actually ever happen. The moral law is also embodied in revelation, and revelation presents itself as a guide to us in all the vicissitudes of life. But note that even if nobody ends up in circumstances that go beyond the presuppositions of the moral law, going beyond these presuppositions could be physically possible but for God's providential protection. A case of choosing whether to kill one innocent to save a billion may be like that: God makes sure we're not tried beyond the edge of ethics.

But what could one say without revelation?

Of course, the above line of thought fits best either with (a) divine command metaethics or (b) natural law metaethics on which what grounds ethical truths is our nature and an Aristotelian metaphysics of human beings on which it makes sense to ask what our normal operating conditions are. All this won't be an issue given a utilitarian or perhaps even Kantian metaethics. So that limits the applicability of the line of thought. But if we do find plausible the Aristotelian metaphysics and a natural law metaethics, then I think we should take seriously the worry that sometimes an analytic philosopher's ethics examples will go too far beyond our normal operating conditions. An argument for the above line of thought, and hence indirectly for either (a) or (b), is given by the apparently insuperable difficulties in ethics when one supposes that one's actions affect an infinite number of people.

Treatment versus enhancement

I don't think you have much hope of having a distinction between treatment and enhancement unless you have the notion of the normal state or proper function of the human body. I previously thought we want a distinction between treatment and enhancement for such purposes as figuring out what the task of the physician as such is and what requests from the patient the physician has a right to turn down flat. For instance, a physician who receives a request to remove a cancer, and who judges that removal of the cancer is feasible, safe and ethically permissible, has a medical duty to either remove the cancer or refer to someone else. On the other hand, a physician who receives a request to pierce a patient's ears for earrings, even though she no doubt judges this to be feasible and ethically permissible, has no medical duty to perform the procedure or refer to someone else, since it is not a medical treatment.

But a new kind of case seems to me to make the distinction even more pressing, and this is cases where it is not possible to ask the patient's consent. Suppose that in the middle of heart surgery, the surgeon notices an old bullet lodged near the heart. The bullet does not impair the heart's functioning, so the patient's consent to the heart operation does not extend to the bullet. But it is intrinsically morally permissible for the surgeon to remove the bullet if she reasonably judges that doing so is good for the patient (of course, there may be laws and regulations that prohibit this, in which case it will be extrinsically impermissible). On the other hand, if a brain surgeon removing a cancer from someone's brain reasonably judges, on the basis of the latest research, that moving a few neurons around will make the subject super-fast at arithmetic with large numbers, that is unacceptable. Likewise, if in the course of a Caesarian the physician notes that the tubes could be tied and judges that the patient would be better off not getting pregnant, that too is unacceptable, whether or not consensual sterilization is permissible (this is, alas, not a hypothetical case).

One can try to handle this with "presumed consent", but that's kludgy, and probably doesn't work. Presumed consent from an unconscious suicidal patient for emergency treatment following the attempted suicide is going to involve dubious counterfactuals, like asking what the patient would want if the patient were fully sane (there might be no fact of the matter about this), and, besides, you probably can't make sense of "sane" without the concept of normalcy. Moreover, we can imagine cases where one can presume that the patient would consent if asked, but the action is still wrong. For instance, one may well know of many patients that they would agree to have a gift of diamonds worth millions sewed into them as a part of surgery, if they were going to be later notified and could have the diamonds safely removed through another surgery and if there was no other way for them to be given the diamonds. But to sew in the diamonds as part of heart surgery, without having sought the patient's consent, is morally impermissible--or at least it's bad medicine.

Divine simplicity and theistic reductive accounts

Some theists give reductive accounts of such phenomena as morality and proper function in ways that involve contingent divine mental states. For instance, one might say that the proper function of x is to A if and only if God designed x to A, or that we ought to A if and only if God wills for us to A. Such reductive accounts are apt, however, to be in tension with divine simplicity.

