Philosophy of Mind
If we are our brains, why do we keep talking of the mind? There are things like mental illnesses, we keep labelling them as such anyways.
Reductive physicalism and non-reductive today (next week eliminative physicalism)
Idealists say everything in the world is mental; the physical stuff is only illusory. We don’t discuss idealism in class because there are few serious idealists today.
A recent review of Berkeley tried defending idealism; and Berkeley was insane.
”By convention colour exists, by convention bitter, by convention sweet, but in reality atoms and void” – Democritus.
Dualism goes back to Plato, was picked up in Christianity, but all that time, during all those centuries, there was something else in the margin. And this starts in antiquity with the atomists; philosophers like Democritus who argued that everything boils down to one monistic property.
There are qualities in the world, but according to Democritus this is not really how the world is. The pure experience is not the reality of what the world is. The most complicated thoughts that we have or feelings are just configurations of atoms. It did not really become a popular theory.
In the 16th century there was a change in the intellectual climate of the west, referred to as the scientific revolution.
The Restless Clock, a book about natural phenomena as automata.
In the 50s there was a book by the dutch historian of science called EJ Dijksterhuis, The Mechanisation of the World Picture. What changed during the scientific revolution changed the way we fundamentally experienced and looked at the world changed.
Physicalism really has its roots in the scientific revolution, understanding one means understanding the other.
What went on before the revolution? What did it replace?
In the middle ages and antiquity, people really understood and nature as a kind of organism. A minded thing with a soul. And they inferred from the observation of everyday life that nature organismically does stuff: ’mother nature awakes’ and so on.
Imagine these people in the middle ages looking at the buzz of life, and thinking about why that happens; we may be able to get some empathy for them because of that.
Aristotle explains everything according to its cause.
If you want to understand something fully you have to understand its material cause. That is, what does it consist in?
And the formal cause, what shape does the thing take, its morpology.
And even more the efficient cause, the thing that initially made it be as it is – how it began.
Then there is the final cause: why does something exist in the first place; what is its purpose; its teleology? The final cause is a bit weird however. It is unlike the causes that we now know best, those that cause an effect. Final causes are generally, in a sense, in the future. They come after the effect and don’t precede it. They work on us by inspiring us to obtain that end which is the final cause. For example, why is it that humans do what they do? Well because they have goals which they may reach by doing those things, they are their final cause – in the future. It is an answer to the question why we are here?
For philosophers in the middle ages, the world is full of final causes. Everything in the world has some goal that it is attempting to reach. Every acorn, and every ant, has some inherent desire that which it is trying to reach.
What is the final cause of a rock? For Aristotle, the final cause of a rock is to go downwards. Stones have a kind of desire to be at their natural place, which is to be on the ground.
God is the end of all desire however, there isn’t really anything he is moved by, yet moves the universe. Everyone wants to be that unmoved mover though.
Physicalism marks the end of the thinking of final causes.
This is basically the mechanisation of the world picture to a T.
Aristotle and Plato postulated the existence of a number of souls to understand why the universe and living nature is doing whatever it is doing. Animals and plants have souls.
Somehow during the scientific revolution, understanding the world in terms of final causes and souls became weird and uncertain. There was a movement to demystify nature; and nature rather became viewed as a kind of machine which can be used as one sees fit. There are no mysterious substances in it needed to understand it.
As Democritus anticipates in antiquity, experiencing the world in terms of colour and taste was common – this was replaced by understanding the world quantitatively in the scientific revolution.
Automata were first used in religious context as cute little moving figures in churches. Later they were secularised and lots of people could have them and then they began thinking about living things as fundamentally like the automata – that is having mechanical parts that interact.
Jacques Vaucanson made a mechanical duck in the 1700s. Vaucanson claimed that he had been able to mechanise the digestive system of the duck. You could feed it and then it would poop. It was probably fake, but the idea that people received was that nature can be mimicked mechanically.
Julian Offray de la Mettrie made a book called l’homme machine which asks us to think of the world like a machine.
Descartes had already gone a long way to mechanise the world, but he still thought there were certain features we couldn’t understand in mechanical terms like language and so on. De la Mettrie argues that this is absolute bullshit, we are just machines for him and nothing else.
Real physicalism starts in like the 1950s kinda.
The world consits of one kind of stuff: physical stuff.
