IntroMindWeek2

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The Mind – Body Problem Intro to the Philosophy of Mind
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Motivating Dualism • You have a mind. You also have a body. • Your body is physical. It is composed of matter and occupies space. • As a result, the realm of bodily behavior is publicly observable. • Your mental life is essentially private. Unlike the physical realm, it is not publicly observable. • You have privileged access to your own mental realm. • The simplest theory of the universe that fits these facts is Dualism.
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Dualism • The essential nature of the mind resides in something nonphysical. • Dualism is a common everyday theory of mind and often associated with many popular religions. • (anecdotally) increasingly influential among philosophers
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The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Dualism in history • Starts as a philosophical theory with Plato (400 BCE) • Religious dualism in the Buddhist text, the Visuddhimagga, dating to the 5th Century CE: an interdependent mind and body. • Egyptian Book of the Dead (~1000 BCE) • Some evidence that neanderthals were dualists.
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Substance Dualism • Each mind is a distinct nonphysical thing (or substance). • The mind can be linked to a physical body, but can also in principle exist in a disembodied state. • The distinct nature of mental states (e.g. thoughts, visual images) and mental processes (e.g. thinking, imagining) comes from their being states and processes of this nonphysical thing. • Distinct nature: privileged access, consciousness, "aboutness", etc.
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Cartesian Dualism | René Descartes (1596-1650) • The universe is split into two halves: material things and mental things. • The essential feature of material things is that they are extended in space: every material thing has length, breadth, height, and spatial location. • The essential feature of mental things is that they are thinking things. Capable of thought.
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The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Cartesian Dualism • The mental and physical interact: • The physical state of your body can cause various experiences in you. • You (the mind), can cause various changes in the physical state of your body. • But you are not your body or any part of your body. You are a nonspatial thinking thing.
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Descartes' Argument for Dualism • If two things are identical* then anything true of one is true of the other. • I cannot doubt that I have a mind (The Cogito) • I can doubt that I have a body • (I can also doubt that I have any given part of my body) • Therefore, my mind cannot be my body or any part of my body. *Identical in the technical sense of having all the same properties.
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • The Problem of Causal Interaction • If mental things have no mass/shape/position/etc, then how could they causally influence material things at all? • Conversely, how can something spatial and extended causally influence an entirely nonspatial mental thing?
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The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • The Problem of Causal Interaction • Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680): “I admit that it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to the soul than to concede the capacity to move a body and to be moved by it to an immaterial thing.” (From a letter to Descartes)
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Why only two kinds of stuff? • Trialism • Mind stuff, body stuff, union stuff • Descartes was possibly a trialist • West African Akan philosophy • Okra - ‘soul’ or ‘life force’ • honam - ‘body’ • sumsun - ‘personality’ or ‘character’ • Soul persists after death, but personality is lost
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Popular Dualism • A folk-version of dualism. • The mind is a "ghost in the machine"; it is a different substance, but has spatial properties. • In spatial contact with the brain. Interactions can be explained as a kind of energy exchange we don't yet understand. • Still relies on the existence of a non-material substance.
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The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Property Dualism • The mind is not a distinct thing/substance from the brain. Rather, the brain has two fundamentally different kinds of properties: physical and mental ones. • Mental properties can never be fully explained in terms of the concepts of physical science. • Understanding the mind calls for an entirely new and independent field of inquiry.
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Epiphenomenalism • The oldest version of property dualism. • Holds that mental properties cannot cause any physical activity but rather ‘ride above’ such activity (the Greek prefix “epi-” means “above”). • The view tries to strike a bargain between a rigorous scientific approach to the explanation of behavior and the reality of irreducibly mental properties.
The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Interactionist Property Dualism • Allows mental states to have causal effects on the brain (and thereby on behavior). • Mental states are emergent properties of the brain (other examples of emergent properties: being solid, being beautiful, being alive). • Such properties only appear on the scene once a certain level of complexity is reached.
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The Mind-Body Problem | Dualism • Elemental Property Dualism • If mental properties “emerge” from brain activity, how come they can’t be explained by brain-activity? • (Emergence seems to be in tension with Irreducibility.) • One way to resolve the tension is to deny that mental properties appear only once a certain level of evolutionary complexity is reached. • Mental properties are fundamental—properties that have been around since the universe’s inception, on par with other fundamental properties such as length, mass, charge, time, etc.
The Mind-Body Problem| Dualism • Interaction, Reduction, Emergence • Aside from epiphenomenalists, dualists allow for mental-physical interaction, agreeing that mental happenings can cause changes in the brain, and vice versa. • Some property dualists additionally claim that mental properties emerge from the complex activity of the brain. But this may conflict with the irreducibility of mental properties. • To avoid this conflict, some dualists deny that mental properties are emergent, taking them to be “elemental” or “elementary”.
