Aristotle on the Immateriality of Intellect and Will

Michael Egnor January 26, 2015 3:27 PM | Permalink

At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne has responded to my post about the immateriality of the intellect and will and the reality of free will. He admits that he doesn't grasp the argument completely, so I'll expand upon it a bit.

First, a note on the provenance of the argument. The argument is not mine. It was originally proposed by Aristotle (De Anima, Book III). For two millennia, it was the common wisdom of educated men, and was widely considered decisive. Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic philosophers developed it further (Sententia Libri De Anima). Through Aquinas and Maimonides and Averroes, this argument of the peripatetic pagan became a cornerstone of the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic understanding of the mental powers of the soul.

With the rise of Cartesian and Hobbesian mechanical philosophy and materialism in the 16th and 17th centuries, the classical argument for the immateriality of the intellect and will was simply ignored and then forgotten. Yet Aristotle's argument has never been refuted. Modern materialists confidently deny free will and deny the immateriality of the intellect and will without even the slightest acquaintance with this pivotal argument that has been extant for two thousand years. That we take the free-will deniers seriously is a pitiful commentary on our gullibility and the poverty of our intellectual culture.

What follows is a précis of the argument.

We have knowledge of two kinds of things -- particulars and universals. Particulars are things that exist as discrete objects in nature. An apple is a particular, as is a tree and a man.

Universals don't exist as discrete things in nature. Universals are characteristics of particular things. Goodness (say, a good apple), greenness (of a tree), and humanity (said of man) are universals. Universals are concepts, not discrete things existing in nature.

Particulars are substances -- things that exist in their own right. Universals are things that exist in other things -- accidents, in Aristotelian terminology.

Particulars have material agency, whereas universals don't. If you are hit by a red truck, you are hit by the truck, not by the red.

Aristotle asked: Is knowledge a material act, or an immaterial act? He noted that certain kinds of knowledge -- such as sense-perception, imagination and memory -- grasp particulars and can be readily understood as material acts. I see a rock, or a tree, or a man. Such perception of particulars can easily be understood as inherently material -- or at least very tightly linked to matter. In fact, modern neuroscience has dovetailed nicely with Aristotle's view. The visual perception of a tree involves a fully material process of light striking the retina, activating neurons and action potentials via projections to the occipital cortex, etc. In many situations, the sense-perception of an object correlates with brain activation in a somatotopic pattern. Regions of the retina project consistently to specific corresponding regions of the cortex. It's very well organized. It's quite elegantly material.

Now Aristotle understood "material" in a quite different way than modern materialists do, so modern materialism is still stymied in its ability to explain even sense-perception (the qualia problem). But the general Aristotelian principle that knowledge of particulars is inherently material has withstood the test of time.

Aristotle pointed out that universals are another issue entirely. Knowledge of universals like good and evil -- the kind of knowledge on which free will is based -- is mediated by intellect and will. Intellect and will entail knowledge of concepts, not particular things.

How can a concept be instantiated in matter? Well, it can't. Concepts (universals) are not particulars. Therefore concepts cannot be instantiated as a particular in brain tissue or as a particular in any material substrate, such as a brain state.

Simply put: brain states are particulars, and concepts are universals, so a concept cannot be a particular brain state.

The standard materialist reply to this observation (after the materialist admits that the two thousand year old argument is completely new to him) is that the concept is represented in a brain state. The materialist will appeal to "integrated... overlapping... massive parallel processing" or to whatever is the consensus neurobabble of the day. But all neurobabble reduces to representation. All (non-eliminative) arguments for the materiality of the intellect and will depend on brain representation of concepts.

The materialist will have a point here, although he won't understand it. While a universal cannot be a particular substance, it can be an accidental form in a particular substance. It is certainly true that concepts can be represented materially. I am doing so now as I type this. Perhaps concepts can be represented in the brain in some way, analogous to the way I am representing these Aristotelian concepts on my computer.

