Philosophy 3260: Outline of positions on Mind & Body.
1. Philosophers have defended a large number of positions on mind and body and
related issues. I want to provide you with a quick & simple account of some of
them here, just to help clarify some of the terms we’re throwing around. Along
the way we’ll also encounter a few of the standard arguments & counterarguments.
2. Dualism: This is the view, shared by many, that ‘mind’ is (must be)
fundamentally distinct from body, in the sense of being (or constituting) a
separate substance. Comment: Descartes’ version of this view is more reserved
than some realize: He merely claims that it is possible for God to separate the
mind from the body, preserving what is essential to the mind, i.e. the ability to
think. (And this ability to think probably does not necessarily include the ability
to imagine, i.e. picture things to ourselves. It covers only the ability to understand
& reason.)
3. Physicalism: This is the view, also shared by many, that ‘mind’ is really
physical, or that the phenomena (experiences, beliefs, thoughts, etc.) that we
attribute to the ‘mind’ are actually physical events & states. Comment:
Physicalism takes many forms—here are a few: Mind-brain identity theories (the
mind just is the brain); functionalist accounts, holding that ‘mental’ descriptions
are abstract descriptions that could hold of very different physical systems;
eliminativist accounts, which reject our familiar talk of beliefs, desires and other
mental states as an unscientific ‘folk’ theory that needs to be replaced by a
scientific account of what we are and how we ‘work’; ‘supplemented’ theories
according to which some mental phenomena have yet to be ‘located’ in our
physical understanding of the brain, but will eventually be part of that
understanding; and normative accounts, according to which our ‘mental’
descriptions of ourselves and others are not really descriptions at all, but
normative interpretations subject to revision and re-interpretation, while true
descriptions of ourselves are purely physical. Adding to the complexity of this
range of views, some positions combine various aspects of them.
4. Problems for Dualism: A. It’s difficult to explain, from a dualistic position,
how it mind and body interact. If they are in principle separate ‘kinds’ of thing,
how can they influence each other? But it’s indispensable to our ordinary use of
mental descriptions that they both explain (are treated as causes or reasons for)
many of our actions, and are explained by (are treated as the result of) physical
states of affairs and processes. B. Closely related is the causal closure argument:
Physics aims at a complete account of how the physical world works- so, if
‘minds’ (whatever they are) affect what goes on in the physical world, they must
be included in any attempt at a ‘complete’ physics, i.e. they must turn out to be
part of any satisfactory account of the physical world.
5. Responses to these problems: A lot of strange metaphysics has arisen in efforts
to deal with this problem. Two positions, occasionalism (Malebranche) and preestablished harmony (Leibniz), replace real interaction with an alternative,
namely mere correlation. Occasionalism holds that God actively maintains the
coordination of mind and body by directly producing the required effects in each,
so that our senses interaction with the physical world leads God to produce the
appropriate experiences in us and our desires and beliefs lead God to produce the
appropriate actions on the part of our bodies. Pre-established harmony holds that
both mind and body operate independently according to their own laws, but have
been arranged so that the appropriate ‘results’ occur in each, as certain
states/changes occur in the other.
6. Problems for Physicalism: A. Normativity and teleology have been given up in
modern physics, which instead explains what goes on in the world in terms of
purely descriptive, efficient causal processes. But when we explain our actions
we appeal to desires and beliefs, both of which seem to be teleological: Desires
aim at certain results of our actions (whether they are actually achieved or not),
and beliefs aim to truly describe the world (whether they actually do or not). This
is also closely related to the ‘Chinese room’ argument advanced by Searle.
B. Experience has a qualitative character. That is (as Thomas Nagel famously
put it) there is something it is like to be a conscious thing. But physical
explanations and descriptions of organisms like (say) bats don’t seem to provide
us with any understanding of what it’s like to be a bat, or to use echo location to
‘see’ the world—what would that feel like, and how could we ever know? So
physical explanations and descriptions seem to be leaving something important
about conscious beings out. This is closely related to the Zombie argument,
which claims that, since it’s possible for there to be organisms physically just like
us but which lack any qualitative ‘inner’ experiences (call them ‘Zombies’),
dualism must be true of us.
7. Responses to these problems: A. The theory of evolution provides some sense of
how ‘goals’ and teleology (of a sort) could come to be part of a reasonable
account of organisms. But there are treacherous conceptual waters to navigate
here: Natural selection explains why organisms will come to have features that
resemble, in certain limited ways, tools and other artifacts. But it is descriptions
and explanations of our own conscious, purposive actions that are the ‘home’ turf
for talk of teleology. All that we have in this evolutionary account so far is a kind
of analogy with that home turf. A satisfactory account will have to explain how
evolution could lead us to be organisms that are truly described and explained in
literally teleological terms (or it will have to dismiss such talk as useful illusions
instead—leading off in an eliminativist direction). B. Some (Jack Smart, for
instance) have argued for an analogical interpretation of our talk of ‘experiences’
and experiential qualities. So saying ‘I’m having an experience of orange’ is
really just saying that ‘what is happening in me is, in some way, like what
happens in me when I see something orange under normal perceptual conditions.’
What more can you infer from my saying that I’m having such an experience?
Others claim that a complete physics of the brain will include states with the right
sorts of features to be identified as the ‘qualities’ of sensory experience. As to
zombies, the question is, how do such arguers know that it’s possible for beings
physically just like us to lack conscious experience as we know it? All these
replies aim to cast doubt on the directness and completeness of our ‘knowledge’
of what our experiences are (and are ‘like’).