The Mind-Body Problem • Arguments for Dualism • Argument from Religion: The existence of an immaterial soul has been asserted by most major religions. • Argument from Introspection: When we focus our attention on our conscious states, we do not observe a flux of neural activity but thoughts, sensations, desires, emotions, which seem radically different from physical states. • Argument from Irreducibility: No purely physical explanation could possibly account for the creative use of language, the faculty of Reason, consciousness, meaning, emotion, and parapsychological phenomena (e.g. telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, etc).
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The Mind-Body Problem • Arguments for Dualism • Mary the Color Scientist • Does Mary learn something new? • Zombies • Could there be a world where people act exactly like us, but aren’t conscious? They have no experience?
The Mind-Body Problem • Rebuffing the Arguments: Religion • Attempts to decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy have a poor track record. • One’s religion is not dictated exclusively by one’s reason. If it were, we would expect to see much more convergence among the various religions and a more even distribution of religions across the globe. • Basing one’s theory of the mind on religion would put social (and other irrational) forces in place of empirical evidence.
The Mind-Body Problem • Rebuffing the Arguments: Introspection • Why think that our faculty of introspection reveals things as they really are? • After all, other forms of observation (e.g. sight, hearing, touch, etc.) do no such thing, e.g. an apple does not look like a collection of particles, but that’s what it is. • If one’s pains, thoughts, and emotions do not introspectively seem like states of one’s brain, that may be only because our faculty of introspection does not reveal their true nature.
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The Mind-Body Problem • Rebuffing the Arguments: Irreducibility • What the dualists need in order to establish their view is the conclusion that a physical reduction of the relevant aspects of the mind is outright impossible. • However, at best, what they have is just the conclusion that such a reduction is not yet achieved. • Active research programs are underway in trying to explain language and reasoning in broadly physical terms. And there is no significant evidence that parapsychological phenomena even exist.
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The Mind-Body Problem • Rebuffing the Arguments: Zombies • Conceivability arguments draw conclusions about what’s possible, based on what we can imagine (conceive). • It seems like we can conceive of some things that aren’t possible, because we don’t fully understand all of the relevant details. • Supporters of conceivability arguments think we know enough. • Supporters of zombie arguments point to common sense (“mentally fit, but physically disabled” or “healthy bodies, but cognitively unable to function,” etc.) verbal assault is legal, physical assault is not, and so on.
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The Mind-Body Problem • Arguments Against Dualism: Simplicity • If all else is equal, the simpler of two competing hypotheses should be preferred. • Ockham’s (1287–1347) Razor: “Do not multiply entities beyond what is strictly necessary to explain the phenomena.” • The materialist postulates only one kind of substance (physical matter) and one class of properties (physical properties), whereas the dualist postulates two. • But can either fully explain mental phenomena?
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The Mind-Body Problem • Arguments Against Dualism: Explanation • Neuroscience can explain much of our behavior in terms of the properties of the brain, and progress continues. • Compared to the explanatory successes of materialism, dualism is not so much a theory of the mind as it is an empty space waiting for a detailed theory to be put in it. • Dualist’s reply: neuroscience has had much success in explaining how the mediating functions of how the mind works, but not in explaining its central capacities (we will get back to this controversy later on).
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The Mind-Body Problem • Arguments Against (Substance) Dualism: Neural Dependence • If there really is a distinct and materially independent entity in which reasoning, emotion, and consciousness take place, then we should expect these aspects of the mind to be relatively invulnerable to impairment of the brain. • In fact, the opposite is true: alcohol can impair judgment, chemicals can affect our emotions, anesthetics and stimulants can affect our consciousness. • We should expect this if reason, emotion, and consciousness are activities of the brain. But it is hard to see why this would be so, if they are activities of an immaterial entity.
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The Mind-Body Problem • Review: Arguments • Arguments for Dualism: • Religion • Introspection • Irreducibility • Arguments Against Dualism: • Simplicity • Explanation • Neural Dependence
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The Mind-Body Problem (T/F) 1. Only a tiny minority of philosophers are dualists nowadays. 2. Descartes took the essential feature of material things to be their extension in space. 3. Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia has raised the causal interaction problem to Descartes. 4. Epiphenomenalists deny that minds can cause physical happenings in the brain. 5. Elementary property dualists regard mental properties to be fundamental aspects of nature, present from the very beginning of the universe. 6. One argument for dualism is that there cannot possibly be a physical explanation of our capacities to reason and use language. 7. The arguments from simplicity, explanation, neural dependence, and evolution are universally accepted and prove Dualism to be false.
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