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Thoughts on Thought

Love & Metaphysics

Peter Graarup Westergaard explains why love is never just physical, with the aid of Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism.

Most people have felt the gap between the consciousness of love and the physical aspects of love. Science, even if it could describe all the hormonal changes, the chemistry of smells, and the social conditions of love, would still not able to accurately predict who will fall in love with whom.

Metaphysical dualism, which distinguishes the mind from the brain, might explain the difference between physical love and the consciousness of love. Indeed, I want to argue here that being in love as a mental state is a challenge to all materialist theories of mind, including behaviourism, type-identity theory, and physicalism. I’ll argue that you need to be a dualist at least about mental and physical properties, otherwise you will meet overwhelming challenges trying to understand the consciousness of love. However, you do not need to be a substance dualist like René Descartes. Rather, to metaphysically understand the consciousness of love, it is my suggestion that we should look in the direction of Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism.

Love by Vikas Beniwal
© Vikas Beniwal 2024. Please visit his Instagram @wisdomillustrations

Reductio ad Absurdum de Eros

Descartes argued that each of us has a physical brain – subject to the normal laws of cause and effect – and a non-physical mind, with the two interacting in a part of the brain called the pineal gland. This ‘Cartesian dualism’ – or variants on it – was the dominant philosophical view for a long time. In his 1949 book The Concept of the Mind Gilbert Ryle famously attacked this kind of dualism, calling it “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.” Instead he favoured behaviourism, where mind is an aspect of behaviour and mental events are reflexes produced by a response to stimuli under certain conditions.

From a dualist point of view, one problem with behaviourism is that it cannot explain the experience of love. The experience of someone in love cannot be fully grasped purely through external observations of their behaviour. One must also take introspection into account, and look at consciousness from the inside, as the concept of love is an essential ‘ghost in the bodily machinery’.

The species of materialism called type-identity theory, which holds that mental states are identical to their associated brain states, is also problematic. For example, Saul Kripke argued in Naming and Necessity (1972) that there is an element of contingency in the correspondence between brain states and mental states, and this conflicts with the idea of them being truly identical. If they were, then they would be necessarily identical in all possible worlds, but this does not seem to be the case. Indeed, one might argue that no kind of physical monism – in which any mental event just is a physical event – can explain how it is to be conscious.

As David Chalmers puts it: “The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. Human beings have subjective experience: there is something it is like to be them. We can say that a being is conscious in this sense […] A mental state is conscious when there is something it is like to be in that state.” (Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2002). The hard question is, how do our experiences relate to the brain states or activities that underpin them? Even though we might be able to identify some stimulus and connect it to resulting brain states, and even monitor and explain internal states of the brain, we will still have great difficulties in explaining how it is to be in love. Any kind of physical monism can only explain structures and functions, and the causal order of these, but not consciousness itself – or how it feels to be in love.

Mental Events

There are some deep inherent contradictions in our understanding of consciousness, and our conceptions of love and of freedom. As humans we believe in freedom and that we are free to choose whom we love, even though the metaphor “fall in love” might suggest otherwise. It is difficult to explain the freedom of humans if you at the same time argue that consciousness can be explained from a physicalist, and hence determinist, point-of-view. Yet we cannot reject the physical aspect of love either, as the ‘falling’ metaphor suggests. As a consequence, in order to save freedom of choice, in love as well as out of it, we need to maintain a dualist perspective, yet on the other side we cannot deny the physical explanation and deterministic laws either.

Donald Davidson has tried to combine the internal contradictions in the explanation of consciousness in his seminal essay Mental Events (1970). In it Davidson asks: “Mental events such as perceivings, rememberings, decisions, and actions resist capture in the nomological [law-like] net of physical theory. How can this fact be reconciled with the causal role of mental events in the physical world?” To solve this puzzle, Davidson invents ‘the triad’. In doing so, he just might save consciousness from materialism. The triad says:

(1) There must be mental-physical causal interaction;

(2) “Where there is causality, there must be law: events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws.” Finally,

(3) There are no deterministic laws which can explain mental events, otherwise we would not have a free will.

Idea (3) he calls ‘the anomalism of the mental’. Davidson names his theory ‘anomalous monism’ since it contains these three apparently contradictory statements. Mental-physical causal interaction must be according to laws, but no laws can entirely determine the mental events if there is such a thing as free will.

Supervenience, Monism & Love

A key word in Davidson’s theory is ‘supervenience’. In philosophy this denotes a special kind of relationship, whereby A is supervenient on B if some change in B is necessary for any change in A. This doesn’t mean A is the same as B. Davidson thinks that mental properties are supervenient on brain events, but this doesn’t make mental activity deterministic.

Supervenience does not entail the reducibility of the mental to the physical. Indeed, Davidson argues that such ‘type-identity’ between the mental and the physical is impossible. So instead of type-identity, every mental event is a representation of a certain brain event as a ‘token-identity’, such that similar states of the brain will give rise to similar experiences, although the experience is not identical to the brain state. Clearly, mental events such as thoughts, or feelings of being in love, possess characteristics or properties that physical events do not, and vice versa, so the mental and the physical are different things. Nevertheless, Davidson denies a ‘substance dualism’ of mind and body, put forward most famously by Descartes. Instead, it seems he’s arguing for a kind of ‘property dualism’, in which both mental and physical events share a physical substance – brain activity – yet have different properties and predicates. As Davidson puts it: “Anomalous monism resembles materialism in its claim that all events are physical, but rejects the thesis, usually considered essential to materialism, that mental phenomena can be given purely physical explanations.”

Is Davidson any kind of dualist, though? One might argue that it seems contradictory that Davidson describes his theory as monist (that is, about ‘one thing’), yet so clearly stresses the differences between the properties or predicates of the mental and of the physical. One can say that he does save a monistic physical world, but on the other hand he must also admit that there is a “categorical difference between the mental and the physical.” One has to consider anomalous monism as a kind of nonreductive materialism, where the mental is only conceptually different from the physical, but not ontologically autonomous.

Davidson’s theory of anomalous monism is enlightening for the study of love. The experience of love is different from the physical explanations of love one finds in the natural sciences. There is what Chalmers might call an ‘explanatory gap’ between the subjective and the objective description of the consciousness of love. As Davidson puts it: “Mental events cannot be explained by physical science.” So you need to be at least a property dualist to explain love.

Free will also mean that love cannot be explained by physical-only law-like circumstances. As such, even the best physical science will not allow scientists (or any dating website or reality show) to definitively calculate which couple will match, even if they knew all the physical factors and behavioural data.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the mental events of love interact with the physical because the mental is not a separate, independent system in human life, yet it is only supervenient on physical states, and this suggests the freedom of love.

Love is also a phenomenon of consciousness – a mental event, if you will – and as such it cannot be entirely explained by or even deduced from the natural sciences. The reason is that the predicates/properties of the mental and of the physical are categorically different, even though they might be ontologically the same. This is why a future Big Date dating app based on Big Data will not help you very much in your search for true love.

Peter Graarup Westergaard teaches philosophy at an upper secondary boarding school in Denmark.

• A version of this article was originally published in the Annual Review of The Philosophical Society in Oxford, 42, 2020.