“An employee at my university solves mathematical problems. She sits at a desk outside a closed room, takes problems that are brought to her into the room and always returns with the correct answer. The employee tells everyone that she uses a “calculating device” is. Some theorists, emphasizing the difficulty of many of the problems, suggest that the calculating device is a large computer. Others, noting our limited campus budget, believe the calculating device is a large calculator. Others…believe the woman is a mathematical genius”

What is the calculating device?

Analogy to the question: What is the mind? – Is it physical or non-physical?

This is a metaphysical question. Recall: metaphysics asks what particular entities exist?

Definitions: We need to use definitions everybody can accept.

Mind– center of thinking (functional definition)

– in being a functional definition, there is no metaphysical commitment on the part of this definition—no answer to the Mind/Body Problem

Can’t just identify mind = brain, then we would presuppose the very metaphysical answer we want to prove. If someone thinks minds = brains, they have to philosophically argue for it.

Physical – the quality of being extended in space-time.

Non-physical – the quality of existing outside of space

· these things lack shape, energy, mass, and charge.

Hence, the mind/body problem is about what persons are metaphysically. Three options to talk about:

1. Persons are physical in that all mental states and bodily states are physical = materialism

2. Persons are entirely non-physical in that persons have non-physical minds, but not bodies = idealism/phenomenalism

3. Persons consist of both physical bodies and nonphysical minds = dualism

Let’s ignore the chart on 104 for now. We’ll return to it later. Both Phenomenalism and Dualists are committed to the premise that we have non-physical minds. Let’s examine this common belief. 3. Basics of Dualism

1. Persons’ bodies – including their brains – are physical; and

2. Persons’ minds are nonphysical (nonphysical mind = souls, though I will personally avoid this term sticking to the trend in the chapter to call minds nonphysical)

Dualistic interactionists, dualistic parallelists, and dualistic epiphenomenalists all embrace 1 and 2 above.

Dualism is attractive to Christians and any of the Abrahamic religions that believe in an afterlife.

Dualism is attractive to people in that it posits a distinct difference between how we stand above other animals.

· Humans have nonphysical minds

· Animals do not have nonphysical minds (animals don’t have souls).

Dualism is attractive since it grounds the metaphysical reason why we have a type of free-will that cannot be bound to the strict laws of a determined nature. We have souls.

If our minds are identical to our brains and the brain as being part of the causal order is being determined to always follow in sync with the laws of nature, then even the thoughts that initiate action would be determined and we would have no moral responsibility.

4. The Law of Identity Argument for Dualism

First, the law of identity: Given two apparently different things A and B, A and B are really just the same thing going under different names if and only if A and B share all characteristics.

1. Minds and mental states have characteristic C

2. Brains and brain states do not have characteristic C

3. Therefore, minds and mental states are not identical to brains and brain states.

Versions of the Law of Identity Argument

Put another way, we can introspect these differences between mental states and brain states.

Argument from Introspection

A: My mental image is orange and elephant-shaped.

B: No part of my brain is orange and elephant-shaped

C: Therefore, my mental image is not identical to any part of my brain.

D: Therefore, probably, my mental image exists in a non-physical mind.

Criticism: Although, we can talk about image-talk, our normal everyday speech might not reflect the complexity of the mind. Premise A could be false.

Descartes’s Introspective Argument:

i. I am a thinking thing and unextending thing

ii. All bodies (including my body) are nonthinking and extended things

iii. Therefore, I am not identical to a body of any kind, including my own body.

iv. Therefore, dualism is true.

Criticism: In this argument, the only evidence Descartes offers is his way of thinking about minds, but that does little to establish the truth of the overall argument. Descartes has presupposed the difference between mind and bodies before establishing this against the materialist. This difference is the very thing he wants to prove, yet he presupposes this difference.

5. Nonphysical minds as the best inference to explanation…

Descartes Again

Animals are only stimulus-response machines. Human beings have nonphysical minds that produce mentality. We are capable of a great range of behavior and we use language.

The Epistemological/Knowledge Argument

“I seem to see a cat” is known with greater certainty than “I see a cat.” The latter falls through if the former is not true.

