Philosophy of Mind
Do animals have minds? Yes, what an easy question.
What do I need to know in this course? The textbook. There will also be slides, and it’s probably smart to take notes.
Written exam, 30 mp choice, 1 essay question.
Some phenomena lack essences. Shit.
Professor will propogate a philosophy of nuance and complexity… We’ll see.
The mind is a collection of mental states, I guess Hume figured it out.
What is the relationship between mental and physical states?
I already answered in this document about the minds of animals.
3 categories of mental states:
Experiences.
Propositional attitudes.
Mental actions.
Intentionality is a feature about mental states that refer to something else.
Accessibility to the contents of my mind. If we are to believe Freud we lack full access to our mind.
Observability is central. Being in love is a mental state. Somebody being in love can be observed in their actions, in their mannerisms and so on.
All of the above are fuzzy concepts. This means that we can’t really delineate where it ends and begins in a simple fashion. There are plenty of diseases and disorders, but then there are plenty of borderline cases, wherein people may not agree about what is a disorder and what isn’t.
Experiences
Includes emotions, but also sensations – tasting smelling hearing etc. – Emotions have an object, they are intentional. But a particular mood doesn’t necessarily have an object, like anxiety.
Pain is not an intentional state. [But aren’t you pained at some place?]
Pain is not really intentional, but is fairly observable, you can infer pain, and it’s very accessible to us.
Propositional Attitudes
Very intentionally bound, not that observable but still observable, and they are accessible.
These are attitudes you adopt towards a proposition, like a belief in some x. You can either agree or not agree with a given proposition.
Some desires are very observable, you desire to be with someone, so you may go to certain lengths to reach that person, something which is quite visible.
Mental Actions
Very accessible and intentional in nature, however they ae not particularly observable.
Some propositional attitudes look quite a lot like mental actions. Mental actions are activities going on in your mind. As opposed to behaviours, which belong to the purely physical world. The behaviour of choosing a certain thing over another seems to often be related to real material choices [though this also seems a bit dubitable].
Yeah, professor basically says this project is stupid.
Three Candidates
What is common to all mental states?
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Indubitability; the cartesian project.
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Intentionality; husserlian maybe?
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Consciousness; borders on the unusable. It has so many meanings.
Consciousness can be of multiple kinds.