A summary of the course Philosophy of the Mind. The summary consists of the lectures given by professor Dooremalen and Blancke and the two books "Consciousness" by Blackmore and Troscianko and "8 Questions" by Hans Dooremalen, all the keywords and important persons are marked.
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Introduction
Philosophy = conceptual analysis; conceptual clarification; the science of validity; changing
perspective; search for the truth. We want to know what we mean by our concepts, we want them to
be valid, and to find this out we sometimes need to change perspectives, in order to clarify them.
Not fact-free, not skepticism or relativism.
Philosophy is critical thinking. As an academic you learn how to think critically.
Chapter 1 What is the conscious mind?
Mental states like experiences, thoughts and emotions together form the conscious mind. All
experiences have qualitative aspects, called qualia or the what-is-it-likeness. Three types of mental
states:
Phenomenal experiences – they are characterized by their qualitative feel (what-is-it-
likeness/qualia).
Cognitive state – they are characterized by that they possess intentionality (= property of
being about something, aboutness).
o In many philosophical text, the archetype of a mental state with intentionality is the
propositional attitude. Proposition is the meaning of a sentence, but you may have
different attitudes towards a proposition, like knowing, believing, hoping or wanting.
Emotion – possesses both what-it-is-likeness/qualia and aboutness.
The relation between conscious and unconscious mind is that the states of the unconscious mind can
become conscious give the right circumstances.
Mind-body problem = how the conscious mind fits into the physical world. Each mental state has its
own mind-body problem:
How do phenomenal experiences, cognitive states or emotions fit into the physical world?
But we have two properties: qualia and intentionality, so actually two problems:
How do qualia or how does intentionality fit into the physical world?
Cognition = refers to the part of the mental states that have aboutness.
Consciousness = refers to the phenomenal states of the mind. Cognitive states can also be conscious
states, but they can become conscious.
Metaphysics = the philosophical discipline that tells us for instance how it is possible that a world
exists in the first place, it goes beyond physics. It does not consider what science has discovered
about the world.
But we need science and philosophy to answer the questions about the conscious mind. Philosophy
often brings data together from different scientific fields. Taking science seriously results in no wrong
theories, but could result in data counter to our intuitions.
Chapter 2 Can the mind function separately from the brain?
Many people accept the idea that the mind can exist and function separately from the physical world
– the separability thesis.
Michel de Montaigne, a skeptic, nothing he could be sure of: any claim was open for doubt. But he
did not conclude that he did not know anything for certain. He used Que Sais-je? (what do I know?).
René Descartes desired true knowledge, using the method of the skeptics: he doubted everything he
could doubt, even his senses. A demon was so powerful that it deceived Descartes.
Doubting is thinking, if you think, you exist. “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). A new method
to make the demon disappear: those claims that he perceives clearly and distinctly have to be true.
,Descartes says that when he examines the contents of his mind, he sees that he has ideas.
God is the most perfect being, but this idea is not his own. So, it comes from god, so god
exists. God will not deceive Descartes, because deception is imperfection. That’s why
Descartes could conclude that he is both a mind and a body.
A thinking thing and a physical thing are both substances (= which can exist on its own). These are
two independent substances, they do not need each other to exist.
Essential property of thinking substance/res cogitans: it thinks (not three-dimensional).
Essential property of physical substance/res extensa: it is three-dimensional (it has a place in
space).
o There can only be one physical object at a certain place. Bodies move because of
this, they bump and push each other.
Animals are machines: they only have the physical substance. The human body is a machine but
closely related to the human mind.
Princess Elizabeth and Descartes were friends, she was the only one who understood his work and
that’s why she pointed out its problems: the interaction problem (how do the body spirits interact
with the soul) – the pineal gland makes the interaction possible.
Descartes: soul does not move body to bump into other body. Heaviness moves a body towards the
center of the earth and the soul does the same. Elizabeth not satisfied and in the end Descartes
agrees with that it is a mystery.
