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Philosophy of mind is the philosophical study of the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, and consciousness, and of the nature of their relationship with the physical body: the so-called mind–body problem.• Reductivists assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by neuroscientific accounts of brain processes and states.•, •, • Non-reductionists argue that though the brain is all there is, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable and cannot be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science.•, Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these issues, but they are far from having been resolved, and modern philosophers of mind continue to ask, "How can the subjective qualities and the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties be explained in naturalistic terms?"•, • The mind&body problem The mind–body problem is essentially the problem of explaining the relationship between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli which arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world and these stimuli cause changes in the states of our brain, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza will tend to cause that person to move their body in a certain manner in a certain direction in an effort to obtain what they want. But how is it possible that conscious experiences can arise out of an inert lump of gray matter endowed with electrochemical properties? How does someone's desire cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract in exactly the right manner? These are some of the essential puzzles that have confronted philosophers of mind at least from the time of René Descartes. Dualist solutions to the mind&body problem Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical. One of the earliest known formulations of mind-body dualism existed in the eastern sankhya school of Hindu philosophy (c. 650 BCE) which divided the world into purusha (mind/spirit) and prakrti (material substance). In the Western philosophical tradition, we first encounter similar ideas with the writings of Plato and Aristotle, who maintained, for different reasons, that man's "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, his physical body., However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-physical substance. Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. Hence, he was the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it still exists today. Arguments for dualism The main argument in favour of dualism is simply that it appeals to the common-sense intuition of the vast majority of non-philosophically-trained people. If asked what the mind is, the average person will usually respond by identifying it with their self, their personality, their soul, or some other such entity, and they will almost certainly deny that the mind simply is the brain or vice-versa, finding the idea that there is just one ontological entity at play to be too mechanistic or simply unintelligible. The majority of modern philosophers of mind reject dualism, suggesting that these intuitions, like many others, are probably misleading. We should use our critical faculties, as well as empirical evidence from the sciences, to examine these assumptions and determine if there is any real basis to them. Another very important, more modern, argument in favor of dualism is the idea that the mental and the physical seem to have quite different and perhaps irreconcilable properties.Jackson, F. (1982) “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” Reprinted in Chalmers, David ed. 2002. Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford University Press.Mental events have a certain subjective quality to them, whereas physical events obviously do not. For example, what does a burned finger feel like? What does blue sky look like? What does nice music sound like? Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events qualia (or raw feels). There is something that it is like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on; there are qualia involved in these mental events. And the claim is that qualia seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical. Interaction dualism
Other forms of dualism
Monist solutions to the mind&body problem
Behaviorism Behaviorism dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, especially the first half. In psychology, behaviorism developed as a reaction to the inadequacies of introspectionism. Introspective reports on one's own interior mental life are not subject to careful examination for accuracy and are not generalizable. Without generalizability and the possibility of third-person examination, the behaviorists argued, science is simply not possible. The way out for psychology was to eliminate the idea of an interior mental life (and hence an ontologically independent mind) altogether and focus instead on the description of observable behavior. Parallel to these developments in psychology, a philosophical behaviorism (sometimes called logical behaviorism) was developed. This is characterized by a strong verificationism, which generally considers unverifiable statements about interior mental life senseless. But what are mental states if they are not interior states on which one can make introspective reports? The answer of the behaviorist is that mental states do not exist but are actually just descriptions of behavior and/or dispositions to behave made by external third parties in order to explain and predict others' behavior. Philosophical behaviorism is considered by most modern philosophers of mind to be outdated. Apart from other problems, behaviorism implausibly maintains, for example, that someone is talking about behavior if she reports that she has a wracking headache. Identity theory
