A summary of Noam Chomsky’s Language and Nature (Mind, Vol. 104, Oxford University Press, 1995; PDF), archived by the Radical Anthropology Group as class text 095. The title is mine; the argument is his, and it is stranger than it looks.
The mind-body problem, in brief. We seem to be two things at once: a body (brain, neurons, matter under physical law) and a mind (thought, sensation, the felt redness of red). How can meat produce an inner life, and how can a weightless decision lift an arm? Fitting consciousness into a physical world with no evident room for it is the problem, and for three centuries it has been filed under insoluble.
Gilbert Ryle ridiculed Descartes’s dualism as the ghost in the machine. The joke presumes we still know what the machine is. Chomsky’s reply is that we lost it long ago, and that the ghost was never the difficulty.
Matter, defined then destroyed. The seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy held the world to be a machine: bodies act only by direct contact, and that contact was what “matter” meant. Descartes, unable to reduce the ordinary creative use of language to any such mechanism, posited a second substance, thought, and with it a real scientific question: how do the two touch?
Newton dissolved the body, not the mind. Gravity acts at a distance, through no contact at all, an “immaterial” force Newton himself judged an “absurdity” and never accepted (“I frame no hypotheses”). Leibniz and Huygens denounced it as a lapse into the occult. It was correct. What science expelled was therefore the machine, not the ghost; body is what vanished from the picture of the world.
Materialism is therefore empty. To say the mental “reduces to the physical” you need a prior notion of the physical, and since Newton there is none. “Matter” now means whatever the reigning theory invokes: fields, curved space, ten-dimensional strings, whatever is concocted next. Priestley drew the honest conclusion: not that all is matter, but that “the kind of matter on which the two-substance view is based does not exist.” Thought is simply what a certain organised system, the brain, does.
So study mind as nature. Treat language and mind by ordinary empirical inquiry, with no metaphysical wall between the “mental” and the “chemical.” Seek unification, not reduction: chemistry joined physics only after physics was overturned to receive it. Expect to leave common sense behind, exactly as physics left common-sense body behind.
And keep the genuine mystery. The creative aspect of language (speech endlessly novel, apt to the moment yet uncaused by it) was for the Cartesians the best proof of other minds. Of it, and of consciousness, we still have “only description and illustration,” no theory. Not the routine irreducibility science keeps absorbing, but perhaps a permanent bound on a biological creature’s reach.
The message is at once deflationary and immense. The mind-body problem was never solved; it was dissolved, the moment the body dissolved. We are not ghosts trapped in machines: there are no machines, only a nature far stranger than common sense allows, of which thought is one more unexplained part. The confident materialism of our age mistakes its own vocabulary for the structure of the world; the hard-headed naturalist who swaps the old God for natural selection and pronounces nature transparent has merely inherited a faith on worse credentials. Newton’s lesson, still unlearned three centuries on: it is not mind that defies physics, but our idea of what physics is.