6.1 Philosophy Lockdown Work: Metaphysics of Mind

This material covers the first part of the MoM course, and goes back over the material covered in the first three of the PPTs, but you will need to also research the answers online and in text books:

Introducing the features of mental states and Substance Dualism.

Answer the questions as well as you can and email me if you have any questions ktozer@ttsonline.net

3.4.1 What do we mean by ‘mind’?

Features of mental states:

· All or at least some mental states have phenomenal properties

· Some, but not all, philosophers use the term 'qualia' to refer to these properties, where 'qualia' are defined as 'intrinsic and non-intentional phenomenal properties that are introspectively accessible'

· All or at least some mental states have intentional properties (ie intentionality).

Terminology of Mind

Q1. What is a difference between ‘supervenience’ and ‘physicalism’?

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Q2. What is similarity between ‘property dualism’ and Locke’s ‘primary and secondary qualities’?

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Q3. What is a similarity between ‘solipsism’ and ‘phenomenal’?

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What is the Mind?

The main debate regarding mind revolves around the dualists and physicalists. Is the mind different, separate, distinguishable from the body either in substance or even linguistically, or is the mind literally biological in its nature?

Two aspects of minds seem to be thought and consciousness.

Q4. What is the difference and relationship between thought and consciousness?

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Q5. What is your personal view? Do you think you can have consciousness without thought or thought without consciousness or do you need both to have a mind?

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Intentionality

When you are conscious you are conscious OF something, say most philosopher’s of mind. Remember what Hume said:

You can have a reflective thought on both an external sensation or an internal thought.

Your intentional consciousness would be directed toward either redness of a ball [external] or a thought about the redness of a ball [reflective]

Q6. Give an example of intentionality towards an object in the external world:

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Q7. Give an example of intentionality in a reflective sense, the internal world:

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Q8. This is an extract from tinybuddha.com. Copy three selected extracts from below and explain whether and why they are examples of ‘intentional objects’ [the object of intentional consciousness] or ‘aspectual shape’ [one’s mental attitude toward the object].

“As Tiny Buddha grows larger, I find there are a lot more people emailing me with requests. The people pleaser in me wants to say yes to everyone, but the reality is that there is only so much time in the day—and we all have a right to allocate our time as best supports our intentions, needs, and goals.

Recently someone contacted me with a request that I was unable to honour. After I communicated that, he made a sweeping judgment about my intentions and character, ending his email with “Buddha would be appalled.”

As ironic as this may sound given the context of this site, I felt angry.

I felt angry because I have always struggled with saying no, and this was exactly the type of uncomfortable encounter I generally aim to avoid.

I felt angry because I felt misunderstood and judged, and I wanted him to realise that he was wrong about me.

I felt angry because I assumed he intended to be hurtful, and I didn’t feel like I deserved that.”

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Some philosophers’ views on intentionality

· “Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.

… We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.” Brentano [1874]

· ‘It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional’ said Jean-Paul Sartre [20thC], ‘and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something would ipso facto cease to exist’.

Q9. Rewrite Brentano and Sartre’s ideas in your own words:

Franz Brentano:

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Sartre:

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We might ask ourselves whether there can be a state of consciousness that is conscious OF something but not in an intentional way. By that we mean, not in a way that is a self-reflective directed thought. Can one see red or feel blue in an unintentional way? Or is there non-intentionality whereby one’s experience is not focused on the object of experience but rather the quality of the experience.

Qualia experiences

There must be something it is like to see red, feel sad, hear a siren. There must be something about the quality of those experiences. The quality of these experiences is said to be the phenomenal quality. Only conscious beings have qualia experiences. Only beings with perception.

Of phenomenal states Thomas Nagel says in his book ‘What is it like to be a bat’:

“We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, … It is not analysable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing. … [Perhaps there could not actually be such robots. Perhaps anything complex enough to behave like a person would have experiences. But that, if true, is a fact which cannot be discovered merely by analysing the concept of experience.] Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defence of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character.”

Here, Nagel is discussing the idea that reductionist theories, which reduce consciousness to only physical events in the brain, may not explain the whole of consciousness if they don’t explain a part of consciousness, ‘the subjective character of experience’ / phenomenal states / qualia experience.

Q10. What would Locke have to say about qualia experiences?

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Q11. How might qualia experiences pose a problem for direct realists?

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The pain brain

Imagine your foot was wired up to various pain stimulators.

You were placed in an MRI and had to scale the pain from 0-10.