Functionalism Functionalism was formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor as a reaction to the inadequacies of the identity theory. Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an empirical computational theory of the mind.Block, Ned. "What is functionalism" in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, 2 vols. Vol 1. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1980). At about the same time or slightly after, D.M. Armstrong and David Kellogg Lewis formulated a version of functionalism which analyzed the mental concepts of folk psychology in terms of functional roles. Armstrong, D., 1968, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, Routledge. Finally, Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Gilbert Harman. What all these different varieties of functionalism share in common is the thesis that mental states are essentially characterized by their causal relations with other mental states and with sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. That is, functionalism quantifies over, or abstracts away from, the details of the physical implementation of a mental state by characterizing it in terms of non-mental functional properties. For example, a kidney is characterized scientifically by its functional role in filtering blood and maintaining certain chemical balances. From this point of view, it does not really matter whether the kidney be made up of organic tissue, plastic nanotubes or silicon chips: it is the role that it plays and its relations to other organs that define it as a kidney. Nonreductive physicalism Many philosophers hold firmly to two essential convictions with regard to mind–body relations: 1. Physicalism is true and mental states must be physical states. 2. All reductionist proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states cannot be reduced to behavior, brain states or functional states. Hence, the question arises whether there can still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism is an attempt to formulate such a physicalism. The idea is often formulated in terms of the thesis of supervenience: mental states supervene on physical states, but are not reducible to them. "Supervenience" therefore describes a functional dependence: there can be no change in the mental without some change in the physical.Stanton, W.L. (1983) "Supervenience and Psychological Law in Anomalous Monism", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 72-9 Eliminative materialism If one is a materialist but believes that all reductive efforts have failed and that a non-reductive materialism is incoherent, then one can adopt a final, more radical position: eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialists maintain that mental states are fictitious entities introduced by everyday "folk psychology". Should "folk psychology", which eliminativists view as a quasi-scientific theory, be proven wrong in the course of scientific development, then we must also abolish all of the entities postulated by it. Eliminativists such as Patricia and Paul Churchland often invoke the fate of other, erroneous popular theories and ontologies which have arisen in the course of history., For example, the belief in witchcraft as a cause of people's problems turned out to be wrong and the consequence is that most people no longer believe in the existence of witches. Witchcraft is not explained in terms of some other phenomenon, but rather eliminated from the discourse. Linguistic criticism of the mind&body problem Each attempt to answer the mind–body problem encounters substantial problems. Some philosophers argue that this is because there is an underlying conceptual confusion. Such philosophers reject the mind–body problem as an illusory problem. Such a position is represented in analytic philosophy these days, for the most part, by the followers of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinian tradition of linguistic criticism. The exponents of this position explain that it is an error to ask how mental and biological states fit together. Rather it should simply be accepted that humans can be described in different ways - for instance, in a mental and in a biological vocabulary. Illusory problems arise if one tries to describe the one in terms of the other's vocabulary or if the mental vocabulary is used in the wrong contexts. This is the case for instance, if one searches for mental states of the brain. The brain is simply the wrong context for the use of mental vocabulary - the search for mental states of the brain is therefore a category error or a pure conceptual confusion. Today, such a position is often adopted by interpreters of Wittgenstein such as Peter Hacker. However, Hilary Putnam, the inventor of functionalism, has also adopted the position that the mind–body problem is an illusory problem which should be dissolved according to the manner of Wittgenstein. Naturalism and its problems The thesis of physicalism is that the mind is part of the material (or physical) world. Such a position faces the fundamental problem that the mind has certain properties that no material thing possesses. Physicalism must therefore explain how it is possible that these properties can emerge from a material thing nevertheless. The project of providing such an explanation is often referred to as the "naturalization of the mental." What are the crucial problems that this project must attempt to resolve? The most well-known are probably the following two: Qualia Many mental states have the property of being experienced subjectively in different ways by different individuals. For example, it is obviously characteristic of the mental state of pain that it hurts. Moreover, your sensation of pain may not be identical with mine, since we have no way of measuring how much something hurts or describing exactly how it feels to hurt. Where does such an experience (quale) come from? Nothing indicates that a neural or functional state can be accompanied by such a pain experience. Often the point is formulated as follows: the existence of cerebral events, in and of themselves, cannot explain why they are accompanied by these corresponding qualitative experiences. Why do many cerebral processes occur with an accompanying experiential aspect in consciousness? It seems impossible to explain. Yet it also seems to many that science will eventually have to explain such experiences. This follows from the logic