Dialogues on Psychophysical Harmony, Part 1

An intro to an argument

Setting: Two students, A and T, have met for brunch in the Covered Market.

…

A: So, what’s new with you?

T: Oh, nothing much.

A: Really, nothing?

T: Well, I finished redecorating by dorm room, I changed my mind about the existence of God, and… oh! I’ve recently started juggling!

A: Come again?

T: I’m learning to juggle! I’m getting pretty comfortable with three balls, but four is still a challenge, although…

A: No, I mean, you believe in God now? Are you religious?

T: No, not yet. But I do believe in God.

A: Yikes, I’ve know you for a while and you always struck me as a reasonable fellow. What changed? A miracle? Pascal’s Wager? The beauty of the setting sun? What?

T: No, none of the above. What changed my mind was the argument from psychophysical harmony.

A: The argument from whatzawhozit?

T: Psychophysical harmony.

A: Psychophysical harmony - ok. What’s that?

T: Can I illustrate with some examples?

A: Go for it.

T: Look at me. What do you see?

A: Someone in need of blackhead removal.

T: Fine, I’ll use a different example. *Holds up nutricious vegan wrap* What do you see this time?

A: Rabbit food?

T: (supresses tears)

A:  Ok, ok, fine!  A “wrap”.  

T: *blows nose* And not a lobster?

A: What?

T: I know you heard me.

A: Why would there be a lobster?

T: I’m not asking if there is a lobster. I’m asking if you see a lobster when I show you this wrap.

A: No, I don’t see a lobster. What’s your point?

T: My point is that your mental representations of objects you see in the world are broadly accurate, and not wildly inaccurate. Your mental image of a wrap corresponds to what’s actually there.

A: Oh, not always. Like, this one time, at band camp, my friend took these tablets that she got from Counsellor Stevens, and—

T: Ok, ok, barring obvious exceptions, like when you’re dreaming or doing drugs, the things that are actually in front of your eyes tend to be the things represented in your visual field, correct?

A: Correct.

T: That’s an example of psychophysical harmony. Your visual mental states correspond to objects in the physical world in a rationally appropriate way. You see certain things represented in your visual field, and those things are actually there in front of you.

A: I see.

T: (annoyingly flicks A on the forehead) And what happens when I do that?

A: I phone your mother.

T: Before that.

A: I feel pain. And a disposition to phone your mother.

T: Well, that’s an example of psychophysical harmony too.

A: How so?

T: When something harms your body, you experience a feeling. That feeling is negative: pain. And that negative feeling, pain, also gives rise to a rationally appropriate desire. The desire to defend yourself, run away, or exact revenge.

A: Okay, I think I get the general idea. Psychophysical harmony is the observation that our mental states match up with the external, physical world in rationally appropriate ways.

T: Exactly.

A: (yawns) So, how is this evidence for God again?

T: Hold the phone. I’ll get to that eventually, but before I can, I need to explain why psychophysical harmony is so puzzling. To convince you that God is the best solution to the problem of psychophysical harmony, I need to convince you of why it’s a problem in the first place.

A: Ok; go for it.

T: Here’s an observation about psychophysical harmony. Tell me if this seems right to you. The fact that our mental states match up with physical states in rationally appropriate ways is a regular and uniform occurrence. It doesn’t just happen randomly – once in a blue moon, on again off again. Psychophysical harmony is dependable and regular. Like a law of nature.

A: A law of nature?

T: Yeah, like gravity.

A: How so?

T: Psychophysical harmony is actually quite a bit like gravity. When I’m pinched, I feel pain. This response is uniform, predictable, and regular – like gravity. When I let go of an object, it predictably falls to the ground. Gravity, too, is uniform, predictable, and regular.

A: What are you saying?

T: I’m saying that just like how the law of gravity describes the regular occurrence that an object will fall when I drop it, there are laws that equally describe the consistent match up between particular brain states and particular mental states – between being pinched and feeling pain, between having sex and feeling pleasure, between eating food and wanting more. In other words, there are psychophysical laws.