It is not necessarily material stuff, but physical stuff. Materialism is not ideal because it suggests a certain solidity to everything that’s physical like energy and so on.
What happens to other sciences if everything is physical and the science of physics, the only stuff that exists, already covers that?
There are three ways of being a physicalist.
Reductive, non-reductive and eliminative.
Reductive physicalists will say that psychology as a science enables us to understand human behaviours by using mentalistic terms but really what these terms denote are physical states, like brain states. When we talk about desire we don’t talk about anything mental: this is just a configuration of the brain. It’s just like when we talk about water; it isn’t actually water that exists, but a lot of different compounds that make up what we usually call water. Water is just a common expression of that general combination of compound.
Talking about human behaviour in terms of the mind is fine, so long as we know we’re actually talking about the brain.
Non-reductive physicalists will attach more important to mental terms. They will say that we’ve known for a very long time now that water is h2o, yet we still keep talking of water. We never order h2o at a restaurant. The same is true of mental terms.
Eliminativists hate psychology. They’ll tell you that psychology is absolute nonsense. And that we should stop studying psychology.
Jackson thinks qualia are important and non-reductive, whilst others think they are mysterious and probably fake. Nagel is saying that our mental life is really full of subjectivity, and he can’t imagine how you would reduce highly subjective mental states into something ’objective’. Eliminativists will then say, well, that’s your problem. There are limits to what we can conceive. When you are taking photos with your smartphone, and you show someone in the 1400s that one day you’ll be able to use symbols to reduce a complex picture you’ve taken into encodable data.
Phlogiston ended up on the graveyard of the sciences. And this graveyard is kinda big. There are plenty of theories in science that people have given up on.
If you’re talking about folk psychology, the eliminativist will argue that just because it has been around for a long time doesn’t mean it actually makes sense to talk about. Soon the same that happened to phlogiston will happen to folk psychology as well.
Reductive Physicalism
Can be behaviouristic or identity theory.
Gilbert Ryle is the foremost proponent of behaviourism. He is famous for dismissing substance dualism as a kind of logical fallacy. Descartes was assuming that the mind is something else over and above physical states like behaviours. Ryle argued that there is nothing but behavioural states. Someone being angry is nothing but the anger as behavioured. There is nothing over and above these anger-related behaviours. Ryle is trying to reduce mental states to behavioural dispositions.
Mental states = behavioural dispositions.
One of the ways in which behaviourism took off was in the theoriticians of logical positivism of the Wiener Kreis, and Mortitz Schlick. The Tractatus solved all philosophical problems. Everything is done and philosophers should go home. Wittgenstein tried to basically dissolve the problems of philosophy. How does he do that? By using logic. It was an optimism about the use of logic to get rid of the problems of philosophy.
Is it possible to reduce mental states? It may be an interminable task. Some mental states like beliefs are difficult to reduce to behavioural states.
And what about mental actions? There are a specific set of mental states that typically are very hard to observe and are not even observable at all, like calculation. If they are not observable behaviour they are not mental states, but this seems bizarre because we do know that people can do multiplication in their head without showing off that behaviour.
What about actors? If someone is acting angrily, behaviouristically we should infer that they are anger. However, quite clearly, actors can act angry in a very real way without being angry at all. But clearly we know that they are not really angry in a meaningful sense.
Identity theory
Mental states = physical states = brain states.
A posteriori, we are our brains.
We firmly believe that our brains play an important role in our mental life. By doing something with the brain, we also interfere with our mental life.
This theory basically follows the success of the sciences. It accomodates common sense intuitions and it has its onw conceivability argument.
It hinges on the authority and success of the sciences. It is appealing to believe that the sciences have been so successful in helping us understand so many different phenomena that they will also help us understand the mind.
Has the hypothesis of witchcraft been successful? Not really: it led to a lot of people dying and so on and so on (kinda misses the point it feels like but cute enough).
On the other hand, knowing that people who are fucked up may have some kind of neurological pathology which we can treat it seems like a better hypothesis.
This is an entirely inductive argument.
Hempel’s dilemma:
about the problem with defining physics.
We either define physics as whatever our current physical science says – then we know that physicalism is false because our current conception of physics is probably wrong.
Or we define physicalism as whatever physics will say in the future – at which point we aren’t really saying anything at all.
Philosophical zombies, or qualia zombies.
You wanna reduce mental states to brain states, but that doesn’t seem to work. You lose something very important when you do that.