I've been trying to compare Chomsky's vs Nagel's view on the mind-body problem and I've had some difficulty understanding Chomsky. In the first 2 quotes below he appears to be disagreeing with Nagel and yet in another paper (third quote below) he appears to be agreeing with Nagel. In “
Linguistics and Cognitive Science: Problems and Mysteries” (p. 39) Chomsky appears to question Nagel on the unique and difficult nature of the mind-body problem when he writes:
...this argument presupposes some fixed notion of the ‘objective world’ which excludes subjective experience, but it is hard to see why we should pay any more attention to that notion, whatever it may be, than to one that excludes action at a distance or other exotic ideas that were regarded as unintelligible or ridiculous at earlier periods, even by outstanding scientists.
Elsewhere on that page he continues this line of argument:
But from this we do not conclude that there was then (or now) a body-body problem, or a color-body problem, or a life-body problem, or a gas-body problem. Rather, there were just problems, arising from the limits of our understanding.
I’m not understanding this. I think Nagel’s position is clear. Nagel is simply arguing that the mind-body problem is different than all these other problems because unlike the others, subjectivity/qualia cannot be reduced to any “material” entity regardless of future revisions of our “physical” theories because even if our idea of the physical ever expands to include mental phenomena, it would have to assign them an objective character-whether or not this is done by analyzing them in terms of other phenomena already regarded as physical. And this will miss the essence of qualia/the experiential. But then in another paper he appears to support Nagel:
The new version of the mind-body problem resurrects some observations of Bertrand Russell’s 80 years ago, and recently reinvented. Russell asked us to consider a blind physicist who knows all of physics but doesn’t know something we know: what it’s like to see the color blue. Russell’s conclusion was that the natural sciences seek to discover “the causal skeleton of the world.” Other aspects of the world of experience lie beyond their reach. Recasting Russell’s insight in naturalistic terms, we might say that like all animals, our internal cognitive capacities reflexively provide us with a world of experience, largely shared in fundamental properties – the human Umwelt, to borrow the term of ethologists. But being reflective creatures, thanks to emergence of the human capacity, we go on to seek to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomena of experience. These exercises are called myth, or magic, or philosophy, or “science” in the sense of that term proposed in the 19th century, distinguishing the pursuit from the rest of philosophy. If humans are part of the organic world, we expect that our capacities of understanding and explanation have fixed scope and limits, like any other natural object, a truism that is sometimes thoughtlessly derided as “mysterianism.” It could be that these innate capacities do not lead us beyond some understanding of Russell’s causal skeleton of the world – including the principles that enter into determining conscious experience; there is of course no reason to expect that these are even in principle accessible to consciousness. It is always an open question how much of Russell’s “causal skeleton of the world” can be attained. These could become topics of empirical inquiry into the nature of what we might call “the science-forming faculty,” another “mental organ.” These are interesting topics, in principle part of normal science, and now the topic of some investigation. They should not be confused with the traditional mind-body problem, which evaporated after Newton.
Biolinguistic Explorations: design, development, evolution
https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/jo ... lution.pdf
So, it seems, in this more recent paper Chomsky seems to be taking a position similar to McGinn and Nagel; that is, we might never have the answer. The again, I might be misinterpreting this?