William

Philosophy of Mind

Chapter 2; Dualism and its discontents

How do mental states relate to brain states?

• A metaphysical topic.

• Desires, emotions, choosing etc. → the things that make up a mind.

• It is a double problem. It is both ontological and metaphysical. What is the mind?

• But it is also a causal problem. How does mental states relate to brain states?

There is always a complicated back and forth between the mind and the body. The first movement from mind to brain and mind to body, for example with desires as motivational states, is unclear. How can we know whether it is the body that creates the essential impetus or the mind?

Professor is skeptical about the importance of the mind-body problem. It seems this debate is quite premature. The many positions of the debate are various anticipations of how certain sciences can and will deliver in the future.

There is an asymmetry between the knowledge of our minds and our brains.
We know a lot about the human mind, but only really on an individual level. We keep learning about ourselves as we live. About the way we react to the world and so on. We have privileged access to our own minds, and from very early on we can look at ourselves to consider ourselves and there is always a kind of familiarity with ourselves throughout life. The same remains on a cultural level, in a sense, you get to learn quite a lot of people’s minds throughout life. There is a vertiable gold mine of mind-knowledge.

By contrast, the brain is quite unknown. It is only 150 years since we learned the basic building blocks of the brain; the fact of the neuron and its electrical parts. It is probably the most complicated organ in the universe. We do know quite a bit about the brain, but there seems to be a lot more that we don’t know yet. Brain-states are more or less unknown. The question about brain-states and mental states seem unclear. It’s difficult to analyse which is prior, without further study.

So basically all the theories of mind have thought ahead, but it seems we cannot fundamentally know the structure without further research. At least according to the professor.

Dualism is not particularly popular anymore. Substance dualism at least is not very popular.

The more popular position in most of the sciences is physicalism. ”We are our brains”. What makes us a certain person etc. are all found within the organ of the brain.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that dualism is dead.

Paul Bloom argues that dualism is a natural inclination of belief. Descartes’ baby, humans are born with the idea that we have a soul and a body. Humans are ’common sense’ dualists. We don’t often think of ourselves as a body. We think of ourselves as creatures that possess a body, without us being that body, it is rather something more to it. This is reflected in common stories we tell, like Christ’s resurrection. People have no problem conceiving of a scenario where someone can come back from the dead through the return of that person’s vital energy, whatever that is.

If you look at Neuroscience, and medicine in general, there is a certain dualism still at work. There is a split between the general ICD-10 manual and DSM-5. On many societal levels we keep distinguishing between the mind and the body.

This doesn’t mean dualism is essentially right of course. But our inuitions aims at this kind of insight.

Dualism: the theory that the universe consists of two kind of stuff that is irreducibly different: physical stuff and mental stuff.

We kind of have a good grasp of physical stuff, it’s explained by physics. It is bodies (extension, that is having certain volume) in motion (which happens in time). Most physical stuff is finite. We can all apparently look at physical stuff from the same position.

Even though there are some parts of physics that physicists are confused about, like qm.

When it comes to future science, there will be parts of our current science that in the future will be proven to be wrong and bs.

And this may happen to physics too.

Mental stuff is not publicly accessible. You can make certain detours to know what is in the mind, but you cannot seemingly perceive the mind itself, as it is. It seems mental stuff is not tied to any space therefore and so on lacks extension, and in certain senses it seems untied to time, and so is immortal, or just untimed. This may allow us to build the belief that when our bodies go, the mind remains, because all the things it thinks about seem to be eternal existent.

And lastly it is only privately accessible and subjectively researchable.

David Chalmers for example considers himself a naturalist dualist. Both physical and pshycological phenomena are natural. He thinks there may be some science in the future that explains that both of them are normal.

Varieties of dualism:

Property dualism (John Stuart Mill): this just says that we have mental and physical properties. It doesn’t belive that we are composed of certain substances. The physical body just happens to have those traits that give rise to mental properties. We are just bodies however. Since these people basically believe we are physical, it comes closer to a kind of non-reductive physicalism.

Substance dualism (Descartes): We are our minds. Whatever you need to know about me is my mind.

People after Descartes have no quite understood how unimportant the body was to Descartes. In a book by Russell Shorto, Descartes Bones, which speaks about Descartes’ death in Stockholm and how they dug up his bones and had them travel to a bunch of abbies in Europe, and parts of that skeleton kept being stolen. At one point in the auction world there were 4 skulls of Descartes for sale.

The gist of substance dualism basically boils down to the following syllogism:

1. If we can exist without a body, we cannot be a body.

2. We can exist without a body.

3. Therefore we cannot be a body.

Descartes asks himself the question about whether he is mistaken about himself having a body. The answer is yes. He figures that he can doubt the existence of his body by invoking the evil genius, who does something to Descartes to convince him that he has a body through illusion. And at that point it seems we don’t actually have a body in reality.

Arguments in favor of SD:

It accomodates common sense intuitions. It does better than both physicalism and idealism in terms of coming closer to the way we naturally think about the soul and the body.

Substance dualism seems to be the only theory which provides for there to be free will (?)

In physicalism, there is only one kind of stuff, and some physicists describe the physical world as a determinist world. Everything is caused by antecedent causes. In a determinist world there is no freedom to do otherwise. One important condition for free will is the principle of alternative possibilites. If we only has 1 option, there isn’t really free will. And this is important for there to be moral responsibility. As such, it seems free will cannot exist in a determinist world.

How important is the common sense? Probably not very. There are many intuitions that we generally don’t have to have to be correct.

Armchair philosophers vs empirically informed philosophy.
There are certain philosophers who have a certain intuition from which they build their general understanding. A naturalistic way of doing philosophy then may be better, rather than just acquiesing our intuitions.

It seems our intuitions are not always representative.

Joseph Henrich is a canadian psychologist and anthropologist: somehow psychology doesn’t always work in the exact same way as it does on the findings from WEIRD people. As such, some of our intuitions may not be so representative of humanity generally.

Leibniz principle of identity may be an argument in favor of SD.

If x and y have the same features, they are the same.

Brain states and mental features seem not to have the same features, as such they are not the same.

The mind seems indivisible, whilst the brain clearly isn’t. Though this can also be argued against. The mind seems to be able to fall apart into for example multiple personality disorder.

Dualists also argue that it is conceivable to lack a body, and therefore we can also in reality lack a body.

Everyone already disagrees with this argument immediately.

How does matter come to think, and vice versa?

Descartes would say that there is interaction between the two, but that they are entirely different from each other. There is no common platform and space in which they may interact it seems. This is a kind of intuitive problem for SD.

Descartes solves the problem by applying the soul to the pineal gland.

It seems that when comparing physicalism and SD according to virtues, it seems to be more complicated than physicalism, it is ontologically extravagant.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

Descartes just makes shit up.

According to Gilbert Ryle, it is a categorical mistake.
Mind = behaviours and statements.

A categorical mistake happens when we put some phenomenon in a category when it belongs in another.

A University is a collection of various buildings & services spread out all over the place according, and not some kind of outstanding thing unrelated to the physical things themselves.

However, Ryle was a pure behaviourist, so remember that in terms of this argument.