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Summary 2.3 Problem 7
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Problem 2 - Thorne, Hergenhahn, Bem&Jong, 2 pdfsPart a) Is there a mind? Does it exist?
Part b) What’s the relationship between body and mind?
Part c) What are materialistic views? Can a mindless body (robot) experience mental states?
RYLE: DESCARTES’ MYTH
- Every human is both a body and a mind, after the death of the body the mind continues to
exist and function
- Human bodies are in space and are subject to mechanical laws, they can be inspected by
external observers (public)
- Minds are not in space and their operations are not subject to mechanical laws, the workings
of the mind are not witnessable by other observes (private)
- The physical world, including body are external - but the workings of mind are internal (this is a
metaphor because mind can’t be internal since it is not in space)
- How a person’s mind and body influence each other is a mystery, it can’t be inspected by
introspection or lab experiments
- Material objects have a common field ‘space’ but there is no causal connection between what
happens in one mind and another
- Only through the medium of physical world one person can make a difference to another
person’s mind
- People are blind and deaf of the workings of one another’s minds
- Inner perception or introspection: looking at what’s passing on your mind
- This self-observation is not affected by illusion, confusion or doubt
- A person has no access to inner life of another person, the best is to make inferences from
observed behavior to states of mind
- We have no good reason to believe other minds exist, because we can’t discover them
- People speak of the official doctrine as “the dogma of the ghost in the machine”
- Criticism to the doctrine:
o There is a category mistake (Descartes implied minds belong to the same category as
bodies- wrong)
o E.g. A person visiting Oxford sees the colleges, libraries, fields, museums, departments
and offices and then asks “where is the university?” the university is not another
institution but just the way all of that is recognized
o As the human body is a complex organized unit, the human mind must also be another
complex organized unit, a field of cause and effect
o The human body is an engine, but not an ordinary one because it is governed by
another engine inside it – a special engine that is invisible, inaudible, has not weight or
size
o Unlike what Descartes said minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they
are themselves just ghostly machines
o Since there are laws explaining the effects of movements in space, there must be other
laws explaining the effects of non-spatial workings of minds
o But these laws/processes are not the same – not in the same category – so it doesn’t
make any sense to conjoin or disjoin the two
o Minds exist and bodies exist, but these expressions of existing are two different species
of existence
, o Theorists correctly assume that any sane man can recognize differences between say
rational and non-rational utterance, However:
o According to the theory it is impossible for a man to claim sanity or consistency even
for himself because he can’t compare his own performances with others
o With the exception of himself he could never tell the difference between a robot and a
man
Linguistic behaviorism: by Ryle (Bem & Jong)
- Mental concepts refer to behavior and behavioral dispositions
- A disposition is the tendency to behave in a certain way under certain circumstances
- E.g. referring to someone as intelligent means that she will behave in certain ways like getting
a high score in math
- The concept of intelligence we use in daily life doesn’t refer to an inner mechanism but serves
to describe and predict behavior
- Criticism: It can’t go beyond what is implicit in common-sense knowledge
CHAPTER 8 – CONSCIOUSNESS BY WILSON
- Our behavior and cognitive processing are accompanied by experience
o Qualia (singular: quale): the name used to describe the experiences that make our
consciousness, like feeling pain or seeing redness or tasting strawberries
- Conscious experience is subjective and private
- We know that this experience is linked to our brain but why are our brains -which are material-
able to experience things?
- Consciousness: what it is like to be – places emphasis on experiential nature of consciousness
- The mind and consciousness are closely linked but there are aspects of mind that are not
conscious so mind is a too broad for the term consciousness
- More traditional views mention consciousness as wakefulness, awareness and self-
reflectiveness
- Consciousness is linked to the brain which is a physical object so how does it do it?
- All the non-conscious things (e.g. neurons) in the brain somehow lead to consciousness
- We live in a physical world, so everything should be able to be explained in physical terms
- Materialism claims that there is one type of substance in the world and things like mental
processes and consciousness must be explained in physical terms
- Idealists claim that there is only mental substance or “stuff” in the world and anything we
consider physical is an illusion by our minds
- Materialists believe that once we understand brain function, an explanation for consciousness
will follow:
1. Identity Theory: holds that mental states are identical to brain states
- There is one-to-one correlation between physical processes in the brain and everything we
associate with the mind (including consciousness and qualia)
- E.g. temperature is identical to kinetic energy or feeling pain is simply a specific pattern of
neural activity
- Criticism:
o Too inflexible: problem of multiple realizability
o If it can be shown that certain mental states can exist via more than one state, this
debunks the idea of one-to-one relationship
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