PHILOSOPHY OF MIND: A CONTEMPORARY INTRODUCTION
John Heil
Book outline
1. INTRODUCTION
1. Experience and reality
2. The unavoidability of the philosophy of mind 3. Science and metaphysics
4. Metaphysics and cognitive science
5. A look ahead
2. CARTESIAN DUALISM
1. Science and philosophy
Criticism: philosophers never answer questions, but merely pose them (any answer is as good as another)
Answer: Science provides a loose framework for representing empirical findings, but no strictly scientific principles tell us how to interpret or make sense of those findings. For that, we must turn to 'common sense' and to philosophy.
2. Descartes's dualism
Mental vs. material:
1. Material is localizable in space, mental is not
2. Qualitative difference: qualities of mental experiences (e.g., pain) could not be attributed to material things
3. Public/private difference: The knowledge you have of your own states of mind is direct and unchallengeable in a way that your knowledge of material objects is not
a. Transparency: if you are in a particular state of mind, you know you are in that state; and
b. Incorrigibility: if you believe that you are in a particular state of mind, you are in that state.
Minds and material bodies are distinct kinds of substance; no overlap
3. Substances, attributes, and modes
Substances as individual, self-standing objects, as distinct from classes of things
Non-substances:
Nonsubstantial individuals: 'concrete' items such as events and 'abstract' entities such as sets and numbers
Properties: thse are had or possessed (or 'instantiated') by substances
Properties for Descartes are attributes and modes
Attributes: makes a substance the kind of substance it is
Material substance: extension (3-d)
Mental substance: thought
Mode: ordinarily think of as properties of everyday material objects (shape, texture
4. The metaphysics of Cartesian dualism
Mind/body distinction
Bodies: are material substances possessing the attribute of extension
Minds: possess the attribute of thought
Thinking and extension are mutually exclusive
Mental substances are intimately connected with some material thing
Fits with common sense: we can conceive of swapping bodies, but not swapping minds
Fits with science: qualities of our experiences seem to differ dramatically from the qualities of material bodies discovered by science (e.g., a scientific analysis of music vs. mental experience of music)
5. Mind-body interaction
Problem: our minds and bodies interact, but if minds and bodies are utterly different kinds of substance, it is hard to see how such causal interaction could occur
Solution: the causal interaction is a completely unique kind that we don’t encounter in the physical world
Criticism: science assumes that the material world is a causally closed system
Pineal gland: that minds were linked to bodies by way of the pineal gland
Criticism: requires violation of the laws governing the micro-particles that operate in accord with physical law
Perhaps there’s a statistically undetectable influence (similar to someone secretly manipulating the flipping of a coin)
Criticism: with physical systems, probabilities are built into the system, thus their being altered would amount to a 'violation' of physical law
“The kinds of statistical law thought to govern the elementary constituents of the world exclude so-called hidden variables”
It is possible that the material world is not in fact causally closed and that natural law is subject to contravention
However, this conflicts with a fundamental presumption of modern science, a presumption we have excellent independent reasons to accept.