Descartes suggests that god is responsible for interaction of mind and body, two ways of
interpretations, both are not insightful:
Occasionalism = the only cause of any event in the world is god. Causal interaction between
soul and body is impossible, but there is an interaction. God is the cause between body and
mind.
Parallelism = the will and the movement both depend on god who has made them in such a
way that they run parallel to each other.
Dualists always end up with a question in how the interaction works, but they argue they have some
good reasons to prove that substance dualism is true. Dualism does not take science seriously and
therefore we should discard substance dualism.
Parapsychologists = they investigate claims about paranormal phenomena and they accept the
separability thesis.
Clairvoyance = ability of some people to gain information about a person, event or object in a
way that does not use normal senses, extrasensory perception. Not proven.
Electronic voice phenomena = you can tune a radio or television to a channel between two
stations and record the white noise, you can discover messages in this. Later Instrumental
Transcommunication, with pictures. Not proven.
o Pareidolia = tendency to interpret meaningless sounds as meaningful and repetition
in different interpretations.
o Theory ladenness of perception = what we perceive is influenced by a theory that
tells us what to perceive.
Chapter 3 Is there only mind?
Substance monism = the view that there is only one substance, the interaction problem disappears.
There are different version of monism:
Materialism/physicalism = everything in the world is physical, everything is material or made
out of matter. Also, the conscious mind and takes the mind and science seriously.
Idealism = everything in the world is mental, a secondary property (does not take science
seriously).
, Empiricists claim that we can only gain knowledge about the world via sensory experience. According
to John Locke (an empiricist) we perceive color, tastes, smells and warmth, but without perceivers
they do not exist. Locke made distinction between two properties:
Primary properties = a property that does not depend on our perception, things really have
these.
Secondary properties = a property that depends on our perception, we ascribe them.
However, there is a problem. A quality is a property and a property is always a property of
something. But we only perceive the properties, not the thing that has all those properties. So, Locke
maintained that there was a substance underlying the primary properties, but as an empiricist he
could not have the knowledge of this substance.
George Berkeley, an empiricist, we get our ideas via the senses or via perceptions of the workings of
our mental lives. His ideas stem from commons sense. He argues esse est percepi (to be is to be
perceived).
If primary properties exist, there must be something that has those properties. That is the substance.
There is no physical substance and there are only secondary properties, nothing cannot be perceived
– idealism/immaterialism. But he made an error in his reasoning: e.g. small or big depends on the
observer, but the height does not, so his conclusion is invalid.
Sometimes things are not perceived by us, but they do not disappear. Berkeley’s solution to this is
that there must be a spirit (god) in whose mind all these sensible things exist. He did not take science
seriously but only the mind.
Chapter 4 Is there only behavior?
Behaviorism = psychology is about describing, predicting and controlling behavior, no mind – founder
John Watson. All behavior is in essence reflex-like in nature (does not take the mind seriously). Part
of materialism.
Psychological/methodological behaviorism = science should use an objective method so that all
observations could be verified independently. They study the correlation between stimulus and
behavior. They use experiments and use predictions.
It was a response to introspectionism, has no objective verification + impossible to study
animals (does not take science seriously).
Philosophical/analytic/linguistic behaviorism:
Gilbert Ryle argued against dualism and said it is better to study behavior and no longer think about
an immaterial mind. The mind is nothing more than a set of disposition to behave and if you think
that it is more, then you are making a category mistake.
Category mistake – if one thinks that the category ‘mind’ is different from the category that
our set of dispositions belong to. You use two categories for one, you make a pseudo-
problem.
o The solution to the mind-body problem is to disqualify the problem as a pseudo-
problem because it contains a category mistake.
Disposition = a behavioral pattern that one displays under certain circumstances.
According to the Vienna Circle, empiricists, metaphysics did not mean anything at all and they
wanted to get rid of it. They became the Logical Positivists, trying to get rid of pseudo-science and
meaningless statements. For psychology to be meaningful/scientific is should be objective.
A claim of behaviorism is that any sentence containing a reference to a subjective mental term can
be paraphrased without loss of meaning – with result being a long sentence with only observable
behavioral disposition.
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