A: Psychophysical laws?

T: That’s right. Psychophysical laws.

A: Never heard of them. How do you know they’re real?

T: For the same reason we think any other law of nature is real. If a phenomenon occurs with lawlike regularity, and does so across time and place, it seems reasonable to infer that that phenomenon can be explained in terms of a law, or a set of laws. Otherwise, it’d be pretty near impossible to explain why objects tend to fall why you drop them, why water boils at 100°C, or why matches burn when you strike them. Psychophysical laws are the same way. There are regular, uniform correlations between brain states and mental states.

A: Seems reasonable. But, what, are you saying that on top of the laws of nature that physicists, chemists, and biologists have discovered, there are a bunch of other, weird, spooky laws governing the “psychophysical realm” (does massive air-quotes) that no-one else knows about?

T: Every self-aware person with a brain knows about them - literally, because every self-aware person with a brain is bound by them and experiences their effects. Also: I’m not saying the psychophysical laws are distinct from the laws of biology, physics, and chemistry. They might be. I couldn’t say. Maybe psychophysical correlations are reducible to a law or a to set of laws described by one of those fields. That wouldn’t affect the argument. All I’m claiming is that – whatever they turn out to be – psychophysical laws exist.  

A: I guess I could buy into that.

T: Wonderful. Are you ready for the next bit?

A: No, not yet; I’ve changed my mind. If psychophysical laws are real, what about mental illness?

T: What?

A: What about hallucinations? What about people who can’t feel pain when you pinch them? You’ve been saying that the psychophysical laws are uniform. But they’re not uniform. They vary. A lot. Different people have different sorts of subjective experiences all the time.

T: Thanks for bringing that up. I should’ve been more precise: by uniform, I don’t mean that everyone’s subjective experiences are the same. You’re right, they’re not. People’s brains can be configured or externally influenced in different ways, and different sorts of subjective experiences will result. But that doesn’t mean psychophysical laws don’t exist. All it means is that the laws are complicated, and give rise to different subjective experiences depending on what differences there are in the brain.

A: I see. So it is sort of like gravity. A naïve description of the law of gravity might be that objects always fall when you let go of them. But the fact that objects don’t fall when you let go of them in Outer Space doesn’t mean there are no gravitational laws – only that we’ve been thinking of the gravitational laws in a simplistic way.

T: Exactly.

A: Ok. With you so far. Psychophysical laws exist, and they give rise to psychophysical harmony.

T: Boy do they.

A: But why do you find that puzzling? It seems fine to me.

T: It totally isn’t fine. Here’s why the phenomenon is so puzzling: up to this point, we’ve agreed there are certain psychophysical laws, and that those laws allow for psychophysical harmony, haven’t we?

A: We have indeed.

T: Now, imagine the laws were different. Imagine the laws governing the relationship between mental states and physical states – the psychophysical laws – were such that no matter what happened in front of your eyes, all you could ever see was a frozen gif of Owen Jones, teaching a 96-year-old grandmother from Surrey a lesson on politics.

A: You’re scaring me. Please stop.

T: And imagine the psychophysical laws were such that all you could ever hear was a looped recording of Jones’s voice, saying: “That’s not actually how the economy works, actually.”

A: (quakes in boots)

T: Conceivably, the psychophysical laws could have been that way. Conceivably, they could’ve also been such that all you ever saw was inky blackness, all you ever felt was freezing bathwater, and all you ever heard was a mysterious, rhythmic ticking noise. Can you conceive of the psychophysical laws being those ways?

A: (closes eyes, concentrates)

T: Take a minute if you like.

A: (takes a minute) Yes, I can conceive of the psychophysical laws having been all of those messed up ways. They aren’t, though, so what your point?

T: My point is this: conceivably, there are loads – billions, trillions, zillions – of ways the psychophysical laws might have been. There are tons of ways they conceivably could have been combined, but aren’t. The majority of these – the vast, vast majority – would not have allowed for psychophysical harmony. They’d have only allowed for psychophysical disharmony, where mental states do not match up with physical states in rationally appropriate ways.