The doctors at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences induced various levels of pain in your foot while they observed the brain activity on the MRI scanner.

The MRI scanner is sophisticated enough and the doctors are knowledgeable enough to be able to trace every intensity and every type of pain you are going through.

The question is, do the doctors know what you are experiencing?

Q12. What are your personal thoughts about the situation above? Is there something the doctors don’t know about your pain?

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The problem of consciousness

Read your AQA textbook by Cardinal Jones and Hayward bottom of 186-187 if you have it.

Q13. What is the ‘central mystery of consciousness’ according to Chalmers?

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Q14. What is the difference between monism and dualism?

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Q15. How would you summarise what you have learned so far in 3 succinct bullet-points?

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Q16. Of the theories of mind summarised, which most appeals to you and why?

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DUALIST THEORIES

Substance dualism

· Minds exist and are not identical to bodies or to parts of bodies.

· The indivisibility argument for substance dualism (Descartes).

Q17. Reading your notes, textbook or revision guides re-explain Descartes cogito argument.

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Q18. In what way does Descartes’ cogito argument support the idea that ‘minds exist’?

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Q19. Descartes says:

“And although possibly (or rather certainly, as I shall say in a moment) I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined, yet because, on the one side, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul by which I am what I am], is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it.”

What do you think he means when he says the body is extended and the mind unextended?

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Descartes’ Indivisibility Argument

Descartes said that the mind and the body are different and hence promotes his dualistic ideas about the mind and body:

“In order to begin this examination, then, I here say, in the first place, that there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible. For, as a matter of fact, when I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire; and although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, yet if a foot, or an arm, or some other part, is separated from my body, I am aware that nothing has been taken away from my mind. And the faculties of willing, feeling, conceiving, etc. cannot be properly speaking said to be its parts, for it is one and the same mind which employs itself in willing and in feeling and understanding.”

Q20. Do you agree with Descartes when he says that ‘willing, feeling, conceiving’ is not a division of the mind the same as a foot, arm or some other part of the body is a division of the body? What are your thoughts?

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Q21. Issues with the indivisibility argument

Responses, including:

· the mental is divisible in some sense

· not everything thought of as physical is divisible.

Create a dialogue using the following prompts:

· Descartes suggests the essence of a mind is that it is an indivisible thinking thing.

· Locke suggests that can’t be true because we have significant states of unconsciousness during sleep, for example.

· Dualists might reply and say the mind has unconscious thoughts.

· Locke might reply with his transparency of ideas argument.

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Q22. The mind does seem divisible

Split-brain or callosal syndrome is a type of disconnection syndrome when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree, often to address some forms of epilepsy.

After the right and left brain are separated, each hemisphere will have its own separate perception, concepts, and impulses to act. Having two "brains" in one body can create some interesting dilemmas. When one split-brain patient dressed himself, he sometimes pulled his pants up with one hand (that side of his brain wanted to get dressed) and down with the other (this side did not). He also reported to have grabbed his wife with his left hand and shaken her violently, at which point his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand.

In what way might the above phenomenon disprove Descartes theory of mind?

Try to write your response as a syllogism. “If … And … Then”

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Q23. Not everything physical is divisible. See p.198 of textbook

We describe physical events or physical things using terminology such as running, burning or melting. Those are physical events yet we wouldn’t say they are divisible as such.

However, are you convinced this really engages with what Descartes’ was saying? Modern physics accepts that divisibility at a quantum level isn’t about dividing surfaces but dividing the spatial relations between parts. Electrons and quarks are point particles so don’t count as objects. So modern science considers space and time to be infinitely divisible.

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If you had a go at this question in your previous session please self-assess it using the mark scheme:

Property Dualism

Property Dualism appears better able than Substance Dualism to accommodate scientific evidence. Property dualism claims that the brain has a special set of non-physical properties alongside its ordinary physical properties. These are properties possessed by no other kind physical object. These properties are mental phenomena such as sensations, feelings, desires, thoughts…

Read page 213 in your Hayward text book.

For property dualists consciousness is not a substance ie. It cannot exist without a brain. Conscious experiences can emerge when the brain has developed so mental properties are ‘emergent’. Evolution, for example, has enabled biological matter to become more complex. Property dualists argue that mental properties are a special sort of emergent property as they are irreducible to matter and thus cannot be explained in terms of the physical properties of the brain.

Q24. Can you give other examples of properties that are emergent?

