We cannot deal adequately with mind without dealing with the nature of knowledge and truth, as well as the nature of reality.  Interestingly, I don’t think that we can deal adequately with the nature of knowledge and truth without dealing with the nature of intentional beings with minds.

I’m going to propose that we tend to conflate two separate models of reality, both true, both necessary, and inherently incapable of unification.  In doing so, I delve into areas of epistemology that are not my field.  Although I think that my position is fairly solid, I recognize that I do not always make it easy to compare my assertions to positions taken in the current literature.

Independent Reality and Necessary Constructs

I want to distinguish independent reality from the rest of reality.  By independent reality, I mean what is there independent of people modeling the world.  My belief is that independent reality is comprised of physical things, their qualities and their relations (including events).  This implies that only those things have independent reality which can act as cause and/or effect, and thus might leave a trace.

If I am right that independent reality is so spare, then it probably can’t be known without our positing it to contain some other things, such as cause-and-effect, physical laws (such as E = MC2), mathematical principles and axioms, and so on. 

Further, I doubt that independent reality has much in the way of natural kinds or other sorts of discriminations.  We might think of it as an undiscriminated whole, perhaps not yet even discriminated into specific things, qualities or relations.  Those who try to model reality must do so by inventing classifications, boundaries (where one entity stops and another starts), and so on -- meanings. 

The notion, then, is that knowledge of the world requires the invention of a conceptual model into which we try to shoehorn reality, which model points at more entities than are found in independent reality (i.e., laws, etc.).

I thus propose two levels of known reality – two types of entity that are pointed at by any good model of reality:  physical things with their qualities and relations, and necessary constructs (where a construct is a supposed entity having no physical reality, such as a law).

Necessary constructs are tricky, in that few constructs are necessary in themselves, and constructs tend to fall along a scale of our degree of need for them.  Conceptually, a necessary construct is one which is important to the adequate functioning of our model of reality.

E = MC2 is a discovered, real relation that has occurred in our experience.  But we properly take it to be more than that:  a law that must be followed in the future, or a fixed part of the fabric of the universe.  Such a law is a necessary construct.  We can imagine an adequate model of the world that accounts for the relation of matter and energy in different ways, but our own model is dependent on this law.  Said differently, the world seems to run under the control of laws.  We haven’t ever discovered a law, but we have discovered so powerful a consistency in relations that we feel justified in inventing a law that predicts their continuance.

I like to call necessary constructs valid/real.  They are valid in that they strengthen our model and produce no logical inconsistencies when utilized.  They are real insofar as they are necessary to our model of reality.  I use “valid/real”, then, as a lesser form of reality.

The Ptolemaic (geocentric) theory of astronomy is a construct that could be made part of an adequate model of the world, but with vastly greater complexity than is needed with the Copernican theory.  It is a construct, but neither valid nor necessary for our model.

We can imagine that Martians model the world as effectively as we do, but using somewhat different necessary constructs.

I propose, then, that one completely adequate model of the world is materialist:  all real things are either physical or are necessary constructs that we invent and that are integral to our adequate model of reality.

By saying that it’s completely adequate, I propose that an ideal materialist model would so adequately predict future events and explain present and past events that its power would not be strengthened by adding anything that is non-materialist.

By asserting that there is no inherently correct way of modeling the world, I imply that there is an indefinite number of correct materialist models of the world. They might be dramatically different, but all equally able to predict and explain.  Martians, for example, if they perceive reality at the level of quarks, gravitons and electrons, might have a very different model from ours.

This focus on invented models is consistent with the view that the world isn’t necessarily very well suited to being fully known.  It’s an undiscriminated whole that might not always fit conveniently into concepts.  This suggests that we invent classifications and concepts and then fiddle with them, trying to make them fit as well as possible with independent reality.

Humans seem to have evolved in accidental ways to be highly adaptive systems that have the ability to create and modify concepts that make sense of the world.  I like to think of an intransigent world out there, and a species creating a model that matches it as closely as possible.