A: Why is that? Why think that the vast majority of ways the psychophysical laws conceivably might have been would be disharmonious?

T: Because reality is only the one way, and so there are a limited number of ways the psychophysical laws could’ve been so as to produce rationally appropriate responses to it. By contrast, there is a virtually unlimited number of ways the psychophysical laws could’ve been that wouldn’t fall into this narrow range. So the overwhelming majority of ways the psychophysical laws could conceivably have been would not allow for psychophysical harmony.

A: Fair enough. What comes next?

T: This: suppose for the sake of argument that naturalism is true.

A: What do you mean by “naturalism”?

T: Naturalism is the view that there is nothing supernatural; no God, no angels, no devils, no gods – just nature. Naturalists also tend to think that nature is indifferent to value. Nature – which is all that there is – doesn’t have an in-built desire or tendency to bring about good things, like consciousness or democracy or people. It just brings about things, blindly, indifferent to whether they’re valuable or not.

A: Sounds like what I believe in now.

T: Right; so suppose that’s true. Then, on that supposition, the supposition of naturalism, how surprising is it that the psychophysical laws are such that they give rise to psychophysical harmony?

A: Depends. What do you mean by “surprising”?

T: Something is surprising if it is both unexpected and significant. Both elements – unexpectedness and significance – need to be in place for a fact to qualify as “surprising”: When Roe was overruled, that was significant, but it wasn’t surprising, because we already knew what the ruling would be in advance. And if you somehow learned that someone you knew has exactly 186 face-freckles, that specific number of freckles would be unexpected but not surprising – there’s nothing significant about the number 186 in the context of freckles. But consider this: if I flipped a fair coin 400 times, and the results were Heads, Tails, Heads, Tails, Heads, Tails, Heads, Tails, Heads, Tails, and on like that until the four-hundredth flip, then that fact would be surprising, because it’s both unexpected and falls into a pattern – Heads, Tails, Heads, Tails – that strikes us as being somehow more significant, more noteworthy, than a completely random distribution of Tails and Heads with no sequence or pattern.

A: Ok, so, something is surprising if it’s both unexpected and significant. That makes sense. And so you were asking me… how surprising is it, on naturalism, that that the psychophysical laws are such that they give rise to psychophysical harmony?

T: Right. How surprising is it?

A: I mean, do you want a number?

T: Ballpark.

A: I have no idea.

T: Given what I said about what it takes for something to be surprising, how would you go about trying to get a sense of how surprising a given fact is, on a scale of ridiculously surprising to not surprising at all?

A: I’d get a sense of how unexpected it is, and then I’d get a sense of how significant it seems.

T: So do that with psychophysical harmony.

A: Well, psychophysical harmony does seem unexpected. Like you said, there are gazillions of ways the psychophysical laws conceivably could have been, and yet the psychophysical laws aren’t any of those ways. They’re this particular way. That’s unexpected. As in, if we could somehow guess what the psychophysical laws would be like without knowing anything about our own consciousness, and all we knew was that naturalism was true, we’d have no reason to predict that the psychophysical laws would be harmonious, given all the other disharmonious ways we can conceive of them having been.

T: We agree. And what about significance? Does the fact that the psychophysical laws give rise to psychophysical harmony seem more like the case of your friend having exactly 186 freckles, or more like the case where the fair coin gets flipped 400 times and ends up with a perfectly alternated distribution of Tails and Heads?

A: I’m not sure…

T: Really? It seems significant to me.

A: How come?

T: Because psychophysical harmony is incredibly fortunate and totally awesome. The actually existing psychophysical laws are way better, as far as we’re concerned, than the vast majority of other ways the psychophysical laws conceivably could have been. Remember: conceivably, the psychophysical laws could have been totally disharmonious. That would have been incredibly unfortunate and totally lame – possibly even terrible. You might have had to listen to Owen Jones. But, in reality, the psychophysical laws we actually have give rise to psychophysical harmony, which is really good because it allows us to pursue our projects, learn truths, and experience beauty.