Here is why. If divine simplicity is true, then God has no contingent purely intrinsic features. One way to argue for this claim is that if divine simplicity is true, then God is the truthmaker for all claims purely about God (this is the Oppy account of divine simplicity, further developed by Jeff Brower and myself). Thus if God has a purely intrinisic feature F, then God is the truthmaker of the claim that God has F, and hence the existence of God entails that God has F, and hence God has F essentially. Another way is with the intuitive argument that if God has a feature (think of it as trope-like rather than as universal-like) F and F is accidental, then F cannot be identical with God's essence (since F and the essence have different modal properties—the essence exists in all world where God exists while F doesn't). But that is contrary to divine simplicity.

Now, plausibly, if two worlds do not differ with respect to the purely intrinsic features of x, but the worlds do in fact differ, then they must differ with respect to something extrinsic to x. Therefore, if God has no contingent purely intrinsic features, and God exists necessarily, then any two worlds that differ, must differ in respect of something extrinsic to God. Thus, all contingent facts supervene on created reality, i.e., on that which is extrinsic to God.

In particular, this means that there cannot be two worlds where the same created stuff exists, and the only differences are in God's intrinisc mental states. In fact, it is impossible for there to be intrinsic contingent mental states in God.

This does not destroy the possibility of the theistic reductionist accounts of proper function and morality. But it does mean that these accounts cannot make the contingent divine mental states be independent of what is, in fact, in creation. On the contrary, these mental states have to supervene modally on creation. But if so, then there are certain features of creation such that, necessarily, x has function F or y ought to A if and only if these features obtain. And if there are such features, why not analyze the function or the ought directly in terms of these features?

(This does not mean that God is left out. For these features are in creation, and God's creative and concurrent causality is involved in them.)

More on evolutionary theories of mind

According to evolutionary theories of mind, that we have evolved under certain selective pressures not only causally explains our mental functioning, but in fact is essential to that very functioning. Thus, if an exact duplicate of one of us came into existence at random, with no selection, it would not have a mind. The reason is that components of minds have to have proper functions, and proper functions in us are to be analyzed through natural selection.

Of course, there could be critters whose proper function is to be analyzed in terms of artificial selection, or even in terms of design by an agent. But as it happens, we are not critters like that, says the evolutionary theorist of mind. Nonetheless, it is important that the account of proper function be sufficiently flexible that artificial selection would also be able to give rise to proper function (after all, how would one draw the line between artificial and natural selection, when artificial selectors—say, human breeders—are apt themselves to be a part of nature?). Moreover, typically, the evolutionary analysis of proper function is made flexible enough that agential design gives rise to proper function as well. The basic idea—which is more sophisticated in the newer accounts to avoid counterexample—is that it is a proper function of x to do A if and only if x-type entities tend to do A and x-type entities now exist in part because of having or having had this tendency. Thus, a horse's leg has running fast as one of its proper functions, because horse's legs do tend to run fast, and now exist in part because of having had this tendency. A guided missile has hitting the target as a proper function, because it tends to do that, and guided missiles exist in part because of having this tendency (if they didn't have this tendency, we wouldn't have made them).

Whatever the merits of these kinds of accounts of proper function, I think it is easy to see that such an account will not be satisfactory for philosophy of mind purposes. To see this, consider the following evolutionary scenario (a variant on one that the ancient atomists posited). Let w₀ be the actual world. Now consider a world w₁, where at at t₀ there is one super-powerful alien agent, Patricia, and she has evolved in some way that will not concern us. Suddenly, at t₀, a rich infinite variety of full-formed organisms comes into existence, completely at random, scattered throughout an infinity of planets. There are beings like dogheaded men, and beings like mammoths, and beings like modern humans, behaving just like normal humans. On the evolutionary theorist's view, these are all zombies. A minute later, at t₁, Patricia instantaneously kills off all the organisms that don't match her selective criteria. Her selective criteria in w₁ happen to be exactly the same ones that natural selection implemented in w₀ by the year 2009. Poof, go the mammoth-like beings in w₁, since natural selection killed them off by 2009 in w₀. However, humanoids remain.

At t₁, the survivors in w₁ have proper functions according to the evolutionary theorist. Moreover, they have the exact same proper functions as their analogues in w₀ do, since they were selected for on the basis of exactly the same selective principle. This was a case of artificial selection, granted, but still selection.

