Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Tell someone that the thing they love most amounts to a pattern of neural firing and watch what happens to their face. Not disagreement — something closer to grief. You have not contradicted them; you have, it feels, robbed them. The tenderness they feel watching their child sleep, the lift in the chest when a particular chord resolves, the ache of a place they will never see again: all of it, you seem to have said, comes to nothing but chemistry. The word nothing but does the damage. It carries the suggestion that once we have the physical story, the significance drains out, like color from a photograph left in the sun.

This worry has a respectable name. Philosophers, borrowing a phrase from Max Weber’s account of modern life, call it the disenchantment of the world.¹ The sciences described nature as matter in lawful motion — magnificent, predictable, and utterly indifferent. And consciousness, meaning, the felt preciousness of a life, seemed not to fit anywhere in that description. David Chalmers states the sophisticated version cleanly: “Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world.”² If nature just is the disenchanted realm the physicist describes, then either mind belongs to a second realm science cannot reach — the dualist’s escape — or it gets absorbed into the first realm and, the worry goes, drained of everything that made it matter. Naturalism, on this telling, is the great disenchanter. To naturalize the mind is to explain it away.

I want to argue that the worry gets the direction of the draining exactly backwards. Naturalism, done properly, did not empty the world of significance. The picture it replaced did that — and naturalism is what lets you have the world back.

Start with the philosopher who saw the structure of the problem most clearly. John McDowell, who taught for decades at Pittsburgh after an Oxford training alongside Gareth Evans, delivered a set of lectures in 1991 — published as Mind and World — that diagnosed the disenchantment worry as a self-inflicted wound.³ His move is this. The worry assumes that “nature” means one thing: the realm of natural law, the disenchanted domain in which there are causes but no reasons, pushes and pulls but nothing that matters. Call that bald naturalism. It equates the natural with the law-governed-and-meaningless, and then, having defined nature that way, discovers to its horror that meaning has no home in nature. The horror is manufactured by the definition.

McDowell’s correction runs through an old idea he calls second nature. Human beings come into the world as animals and are then raised — into a language, a set of practices, a way of finding things salient and others negligible. Through that upbringing we acquire capacities the bald naturalist cannot place: the capacity to be moved by a reason, to find a face beautiful, to mean something by a word. These capacities are not a second substance bolted onto the animal. They are nature, in a second key — the natural endowment of a creature shaped by culture. “Once we remember second nature,” McDowell writes, “we see that operations of nature can include circumstances whose descriptions place them in the logical space of reasons.”⁴ Meaning belongs to nature. It needs no second realm, and naturalism does not drain it, because the cramped definition that made draining seem inevitable was never compulsory.

Now the deeper point, the one that turns the whole worry around. Notice what the disenchantment worry has to assume before it can even begin. It assumes that significance is a kind of inner stuff — a glow, a phosphorescence, a private light that experience gives off — and that the trouble with physics is that it never mentions the glow. But significance is not a stuff. Meaning, significance, preciousness — these words do not name inner items. They name relations.⁵ What is precious about watching your child sleep is not a luminous quale of child-watching, secreted somewhere behind your eyes. It is that you are watching your child. The grief over the place you will not see again is not an inner residue; it is grief for the place. Cash out the significance and every time you find a creature bound up with a world — directed at it, answerable to it, caring about it.

This is where the reversal lands. The picture that made significance look drainable was the inner theater: the old Cartesian image of the mind as a private chamber in which sensations are screened for an inner audience, sealed off from a world it can only infer.⁶ That picture is the disenchanting one. It drains the world first — turns the sun and the face and the chord into mere matter, milling about behind a veil — and then stuffs all the value into a private inner item, the glow, the what-it’s-likeness, the thing the philosophical zombie is imagined to lack. Having put significance inside, sealed away from everything, the picture leaves it looking exactly like the kind of thing physics could fail to find, or fail to need. The disenchantment was real. It just happened at the other end. The inner theater drained the world and called the result mind. This does not by itself prove that no version of naturalism could disenchant by some other route; it shows that the most familiar road to disenchantment runs through the inner theater rather than through naturalism — which is enough to strip the worry of its air of inevitability and to clear the ground for the relational reading’s chief rival.