A: But why does that make it significant?

T: You mean, “Why does something’s being incredibly valuable, and way more valuable than almost every other alternative, make that thing significant?”

A: Well, when you put it like that…

T: Look, if something is incredibly valuable, and way more valuable than almost every other alternative, doesn’t that just make it significant by definition?

A: I suppose so. But this whole idea of “significance” sounds pretty subjective and woolly. How can you rest your claim that psychophysical harmony is surprising on such a vaguely defined concept?

T: “Significance” is hard to define – you’re right. It’s not clear that all of the things we consider “significant” share any single feature in common that would explain why we’re disposed to label all of them “significant”.

A: So I repeat: How can you rest your claim that psychophysical harmony is surprising on a concept as vague and woolly as “significance”?

T: Well, we’ve already established that if something is not “significant” in the relevant sense, it can’t count as “surprising”. So all of our judgements about anything being “surprising” are going to have to rest on this somewhat vague idea.

A: So what? If we can’t specify exactly what we mean when we call some fact “significant”, then we should never go around calling that fact surprising.

T: But if we can never call any fact or event surprising, then we can’t say it’s surprising when a fair-looking coin gets flipped 400 times and lands in a perfectly alternated sequence between Tail and Heads. But that’s Bonkers Town. Surely, surely, a fair-looking coin landing in a perfectly alternated sequence between Tail and Heads for 400 consecutive flips is surprising.

A: I guess that seems right. But don’t call me Shirley. (laughs uncontrollably at own joke)

T: (literally nothing)

A: (regains composure)

T: Anyway, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the “significance” part of my account of “suprisingness” is vague and hard to define. I’m using the same sort of method to define “significance” that Justice Potter Stewart used in 1964 to define “hard-core pornography”: I can’t define it, exactly, but I know it when I see it. That’s the common-sense method that we use to apply most of our concepts to most things, and it seems to work well enough.

A: Ok. I think I’m with you so far. The fact that the psychophysical laws happen to be such that they allow for psychophysical harmony is “significant” and highly unexpected on naturalism. So, on naturalism, psychophysical harmony is very surprising. And you’re saying that that’s a problem for naturalism?

T: Big time.

A: Why so?

T: Imagine a group of scientists come up with some new theory: theory X. If the scientists go on to discover about a fact about our world that would be very surprising if theory X were true, but less surprising if theory X were false, then that fact - taken on its own - is evidence against theory X. The more surprising the fact, the stronger the counter-evidence. And what I’m saying is that the fact of psychophysical harmony is ridiculously surprising on naturalism. This makes psychophysical harmony powerful evidence that naturalism is false – because it’s so surprising.

A: Psychophysical harmony might be evidence against naturalism, but that doesn’t mean it’s evidence in favour of anything else. If psychophysical harmony is just as surprising on every other theory, then it doesn’t give us reason to replace naturalism with any other theory – including the theory that God exists.

T: True. If other theories explained psychophysical harmony just as badly as naturalism does, then the observation of psychophysical harmony would give us no reason to reject naturalism in favour of something else.

A: So, I suppose you’re going to tell me that theism explains psychophysical better than naturalism.

T: Bingo bongo. And not just better. A lot better.

A: Well, you’d better tell me why – now!

T: No, I won’t.  

A: What? Why?

T: In approximately half an hour there’s an aubergine cookout for vegetarian members of the Oxford Beagling Society. Theists have lives too, you know.

A: Right. Sure they do. Same time tomorrow?

T: You bet.

A: Later skater.

T: Catch you on the flippedy-flop.

[To be continued…]

[For more on the argument from psychophysical harmony, see Cutter and Crummett’s “Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism”: https://philarchive.org/archive/CUTPHA Views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the argument’s inventors.]