Phil of mind
From metabolism to cognition
Biology can help us to restrain philosophy of mind. This tradition has been very armchair for a long time. It’s about logic. We are doing philosophy that relies on intuition. We talked about folk-psychology which is also a set of intuition.
It is very important to look at how contemporary science helps us correct particular ideas, debates and assumptions in phil of mind. A case study is naturalism. Naturalism is synonymous with empirically informed philosophy (for me). This is gonna be an exercise in naturalism. Few people know that but even Nietzsche was a naturalist. He was convinced that we should let the sciences influence the kind of philosophy that we do.
How can biology help us correct certain assumptions in phil of mind. We take a step back and look at what neuroscience has led us.
Is phil of mind heading in the right direction?
The Churchlands would emphatically say that it is going in a bad direction. Much critique of phil of mind by biologists and philosophers themselves.
”The mind is not an abiotic, atemporal, autonomous and abstract entity. It’s intimiately related to the brain, which is an organ that operates by the same biological principles and causes as any other organ in the body. In brief: phil of mind needs a biological framework.”
What is the cerebral mystique?
Neuroscience and philosophy have produced a set of myths regarding the brain (neuromyths)
They overemphasise inorganic features in the brain. They underestimate the fact that the brain is an organ, a biotic structure. Think for example about the computational view of the brain; it is an overemphasising of organic features.
They keep a lot of misconceptions alive about the division between body and mind, free will, and the nature of personal identity.
”The cerebral mystique is a similarly powerful illusion about the exceptional qualities of our brains and thus about ourselves as individuals. We echo the spritiuality of the past when we conceive of the brain as an omnipotent structure that encapsulates everything important about our personalities etc.”
”Our minds are biologically based, rooted in banal physiological processes and subject to all the laws of nature. By mythologising the brain, we divorce it from the body and the world”.
One neuromyth is the brain in a vat.
Can we have a virtual world that is qualitatively identical to the world as we experience it as human brains with a body?
Some assumptions:
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The brain is independent from its environmetn (inner, ecological, social).
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The brain is passively receiving information from the external world. When the brain is not stimulated it is just waiting to be processed. But if there is no information then it is just doing nothing. It is passive.
This experiment has been very influential in phil of mind.
The brain however seems not to be independent from its environment. There are plenty of things that the brain needs to function. If you take it out of the skull, you need to add a lot to make that brain work. The more elements you add however, to make it function, the whole system will eventually start to function exactly like a body – Because it NEEDS a body to function. The brain plays an active role in the reception of information from the external world as well. It is not just a passive receiver. It is a thing that ventures out for stimuli. The brain proactively anticipates what is going to happen, and it fills in the gaps. There is also the example of tinnitus.
Your brain basically gets stuck in expecting to hear frequences of a certain kind. And if they don’t come in, then the brain will start producing certain sounds by itself. It anticipates that there should be some kind of sound, maybe because of a physical damage to the eardrum, which the brain feels and therefore receives an input that there should be sound, which it anticipates.
The mind can be studied at different levels of organisation. Why does philosophy focus only on one level. From quantum theory to the human brain collective.
Alan Turing came up with the turing machine. A theoretical invention, a machine that help us process information. A machine that has infinite memory locations arrayed in a linear structure. A central processors which can access one memory location at a tie. The central processor can perform elementary activities such as write, erase, move, access memory locations. Which elementary operation the central processor performs depends entirely on which symbol is currently inscribed into it. A machine tables dictates which elementary operation the central processor performs.
In 2015 the british government publically apologised for making Turing kill himself.
Fodor argued that the mind is modular, which means that the parts of the brain are computational devices that translate inputs to outputs. Perhaps we can use mathematical approaches then to study qualia and mental phenomena.
Does neuroanatomy help us debunk this metaphor?
Brains are not only made up of neurons. More than 75% of the brain consist of fluids, chemicals and glial cells which lack computational functions. Brain activity is influenced by complex metabolic processes (glucose synthesis) and other causes such as temperature, acidity, hydration, rest and emotional states. A computer is designed by an engineer, and not evolved. This means that a number of features of the brain cannot be explained by the assumption that it is like software. Because it hasn’t been designed. If the brain was designed then it would look differently, it would work better etc. But that is not what happened.
Information theory is too limited. Does not do justice to the biological complexity of the brain.
Philosophical research into nature of the mind heavily relies on the use of thought experiments. They are used as a method to understand what is and what is not possible. However, they have been criticised because of their fictive nature and lack of grounding. Biology brings a new argument against the power of conceivability, as it is based on imagination. Imagination is an activity of the brain organ, and, as such, imagination is constrained by biological principles and causes like natural selection. Thought experiments might be telling us more about the nature of imagination than objective facts about phenomena.
Critique of Nagel: lack of imagination does not tell us anything about the world.
Ernst Mayr, framework for cause and effect in biology.
What kind of causes are there in biology. If we think about biological causes, like mental states and emotions, he answers that there are two: proximate causes and ultimate causes. Proximate causes are ahistorical and instant. It is a cause that immediately precedes the effect. The temporal connection is very tight. The proximate cause of fever is the immune system reacting to an infection.
An ultimate cause is historical and explains the processes from which something came to be. For instance, to look for the ultimate causes of fever ,emas to look in its history the reasons that brought it about: how did it evolve.
Tinbergen has four questions similar to the framework of Mayr. He got depressed after the noble prize.
Two of them are kind of proximate causes. First we need to ask about causation; which is basically about the mechanism, the physiology of the mind from metabolic systems all the way up to cognition. Genes are causes situated here.
Mechanistic explanation aim to explain why different mental states function the way they do. For example, identificatio nof hormones and neurotransmitter, biochemical processes leading to neuron firing etc.
Second we need to ask the question of development: How the mind develops over a human lifetime, the ontogeny of the thing. We can look at how features develop over time. The brain is an organ that does develop.
The third question, which is an ultimate question, is about adaptation: How does the mind contribute to an animal’s lifetime reproductive fitness? Since the mind is a biological trait, then, just like other biological raits, they have evolved by means of natural selection.
And lastly evolution: how a mental state has evolved?
You can use these four questions to produce new questions in phil of mind. You can ask all sorts of questions by grounding yourself in these 4. We should look at the causation of certain mental states. How is consciousness/qualia/free will/ mental disroders developed from birth? The ontogeny of the individual and their states.
You can ask about the adaptive value of certain mental phenomena. We can ask the question: if natural selection produced the human body, why are we so easily attacked by diseases? Both mental and physical. You’d expect that we’d have evolved enough to be unsusceptible to mental disorders. Maybe depression is an adaptation then, and the same holds true of disease.
And we can ask question about when certain traits were evolved. We can look at animals that seem to be in earlier stages of evolution, and have a comparative analysis.
The text by Godfrey-Smith is one of the earliest attempts to do this.