But this doesn't get materialists out of the bind. Imagine that a concept can be represented in a brain state, via a kind of neuro-HTML code for thought. In fact, philosopher Jerry Fodor and others have proposed a "language of thought" hypothesis that proposes that thoughts are represented in the brain by a specific syntax. The problem with the use of language of thought hypotheses to fully explain mental concepts materialistically is that a representation presupposes that which it represents.

Imagine drawing a map of a city. You must first have a city, or the concept of a city, in order to draw the map. No city, no map. A representation is a representation of something -- so the representation cannot be the complete instantiation of that thing. If the representation is the complete instantiation of a thing, the representation is the thing itself, not a representation.

If a concept is represented in a brain state, then the concept is presupposed by the representation, and therefore you haven't explained the concept. You've merely explained its representation.

Even if materialists could show that a concept is represented in a brain state, as an accidental form rather than a substantial form, they can't explain the concept materialistically, because the material representation of a concept by accidental form presupposes the concept.

A further problem with the view that a concept could be an accidental form is that accidental forms have no material agency -- the truck hits you, not the red -- so if concepts were accidental forms, they couldn't cause anything to happen in the material world, including in the brain. Concepts would be mere epiphenomena of brain activity, and would be causally impotent. This view, which is epiphenomenalism, hasn't been taken seriously for centuries, for obvious reasons. In case the reason doesn't seem obvious, consider this: if a concept is an accidental form, and it therefore has no material agency, your statement "a concept is an accidental form" couldn't be caused by any concept that you have.

A concept -- a universal -- can't be explained materialistically.

You may have noticed in this argument a way out for materialists. Materialists could claim that the brain state doesn't represent the concept -- it just is the concept. Materialists could claim that our folk concepts (sic) of concepts are mere ignorance of the reality that we have no concepts at all. (If you're not chuckling now you don't understand the argument.) This is the concept that there are no concepts. Matter is the only thing that exists. Our concepts are just matter, without remainder and aren't representations at all.

This view -- eliminative materialism -- is regnant in materialist circles. Suffice to say that eliminative materialism is the drain around which all materialism eventually swirls.

Intellect and will are immaterial powers of the mind. The will is not determined by matter, and free will is real.

Now all of this is not to say that intellect and will are not dependent on matter for their ordinary functioning. If you are hit in the head with a baseball bat, your immaterial intellect and will won't work properly for a while. This is because intellect and will are dependent on material sense-perception and imagination and memory for their ordinary function. If you cannot perceive anything or imagine anything or remember anything, you have no substrate by which to understand anything. The immaterial powers of the mind function normally only when the material powers of the mind are functioning normally.

You may notice that this Aristotelian view of the dependence of immaterial intellect and will on material sense-perception and imagination and memory comports nicely with our own experience of free will. We are obviously influenced, and sometimes influenced powerfully, by the material state of our body. We do not judge or act wisely when we are tired or drunk or sick. Sometimes the impairment is so profound that we are not held responsible for our actions (e.g., if we have schizophrenia).

So our will is free from determinism, but influenced by matter. Sometimes the material influence is strong. Sometimes the influence is weak. Matter does not determine our will, but matter most certainly influences our will. This is our common experience.

The heart of Aristotle's genius was his ability to provide an enduring and masterful explanation of what all men know to be true. The modern denial of free will is a bizarre delusion, and one wonders if the deniers really believe what they say. They certainly live their lives as if free will were undeniable.

It is a scandal that the debate over free will is taking place largely without acknowledgement or even awareness of the classical demonstration of the immateriality of intellect and will. Aristotle's demonstration of the immateriality of intellect and will and his implicit defense of the freedom of the will from materialist determinism is as valid and pertinent today as it was two thousand years ago.

While Jerry Coyne cannot or will not accept the immateriality of the intellect, will, and reality of free will, Karl Popper had no such problem.

Popper (1902-1994) was a British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. Because he is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, what he had to say about philosophical materialism and Darwinism is of utmost importance to the down and dirty war of attrition waged by methodological and ontological naturalists against creationists and intelligent design adherents.

