Philosophy Of Mind

The main questions in the philosophy of mind are derived from puzzles involving trying to develop a coherent theory of the nature and functions of the mind. Beginning with the nature of the mind, they include: Are minds separate from bodies or is the mind really just the body? If the mind is immaterial and the body material, how do they interact? How can this fit in with science? If the mind is just the body, then how is consciousness explained? How can we have experiences or free will to think and act? How can we explain the special relationship we seem to have with knowing our own mental states?

Cartesian dualism posits two substances, or fundamental kinds of thing: material substance and immaterial thinking substance. These are two entirely different kinds of entities, although they interact with each other. According to property dualism, on the other hand, there is one fundamental kind of thing in the world—material substance—but it has two essentially different kinds of property: physical properties and mental properties. So for instance, a property dualist might claim that a material thing like a brain can have both physical properties (like weight and mass) and mental properties (such as having a particular belief or feeling a shooting pain), and that these two kinds of properties are entirely different in kind. Some philosophers subscribe to property dualism for all mental properties while others defend it only for conscious or “phenomenal” properties such as the feeling of pain or the taste of wine.[1] These latter properties give rise to what is known as the hard problem of consciousness: How do we explain the existence of consciousness in a material world?

Though these are both dualist views, they differ in fundamental ways. Property dualism was proposed as a position that has a number of advantages over substance dualism. One advantage is that, because it does not posit an immaterial mental substance, it is believed to be more scientific than Cartesian dualism and less religiously motivated. A second advantage is that it seems to avoid the problem of mental causation because it posits only one kind of substance; there is no communication between two different kinds of thing. And a third advantage is that, by maintaining the existence of distinctly mental properties, it does justice to our intuitions about the reality of the mind and its difference from the physical world. ...

As I sit writing this sentence, I am enjoying a wealth of experiences. In front of me, the sky is full of the pink and blue hues of approaching sunset dashed with white clouds. Tropical birds chitter in high-pitched trills, while a pair of dogs utter guttural barks at each other. My skin alternately prickles with the last lingering heat of the day, interrupted by the pleasant coolness of an evening breeze.

The scene I have just described is full of experiences with distinctive qualities—colours, sounds, and physical sensations. These qualities of experience are known to philosophers of mind as qualia, an oddly obscure term for an aspect of our lives that could scarcely be more familiar to us. Every waking moment of our lives, we are experiencing various qualia associated with sights, sounds, or feelings. Sometimes, we deliberately seek out new qualia, as when we order an unfamiliar dish at a restaurant, eager to learn what it tastes like. On other occasions, we seek urgently to put an end to some quale (the singular of “qualia”) or another; for example, when we take an aspirin to relieve the throbbing sensation of a headache.

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The challenge here is not merely to explain the neuroscience of how vision works or how our tongue relates flavour information to the brain. Important progress is being made every day in understanding questions like these, although the science still has a long way to go. Instead, the real difficulty is that while science tells us about how the brain works, it seems unable to tell us what experiences are actually like. To get an idea of the problem, imagine a person who has been completely deaf since birth who wants to know what Beethoven sounds like. Even if we had perfect brain-scanners and could show them exactly what happens to someone’s neurons when they listen to music, it does not seem like this could ever properly convey to them the subjective experience of hearing the opening bars of the Choral Symphony.

How much control do people exercise over who they are and what they do? Suppose it is the night before an exam, and Quinn should be studying, but her roommate asks her to come out with her and some friends. It certainly seems like it is up to Quinn what she does. She could stay home and study or she could spend the night out with friends. The choice seems hers to make and up to her. And when Quinn arrives exhausted to her exam the following morning, Quinn should feel justified blaming herself for failing to do what she should have done and what she could have done.

Or, suppose you are weighing the pros and cons between a career in something with a reasonable return on investment, like nursing or accounting, versus a career in a field with more questionable career prospects, like philosophy. Again, the choice seems yours to make. You’re free to pursue whatever career path you want and it is ultimately up to you what you decide to do with your life. Right?

But maybe this sense of freedom is a mere illusion. Maybe Quinn’s decision to go out with her friends the night before a big exam is an inevitable, deterministic consequence of the past and the laws of nature in such a way that her supposed freedom is undermined. Or perhaps it is the case that the real reason someone chooses a career in philosophy over a career in accounting has more to do with unconscious brain processes and the environment and social situation they find themselves in then it has to do with any conscious decision they may have made. And if so, if our choices are really the causal results of unconscious brain processes or external environmental factors, are any of us really free? Are we really in control of who we are and what we do? Or are free-will skeptics correct to claim that the things we do and the way that we are is ultimately the consequent of external factors beyond our control?

To investigate whether or not humans sometimes act freely, we need to first clarify what is meant by free will. The discussion of freedom has a long history and free will has been used to apply to a multitude of, often radically different, abilities and capacities that people may, or may not, have.

A helpful place to start is to note that most philosophers today who write on free will have in mind the kind of control required for morally responsible action (McKenna and Pereboom 2016, 6-7). That is, to ask whether or not someone is free is to ask whether or not they have control over their actions such that they are deserving of blame or praise for what they do (or fail to do).

The problem of intentionality is the problem of how some entities can be “about” something. That is, sentences, thoughts, or concepts, among others, display intentionality in that they are about something else; they are said to be a representation of something. The notion of intentionality can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle (384 BCE-322 BCE), though the German philosopher Franz Brentano (1838-1917) is generally credited with introducing the notion to contemporary philosophy in the late nineteenth century. Brentano’s oft-quoted remark is that “Every mental phenomenon is characterized by … the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object” and “reference to a content, direction toward an object.” In other words, “Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on” (Brentano [1874] 1995, 68).

Supervenience, In philosophy, the asymmetrical relation of ontological dependence that holds between two generically different sets of properties (e.g., mental and physical properties) if and only if every change in an object’s properties belonging to the first set—the supervening properties—entails and is due to a change in properties belonging to the second set (the base properties). Supervenience has often been appealed to by philosophers who want to uphold physicalism while rejecting the identity theory: Though it may be impossible to identify mental properties with physical properties in a one-to-one fashion, mental properties may still supervene on, and thus be grounded in, physical properties. Thus, no two things that are physically alike can be mentally (or psychologically) different, and a being’s mental properties will be determined by its physical ones.