3. DESCARTES'S LEGACY
1. Dualism without interaction
Problem with interactive dualism: it is hard to see how such interaction could occur if minds are unextended, nonmaterial substances and bodies are extended, material substances
2. Parallelism
Mind and body are distinct substances, but they do not interact; covariation without causation
Reason for the covariation
It’s a brute fact
Criticism: it is ad hoc, and interactive dualism offers an alternative account
God intervenes to make sure that the two realms run in parallel (e.g. two clocks in perfect synchronization)
The appeal to God is an appeal to a deus ex machina, a contrived solution to an otherwise intractable problem
3. Occasionalism
God mediates between events in the mind and body
Offers an explanation for the appearance of interaction
Criticism: pushes the original problem around without solving it
4. Causation and occasionalism
Normal view of causation: causation is a relation holding between events: one event, the cause, brings about another event, the effect
There is a “causal nexus” between the two, that is, a connecting mechanism or linkage between causes and effects
Humean causation: there are no genuine links between events, only bare event sequences; a causal sequence is nothing more than an instance of some regularity
The idea of a causal nexus is only a projection that we impose on the sequence after seeing similar cause-effect sequences
Implications for interactive dualism and parallelism: no explanation of a causal connection is required
Given Humean causation, why are event sequences tightly structured (enshrined in every day causal generalizations)
Occasionalist answer: God sets up the effect
The occurrence of every event is, in an important sense, miraculous, and he creates every event out of nothing
In a series of time slices, God creates the changing events in each sequence
This is the only available option to seeing causes and effects as brute facts (assuming Humean causation)
5. Idealism
Idealism: the world consists exclusively of minds and their contents
The material world is an illusion
Solipsism: a variant of idealism such that the world is just a single mind - your mind - and its contents
Explanation of regularity:
The intrinsic nature of minds
God ensures that ideas occur in an orderly and predictable way (Berkeley’s view)
Observational evidence for the material world (e.g., kicking a stone)
Observations are conscious experiences and so do not carry us outside the mind.
6. Mind and meaning
Idealists argue that the view of a mind-independent world is literally incoherent
Our thoughts about tomatoes are really thoughts about mental goings-on: conscious experiences of a particular kind we have had, or would have under the right conditions.
We find nothing answering to the expression 'mind-independent tomato'.
The expression 'mind-independent tomato', then, is empty of significance. In that regard, it resembles 'colorless green ideas' . You could utter these words, but they signify nothing.
Criticism: we can think of a mind-independent tomato
Response: In setting out to imagine a mind-independent tomato, you first call to mind certain experiences, then subtract from these the idea that they are experiences, which is incoherent
7. Epiphenomenalism
Epiphenomenalism: the material world is 'causally closed', but material events can have mental by-products
e.g., like smoke produced by a locomotive
Criticism: your experience of pain as you move your hand closer to the fire is what brings about your withdrawing it
Response: all the causal work in these cases is done by events in your nervous system
Neuroscientists: we can ignore the qualities of mental phenomena altogether, and focus exclusively on physical mechanisms and processes in the brain
Criticism: there would be no harm in allowing that mental events could cause other mental events
Criticism (application of Ockham’s razor): we should prefer a theory that doesn’t have “dangling” causal relationships
'Dangling' causal relations: special causal relation by which material events cause mental events
If an alternative to epiphenomenalism avoids 'dangling' causal relations, then the burden is on the proponent of epiphenomenalism to convince us that epiphenomenalism nevertheless affords a better account of the phenomena.
4. NON-CARTESIAN DUALISM
1. Three facets of Cartesian dualism
First, minds and material bodies are taken to be radically distinct kinds of substance.
Second, minds and material bodies are assumed to interact causally.
Third: mental and material substances are distinguished by unique attributes: minds are thinking substances, bodies are extended substances.
Non-Cartesian dualism rejects this third element
2. Individuating substances
Principle of individuation: a principle by which you determine an individual thing’s identity
Locke:
Artifacts: A particular aggregate or collection of particles owes its identity to the particles that make it up
Living organisms: have very different identity conditions than artifacts
Ship of theseus: a boat is not necessarily co-extensive with the planks that make it up at a given time
If a boat could continue to exist when the collection of planks that now make it up does not, and if a collection of planks that now constitutes a boat could exist when the boat does not, then a boat cannot be identified with the collection of planks that makes it up at a given time.