Though Popper favored evolutionary theory and natural selection, he also forthrightly stated that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but rather a metaphysical research program. By this he means that not only is Darwinism metaphysical (immaterial/spiritual), but so are its' two most important foundations, classical empiricism and the observationalist philosophy of science that grew out of it.

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that contradicts itself by asserting that human knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience rather than the mind while observationalism asserts that human knowledge and theories must be based on empirical observations....instead of the mind. For this reason, Popper argued strongly against empiricism and observationalism, saying that scientific theories and human knowledge generally, is conjectural or hypothetical and is generated by the immaterial creative imagination.

In other words, all three theories originated in the immaterial mind, a power of which is imagination. As spirit (intellect and will) is the citadel of the soul, then Darwinism, empiricism, and observationalism are spiritual.

The Founding generation knew that mind is a power of soul, and imagination the power by which mind conceives. In Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, soul and imagination are respectively defined as:

1. Soul: "The spiritual, rational and immortal substance in man, which distinguishes him from brutes; that part of man which enables him to think and reason."

2. Imagination: "...the power or faculty of the mind by which it conceives and forms ideas of things communicated to it by the senses....The business of conception (and the) power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones so as to form new wholes of our own creation...(imagination) selects the parts of different conceptions, or objects of memory, to form a whole more pleasing, more terrible, or more awful, than has ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature."

In short, Darwinism, classical empiricism and the observationalist philosophy of science claim to be what they are not in order to obtain an advantage over the Genesis account of creation and intelligent design by imposition of immoral means. We need to realize that the most zealous and outspoken defenders of this false science are arrogant sophists who hate truth and reality and mean to keep it out.

"This philosophical insight is actually reduced to an experimentally reproduceable phenomenon in cases where the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies."

Spirited: No it doesn't. Heisenberg's "uncertainty" derives from losing his faith tied to a subsequent fall into the "here below" (naturalism) and a desperate but ultimately futile search for answers to the ultimate questions: where did life and the universe come from? What is man and what happens after he dies?

While Heisenberg's futile search took him deeper and deeper into mereological nihilism (see Quantum Field Theory and Mereological Nihilism/Atomism, physics forums)earlier apostates searched within the spirit realm:

"Skepticism based on science flowed into and reinforced the older stream of doubt stemming from historical and ethical considerations. Their joint effect may be traced in the fact that whilst the outstanding Cambridge men of the 1840's...all took Orders (three of them becoming great clerical headmasters and six bishops), the outstanding Cambridge intellectuals of the 1870's – the Trinity group centring on Henry Sidgwick and Henry Jackson and including Frederic Myers, G. W. and A. J. Balfour, Walter Leaf, Edmund Gurney, Arthur Verrall, F. W. Maitland, Henry Butcher and George Prothero – tended towards agnosticism or hesitant Deism." (The Founders of Psychical Research, Alan Gauld, p. 64)

In this same period a group of young dons from Trinity College, Cambridge, were also turning to psychic research as a substitute for their lost Evangelical faith:

" In February 1882, Podmore took Pease to a meeting at which this group founded the Society for Psychical Research . . . Among those who founded the SPR were Henry Sidgwick, Arthur Balfour – later a conservative Prime Minister – and his brother, Gerald." ((Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie,The Fabians, p. 18)

The progenitor of the socialist Fabian Society was the Cambridge University spiritist group, the Ghost Society, founded in 1851. The Ghost Society also spawned the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) founded in 1887:

"Council Members and Honorary Members of the SPR included a past Prime Minister (William Gladstone)...and a future Prime Minister (Arthur Balfour)...2 bishops; and Tennyson and Ruskin, two of the outstanding literary figures of the day (as well as) Lewis Carroll (and) a surprising number of titled persons." (Gauld, p. 140)

Having apostatized from their faith they conceptually murdered the God of Revelation, disowned their own souls, closed the way to Heaven and sought power here below. Thus the over-riding interest of the S.P.R. was not matter as with Heisenberg but the spirit realm. In search of power they conducted scientific research into phenomena such as mesmeric trance, telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, haunted houses, séances, and all aspects of mediumism, or contact with spirits, to determine the scientific laws of physical spiritualistic phenomena.