The Knowledge Relation

Knowledge, then, is a function of mapping.  There is a conceptual model that is designed to map onto independent reality.  Necessary constructs have a foot in both model and reality.  I like to think of a necessary construct as an imagined entity in reality, pointed at by a term in our model, such as ‘cause-and-effect’.  The term ‘star’ is used to point at a real entity, but is also dependent on a construct:  the class of stars with defined boundaries (that includes or excludes black holes, supernovae and stars that have exploded).  Those boundaries can be seen as part of the model itself, which helps to construct how reality itself appears to us, in causing some entities to present themselves to us as stars, and others as non-stars.

It isn’t always useful to distinguish that which is in reality itself from that which is in the model.  We don’t know independent reality, but modeled reality.  The model is a lens by which reality is known.

A model of reality is a system that is capable of producing assertions.  It is an adequate model to the degree that it tends to produce true assertions in areas of importance.  A model is not a fixed set of assertions.  It is an indefinite number of potential assertions, limited by the requirement that they must be consistent with the model.  A book full of assertions is not a model (it’s just an ordered collection of symbols), until connected with an agent (such as you or me) who can use it to assert about the world.  A model is not a thing, but a capability.  We might, then, say that models of reality occur in minds.  (I acknowledge that there can be sophisticated automata that operate with models, merely simulating assertion.)

An assertion can only be true to the extent that it is connected to a relatively adequate model of the world (or some appropriate subset thereof).  If I assert that the universe rotates around the earth, that assertion must be connected to a particular model prior to assessing its truth.  The assertion that Evelyn is a good person probably has no more than conditional truth in our model of the world, because our model is underdetermined for such assertions.

The adequacy of a model of the world is a function of its power to predict and explain how things are.  An explanation might especially deal in the causes of what has happened, or place what is being explained into the proper place within the given model.

Knowledge is often described as justified, true belief.  If knowledge occurs as beliefs, the knowledge relation involves three parts:  believer, assertions and whatever those assertions point at.  More broadly, our best model of the world is part of a three-part system that includes who is asserting it (usually, experts or a consensus), and reality itself.

Beliefs are, by their nature, intentional – mental entities with aboutness.  Knowledge occurs only where there is intentionality.

What I have so far said, then, is that

    independent reality is an undiscriminated whole

    truth occurs only within the context of a model of the world

    any adequate model points at both undiscriminated reality and various necessary constructs

    a model is intended to map onto reality, and its adequacy is measured by its power in prediction and explanation

    there is an indefinite number of ways to model the world adequately, and

    knowledge entails a relation that includes an agent who makes assertions.

We have so far considered knowledge only as it might relate to modeling the physical world.  When we talk about minds, dualism, qualia and agency, it’s convenient to start with this same notion of knowledge, even if only to define where we depart from it.

Who or What Is a Knower?

As I discuss elsewhere (“Agency”), the human brain presumably can be modeled microphysically, with our overt and covert behaviors potentially explained without recourse to intentionality.  There is a powerful model of the world in which we have no beliefs, and are fundamentally automata.  This is why I say that one fully adequate model of the world is materialist.

Certain neural events may occur when an apple comes within your visual field. Such neural events tend to lead to appropriate behavior (such as picking and eating the apple).  But the neural events are not intentional in the microphysical model.  They aren’t about the apple at all; rather, they are rule-based covert behaviors that are only accidentally adaptive.

In order to understand the knowledge relation, we usefully explore what it means to be intentional, or, almost the same thing, what it means to be conscious.  In particular, we need to explore who or what is added on top of neural events to make for I/it relations such as the belief relation.

Early in The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers defines consciousness as “what it is like to be a cognitive agent”.  Later, he speaks of conscious experience as “the phenomenal concept of mind”, or the agent approaching mind experientially, rather than just by scientific explanation.

I want to focus on who experiences mind phenomenally, or who we mean by the cognitive agent – the believer. 

The Agent

Of what does an agent consist, and how does agency come into being?

If we accept that independent reality is an undiscriminated, physical whole, with everything in it causally interrelated, then we can imagine it to have reached its present state with no agents – no originators of causes.  We can model living things, including humans, as automata, mere cogs in a clockwork, mere links in the causal chain, mere rule-based systems.  We can imagine intelligent life with no one to believe or know personally.