Q.25. Explain what is meant when property dualists talk of the irreducibility of mental phenomena. How is it possible for property dualists to be described as dualists when they believe that there is just one substance?

Property dualists believe that phenomenal properties are neither supervenient to, nor reducible to physical properties. Supervenience describes the nature of the dependence between mind and brain, what effects the brain will affect the mind. Mental states would supervene on brain states if there can be no difference in the mental without a difference in the brain, but at the same time a difference in the brain need not produce a difference in mind.

Q. 26. What does it mean if the brain is supervenient to the mind? Explain the diagram above.

Physicalists argue that we are purely material beings. Leibniz citricised the view that the mind might be reducible to matter.

In Monadology (1714), Leibniz wrote: “One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions.

Leibniz focuses on thinking, sensing and perceiving. Leibniz posits a non-physical mind which he calls a ‘simple substance’.

Philosophical Zombies Argument

David Chalmers puts forward an argument of a similar nature. He asks us to imagine a normally functioning human that lacks qualia and other mental states – a physically identical ‘human’ whose brain functions in the same way as ours, but with no conscious experience at all who has no subjective awareness and enjoys no qualia.

Recap: Qualia are the non-intentional phenomenal properties of certain mental states which are accessible through introspection. Qualia are subjective i.e. they have a specific nature - there is an intrinsic quality to my experience which is impossible to define.

Chalmers argues that if the idea of philosophical zombies is conceivable then there is a possible world inhabited by philosophical zombies as there is nothing contradictory in the idea. Chalmers believes that mental states depend upon brain states in our universe, i.e. that there is a relation of supervenience between mental and physical properties.

P1. It is conceivable that there are zombies

P2. If it is conceivable that there are zombies, it is metaphysically possible that there are zombies

P3. If it is metaphysically possible that there are zombies, then phenomenal properties of consciousness are non-physical

C1. Therefore property dualism is true.

Q. 27. What is Chalmers' thought experiment regarding the philosophical zombies? (See page 215 of Hayward)

Responses to Philosophical Zombies Argument

Response 1: A zombie world is not conceivable

Daniel Dennett criticises the philosophical zombies argument saying a Zombie World is not conceivable. See page 216. Daniel Dennett said philosophical zombies are not conceivable. We are wrong in thinking that we can take consciousness away from a person's ability to converse or react to stimuli - having a mind is integral to being able to do this, and we should appreciate the way these abilities are linked to the mental states. It isn't conceivable that a zombie would be able to intelligibly talk to you in conversation without understanding what it's talking about - it seems impossible to imagine that the person you're talking to has no conscious.

Dennett draws an analogy to illustrate the argument of 'A Zombie World is not Conceivable' as a criticism of the philosophical zombies argument of property dualism. He asks us to think of a healthy body – any body which has organs which operate effectively is a healthily. He argues that it would be nonsensical to say that a body which functions in all the same ways as a healthy body isn't healthy - health supervenes the state of the body so if I am healthy an exact duplicate of me must also be healthy. This is the same for consciousness - it is constituted by the proper functioning of the body and brain of a human and so as long as a human is functioning appropriately physically, then they will be conscious and an identical copy must also be conscious. We cannot imagine what it is like to be a philosophical zombie, as there is no awareness of anything at all. But to imagine meeting a zombie would appear to be to imagine a normal functioning human being. As zombies can't be distinguished between ordinary people they are not conceivable.

Q.28. Please summarise Dennett’s argument that a Zombie World is not conceivable?

Q. 29. What is the conclusion of the argument 'A Zombie World is not Conceivable' as a criticism of the philosophical zombies argument?

Response 2: what is metaphysically possible tells us nothing about the actual world

Ideas such as time travel can be imagined by us but they are not logically coherent (if you travelled back and killed your younger self, you wouldn't be alive to travel back and kill yourself so you would be alive to be old enough to travel back and kill yourself). The conceivability of these possible worlds can be debated as to whether they are metaphysically possible - we can conceive of chocolate trees although the sense in which they are possible isn't clear.

Q.30. What is the argument 'What is what is metaphysically possible tells us nothing about the actual world?

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Response 3: what is metaphysically possible tells us nothing about the actual world

A zombie world is conceivable but denying this allows us to draw safe conclusions about what is possible. It is not contradictory but zombies are not metaphysically possible - it seems to be conceivable that water is not H2O but this isn't true, and any liquid with a different composition can never be water, no matter how similar it might be. So, the statement 'water is H2O' is metaphysically necessary even though it isn't logically necessary - it is a necessary truth which is only discoverable a posteriori. Philosophical zombies may be conceivable but are not metaphysically possible. In any physical duplicate of this world the humans must be conscious - if they weren't they couldn't behave in the complex way we do.