Secular historians of the nineteenth century agree that the dominant figures in the occult spiritist/socialist and philosophically materialist movements were mainly lapsed Evangelicals and Anglican clergymen preceded by Renaissance occultists. The onslaught of skepticism, atheism, agnosticism, higher Biblical criticism and dehistorization of the Genesis account together with moral relativism, Darwinism, quantum physics, and occult New Age spirituality assaulting the tattered foundations of our Republic were inspired by Protestant/Evangelical heresy together with an unhealthy interest in spiritism. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie explain this strange anomaly:

"The lesson instilled by Evangelical parents had been given a secular form. Evolution or what (Sidney) Webb called Zeitgeist, had taken the place of Providence, yet what Webb described as 'blind social forces'...which went on inexorably working out social salvation' did not relieve men of their moral responsibility. Victorian religion had taught that a belief in God's purposes must be accompanied by an effort to discern and advance them. Socialists who substituted a secular religion for the faith of their youth felt the same compulsion." (Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Fabians, 1977, p. 115-116)

Of course you do not know what I'm talking about since you have no idea of the ancient pagan antecedents underlying modern physics.

There really is nothing new in this world. What once was the animistic (animated matter/physics) worldview of ancient superstitious pagans has been revised and revamped for modern tastes.

For example, prior to the rise of mechanical philosophy, naturalism and positivism (scientism) in the 16th and 17th centuries, the existence of mans' immaterial (unseen) soul/spirit (intellect, will) was taken for granted throughout Christendom, but then simply ignored by naturalists and finally forgotten. Thus modern materialists such as cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett confidently deny free will and the immateriality of the intellect and will without even the slightest acquaintance with the ancient pagan antecedents of their assertions.

Modern materialism together with its' occult New Age counterpart are the antithesis of the Revealed Word and remain virtually unchanged from what they were in Paul's time:

"Paul was reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles, and in the market place every day with those who happened to be present. And also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him. Some were saying, "What would this idle babbler wish to say?" Others, "He seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities,"-- because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, "May we know what this new teaching is which you are proclaiming?… "(Acts 17:18-19)

The Stoics (todays' occult New Age/ cosmic Transhumanists) and Epicureans (todays' materialists/secular Transhumanists) were the two most prominent schools of nature philosophy/nature science/nature religion of that time. Theirs was an atheistic scientific worldview predicated upon a universe of animated (evolving) matter (animism) and energy. They were the physicists of their age.

The principle tenet of the Epicureans held that the world was not made by any deity, or with any design, but came into its being and form, through a fortuitous concourse of animated atoms of various sizes and magnitude that cemented together and so formed the world.

The world and everything in it--life, being, mind--were not created but rather the accidental emergent products of a great cosmic event (Cosmic Egg/Big Bang) that spontaneously generated matter from nothing. In this way of thinking, humans are aggregates of matter in motion in a human form and the human mind an active principle of grey matter.

This way of thinking forms the basis of the psychology of Sigmund Freud as well as of Darwin's evolutionary conception, modern evolutionary biology, Dennett's so-called 'cognitive science,' secular humanism and secular trans-humanism.

The Stoics were a celebrated school of severe and lofty pantheists. Like the Epicureans, they were animists. Their main principle was that the universe of energy was under the law of an iron necessity (determinism in Darwinian creeds and karma in Eastern creeds), the spirit of which was what they called the Deity, World Soul or Gaia.

Much of modern quantum physics falls under occult science and mystical pantheism.

Stoic and Epicurean sages received their ideas from ancient Chaldeans (Babylonians), Egyptians and Hindus whose nature systems extended back centuries before Greek and Roman civilization.

Returning to Heisenberg, along with his loss of faith in the Christian God in three Persons came the devastating loss of immortality after death, and loss of an ultimate source for life, intellect, will, conscience, meaning, and purpose.

