THE METAPHYSICAL PROBLEM OF MIND

1
THEMETAPHYSICALPROBLEM OFMIND
2
What are Minds?

• Mental Phenomena
• 1. There seem to be special mental entities.
• Beliefs
• Desires
• Sensations
• Volitions
• Intentions
• Emotions
• Etc.

3
What are Minds?

• 2. There seem to be certain special mental
  properties/processes/states.
• Thinking
• Understanding
• Experiencing
• Having Intelligence
• Reasoning
• Being Conscious
• Dreaming

4
What are Minds?

• The Ontological Question
• What things among the furniture of the world does
  a commitment to mental phenomena commit one to?
• What has to exist given that mental phenomena
  exist?
• What has to exist in order for mental phenomena
  to exist?

5
What are Minds?

• The Analytical Question
• What is the content of our concepts of mental
  phenomena?
• What do mental phenomena have in common in virtue
  of being mental?
• What is the essence of the mental?

6
Dualism

• Substance Dualism
• Mind is a kind of substance, a kind of subject of
  attributes distinct from matter.
• Rene Descartes is its most famous defender.

7
Cartesian Dualism

• Cartesian Dualism
• Minds are substances.
• Mental episodes are modifications of mental
  substance, i.e., modes or manners in which mental
  substance has its essential attribute of
  thinking.
• A mental episode is in the mind that it modifies.
• Mental substance is distinct from material
  substance.

8
Cartesian Dualism

• There are two distinctive features of mental
  attributes
• 1. Their instances are objects of immediate
  awareness.
• 2. The generalizations that govern their
  interactions are non-physical.
• Rules of reason Descartes, Leibniz, Kant
• Principles of association Locke, Berkeley, Hume

9
Cartesian Dualism

• I am not identical to my body.
• 1. If x and y are identical, then they share all
  the same properties.
• 2. Consider the following property x is such
  that I can doubt that x exists. Call this
  property D.
• 3. I do not possess D.
• 4. My body does possess D.
• \5. My body possesses a property that I lack.
  (from 2, 3, and 4)
• \6. I am not identical to my body. (1 and 5)

10
Some Problems for Substance Dualism

• How do mind and body interact?
• Bodies act upon each other by the transfer of
  physical energies.
• Mental entities cannot apply any physical forces
  because they lack physical properties.
• Mental entities cannot be subject to any physical
  forces because all such forces act at some place
  and mental entities are not at any place.

11
Some Problems for Substance Dualism

• How are mind and body united into one person?
• How many minds are there? How is one mind
  distinguished from another?
• By Their Spiritual History?
• The suggestion is to individuate minds by
  differences in their past experiences.
• But it seems possible that two different minds
  could have the same history, at least for a time.

12
Some Problems for Substance Dualism

• By their Causal History
• The suggestion is to individuate minds by
  differences in the bodies with which they
  causally interact.
• But it seems logically possible that there should
  be disembodied spiritual existence. If there
  were, then we could not distinguish disembodied
  minds.
• It seems logically possible that one mind might
  interact with two bodies. Can the dualist
  distinguished this possibility from the
  possibility that two minds with the same contents
  might interact with distinct bodies?

13
Some Problems for Substance Dualism

• There is nothing to guarantee that individual
  minds are causally linked only to whole bodies.
  There could be minds linked to parts of bodies,
  e.g., hearts, eyes, stomachs, individual cells.
  There could be a different mind controlling the
  functioning of every functional part of the body.
• How are minds created or destroyed?
• Presumably minds must have a different causal
  origin than the bodies they are connected to.
• Since they have no spatial parts, they are not
  assembled from smaller mental parts.

14
Ghostly Dualism

• Ghost-in-the-Machine Dualism
• A mind is a ghost in the machine.
• It is a nonphysical substance with spatial parts
  that are in intimate contact with the body to
  which it is causally connected.
• The problem here is that the view is incoherent.
• Something cannot both be in physical space and
  yet have no physical parts.

15
Property Dualism

• Property Dualism
• The brain, and perhaps certain other complex
  physical systems, have emergent nonphysical
  properties.
• These nonphysical properties include being a
  pain, being a belief that frogs have legs, being
  desire for pickles.

