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Summary Lecture notes (Mid- and Endterm)
Complete notes of the Philosophy of Mind lectures! Got me a 9!
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29/01/2018Philosophy
Lecture 1
Everyday/manifest world view: subjective, common sense
Scientific world view: objective
Conceptual analyses: comparing the everyday world view with the scientific one, you ask
what someone means by his/her concepts (what do you think means ‘intelligence’)
Philosophy is the study of the validity of concepts
Greek teachers were focussed on winning discussions with arguments (like lawyers) but
Socrates was against this
Hard problem: are mind and body connected, how do they interact? problem of
consciousness
Conscious mind: Phenomenal experiences - whats-it-likeness (coffee is like… bad or
good, brown, etc), qualia
Cognitive states - propositional attitudes PA’s (stances towards
propositions,
sentences. Meaning of a sentence), cognitive states have
intentionality (aboutness, you think about something, it tells you
something about something). PA’s are discrete, separate entities, you
can forget one but it doesn’t change the other attitudes
Emotions - have both a whats-it-likeness and intentionality, for
example I feel angry about a bad driver
Subproblems: how do qualia (hard problem) and intentionality fit in the physical world?
Different perspectives about the solutions on these questions
Substance dualism (Descartes)
- the mind and body are independent of each other
- Substance: something that can exist on its own
- Res cogitans (mind) and res extensa (body)
- movement occurs through causality
- tiny particles that cause movement = animal spirit
- Am I awake, do I have a body, is 2+2 4? What if there is a malin genie (evil demon)?
- foundation of knowledge: thinking (I think therefore I am, cogito ergo sum)
- I am a res cogitans
- If something is clearly and distinct, it is true
- God exists, god is good and doesn’t deceive me (so no malin genie)
- This means I am also a body, thus a res extensa
- Extential property: having a place in space
- A physical body can only move because another one bumps into it. He first thought souls
could move things like gravity did, but agreed there were some flaws.
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Lecture 2
Substance dualism (Descartes)
- Every physical event has a physical cause, something always gets pushed. So nonphysical
(mental) causes cannot be understood. How can a nonphysical substance, the brain, then
cause a physical event, moving of the body? This is called a Patrick Swayze problem.
- Elizabeth of Bohemia asked descartes how its possible mind and body can interact
- Descartes thought mind and body are 2 different substances, but are connected. We
cannot think these two statements together because it’s a contradiction, but its there.
- He did say the connection of mind and brain is at the pineal gland
- Solution for the contradiction was that God took care of the interaction
How can god have done that?
- Occasionalism (Malebranche): when I want to move my arm, I think about it and God sees
this as an occasion to move my arm. I do the thinking, God moves it physically
- Parallelism (Geilinex, Leibniz): mind and body are two separate mechanisms God created,
but they run in sync/parallel to each other. So when I think of moving my arm, my arm just
moves because mind and body are in sync.
- These ‘solutions’ aren’t solutions, because we still don’t know how God does the interaction
Elizabeth von Platz: if I have to imagine a soul, I imagine it in 3D, as a human being. This is
the common sense idea of a bodyless mind. But if there is only a mind and no body, how
can we not walk through walls etc?
Because of all these problems, we reject dualism.
Clairvoyance
The term clairvoyance refers to the alleged ability of some people to gain information about a
person, an event, or an object in a way that does not use the normal senses. Hence,
clairvoyance is supposed to be an instance of extrasensory experience (ESP). ESP is
usually seen as evidence for the ability of the mind to function and exist separately from the
body. Often, clairvoyants claim to get their information from the spirit world, in which case it
is evident that their alleged abilities would support the separability thesis.
Electric Voice Phenomena
EVP: The idea of this is that you can “tune” a radio or television to a channel between two
stations and record the resulting white noise. Through these recordings, you can then
discover all kinds of messages from the deceased.
However, the white noise could be just a third radio station.
Theory ladenness of perception: That what we perceive is influenced by a theory that tells
us what to perceive.
Idealism (Berkeley)
- There is no interaction, only the mind, no material substance (monism)
- Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). The outside world only exists when you look at
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it.
- Berkeley is an empiricist, so knowledge is obtained through your senses.
- When you look at a book, you don’t see the substance, but the properties of it (colour, etc)
- Locke: Primary (independent of us, like weight) and Secondary properties (dependent on
the observer, like sweetness or colour), but Berkeley says only secondary properties exist
- Reductio ad absurdum: you can’t identify colours with their wavelengths of light
because everyone can experience colours diferently yellow-orange = brown-
orange (absurd)
Johnston: we think wavelengths, magnetic field, all primary properties are in the outside
world, but they still only exist because there is an observer, so also primary properties are in
our mind
Locke/Galilei/Boyle/Descartes all thought there was a difference between primary and
secondary properties.
- There are no primary properties because height is also subjective (a grain of sand is big for
a small insect but not for a human being). This was actually wrong because the height is
objective, only the subjective height is different.
- My beer doesn’t disappear when I can’t see it because it’s in the fridge. Therefore, God has
to exist. God watches everything so that’s why nothing disappears when you don’t look at
it
- God is still no solution. Therefore, idealism in Berkeley's view is problematic and
unscientific
Behaviourism
- if psychology wants to be a real science, it has to be objective, not subjective. You can’t
observe mental states or introspection.
- Black box: input goes in (stimuli), output comes out (behaviour). What happens inside is
not known.
- Psychological/Methodological Behaviourism
- Skinner: human thought is human behaviour
- Watson: behaviourism is to predict and control behaviour without introspection, purely
experimental. He used little Albert to condition him to be scared of furry things like rats. He
thought that this way, emotions can be conditioned.
- So, they weren’t focussed on ‘the black box’ (why the input caused the output).
Behaviourists therefore refused to believe there was something as consciousness, only input
and output. However, later behaviourists like Jaynes admitted it was just a weak excuse.
- Philosophers became behaviourists for logical and linguistic reasons. Dualism and
idealism were really incoherent and unscientific. Descartes said animals are mindless
machines, and no one can observe the human mind.
Ryle
- if you can’t establish if animals or humans have minds, it doesn’t explain anything if
someone has a mind or not. So, it is better to study behaviour than to think about an
immaterial mind. The mind is about dispositions.
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