Transcript Philosophy OF MIND

An introduction to
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
WHAT IS MIND?
This is a metaphysical question.
The question we are asking can be
paraphrased: what kind of thing is a mind?
Is mind the same thing as consciousness?
Probably not, but minds must be conscious.
MIND IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Réné Descartes answered this question in a way
that has determined the parameters of the
philosophy of mind ever since.
 Prior to Descartes, philosophers believed that all
living beings, all entities with an internal source of
motion, had a soul:

Soul is responsible for growth and change.
 Soul plays a functional role in the organism.
 Soul is the organizing principle and fundamental
explanation of a natural organism.

THREE SOULS
Vegetative soul: responsible for growth
(respiration, metabolism, and cellular division)
and germination (production of seed and
generation of offspring).
 Animal soul: responsible for perception,
appetite (emotions), and locomotion.
 Rational soul or intellect: responsible for
thought.

17TH CENTURY MECHANISM
Descartes and many others believed that the
physical world could be entirely explained in
terms of mechanical forces or direct contact
between semi-rigid bodies.
 On this model, the life, growth, change, and
motion of plants and animals could be
explained as an intricate mechanical system.

VLADIMIR GVOZDARIKI
INTELLECTUAL SOUL, MIND
Mechanism provided a perfectly good explanation of
animal and plant organisms (or so Descartes
supposed), but it failed to explain thought. Why?
All material bodies are extended in space.
 But thought is non-spatial.
 Moreover, I can doubt the existence of spatially
extended bodies, but I cannot doubt the existence of
my own thought.
 So, Descartes concludes, thoughts must be the
attributes of some non-material substance, mind or
intellect, which is truly identified with me.

17TH CENTURY MATERIALIST CRITIQUES

Thomas Hobbes: “M. Descartes is identifying the thing which understands
with intellection, which is an act of that which understands. Or at least he is
identifying the thing which understands with the intellect, which is a power
of that which understands. Yet all philosophers make a distinction between
a subject and its faculties and acts, i.e., between a subject and its
properties and its essence: an entity is one thing, its essence another.
Hence it may be that the thing that thinks is the subject to which mind,
reason or intellect belong; and this subject may thus be something
corporeal.” (Objections to Descartes’ Meditations, AT VII, 172-173).

Pierre Gassendi: “… so far as I can see, the only result that follows from this
is that I can obtain some knowledge of myself without knowledge of the
body. But it is not yet transparently clear to me that this knowledge is
complete and adequate, so as to enable me to be certain that I am not
mistaken in excluding body from my essence.” (Objections to Descartes’
Meditations, AT VII, 201)
FMRI IMAGING
MIND-BRAIN IDENTITY THEORY

In the 1950s and 60s J.J.C. Smart and U.T.
Place proposed that “consciousness is a
process of the brain.”

This is strictly analogous to saying “lightening is
an electrical discharge.”
REDUCTIVE EXPLANATION
A good, naturalist, scientific explanation would
tell us that lightening is identical to electrical
discharge.
Why should there be anything special about the
mind? If we want to explain what the mind is as
a natural phenomenon, naturalism tells us to
look to the brain.
FUNCTIONALISM

Modularity of mind: what cognitive
neuroscience can do is study “modules,” i.e.
discrete computational systems.
 Input

 Processing  Output
No “in kind” reduction:
 Modules
are inherently plastic.
 Reduction requires building bridges (explanation
bridges a gap between two distinct things).
LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT HYPOTHESIS
Jerry Fodor has posited that the crucial piece
that we need to understand about
consciousness is the Language of the Mind.
 This LOM is the “code” in which our
computational processes are written.
 LOM is embedded in the natural architecture of
the brain, it is innate.

 Cf.
Noam Chomsky’s “universal grammar”
MULTIPLE REALIZABILITY
Machinemensch, from Frtiz
Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE




Functionalism claims that mental states are a result of
complex sets of computational processes that happen in
the brain.
Here, there still is a reductive explanation, but one that
is called “token” rather than “type” reduction.
Artificial intelligence imagines that future technological
achievements will allow us to create computer programs
that have all the properties of consciousness.
These ideas have lead to the idea of “supervenience”:
conscious is some set of properties or states (C) that
supervene over physical ones (P), meaning: there can be
no difference in C without differences in P.
SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE

But isn’t there something unique about the
phenomenology of consciousness or what it feels
like to be me that cannot be explained by science?
Zombies – is it conceivable for there to be a physical
duplicate of me without any subjective experience?
 Mary the Superscientist – when I see a color, isn’t that
qualitative feeling (color quale) something more than
just the objective, scientific explanation of the brain
state I am having?

THE EXPLANATORY GAP
THE ‘HARD PROBLEM’ OF CONSCIOUSNESS
David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind: In Search of a
Fundamental Theory, 1996) argues that there are
“easy” problems of consciousness: explaining
behavioral and cognitive functions, how they work, and
how they are correlated with various mental states.
But, he finds, these problems are of a different sort than
the “hard problem”: Why should all this physical stuff
produce phenomenal experience? Why are the lights of
conscious experience on at all? What is the relationship
between the subjective texture of experience and the
physical processes in the world?
SO WHAT POSSIBLE ANSWERS ARE THERE TO
THIS PROBLEM?
PHYSICALISM OR MATERIALISM
The physicalist or materialist says that
whatever consciousness is, it must be either a
physical thing or supervene on a physical thing.
 The hard problem either does not exist
(eliminativism) or the explanatory bridges will
be built by future neuroscientists (deflationary
and reductive accounts).

Daniel Dennett: “There is no separate medium in the brain,
where a content can 'appear' and thus be guaranteed a shot
at consciousness. Consciousness is not like television—it is
like fame. One’s 'access' to these representations is not a
matter of perceiving them with some further inner sensory
apparatus; one’s access is simply a matter of their being
influential when they are. So consciousness is fame in the
brain, or cerebral celebrity. That entails, of course, that those
who claim they can imagine a being that has all these
competitive activities, all the functional benefits and
incidental features of such activities, in the cortex but is not
conscious are simply mistaken. They can no more imagine
this coherently than they can imagine a being that has all the
metabolic, reproductive, and self-regulatory powers of a
living thing but is not alive.”
(http://www.searchmagazine.org/)
DUALISM

Dualism contends that consciousness and
mental states are some separate property or
thing that cannot be reductively explained by
physical facts, even all the physical facts that
could ever be known about the universe.
 Chalmers
– property dualism
 David Rosenthal – Higher Order Theory (HOT) of
conscious states
MONISM

Monism claims that there is only one kind of
substance in nature, but there are at least
three very different positions to take here:
 Consciousness
is merely epiphenomenal.
 The basic components of consciousness are
embedded in a complete account of fundamental
physics.
 Naturalism is in some basic sense dependent on
human consciousness for its power of explanation
(Idealism).
SUPERNATURALISM
Some choose to ultimately reject the project of
naturalistic explanation altogether in the case
of consciousness.
 However, some non-theological case needs to
be made for this maneuver.

 “New
Mysterians”
RELATED AREAS OF INTEREST
Freedom, action, and responsibility
 Human identity
 Personhood and the designation of ethical rights
 Philosophy of Perception
 Cognitive bases for knowledge
 Mental Representation and Intentionality
 Philosophy of Language
 Cognitive Science, Neurobiology, Computer
Science, Psychology