of reductive explanations. If I try to explain a phenomenon reductively (e.g., water), I also have to explain why the phenomenon has all of the properties that it has (e.g., fluidity, transparency).In the case of mental states, this means that there needs to be an explanation of why they have the property of being experienced in a certain way. Intentionality Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in relation with something in the external world. This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen. It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was an historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus. Philosophy of mind and science Humans are corporeal beings and, as such, they are subject to examination and description by the natural sciences. Since mental processes are not independent of bodily processes, the descriptions that the natural sciences furnish of human beings play an important role in the philosophy of mind. There are many scientific disciplines that study processes related to the mental. The list of such sciences includes: biology, computer science, cognitive science, cybernetics, linguistics, medicine, pharmacology, psychology, etc.Pinker, S. (1997) How the Mind Works. tr. It: Come Funziona la Mente. Milan:Mondadori, 2000. ISBN 88-04-49908-7 Neurobiology
Computer science Computer science concerns itself with the automatic processing of information (or at least with physical systems of symbols to which information is assigned) by means of such things as computers.• The question about the possible sensitivity (qualia) of computers or robots still remains open. Some computer scientists believe that the specialty of AI can still make new contributions to the resolution of the "mind body problem". They suggest that based on the reciprocal influences between software and hardware that takes place in all computers, it is possible that someday theories can be discovered that help us to understand the reciprocal influences between the human mind and the brain (wetware).• Psychology Psychology is the science that investigates mental states directly. It uses generally empirical methods to investigate concrete mental states like joy, fear or obsessions. Psychology investigates the laws that bind these mental states to each other or with inputs and outputs to the human organism.• This law describes a relation between visual input and mental perceptual states. However, it does not suggest anything about the nature of perceptual states. The laws discovered by psychology are compatible with all the answers to the mind–body problem already described. Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition Most of the discussion in this article has focused on the predominant school (or style) of philosophy in modern Western culture, usually called analytic philosophy (sometimes also inaccurately described as Anglo-American philosophy). Other schools of thought exist, however, which are sometimes (also misleadingly) subsumed under the broad label of continental philosophy. In any case, the various schools that fall under this label (phenomenology, existentialism, etc.) tend to differ from the analytic school in that they focus less on language and logical analysis and more on directly understanding human existence and experience. With reference specifically to the discussion of the mind, this tends to translate into attempts to grasp the concepts of thought and perceptual experience in some direct sense that does not involve the analysis of linguistic forms. In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel discusses three distinct types of mind: the subjective mind, the mind of an individual; the objective mind, the mind of society and of the State; and the Absolute mind, a unity of all concepts. See also Hegel's Philosophy of Mind from his Encyclopedia., translated by A.V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) ISBN 0-19-824597-1 . In modern times, the two main schools that have developed in response or opposition to this Hegelian tradition are Phenomenology and Existentialism. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, focuses on the contents of the human mind (see noema) and how phenomenological processes shape our experiences. trans.: Giovanni Piana. Milan: EST. ISBN 88-428-0949-7 Existentialism, a school of thought led by Jean-Paul Sartre, focuses on the content of experiences and how the mind deals with such experiences. Flynn, Thomas, "Jean-Paul Sartre", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/entries/sartre/ An important, though not very well known, example of a philosopher of mind and cognitive scientist who tries to synthesize ideas from both traditions is Ron McClamrock. Borrowing from Herbert Simon and also influenced by the ideas of existential phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, McClamrock suggests that man's condition of being-in-the-world ("Dasein", "In-der-welt-sein") makes it impossible for him to understand himself by abstracting away from it and examining it as if it were a detached experimental object of which he himself is not an integral part. Consequences of philosophy of mind There are countless subjects that are affected by the ideas developed in the philosophy of mind. Clear examples of this are the nature of death and its definitive character, the nature of emotion, of perception and of memory. Questions about what a person is and what his or her identity consists of also have much to do with the philosophy of mind. There are two subjects that, in connection with the philosophy of the mind, have aroused special attention: free will and the self. Free will
The self The philosophy of mind also has important consequences for the concept of self. If by "self" or "I" one refers to an essential, immutable nucleus of the person, most modern philosophers of mind will affirm that no such thing exists.• For example, Thomas Metzinger and Susan Blackmore both practice meditation, claiming that this gives us reliable conscious experience of selflessness.• See also Further reading | |||||||||||||||||||
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