My Reconstruction of the Epistemological Knowledge Argument

1. There is greater degree of mental reports than physical sensory knowledge.

2. If there is a greater degree of certainty of mental reports than physical sensory knowledge, then I have a nonphysical mind.

3. Therefore, I (and beings like me) have a nonphysical mind. (1, 2 MP)

Personal Identity Argument:

1. Suppose that human beings consist entirely of their bodies and have no nonphysical minds

2. If so, then as the matter in our bodies changes gradually, so do we.

Evidence for Premise 2: Biologists know that living organisms constantly renew themselves as new molecules go into their cells and replace the old molecules in their bodies.

3. If a persons are solely material, as the materialist maintains, then a person cannot literally be the same person after twenty years.

4. Yet, I am the same as I was and will be. 5. Therefore, to explain this continuity of personal identity (which materialism fails to do so), a nonphysical mind is posited as the reason why we remain the same.

Thought experiment: We beam you to Mars, yet we destroy you in the process and reconstitute you in a teleportation device to Mars. Is this really you? If the materialist is right, then it is someone very different. To put it another way, is the continuity of personal identity both necessary and sufficient to infer the existence of a nonphysical mind? Materialism would seem to be able to claim a less robust personal identity: The teleported you could be relatively the same but not be identically the same.

6. Three Types of Dualism: Interactionism, Parallelism, and Epiphenomenalism

Dualistic Interactionism is the thesis that my nonphysical mind interacts with my physical body.

Doesn’t everyday experience confirm this? I scratch my head, and my scratching causes me to feel the internal thought sensation of itching my head.

Putting my hand near the fire seems to cause the sensation to be felt in my mind.

Both mental and physical events correspond in time. – What causes them to correspond in time? Maybe their materiality?

Biggest Problem: Problem of Interaction: By definition the dualistic interactionists accept that nonphysical minds exist. How does a nonphysical mind interact with a physical body?

“There seems to be no way for the physical brain to latch on to a thing that is not extended in space” (115).

Best defense for the interactionist is not to explain interaction, but attack the fact that all causation is strange.

Doorbell causation has steps

Immediately related events don’t have steps to explain. That’s strange.

Problem of Conservation of Mass

Causal interaction often has energy transfer between two things. Where’s the transfer of energy between a nonphysical thing and a physical thing?

Dualistic Parallelism is the thesis that mental events and brain events only appear to affect each other; instead, nonphysical minds and physical bodies parallel each other.

Varieties: 1. Occasionalism: God directly causes in my mind a sensation of pain as an illusion that it really happens.

2. Parallelism: God establishes a pre-established harmony between mind events and body events so that they perfectly coincide.

Clock analogy:

Clock chimes at midnight and an observer sees the clock chime. It might look to someone that the clock hands moving caused the chime, but really it’s that these events coincide together.

Nonphysical minds Event 1 (sensation of pain)

Physical Bodies Event 2 (impaled my finger with a pencil)

Advantage: It avoids the problem of interaction.

Yet, by invoking God, they have traded one difficulty for another, and maybe that difficulty is too much.

Argument Against Parallelism; Argument from Self-Refutation

1. God is either physical or nonphysical.

2. If God is physical to make it run parallel to the physical, then the parallelists should say that God cannot affect the nonphysical to make it run parallel to the physical. 3. If God is nonphysical to make it run parallel to the nonphysical, then the parallelists should say that God cannot affect the physical to make it run parallel to the nonphysical.

4. On the parallelists own principles, God cannot bring about the desired parallel sequence.

Dualistic Epiphenomenalism is the thesis that our brains affect our minds, but our minds do not affect our brains.

“Mental states are like the sound a babbling brook makes as it flows downstream or the noise from the whistle on a locomotive. They are caused by the operation of the physical thing, but they do not affect its operation.” (118).

No explanation about how the physical world affects the nonphysical (an inverted interactionist problem)

If one is claiming that brain events cause nonphysical mind events, then why not go all the way and embrace interactionism and say that mental events can cause brain events?

Materialism

7. The Basics of Materialism

Materialism holds

(1) The human person is entirely physical

(2) Persons are complexes of nature, and as such they exist both in space and in time.