Naturalism, done in the relational and embodied key the inner theater never allowed, unseals the chamber. The sunset that stops you is the actual sun, ninety-three million miles of fusion and an atmosphere bending its light. The face you love is the actual face. Your experience reaches the world rather than screening a copy of it for you. And significance, which was never an inner glow in the first place, turns out to live exactly where it always seemed to before a bad theory talked you out of it: in the relation between a creature and the things it cares about.⁷ Galen Strawson — son of the Oxford philosopher P. F. Strawson, and a man temperamentally incapable of letting a comfortable consensus stand — makes the complementary move from the side of matter. He insists on what he calls real materialism: experience is the most certain concrete fact any of us has, so if it does not fit our picture of the physical, the lesson is that our picture of the physical is too small, not that experience is suspect.⁸ Naturalism does not shrink the mind to fit a disenchanted world. It enlarges our sense of what the world contains.

The strongest objection comes from Thomas Nagel. In The View from Nowhere, Nagel argues that the more we describe reality objectively — from no particular point of view, the way physics aspires to — the more the subjective standpoint slips out of the account, and the subjective standpoint, the sheer what-it-is-like of being someone, is precisely where significance seems to live.⁹ A complete objective description of the universe would not mention that any of it matters to anyone, because mattering is irreducibly a view from somewhere. So naturalism, in its drive toward objectivity, does threaten to leave significance out.

Nagel has hold of something true, and it should not be waved away. There is a standpoint — yours, mine — and a description that pretends no one is home does leave something out. But notice what the objection still assumes: that the standpoint is an inner item the objective story omits, a glow visible only from within. It is not. The standpoint is a perfectly natural fact about a located creature — that there is a particular animal, here, with this body and this history, for whom the sunset is this sunset. That is second nature again: a natural being whose nature includes a point of view. Nagel is right that you cannot describe the significance of a life while pretending the life is no one’s. He is wrong that the only alternative is a non-natural inner light. The point of view is real, it is natural, and it is where the world shows up as mattering. I will grant Nagel the residue he most wants: a description from nowhere can record that there is a located creature with a standpoint, but it cannot occupy that standpoint, and so cannot capture the world’s mattering from the inside. That residue, though, costs naturalism nothing — it marks a limit on third-person description, not a second realm hiding behind the first. The standpoint that the objective view cannot step into is still a natural standpoint, all the way down.

So the wonder survives the explanation. It was never the cheap wonder the disenchantment worry imagined — that a private light somehow flickers on behind the eyes. It is the stranger and far better fact the inner theater hid from view: that a piece of the world, folded into the shape of an animal and raised into a language, comes to be about the rest of the world — to track it, answer to it, find a chord worth resolving and a face worth keeping. Tell someone that the thing they love amounts to neural firing and you have said something true and almost nothing of interest. The interesting truth is what that firing is of. The explanation does not take the wonder away. It tells you what the wonder is about.

References

Chalmers, David J. (2002). “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature.” In The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, edited by Stephen Stich and Ted Warfield. Oxford: Blackwell.

McDowell, John. (1996). Mind and World. With a new introduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Originally published 1994.)

