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Summary Exam 2 Fundamentals of Psychology UvA Year 2
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Summary of Fundamentals of Psychology Exam 2
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W1.1CHAPTER 7 (BRYSBAERT & RASTLE) – THE MIND-BRAIN PROBLEM, FREE
WILL AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Self: The feeling of being an individual with private experiences, feelings and beliefs, who
interacts in a coherent and purposeful way with the environment
Mind-brain problem: Issue of how the mind is
related to the brain
1. Dualism
2. Materialism
3. Functionalism
DUALISM
Dualism: The mind is immaterial and
completely independent of the body
- Central to religions → Demonologist
view of psychopathology: The
conviction that mental disorders are due to possession by bad spirits
- Central in the philosophies of Plato and Descartes:
- Plato: The human soul is made of the leftovers of the soul of the cosmos and
travels between the cosmos and the human bodies it temporarily inhabited
- Descartes: Humans are composed of a divine soul in a sophisticated body (‘ghost
in a machine’) → Cartesian dualism
In the second half of the 19th century, a growing number of scientists began to question the
dualistic view:
- Discomfort with the emphasis religions placed on the immortality of the soul
- Discomfort with the connection of the soul to a divine entity
- Many mental functions seem to happen outside consciousness
- Locke: Wondered what happens to the mind when humans are asleep; if
consciousness was the defining feature of human existence (as claimed by
Descartes), did this imply that human existence was interrupted during sleep?
- Leibniz: Compared the universe to a living organism → Monad: Metaphysical
concept representing a simple, indivisible and immaterial substance
1. Simple monads: Form the bodies of all matter (organic and inorganic) –
Motivated by a tendency to keep in line with the pre-established harmony
of the universe
2. Sentient monads: Present in all living organisms – Have capacities for
feeling pleasure, pain, and for voluntary attention, but not for reasoning
3. Rational monads: Correspond to the conscious minds of humans –
Possesses the capacity of apperception (= the integration of new
information or experiences with existing knowledge and mental structures)
– Not entirely based on empirical evidence, but also on innate truths
4. Supreme monad: Controls and motivates all other monads – The
omniscient and omnipotent God of Christian religion
, ↓
Each monad is considered ‘windowless’ (i.e. the monads do not have a
direct connection to other monads) → According to Leibniz, human
consciousness is not aware of the activity of the simple and sentient
monads, but these monads still motivate human behaviour →
Unconsciousness
- Kant: Thought of unconsciousness as dark representations (= dunkele
Vorstellungen)
- Interaction problem: Posits that, given that the mind and the body are distinct entities,
it is unclear how the mind could communicate with the body
- Dualism needed the existence of an immaterial, mysterious, animistic ‘soul’ – Relics
Growing belief that from the pre-scientific world
things relied on - Phlogiston: Substance that was believed to make materials flammable before
chemical and the chemical processes of combustion were understood
biological processes - Vital force: Animistic substance thought to be present in living matter before
which could be the chemical and biological differences between living and non-living matter
manipulated were understood
- Causal closure problem: Brings up the question of how our mental experiences, which
seem non-physical, can influence or cause physical actions (such as like moving our
hand) in a world that is thought to be entirely governed by physical causes
- Brain damage problem: Raises the question of why a nonmaterial entity would react to
brain damage
In practice, most defended some kind of implicit dualistic view:
- The distinction between mind and body was attractive to early psychologists because
it provided them with their own study area that could not be invaded and taken over by
brain scientists
- Dualism is intuitive as it puts consciousness at the centre of a person and it gives us
the feeling of being in control of our actions
- Consciousness: The private, first-person experiences an individual lives
through – Contains all the mental states a person is aware of – Part of the mind
that can be examined with introspection
- Free will: When individuals can choose their course of action
- Walter: Three conditions must be met before an action can be ascribed
to free will:
1. The agent must have been able to do otherwise
2. The act must originate in the agent, not in some external force
3. The act must be the outcome of rational deliberation
Leibniz’s and Kant’s ideas were evidence for the Romanticist idea that rational thinking was
but the tip of human potential and that the most interesting part of the mind was active below
the level of consciousness
- Goethe: Liked to be described as a scientist working on the basis of ‘unconscious
naivety’ (= unbewusste Naivität)
- Schopenhauer, Nietzsche & Kant: Associated the unconscious part of the mind with
sexual and destructive desires
,The study of unconscious processing gained momentum from the 19th century discovery that
reflexes and bodily functions were controlled by the spinal cord and subcortical structures, not
by the cerebral hemispheres
MATERIALISM
Materialism: The mind is nothing but a by-product of the biological processes taking place in
a particular brain – Focuses on the physical basis of the mind, specifically the brain