(3) While many – if not most contemporary philosophers – are materialists, the debate about the mind/body problem has been roughly which version of materialism is the best in the philosophical literature.

(4) Recent explorations of our embodied and affective structures linked with the brain have pushed neuroscience to acknowledge the bias of embrainedness that we see here in Double.

As such, we will study the various aspects of materialism this week.

1. Eliminative materialists hold that minds and mental states do not exist. Mental states such as beliefs, desires, and sensations must exist in a completely different sense than how our everyday-talk about beliefs, desires, and sensations cannot adequately represent what is going on.

Ex. When we say that thoughts are “going on in the head” or that “I feel all warm and fuzzy inside after watching a Disney movie.” The sense of “inside” or “in the head” sets up really bad metaphors that people take way too seriously.

2. Identity materialists (also the same as non-eliminative materialists) hold that mental states do exist and are identical to physical events in our central nervous systems.

3. Materialists can be determinists who believe that all human choices are causally necessitated by the laws of nature *(soft determinism); materialists can believe in free-will; some materialists are libertarians who believe that persons make undetermined free choices.

4. Materialists can be theists- Materialists can accept an afterlife if and only if we have an afterlife in a future not-yet resurrected body.

5. Materialism is attractive for many reasons:

A. Given there is no evidence for nonphysical minds (if materialists are right), then we should not posit dualism. Instead, we should be materialists.

B. Dualists mistake awareness of mentality for the existence of a separate kind of stuff; materialism can avoid these mistakes

C. There is no problem of interaction, no violation of the principle of conservation of mass-energy

D. Many materialists like to see human beings as continuous with animals and not discretely different than them.

Slippery Slope Arguments for Materialism

1. If the relation between A1 is continuously X, then any other iteration of A1 to A2 etc… continuously has property X.

2. The ontogenesis of human beings is physical early on and despite dualists believing/positing a nonphysical mind, it makes better sense to see the development of human beings as continually identifying their brains with their minds.

3. Therefore, the inference to best explanation is that the mind is continually identified with the brain.

A. If the relation between A1 is continuously X, then any other iteration of A1 to A2 etc… continuously has property X.

B. The phylogenesis of human beings is physical early on and despite dualists believing/positing a nonphysical mind, it makes better sense to see the development of human beings as continually identifying their minds with their progressively more complicated nervous system than other lower less-complicated organisms

C. Therefore, the inference to best explanation is that the mind is continually identified with the brain.

8. Types of Eliminative Materialism

A. Behaviorism – mental states, such as desires and believing are simply dispositions to act a certain way.

1. Skinner said that psychology can be scientific since we study the stimuli that gives rise to dispositions (assumed a methodological interpretation of this theory to apply to people’s behavior)

2. Gilbert Ryle used a similar argument against the Cartesian/dualistic interactionist

Ryle’s Argument

A. Either there are nonphysical minds, which entails all the difficulties of Cartesian interactionism or there are no minds, in which case behaviorism is true

B. There are no nonphysical minds (Cartesian interactionism is false)

C. Therefore, there are no minds (Behaviorism is true)

B. Neurophilic Eliminative Materialism

1. Neurophile means lover of the brain.

2. Rather than talk about beliefs, desires and sensations as mental events, we should adopt the talk of neuroscience to explain what is going on when events are occurring in the brain.

A. Example: “Fred feels pain” should be replaced with “Fred’s C-Fibers are firing.”

B. As brain science began to explain that seizures are caused by electrical disturbances in the brain, we no longer explain a seizure as being possessed by a demon. “Demon theory” loses sway to brain science. This example should prove that we should be this way with all mental events.

Two objections to Eliminative Materialism: Is this way of viewing the mind too drastic? Eliminative materialists of both varieties cannot make sense of the intuition that we experience mental events.

Even the experience of being convinced by an eliminative materialist that they experience mentality while being so convinced. We’d see the speakers. We’d hear them, and then maybe internally contemplate what their talk meant.

Secondly, insofar as behaviorism is concerned, behaviorists try to explain human minds without any intervening variables. As Jerry Fodor has explained, then, we cannot explain inanimate objects without assuming their intervening variables.

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