But it is absurd that a bunch of zombies would instantaneously become conscious simply because somebody killed off a whole bunch of other zombies. So the evolutionary account of proper function, as applied to the philosophy of mind, is absurd.

Maybe our evolutionary theorist will say: Well, they don't get proper functions immediately. Only the next generation gets them. Selection requires a generation to pass. However, she can only say this if she is willing to say that agency does not give rise to proper function. After all, agency may very well work by generating a lot of items, and then culling the ones that the agent does not want. Pace Plantinga, I do not think it is an absurd thing to say that agency does not give rise to proper function, but historically a lot of evolutionary accounts of proper function were crafted so as to allow for design-based proper functions. Moreover, it would seem absurd to suppose that a robot we directly made couldn't be intelligent at all but its immediate descendant could be.

I think the above shows that we shouldn't take agential design to generate proper function (at least not normally; maybe a supernatural agent could produce teleological facts, but that would be by doing something more than just designing in the way an engineer does), at least not if we want proper function to do something philosophically important for us. Nor do I think should we take evolution to generate proper function (my earlier post on this is particularly relevant here). Unless we are Aristotelians—taking proper function not to be reducible to non-teleological facts—we have no right to proper function. And thus if the philosophy of mind requires proper function, it requires Aristotelian metaphysics.

Evolutionary theories of mind

An evolutionary theory of mind is not just a theory that minds have in fact evolved. Rather, it is a theory that it is essential to mindedness that one be the product of selection (natural or artificial). For instance, one may be an evolutionary theorist of mind because one thinks that intentionality must be understood in evolutionary terms, or because one is a functionalist and thinks that the notion of "proper function" that functionalism needs must be grounded in selective facts, or because one thinks that mental states have normative conditions (e.g., "neural state n is a believing that p only if it is the case that n should occur only if p"). An evolutionary theorist of mind is already willing to bite quite a bullet. Take Davidson's swampman: lightning strikes a swamp, and an exact physical duplicate of Davidson by chance comes out. Since there was no selection, the swampman is not a person, though he is exactly like Davidson physically. Of course if one were a dualist, one wouldn't be surprised by this, since the swampman could differ from Davidson in respect of soul, but the evolutionary theorist of mind doesn't believe in souls. The evolutionary theorist of mind is willing to bite the bullet on the swampman.

Here is an argument against evolutionary theories of mind. As it stands it is an argument against theories on which selection is metaphysically necessary for mindedness, though one might be able to do more with the argument. Moreover, the argument may well apply to other evolutionary analyses of concepts.

The argument is a reductio. Start with the following two theses:

1. (Evolutionary theory of mind.) If none of the physical entities existing in a spacetime region U are the products of selection, there are no physical minds in U.
2. (Almost global supervenience of physical minds.) Suppose worlds w₁ and w₂ are exact physical duplicates, except in an impotent region R of spacetime. Then w₁ contains a physical mind outside of R if and only if w₂ contains a physical mind outside of R.

Here, a "physical mind" is a mind entirely constituted or implemented by a purely physical system. A region R of spacetime is "impotent" provided that no event or substance in R can affect anything outside R.

Now for our clever construction. Imagine a world w₁ which contains a planet much like earth, where history looks pretty much like it looks on earth, and which also contains a Great Grazing Ground (GGG), which is an infinite (we only need: potentially infinite) impotent region. Moreover, by a strange law of nature, or maybe the activity of some swampaliens, whenever an organism on earth is about to die, it gets hyperspatially and instantaneously transported to the GGG, and a fake corpse, which is an exact duplicate of what its real corpse would have been, gets instantaneously put in its place on earth. (I will call it "earth" for convenience but I shan't worry about its numerical identity with our world's earth.) Furthermore, there is no life or intelligence outside of earth and the GGG. Moreover, the organism dies as soon as it arrives in the GGG.