1. Eliminative materialism/complete reductionism: Suggests that ‘common-sense’ mental
concepts should be eliminated from our understanding of the mind
- Churchland: Placing consciousness as the centre of the human mind and the
controller of human actions is a dangerous illusion
- Milgram: Participants gave much higher shock intensities than they had
thought themselves capable of when forced to administer ever-increasing
shock intensities
- Olson: Showed how magicians give people the feeling of free choice when
asked to ‘pick a card’, whereas in reality the choice is heavily constrained by
the magician’s handling of the cards
- Dawkins: Evolutionary theory is misunderstood; whereas everyone assumed
natural selection was about the survival of individuals and species, the
selection actually concerns the survival of DNA molecules – Humans are the
slaves of their genes
2. Reductive materialism: Posits that mental states have a one-to-one correspondence to
neurobiological processes
- Emphasises the idea that general neurobiological processes can fully account
for mental states
- Aims to reduce mental phenomena to physical properties – Once the exact
physical nature of a mental state is identified, it should be the same across
different realisations
3. Non-reductive materialism: Acknowledges the material basis of mental states but
argues that mental phenomena cannot be completely reduced to or eliminated by
physical processes
- Argues that there may be specific features or properties of mental states that
are not fully accounted for by general processes alone
- Acknowledges the importance of multiple realisability – Mental states are
ultimately grounded in physical processes, but rejects the idea that mental
phenomena can be straightforwardly reduced to or identified with physical
properties
- Allows for flexibility in the physical substrates
Problems for materialism:
- Identity problem: The difficulty in explaining how two events can be experienced as
the same despite the fact that their realisations in the brain differs – The explanatory
gap between our understanding of physical processes in the brain and the subjective
experience of consciousness
- Example: When two individuals both look at the same red apple, but one
person’s brain has a slightly different pattern of neural activity associated with
the perception of red, the identity problem arises when we consider that both
subjectively experience the colour red as the same, even though the neural
realisations in their brains differ
, - Example: When a person tries to retrieve a childhood memory, the specific
patterns of neural activation associated with this memory vary each time the
person tries to recall it due to the complexity and variability of neural
connections, but the person can subjectively experience the same memory as
identical across multiple instances of recall, even though the neural realisations
in the brain may vary each time
- Nobody has a convincing idea of how exactly the human mind could be a by-product
of the biological processes in the brain – Attempts to simulate the human mind as a
by-product of biological processes were not successful
FUNCTIONALISM
The Boolean approach could be applied to computers and was the fastest way to make
machines intelligent – Information could transcend the medium upon which it was realised
(Machine) functionalism: The mind is realised in the brain, but the information can be copied
to another machine with the same structure
- Examines the functions of information, rather than the precise ways in which
information is realised
- Multiple realisability: Allows for the possibility that the same mental state or function
can be realised in different physical systems, whether biological or artificial, as long as
they perform the same information-processing functions → The idea that information
can transcend its medium provides a way to approach the identity problem
Meme: Information unit proposed by Dawkins that reproduces itself according to the
principles of the evolutionary theory (i.e. variation, selection and replication) – An idea,
behaviour or cultural practice that spreads within a culture from one individual to another
through imitation – Based on the idea that that humans are not only ‘programmed’ to spread
genes, but also to spread information
Marr’s levels of analysis: A three-level framework for understanding information processing
in computational systems (Marr)
1. Computational level: Concerned with the ‘what’ question, addressing what the system
does and what problems it solves (E.g.: a GPS system is designed to provide optimal
routes for users to reach their destination based on current traffic conditions)
2. Algorithmic level: Concerned with the ‘how’ question, aiming to specify the processes
or algorithms that enable the system to perform the computations identified at the
computational level (E.g.: the algorithms for real-time traffic monitoring, route
planning, and recalculating directions when a user deviates from the original route)
3. Implementation level: Concerned with the ‘realisation’ question, addressing how the
algorithms proposed at the algorithmic level can be physically implemented in a
specific hardware or biological substrate (E.g.: the design of the software, the
processing power and memory requirements, and the integration of the GPS system
with sensors for accurate positioning)
Criticisms on functionalism:
- Cognitive neuroscience often reveals specific neural structures and processes
associated with particular mental functions (E.g.: certain brain regions may be
consistently active during specific cognitive tasks) – Challenges functionalism by
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