Q.31. What is the argument 'What is Conceivable may not be Metaphysically Possible'?

The Knowledge / Mary Argument

Frank Jackson propounded the Knowledge/Mary argument. He argued that the intrinsic nature of certain mental states is irreducible but it is a product of the physical brain.

Jackson's thought experiment for the Knowledge/Mary argument: Mary has spent her whole life in a black and white room, with her only access to the rest of the world being through a black and white television, so she has never seen colours. She has studied the science of vision and knows what happens physically when someone sees colours, knowing all about the wavelengths produced by light and their effect on the retina. One day, Mary leaves the room and for the first time can see colour. Jackson believes that Mary gained knowledge as she learns what it is like to experience colours. As she knew everything she physically could about colour, physicalism left out and cannot explain qualia. Mary's Room is a thought experiment that attempts to establish that there are non-physical properties and attainable knowledge that can be discovered only through conscious experience. It attempts to refute the theory that all knowledge is physical knowledge.

P1. Mary knows everything about the physical processes involved in colour vision

P2. She learns something new when she experiences colour vision herself.

P3. Therefore there is more to know about colour vision than what is given in a complete physical account of it.

C1. So physicalism is false

Response 1: Mary gains no new Propositional Knowledge, only acquaintance knowledge

Q.32. What is acquaintance knowledge? (See page 221 of Hayward.)

Saying that Mary knows everything there is to know about colour vision is saying that she knows all the physical facts, which concerns her propositional knowledge. When she goes outside she doesn't gain propositional knowledge but acquaintance knowledge. Using 'know' in just the propositional sense is an equivocation and leads to the argument failing.

Definition: ‘equivocation’ - In logic, equivocation ('calling two different things by the same name') is an informal fallacy resulting from the use of a particular word / expression in multiple senses throughout an argument leading to a false conclusion.

Jackson’s response to this criticism is that Mary didn't just gain acquaintance knowledge - she also gained propositional knowledge as now she knows facts about what it is like for humans to see colours. Mary had a companion, Marvin, who shared the black and white room with her and who also knew all the physical facts of colour vision but we can imagine that he would ask Mary what she had learnt about her experiences and Mary would've tried to explain what it was like but Marvin still wouldn't have gained this knowledge. Marvin would still not know Mary's qualia.

Response 2: 'Mary gains no new propositional knowledge, only ability knowledge'

Q.33. What is ability knowledge? (See page 222 of Hayward.)

Mary gained a new ability, which is the capacity to imagine and remember colours, or to group different objects based on their colour. She may learn something new but this doesn't undermine physicalism as it is possible to acquire new abilities without this, meaning she didn't have complete factual knowledge of what happens when people view colours. This is like learning to ride a bike - you can learn all the physical facts about riding a bike but by riding one for the first time you don't gain any more physical facts but just a new skill.

Link this to your learning on Aristotle’s Ethics and his Skills Analogy.

Jackson’s response is that although Mary gains new abilities she also acquires factual beliefs about the mental lives of others. She knows what other people have been experiencing when they see colours. He asked us to imagine Mary debating with herself over whether other people do have the same experiences she does when seeing colour, which is wondering whether you can truly know that experiences resemble others. Jackson's concern is that this could worry Mary, as to worry about it she has to ask herself a factual question. Mary's concern is whether she has sufficient evidence to accept a factual claim, and whether her acquired experiences after her release can count as knowledge. If she can know what other people's experiences are like, even if she is wrong, she is still trying to justify propositional beliefs.

Link this to your learning on Epistemology on JTB.

Response 3: 'All physical knowledge would include knowledge of qualia'

If Mary did know all the physical facts about colour vision then she could work out what colours would look like and so she could imagine colours. Dennett urges us to recognise how hard it is to imagine Mary knowing everything about colour vision. We don't know much about how it works so we can't imagine what it would be like to know it all. Dennett says this vague idea is not a safe basis on which to make a judgement concerning what would be possible to understand.

(See page 223 of Hayward.)

Patricia Churchland asks:

‘How can I assess what Mary will know and understand if she knows everything there is to know about the brain? Everything is a lot, and it means, in all likelihood, that Mary has a radically different and deeper understanding of the brain than anything barely conceivable in our wildest flights of fancy.’