Nagel, Thomas. (1986). The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sellars, Wilfrid. (1956). “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1, edited by Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sellars, Wilfrid. (1962). “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.” In Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, edited by Robert Colodny. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Strawson, Galen. (2008). Real Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Tye, Michael. (1995). Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Notes

1. The term disenchantment (German Entzauberung, literally “de-magic-ing”) comes from Max Weber’s diagnosis of modernity, in which scientific rationalization strips the world of the magical and sacred significance earlier ages found in it. McDowell adopts the word as a name for a philosophical rather than sociological condition: a conception of nature as the realm of natural law alone, from which the space of reasons has been extruded. The essay’s argument concerns this philosophical sense, not Weber’s historical thesis. ↩
2. Chalmers (2002), opening line. The sentence is doing more work than it advertises: it presupposes that “our conception of the natural world” is fixed and that consciousness must be fitted into it or excluded. McDowell’s response — and the book’s — is to contest the conception rather than relocate consciousness. Chalmers takes the disenchanted conception as given and concludes to non-reductive dualism (or panpsychism); the present argument treats the disenchanted conception as the disputable premise. ↩
3. McDowell (1996). The book collects his 1991 John Locke Lectures at Oxford. The relevant machinery — “bald naturalism,” “naturalized platonism,” and “second nature” — is developed in Lecture IV and the Afterword. McDowell credits the phrase “the logical space of reasons” to Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), §36, where Sellars distinguishes characterizing a state as knowledge from giving an empirical description of it — placing it “in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.” ↩
4. McDowell (1996), Lecture IV. The full thought: the bald naturalist assumes that to locate something in nature is to locate it in the realm of law, which is by definition disenchanted; “second nature” breaks the assumption by letting the same natural creature be at home both in the realm of law and in the space of reasons. McDowell’s naturalism is avowedly Aristotelian: the relevant capacities are acquired through Bildung, upbringing, the way a human animal is initiated into a tradition. This is the opposite of a “second substance” — it is one nature, described at two levels that need not reduce to each other. ↩
5. This is the book’s anti-reification methodology applied to the axiological vocabulary. Terms like meaning, significance, and value invite treatment as inner substances — things experience contains or emits — when they in fact abbreviate relations between a subject and what the subject is directed at. The disenchantment worry trades on the reification: it pictures significance as a glow, notices physics omits the glow, and concludes significance is endangered. Dissolve the reification and the worry loses its object. ↩
6. The inner theater is the picture, inherited from Descartes, on which the mind is a private inner space whose contents — sensations, images, the felt qualities of experience — are screened for an inner observer and only inferred to correspond to an outer world. The philosophical zombie is the limit case of the reification at issue here: a creature supposed to be physically and functionally identical to a conscious person while lacking the inner “light.” The very intelligibility of that scenario requires that phenomenal significance be an inner item severable from all worldly relations — exactly the picture this essay denies. ↩
7. That significance was never an inner item to be drained is the same datum that drives the transparency of experience: when you try to attend to the “feel” of seeing a red apple, you find only the apple and its redness — never an inner quale standing between you and the world (Tye 1995; the observation goes back to G. E. Moore and was sharpened by Gilbert Harman). If experience is transparent in this way, then what carries the significance of seeing is the seen — the world represented — and not a private screening of it. The relational account of significance and the representational account of experience are the same thesis viewed from two angles. ↩
8. Strawson (2008). Strawson’s “real materialism” (also “realistic monism”) refuses the move that quietly equates “physical” with “non-experiential”: if experience is real, and wholly physical, then the physical must be something more than the non-experiential stuff it is ordinarily assumed to be. Strawson and McDowell pull in different directions on much (Strawson is drawn toward panpsychism, which the book does not follow), but they converge on the present point: the disenchantment worry is powered by a stipulated impoverishment of nature, and the right response is to reject the stipulation rather than the phenomena. ↩
9. Nagel (1986), especially chs. I–IV. Nagel’s worry is not a confusion to be cleared away but a genuine tension between the objective drive of physical understanding and the irreducibility of the first-person standpoint. The reply offered here concedes Nagel’s negative point (a description from nowhere omits the standpoint) while denying his implicit ontology (that the standpoint is therefore a non-natural inner residue). The standpoint is a natural fact about a located, embodied creature — which is also why the explanatory gap that Nagel and Chalmers press is best read as a fact about our concepts rather than a hole in nature. ↩