Our world's earth has minds, and the earth in w₁ has a history that is just about the same. The only difference is that all the deaths of organisms occur not on earth but in the GGG, because they get transported there before death. But this does not affect any selective facts. Thus, the evolutionary theorist of mind should say that the situation in w₁'s earth is similar enough to that on our earth that we should say that w₁'s earth contains minds.[note 1]

The hard work is now done. For imagine a world that is exactly like w₁ outside of the GGG, but inside the GGG, immortal and ever-reproducing aliens rescue each organism on arrival, fixing it so it doesn't die, and even make the organism capable of reproduction again. Furthermore, they do the same for the organism's descendants in the GGG. The GGG is a place of infinite (at least potentially) resources, with everybody having immortality and reproduction, with the aliens shifting organisms further and further out to ensure their survival.

Now in w₂, there is no selection: Nobody ever dies or ceases to reproduce.[note 2] Thus, by (1), there are no physical minds outside the GGG in w₂—all the earthly critters are zombies. But by (2) there are physical minds outside the GGG in w₂, because w₂ is an exact duplicate of w₁ outside of the GGG. Hence we have absurdity.

Suppose our evolutionary theorist of mind denies (2). Then we have the following absurdity: It is up to the aliens in the GGG to determine whether or not there are physical minds outside the GGG, by deciding whether to rescue the almost dead organisms that pop into the GGG. But how can beings in an impotent region bring about that there are, or are not, physical minds outside that region? That would be worse than magic (magic is presumably causal).

Furthermore, while the numerical identities of the organisms on earth in w₁ and w₂ might depend on their history, they surely do not depend on what happens in the GGG, since the GGG is impotent. So we may actually suppose that the earthly organisms are numerically the same between w₁ and w₂. Thus, outside the GGG, w₁ and w₂ are exactly the same physically, and have exactly the organisms, but some of these very same organisms (say, Fred or Martha) have physical minds in w₁ and do not have physical minds in w₂.

This is truly absurd. Hence, evolutionary theories of mind should be rejected.[note 3]

Knowledge of past and future

We observe B, and have good evidence that 99.999% of the time B was causally preceded by A. We are, I think, pretty likely to say we know that A occurred. On the other hand, if we have good evidence that 99.999% of the time B is causally followed by C, a lot more people will be very cautious in affirming they know that C will occur.

The difference here does not, I think, depend on the mere fact that A is in the past and C is in the future. For, surely, if one is unwilling to say "I know I will fail to win the lottery" before the winner is picked, one will also be unwilling to say "I know I failed to win the lottery" after the winner has been picked but before one has heard who it is. It would be really weird to imagine someone sitting around in a closed room, watch in hand, and then as soon as noon comes, she says: "Now I know I failed to win the lottery", just because the winner is picked at noon.

It could be that this is just another example of widespread irrationality (when I wrote this post, which I am much less sure of now, I think this is what I would have said), but let us not have recourse to that immediately.

I am inclined to think the difference is not based on whether the knowledge claim is in the past or future, nor even on whether the knowledge claim is in the past or future of the evidence, but on the causal connection between the evidence and the event about which the knowledge claim is or is not made. We are, I think, much more willing to move epistemically from effects to causes than from causes to effects. If this willingness is not mistaken, then it follows that there can be probabilistically isomorphic epistemic situations in one of which one knows and in the other of which one does not.

Here is one line of thought on this. Perhaps we are confusing de re with de dicto knowledge. Suppose that Koons is right to say in Realism Regained that if D causes E, then it is possible to have D without E but not possible to have E without D. Then by knowing D de re, we cannot know E de re because many numerically different effects could follow the very same D. But by knowing E de re, we are in a position to know D de re, because no other cause could have produced this very E that we know de re.

And maybe this isn't just a confusion. For it may be that saying that I know that E occurs, or maybe implicates, that I de re know (am acquainted with?) E.

This is related to the scholastic idea that genuine knowledge is knowledge of the forms, and this is always by acquaintance.

A different line of thought on the asymmetry would be that one of our doxastic proper functions is gaining non-probabilistic beliefs about causes from effects, but we simply do not have a doxastic proper function of gaining non-probabilistic beliefs about effects from causes. A theist might even give an explanation of this: God hasn't designed us to gain non-probabilistic beliefs about effects from causes, as that would make miracles be deceptive.

[Corrected to fix typo pointed out in first comment below. Thanks, Tim!]