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Summary Chapter 1 - What's the problem (detailed)
This is a very detailed summary on Chapter 1 - What is the problem? of the Consciousness book (S.Blackmore) Third Edition
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élan vital was proposed as a way of explaining something else (how life is created frommatter), and so could be discarded when we found a better explanation, whereas
consciousness is something that itself needs to be explained
Consciousness in Philosophy
Main perspectives: Dualism & monism
Dualism: starting point
- Cartesian Dualism - Renes Descartes
- wanted to base his philosophy on firm foundations that were
beyond doubt.
- argued, in a famous passage in Discourse on Method (1637/1649),
even if we doubt every- thing, there is still something that remains
“I think therefore I am”
- The world consists of two different kinds of stuff: the extended stuff of
which physical bodies are made, and the unextended, thinking stuff of
which minds are made.
According to property dualism, the world is composed only of one kind of
substance (the physical kind), but can be described using mental terms or
physical terms, even though one description cannot be reduced to the other.
- the problem for substance dualism is how the mind interacts with the
body when the two are made of different substances.
Descartes supposed that the two interact through the pineal gland in the centre
of the brain, but proposing a place where it happens does not solve the mystery
- Substance dualism does not work
Ryle
- many philosophical problems are caused by misuses of language. Ryle argued
that because we don’t know how to talk about the mind, we often talk about it
using the language of material cause and effect, but in the negative: we say,
‘Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork’
- If we do this, we are making a category mistake: we are putting mind into
the wrong category of things, giving something non-material properties
which logically and gram- matically apply only to material things
find a middle way between dualism and behaviourism – between the two
mistakes of claiming
- behaviours are not caused by myste- the various mental states, and many
mental states are best understood simply as dispositions to behave.
Current view of the mind: doing r ather than b
eing
- Mind - designer language for the functions that the brain
carries out’
- self is ‘not what the brain is, but what it does’
Attempts to make dualism work:
Karl Popper: dualist interactionism
critical processes in the synapses of the brain are so finely poised that they can
be influenced by a non-physical thinking and feeling self. Thus the self really
does control its brain
, How? - Benjamin Libet:
- non-physical ‘conscious mental field’ is responsible for the unity and
continuity of subjective experience and for free will
David Chalmers: naturalistic dualism
new ‘bridging principles’, in the form of psychophysical laws, are needed to
explain how experience arises from physical pro- cesses even though the
physical world is causally closed
- Theory: version of property dualism or dual aspect theory, with the
central concept of information taking both phenomenal and physical
forms.
Daniel Dennett: Cartesian materialism
- the position of pretending to be a materialist but relying on dualist
concepts – particularly the idea that there is an identifiable time and place
where everything comes together in the brain and ‘consciousness happens
- as soon as you say that something ‘enters consciousness’ - phrases that
the neuroscientific literature on consciousness is full of, once you start to
notice them – you are creating a ‘Cartesian Theatre’.
Monism:
- Idealism - Berkeley
Realism
Materialism: -
Only matter and universe is causally closed
- the laws governing the interactions between matter and energy exhaust
all the forces of the universe, so there is no room for non-physical minds
or consciousness to intervene
Identity theory (which makes mental states identical with brain states) and
Functionalism (which equates mental states with functional states).
Unattractive theory for consciousness because takes away subjective experience
- the powerful feeling we have that our conscious decisions cause our
actions is reduced to purely physical cause and effect
- hard to find any way of talking about consciousness that does justice to
the way it feels
BUT - doesn’t always imply that consciousness can be reduced to physical
properties
- Difference in consciousness must be accompanied by a difference in the
brain, but the reverse is not true
- conscious experience might be possible in 2 different brain states
epiphenomenalism’: idea that mental states are produced by physical events
but have no causal role to play
- physical events cause or give rise to mental events, but mental events
have no effect on physical events
Problem with epiphenomenalism:
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