Jackson believes that qualia may represent complex internal states and so if Mary knew everything about these states she could work out what colours would look like before seeing them herself.

Q.34. What was Jackson's response to the argument 'All physical knowledge would include knowledge of qualia'?

Response 4: 'Mary gains new propositional knowledge' (See page 224 of Hayward)

Physicalists accept that Mary gains new factual knowledge but deny the implication this gives of non-physical facts. The fact that she learns colour is the same as what she knew before but presented in a different way. After her release she gained new phenomenal concepts which enabled her to describe the same facts in a new way - from third to first person.

Mary goes to a party and meets Bruce Wayne, who she learns is a billionaire, and as she had never heard of Batman she couldn't claim to know that he is a billionaire. But if she met Batman that night and learned that he was a billionaire, would she be gaining new knowledge? She may have learnt a new fact about Batman but not about reality, as it is one fact that Batman and Bruce Wayne are millionaires. The knowledge is new, but what it concerns is something she knew before, under a different description. Mary knows all the physical facts about what goes on in the brain when we see red things and once she sees red she learns the experience of seeing red things involves a qualitative feel and acquires a new phenomenal concept from this. She could represent the same physical facts under two different descriptions, so Mary doesn't become aware of new non-physical facts about the world.

Response 5: 'Qualia does not exist and so Mary gains no new propositional knowledge' (see page 225)

Jackson’s thought experiment may appear convincing as there seems to be nothing more real than qualia, however, if qualia could be shown not to exist this would provide a powerful counterargument for physicalists.

We can follow Descartes in doubting the existence of the world outside our minds but the qualitative feel of our sense experiences is an undeniable fact of our consciousness / eliminative materialism as argued by Daniel Dennett:

‘Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia ; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them.’

Dennett tried to show the features of qualia are ultimately incoherent so the concept of it is flawed. Nothing could have the properties given to qualia and so the judgements we make about our conscious experience are comprehensive in terms of what is publicly observable to anyone and so can be explained in physicalist terms. To illustrate this he offered a series of thought of experiments.

· 'Reactive dissociation' thought experiment: some patients who were given morphine were said to have been in pain but not found it unpleasant, so this can be understood either by the patient as not actually being in pain or by saying that it is possible to subtract the horribleness of pain.

· ‘Matter of taste’ thought experiment: involves acquiring a taste for beer, as there are two ways of describing the situation. The first is to say that the taste of beer has changed from unpleasant to pleasant, implying that the taste of beer can change, and so it doesn't have an intrinsic nature which goes against one of the defining characters of qualia. However, if you suppose that your reaction changes this is also problematic as it is confusing how you could come to enjoy a taste if it is intrinsically horrible, and if they have an intrinsic nature we cannot experience them differently from how they are. Dennett says we cannot know which of the two we have experienced and as we cannot know whether we have the same qualia or not then we should abandon talking about qualia altogether.

· ‘Inverted spectrum’ thought experiment: if two people behave in the same way in their use of colour terms there's no way of checking whether their qualia is inverted as they are private and ineffable - this means we could imagine this as a real possibility, but if you couldn't tell the difference then there cannot be any real difference. Wittgenstein linked this to having a beetle in a box that no one else can see - the intrinsic nature of our respective beetles can't be compared and without this intersubjective comparison, their natures can't be meaningfully spoken about. Wittgenstein's beetle represents the individual perception and experiences that form a point of view. Dennett tried to show spectrum inversion is incoherent as you could compare your past qualia to the current qualia, but we can't eliminate the possibility that you would notice the colour switch due to the way that you are disposed to react to certain colours. If we cannot detect qualia change then we should abandon the notion that we have direct and infallible access to their intrinsic natures.

Q.35. What are the thought experiments regarding a matter of taste / inverted spectrum in Daniel Dennett's additions to the argument?

a.) matter of taste: (see page 229)

b.) inverted spectrum: (see page 230)

Patricia and Paul Churchland argue that the whole range of mental-states terms such as qualia, beliefs, desires emotions should be eliminated from a proper understanding of human mentality. They argue that there is nothing in reality that corresponds to terms such as ‘qualia’, ‘beliefs’ or ‘desires’. Eliminativism claims that folk psychology is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist. It is a materialist position. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. Rather, they argue that psychological concepts of behaviour and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the non-existence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions. (NB Folk psychology is a human capacity to explain and predict the behaviour and mental state of other people.)

Q.36. What is eliminativism?

Q. 37. What is ‘folk psychology’?