Philosophy of Mind
Mock exam next week or something. Idfk. Online and so on
Non-reductive physicalism
Thought experiments conflict with the basic tenets of identity theory. Like the one held by Place.
We don’t really know what brain states really are so it is a bit of an anticipation anyways, but it has the appeal of simplicity.
Bats, zombies, and more seems to argue against identity theory.
”Many of us have the feeling that there is something rigid and narrowminded about reductionist strategies. Reductionisms, we tend to feel, attempt to impose on us a monolithic, strait-jacketed view of the subject matter, the kind of cleansed and tidy picture that appeals to those obsessed with orderliness and discipline. Perhaps this impression has something to do with the reductionists’ ritual incantatations of slogans like ’parsimony, simplicity, economy and unity’, all of them virtues of a rather puritanical sort. Perhaps, too, reductionisms are out of step with the intellectual style of our times: we strive for patterns of life and thought that are rich in diversity and complexity and tolerant of disagreement and multiplicity. We are apt to think that the real world is a messy place and resists any simplicistic drive, espeically one carried out from the armchair, toward simplification and unification. In fact, the word reductionism seems by now to have acquired a negative, faintly disreputable flavour in the philosophy of mind.”
Talking about power and love will be senseless for reductionists, they abandon spirit and the meaning of it.
At point there was a job vacancy here in Leuven, part time professorship, and there was a committee that was talking to the candidates. There was one woman from Ghent (and Leuven and Ghent have very different styles of philosophy) and after the talk the committee said: ’we are not going to hire a reductionist philosopher are we?’. She argues for incompatibilism regarding free will. But she is a reductionist, and this seemed like enough reason not to hire her. There was a direct aversion.
Can there be different relationships between the mind and the physical world despite physicalism? And not just a pure identity theory, x isn’t identical to y. But rather, x is dependent on y to realise itself. Mental states are not brain states but are dependent on them.
What is the thing that is being reduced though? What are mental states? It seems to be part of the ontology of folk-psychology. And psychology according to reductionists will one day be reduced to fundamental physical theories.
Reduction means to weaken and to degrade. In chemistry it means to remove oxygen from a substance. This is quite intriguing, because if you reduce oxygen it stops breathing.
Hilary Putnam argued for functionalism, a kind of non-reductive physicalism.
It says that mental states are not brain states, but are functional states. They do something for us. They translated certain inputs into outputs. Eg. sadness: what is that? You feel bad, it happens when something bad happens in life. Low mood is a mental state that helps you connect that adverse life event, the input, to certain behaviours, the output – eg. crying.
Frank Jackson defended epiphenomenalism with a story about some Mary. Every mental-state is an epiphenomena. So we only think of stuff after the fact.
Modularity is very close to functionalism. All mental states are modules insofar as they help us connect input to outputs. Fodor argues for this.
Functionalism builds itself on a computer metaphor: people thought of the mental as basically the software which tells the hardware how to process data. It argues that computer sciences have been successful and therefore that we should think of mental states in the same way.
The argument of multiple realisability:
mental states are multiply realisable. Realisation in different types of physical states that is. One such state is the brain state.
Also realisation in different physical processes of a certain type.
Paco Calvo runs a minimal intelligence lab. He argues that plants have something like intelligence. He uses 79 definitions though so it’s kinda questionable. But they don’t have brainstates. They kinda have neurotransmitters though. Or rather like 2 but yeah whatever. Identity theorists argue that something lacking brain states cannot be intelligent. Some people think it is anthropocentric. Functionalism kinda meets those people’s annoyance.
The chinese room, John Searle: it takes up the idea that two creatures are functionally identical but mentally different. For functionalism this is impossible. Searle thinks he can at least give a thought experiment example of this not being the case.
Eliminative physicalism:
Easy to argue against. There are no mental states at all. Only brain states exist. The whole ontology of contemporary psychology is just one giant illusion. These things they speak of don’t exist.
It goes back to the philosopher couple of the Churchlands. They are basically the only people who hold this theory.
”Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucosteroids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.”
— they are not joking around.
It goes back partially to Quine, Rorty, Feyerabend.
”Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological penomena (folk psychology) constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.”
There are some people doing clinical psychology, organisational psychology, learning psychology, quantitative psychology, neuropsychology. They are all very different, and almost all of them are wrong, because they use fake ontologies.
The terms of psychology come from folk-psychology, the way that normal people speak of their emotions and so on.
When you go to a psychotherapist you talk about your beliefs, your mental states, and your desires. None of these exist.
The ptolemaics had a false premise about the movements of the heavenly bodies. They must have been confronted with anomalies then, ie. observations that don’t fit their theory. What do you then if you are a scientist? Probably you refine your theory then. Either there was something wrong with the hypothesis, or there was something wrong with taking the data.
Daniell Dennet talk about pain. It is part of folkpsychology. What’s wrong with it? There are two central features: you cannot be infalible about it, and there’s the awfulness part. Not many people like being in pain, it cannot be neutral. Then there is pain asymboly. It is the condition where patients report being in pain and yet not feeling pain. So they have the pain, but they don’t suffer.
Folk psychology lacks explanatory power, progress and consistency (the extent to which it is compatible with other theories)