Mind and Body I
Bodies and Ghosts, Qualia, and Mind-Brain
identity.
Brie Gertler
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A naturalistic dualist.
The special character
of ‘mind’.
The limitations of the
physical.
The epistemic standing
of reports of mental
states.
What is physicalism?
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Type identity theory: every type of mental
state is identical to some type of physical
state.
Pain = C-fiber simulation (type/type identity)
See fn 2 here: some defend token-token
identity, claiming only that every mental state
is identical to some physical state. G. claims
her argument addresses both.
Sensations
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G takes pain to be a sensation, i.e. something
like a ‘raw feel’, a kind of experience we
typically have when we stub our toe or cut
ourselves while chopping a pepper, or…
G emphasizes the strength of such identity
claims-- they apply to all situations: if C-fiber
stimulation is what pain is, you can’t have a
pain without a C-fiber stimulation.
Consequences
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Empirical evidence can’t settle such
questions– we can correlate pain sensations
with C-fiber stimulations, but that evidence
can’t prove the pain and the stimulations are
one and the same thing:
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Maybe the correlation is accidental.
Maybe it reflects a causal link (C-fiber
stimulations cause pain).
Maybe they (always) have a common cause.
Dualism
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A dualist denies the identity thesis.
Mental states (and their types) aren’t physical states
(or state types).
The sensation of pain, e.g., could occur without Cfiber stimulation, even if (in fact) it never does.
G’s case: She argues that we could experience pain
(have pain sensations) even if we had no bodies at
all.
Possibility and Empirical Evidence
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G claims empirical evidence only ever shows us
what’s so, not what has to be so.
This raises a question: if empirical evidence doesn’t
do the job, what kind of evidence does?
G proposes that we rely on thought experiments,
combining imagination and ‘careful reflection’:
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100 foot books vs. blue and orange ‘all over’.
A married bachelor?
Concepts vs. imagination
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Imagination involves ‘pictures’ of a sort’;
concepts involve some kind of reasoning.
But either way, we have a ‘conceivability test’
for possibility:
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What’s conceivable is possible.
What’s not conceivable is impossible.
So: is pain without a corresponding physical
state conceivable?
Hubris
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Is my ability to conceive having this pain
without having a body at all really a good
reason to conclude that it’s possible for me to
have this pain without having a body?
All reasoning depends on concepts– so if they
are unreliable guides, we’re in big trouble.
But sometimes we do give up on (or modify)
concepts.
Particular concepts
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So are pain and physical concepts we can or
should rely on?
G asks, are they sufficiently comprehensive?,
or:
“Are they ‘sufficiently clear and complete’,
like your concept bachelor, or might they be
confused or incomplete…?”
What do we mean by ‘X’?
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Physical = Non-mental?
Physical = Part of a system of items and their
properties that we describe and explain in terms of
physics (and chemistry and other such, purely
physical sciences).
(The water & H2O problem…)
Pain = ? : Unlike water, pain (says G.) ‘has no
hidden essence’.
Infallibility: The feeling of pain is pain (no illusory
pain is possible) 291.
The special nature of mind
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Pain, for G., is transparent: if you’re in pain,
you are aware of it. To be in pain just is to
feel that pain. All you need to do is ‘pay
attention’ (look within your mind…)
The problem of other’s pain: I have no such
awareness of another person’s pain– the
essence of pain is missing from my evidence
whenever I judge that someone else is in pain.
What’s hidden?
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The essences of physical substance (science explores
and discovers these).
NOT our mind, or at least not our sensations or sense
data (our minds are immediately, infallibly aware of
their character as sensations—including of the kind
of sensation they are).
The inverted spectrum?
How do we decide what does/doesn’t have ‘a hidden
essence’?
Mental Causation
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If the physical is causally closed (complete as
a system of explanation), then mental states
(of a dualist sort) are explanatorily empty–
they can’t explain or be explained by any
physical goings-on.
Here G. goes Humean.
Next, the chauvinism objection to ‘pain=cfiber stimulation’. (What about the same
objection to phenomenal pain???)
Sellars
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Philosophers talk about concepts. The point,
however, is to change them.
Our concepts of minds and bodies have their uses–
but we don’t have to simply accept them as they are–
we should also think carefully about their origins.
In particular, our concepts of ‘sensations’ and sense
data are clearly modeled on the basic sensible
features of familiar objects and events.
Jackson on Qualia
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Frank Jackson has argued for decades that we have a
special knowledge or awareness of the character of
our experiences that we could not have if they were
(merely) physical events.
His piece here presents an argument for this: He
claims that we could know all there is to know about
a brain state without knowing what it feels like to the
individual who is in that brain state, in his stories
about Fred and Mary (298f)
Epiphenomena
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An event is epiphenomenal if it is caused by
some other events, but itself makes no
difference to subsequent events.
Jackson suggests qualia are epiphenomenal.
Otherwise, we’d be able to ‘get at them’ by
studying their causal effects—they would then
be detected by our physics, not isolated and
special as Jackson takes them to be.
Evolution
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An epiphenomenal effect could arise from evolution
even if it can’t be selected for, so long as it is a side
effect of events/ processes that were selected for.
So qualia could regularly occur together with events
that really are causally efficacious.
My ‘pain’ qualia may not cause me to pull my hand
from the fire; my colour qualia may not cause me to
stop at a traffic light.
This does put qualia in a very mysterious place…
Carruthers
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In this paper Peter Carruthers presents some
clearly formulated arguments in the area.
He concludes in favour of physicalism and
mind-brain identity.
In particular, Carruthers is very critical of the
complete knowledge arguments that Jackson
proposes.
What do we know about qualia?
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Carruthers claims that what we know when
we know ‘what it’s like’ to see red (whether
red1 or red2) is a practical sort of knowledge.
That is, it is the capacity to respond to some
brain state by saying ‘I seem to see red’.
So it isn’t some kind of special, privileged
awareness of some property that no physical
thing could have.
Finally, on intentionality
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It seems to Carruthers that machines can show the
kinds of behaviour (searching, responding to the
same thing in different ways depending on how it’s
presented) that we take to demonstrate intentionality
in humans.
This is pretty familiar today: we use intentional
concepts to interpret what machines do quite
naturally.
But Turing and Searle raise a question: When (if
ever) should we take this seriously?