If there is no Triune God of life and creation, then it logically follows that there is no source for life, consciousness, soul, spirit and will, or for human dignity, worth, liberty, and property. Without God the Father unalienable (God-given) rights are meaningless. If man is not God's spiritual image-bearer, then he is less than nothing, a conclusion Buddha reached long before Jesus Christ walked this earth:

"Six centuries before Jesus Christ, the Buddha already knew that if God does not exist, then the human self cannot exist either......Therefore, he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul. When one starts peeling the onion skin of one's psyche, he discovers that there is no solid core at the center of one's being. Your sense of self is an illusion. Reality is nonself (anatman). You don't exist. Liberation, the Buddha taught, is realizing the unreality of your existence." (The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi, p. 6)

This bears repeating: Reality is nonself...You don't exist. Nor did Heisenberg, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Stalin, Lenin, and so very many more from years past who dug pits for themselves along with many of today such as Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. Logically, all of them were and are the Walking Dead while in this world.

And finally, that the so-called "scientifically enlightened" take these "self-deniers" seriously is a pitiful commentary on the gullibility and intellectual and spiritual poverty of our so-called "scientific elites" and their obsessed followers.

Of course you do not know what I'm talking about since you have no idea of the ancient pagan antecedents underlying modern physics.

Your arrogance and presumption about my knowledge is tedious and sophomoric. As is the rest of your ridiculous screed, in which you slap together unrelated concepts like a high school student flipping through Wikipedia to support a night-before-due term paper.

If there is no Triune God of life and creation, then it logically follows that there is no source for life, consciousness, soul, spirit and will, or for human dignity, worth, liberty, and property.

So logically, all of the religions and philosophy which do not accept the concept of the "Triune God" have no concept not support of any "source for life, consciousness, soul, spirit and will, or for human dignity, worth, liberty, and property"?

LOL - That's, what, 80 percent of the Earth's population, 5 billion people, with no concept or belief in those issues? What a narcissistic, unhinged farce of a contention. Your shamelessness is ugly.

"Six centuries before Jesus Christ, the Buddha already knew that if God does not exist, then the human self cannot exist either......Therefore, he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul. ...Your sense of self is an illusion. Reality is nonself (anatman). You don't exist. Liberation, the Buddha taught, is realizing the unreality of your existence." (The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi, p. 6) This bears repeating: Reality is nonself...You don't exist.

FYI, you shouldn't read about Buddhism from a Bible tract - you're gonna get it wrong. And you're really gonna get Hinduism wrong. As, by the way, you have here, in both cases.

First of all, the "no self" Buddhist and Hindu doctrine of "non-existence" refers to your EGO, not what in the West is called your "soul." But odd course you know this, because you invoked "anatman" - instead of Atman, which is the Self. Except the ultimate Atman is considered to be God, who is beyond our petty identities and yet who comprises our very souls.

I recommend you read up on the Trika Shaivism of Abhinavagupta to try to comprehend these issues more clearly. Oh and that word, "Trika"? It means "three." As in "Triune God" a thousand years before your laughably "ancient pagan antecedents."

Well you're not really returning to Heisenberg, because my reason for invoking him was his physics, not your mind-reading of his soul. But I will note your return to frothing absolutism by denying that same 5 billion purple even more human spiritual attributes, this time "immortality after death, and loss of an ultimate source for life, intellect, will, conscience, meaning, and purpose."

Amazing how the existence of all of those things and more exist in not only Trika Shaivism, but also all three main Buddhist paths, as well as virtually all Sanatan Dharma teachings (Hinduism for those who read about these things in Bible tracts).

Finally, these systems are all united on the concept that human history is cyclical, and that human beings tend to get into the same kind of trouble over and over again, and require nothing less than the incarnation of God to save them. Thus, they see similarities between such historical Avatars as supporting the concept of God protection, rather than, as is seen by Christians, to be done sort of argument as to who's right and who's wrong. For an interesting comparison along these lines, I recommend this web page: Specific similarities between the lives of Jesus and Krishna.

Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.

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