We all know where the mind
is…inside the head, right? The idea that mental life takes place inside the
skull –whether in the brain or in the soul –seems to be one of the commonest
bits of common sense. Many of the more extravagant fantasies of science fiction
are grounded in part by this mundane assumption about the seat of the soul.
That all experience takes place inside the head is the common sense premise
behind the sci-fi scenario in which characters download their memories into a
computer. And it’s because all my experience is contained inside my head that I
can never really be sure whether or not I’m in touch with reality or suffering
from a massive illusion. I could be trapped –God help me –alongside Keanu in
the The Matrix. For all I know, I
could just be a brain in a vat of nutrients which is being stimulated so as to
make it think that it is in front of a keyboard, typing these words in sunny
Florida. 

That’s just the beginning of the
potential horror stories. At least, as Descartes famously summed up on his own
behalf, I know that I exist: there’s no doubt that I am having experiences,
even if they are illusory. But if the mind is tucked away inside the head, then
how do I know that anyone else has the lights switched on? I can’t see your
experience, can I? Thus it’s easy to see how we get from the seemingly common
sense premise that our experience is private to nightmare tales of neighbors
who are robots in disguise fiendishly sent to take over the Earth. These and
other frightening possibilities, while good for the entertainment industry,
have not brought such joy to philosophers. Indeed, like Descartes, philosophers
have for the most part been concerned to banish demons. They have wanted to
show us that we can have justified confidence in our everyday convictions: I
can safely believe that, yes, these are my hands in front of me, and, yes, the
neighbor who so nicely welcomed me to my new apartment is not in fact a zombie.

Gregory McCulloch’s work is
concerned throughout to give us a conception of mental life that makes sense of
the everyday confidence we have in our experience. He sets about doing this by
challenging the seemingly commonsensical idea just introduced, namely the idea
that mental life is constituted by what goes on inside the head. What he sets
in opposition is the phenomenological externalism of the book’s subtitle. Think
of some of the objects of your experience right now: perhaps the computer
keyboard in front of you. The keyboard causes your experience of seeing the
keyboard. But the keyboard does not merely cause your experience the way sun causes sunburn. The keyboard is part of
your experience, isn’t it? That is, isn’t it one of the objects which
constitutes your experience? So, then, doesn’t your experience consist not just
of what is inside your head but what is outside of it too? In fact, when you
think about it, isn’t most of your consciousness ‘made up’ of objects outside
your head? (I hope so!) But if experience were a purely intracranial matter
then what we have introspective access to could not be aspects of the external
world. What we are experiencing must be merely representations of the outside world.
But then, what is ‘outside’ here, if what I normally call ‘outside’ turns out
to be inside my head? If the objects of my experience are all inside my head,
then all I am ever experiencing is the inside of my head. How does my
experience get to be about something beyond my inner representations? (Indeed,
as McCulloch stresses, what even gives one the right to call these putative
inner objects representations?) Thus the intuitive idea that experience is an
inner or internal phenomenon turns out to have a very counter-intuitive
consequence: experience starts to look like a screen pulled between me and
real-world objects rather than the way I am in touch with them. Thus McCulloch
suggests an alternative conception of experience, phenomenological externalism,
according to which experience is essentially open to and dependent upon its
real-world objects. Experience, and mental life, just ain’t in the head.

McCulloch argues throughout this
book that the apparently commonsensical alternative to externalism about
experience –one in which the mind is inside the head –alienates us from our
own mental life. The intracranial conception of mental life cannot make sense
of how the world reveals itself to us in experience or how the mental lives of
others can be open to view. Thus the book is marked by a deeply moving
sensitivity to the life of the mind and a sense of aggrievement at crudely
scientistic or reductive conceptions of human experience. McCulloch argues in a
rewarding chapter-length response to Paul Churchland that scientific realism
needs phenomenological externalism if the realist wants to celebrate the idea
that we are expanding human consciousness when we discover new aspects of the
structure of the universe. On McCulloch’s view, "subjective and objective
interpenetrate: the first does not exclude the second" (63). And this
needs to be the case if we are to make sense of how discoveries about the world
(the objective) could expand and reconfigure the contents of our minds (the
subjective). If we conceive of mental content as self-contained from the world
then, as suggested above, it is hard to see how the world ever gets to appear.

McCulloch is deeply influenced by
the work of his mentor, John McDowell, just as both philosophers are in turn
deeply influenced by Wittgenstein. (Perhaps McCulloch’s two other strongest
influences are Sartre and Quine, whose insights are enjoyably combined.) This
book, like McDowell’s Mind and World,
centers on a rejection of the Cartesian "ontological Real
Distinction" (2) between mind and world. McCulloch develops his own more
detailed and forcefully argued brand of externalism as way to ‘mind the gap’
(or better: remove the gap) between mind and world. One would have liked to
have seen more recognition in this book of how intuitive the intracranial view
is and how strange phenomenological externalism can seem, even if its
strangeness only serves (as no doubt McCulloch would have it) to illustrate how
out of touch our talk about the mind has become from the nature of our experience.
But this book still displays McCulloch’s characteristically punchy engagement
with alternative and opposing views. The
Life of the Mind was published posthumously and should be cherished
alongside his other fine books and articles.

©
2003 Daniel Callcut

Daniel Callcut is Assistant
Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Florida. He is currently
working on a book on the moral philosophy of Bernard Williams.

Categories: Philosophical, Philosophical