3. Metaphysical interlude
Substance:
Traditional notion: a substance is a particular thing, e.g., this tree, your left ear
Complex substance: a substance composed of other substances
Simple substance: a substance that is not composed of other substances
Can have non-substantial parts special or temporal parts, e.g., the corners of a square
Composition
The ordering feature that makes complex substances out of simple ones
Complex substances are collections of substances appropriately organized, where the organizing principle stems from the nature of the substance in question
Identity
Strict identity (self-sameness): A is identical with B, in this sense, only in the case when A and B are the selfsame individual
Exact similarity: two dresses are the same
Dependence
Metaphysical dependence: One thing's absolutely requiring the existence of some other thing
An A metaphysically depends on some B when A could not exist unless B exists
e.g., can’t have a whole ship without any of its parts
Causal dependence: e.g., can’t exist without oxygen (you might exist for a brief period without oxygen)
4. Substance dualism (E.J. Lowe’s theory)
Two physical substances, one of which depends upon the other, but neither are non-physical
e.g., The “boat” and the collective planks are metaphysically distinct substances, but both are physical (neither is non-physical metaphysically)
Self-body dualism
Your self depends on your body (and shares some of the properties of the body), but is not identical with the collective components of your body is physical
Self as a simple substance
No psychological parts (e.g., memory, perception)
A mental faculty is not a substance but a way a substance is organized.
Selves possess both physical and mental characteristics
5. Self-body interaction
Selves are not immaterial substances, so the problem of causal interaction between selves and material substances does not arise
Problem: how can a self that is not identical with a body or with any part of a body act on the world
Lowe’s criticism of Cartesian self-world interaction
Trace the causal chain leading back from the muscle contractions involved in the motion of your right leg. That chain goes back to events in your brain, but it goes back beyond these to earlier events, and eventually to events occurring prior to your birth.
Also, the causal chain culminating in your bodily motion is traced back, it becomes entangled in endless other causal chains issuing in a variety of quite distinct bodily movements
It is hard to see where in the complex web of causal relations occurring in your nervous system a mental event might initiate a movement in your body
Lowe’s solution to the problem: the self makes it the case that the world contains a pattern of causal sequences issuing in a particular bodily motion.
The self might be regarded as a product of complex physical (and, Lowe thinks, social) processes, a product not identifiable with its body or a part of its body
6. Taking stock
Lowe’s notion of self-body interaction: minds 'shape' causal sequences - not by altering the directions of motion of elementary particles, as Descartes supposed, but by constraining sequences in the way a spider's web constrains the motions of a spider
5. BEHAVIORISM
1. Moving away from dualism
Materialism: the mind is not a separate, nonmaterial entity, but only matter, suitably organized
Philosophical behaviorism is associated with a thesis about the nature of mind and the meanings of mental terms.
Psychological behaviorism emerged from an influential conception of scientific method as applied to psychology
Dominated experimental work in psychology until the early 1960s when it was eclipsed by the 'information-processing' model inspired by the computing machine
2. Historical and philosophical background
Pre 20th century: psychological studies relied on introspection
Brains seemed connected with the mind, but were not identical with it
3. Privacy and its consequences
States of mind (as distinct from their physiological correlates) may not be fit subjects for scientific examination
The very idea that we are in a position even to establish correlations between mental occurrences and goings-on in the nervous system can come to be doubted
Can’t rely on first person reports: no reason for thinking that your states of mind qualitatively resemble the states of mind of others
Problem of other minds
Zombie problem: creatures identical to us in every material respect, but altogether lacking conscious experiences
4. The beetle in the box
Wittgenstein: “Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a 'beetle'. No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. - Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.”
The object in the box is irrelevant
The same applies to descriptions of mental events
5. Philosophical behaviorism
Two problems with Cartesian conception of mind
Minds are not entities (whether Cartesian substances or brains)
Mental episodes are not private goings-on inside such entities
Wittgenstein: we are misled by the grammar of our language
'Mind', like 'brain' or 'tomato', is a substantive noun; we erroneously reason that 'mind' must designate a kind of entity, and that what we call thoughts, sensations, and feelings refer to qualitatively similar states or modes of this entity
Ryle: the supposition that minds are kinds of entity amounts to a 'category mistake'
“it represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category. . . when actually they belong to another”
We begin with the idea that minds are entities, distinct from but similar to brains or bodies. When we have trouble locating such entities in the material world, we assume that they must be nonmaterial