Even in such a world, automata can evolve to have highly sophisticated response tendencies that we could call conceptual models of the world (making functional use of “concepts” despite the lack of aboutness).  Simple organisms without central nervous systems have behaviors that we can interpret to be a model of the world that includes food, predators, things to mate with and hostile environments.  The reason is obvious:  mimicking intentionality is highly adaptive – accidentally promotes survivability.

Such “modeling” can advance without limitation (see the article, “Agency”).  This might result in beings who issue words that declare personal intentionality, but who actually mean nothing by those words.  That is, there can be an automaton with overt and covert behaviors identical to yours and mine, based solely on automatic rule-following and the mere mimicry of intentionality.

My thesis, roughly, is that we are precisely such organisms, when modeled microphysically.  One who believes in a single, objective truth about the nature of reality (residing, perhaps, in the mind of God) will conclude that the truth, if I am right, is that we are merely automata.

To the contrary, I suppose that there is no truth about the nature of reality until there are believers.  I further suppose that the sole measures of the adequacy of any model are its power in prediction and explanation.  If that is so, then there can be more than one true explanation of reality.

It is certain that we have evolved as self-modelers, whether or not we are meaning-users (where a meaning is a mental entity with aboutness).  We model ourselves as believers who experience our surroundings and develop beliefs about the world.  As such, we model that each of us encounters our surroundings from a particular context – a first person perspective that implies a subject (agent, observer).

Our model of reality, then, includes not only the physical world, but two other elements:  an agent and beliefs with meaning.  Our model creates the belief relation: I-assertion-object.  This model, then, is distinct from the microphysical model, in that it includes the agent as a necessary construct, and intentional relations as functional relations between agent and objects.  I’ll call this the agent explanation.

Whether or not we are automata, this model is powerful in both prediction and explanation, and accounts for entities that are central to us but missing from the microphysical model. 

There Must Always Be Two Models

As it happens, we have also developed a second, equally adequate model of the world that leaves out both agent and mental entities, and is consistent with what we imagine the microphysical model to be.  This, the automaton (or scientific) explanation, turns out to be more powerful than the agent explanation, given our current level of knowledge, for certain narrow purposes.

In the automaton explanation, our apparent intentionality is illusory, a mere artifact.  In the agent explanation, the automaton explanation is inadequate, in that it doesn’t account for knowledge, belief, concepts, aims, etc.

It is our natural tendency to assume that one of these models is mistaken, or even to believe that they are somehow subsumed by a unified model.

But I propose that there is no single, true model; rather models are only models, and have varying power to produce true assertions. 

I propose that the primary difference between these two models is the use of agency as a (particularly inflexible) necessary construct.  The two models share a great many other necessary constructs in common.

Given agents, the various other intentional terms in the agent explanation are functional:  real relations that include the agent and are otherwise within the chain of cause and effect, with terms that point at the real world by means of their intentional interpretations.

As such, we can map either model onto the other, making them inter-translatable.  This does not, however, make them compatible or combinable.  It simply means that the predictions and explanations of one can be reliably translated by rules into the predictions and explanations of the other.

The agent explanation asserts genuine agency and intentionality.  It claims free will, awareness that there is a world out there, awareness of mental entities including qualia, and that things really do matter.

As an agent, according to this model, I am an originating cause; I am not always bound, and my desires make a difference.  With some effort, I believe, we can define how that is translatable into the automaton explanation.

An agent, in this model, is a necessary construct, and not an immaterial entity.  Qualia are valid/real, functional relations to the agent, and not immaterial entities.  No dualism is implied.

As I discuss in the “Agency” article, the only real difference between the two explanations is the context from which the explained.

Which Model Is True?

There is independent reality, but there is no independent truth.  The automaton explanation asserts that we are merely fooling ourselves when we treat ourselves as believers.  In the agent explanation we are genuine agents.  There is no independent standard against which to compare these models as to which is better, other than power in prediction and explanation.  It is our false view of the nature of truth that leads us to ask whether we really are automata.

The better question is, under which circumstances is it useful to use or not to use the agent construct with all that it implies?