16
Property Dualism

• They are nonphysical properties because
• They cannot be defined using the concepts of
  physics, i.e., mass, momentum, charge, position,
  force, etc.
• The laws governing interactions among events that
  involve them are not the laws of physics.
• They are emergent because
• They are not properties of individual physical
  things, such as individual electrons, protons, or
  atoms.
• They are instead properties of organized complex
  structures of physical things.
• Mental properties emerge from structures the
  individual elements of which do not exhibit them.

17
Epiphenomenalism

• Forms of Property Dualism
• Epiphenomenalism
• Physical events cause mental events, but mental
  events do not cause anything.
• Mental events are like the image on a television
  screen.
• This view produces a strange understanding of
  introspection of ones own mental states

18
Epiphenomenalism

• The epiphenomenalist is committed to the view
  that all mental states, including states like
  being aware that I am in pain, are caused not by
  some mental state, but by some physical state,
  i.e., by some nonmental state.
• This implies that my awareness that I am in pain
  is caused not by my pain, but by some physical
  state that does not include or involve my pain at
  all!

19
Interactionism

• Interactionist Property Dualism
• Mental events interact causally with physical
  events, but do not involve emergent properties,
  the are elementary.
• This view is motivated by the incoherence of
  maintaining both that occurrences of mental
  properties are to be explained by the structural
  properties of systems of physical things and that
  mental properties nevertheless cannot be defined
  in terms of relational properties of collections
  of physical things, i.e., that mental properties
  do not reduce to any physical propertiesnot even
  relational ones.

20
Interactionism

• One problem with this view is that elementary
  properties of physical things are nongroup
  properties, i.e., properties that are possessed
  by individual physical things, e.g., mass, spin,
  charge, velocity, etc.
• If mental properties are elemental, they should
  be nongroup properties also.
• But individual physical things do not have mental
  states. Electrons are never pained. Protons never
  think about Paris. So, if these are elementary
  properties, why are they only present in complex
  groups of physical things?

21
Arguments For Dualism

• The Argument from Religion
• Substance dualism is required for the truth of
  many religious doctrines.
• It is more reasonable to accept dualism than to
  reject deeply held religious beliefs.

22
Arguments For Dualism

• The Argument from Introspection
• 1. I have introspective awareness of my mental
  states.
• 2. When I acquire knowledge of my mental states
  I do not acquire knowledge of my brain states.
• 3. If my mental states were identical to my brain
  states, whenever I acquired knowledge of the one,
  I would acquire knowledge of the other.
• 4. Therefore, My mental states are not identical
  to my brain states. (1,2, 3)

23
Arguments For Dualism

• Arguments from Irreducibility
• Physical systems seem incapable of genuine
  language use or genuine rationality.
• Phenomenal qualities of my sensations cannot be
  reduced to physical properties.
• The content properties of my mental states cannot
  be reduced to physical properties.

24
Arguments For Dualism

• The Argument from Parapsychological Phenomena
• Parapsychological phenomena (precognition,mind
  reading, telekinesis, distant viewing, etc.) seem
  to involve mental properties, relations, and
  interactions that no physical system can enter
  into.

25
Arguments Against Dualism

• Argument from Simplicity
• Dualism violates Ockhams Razor, i.e., it is a
  needlessly ontologically complex thesis.
• We should prefer an account of the mental that
  does not involve postulation of nonphysical
  entities or a distinct realm of nonphysical
  properties and laws, if at all possible.

26
Arguments Against Dualism

• Explanatory Impotence
• Dualists have no hypotheses for explaining or
  describing
• the internal constitution of spiritual substance,
  or
• mental pathologies and breakdowns.

27
Arguments Against Dualism

• Neural Dependence
• All mental states and processes can be influenced
  by factors that influence neural states and
  processes.
• For example drugs, disease, trauma, deprivations
  or various sorts, etc.
• If the mind is distinct from the brain why should
  damaging the brain damage the mind?

28
Arguments Against Dualism

• Evolutionary History
• Our brains have evolved via processes of natural
  selection from simpler organisms.
• Thus, we differ only in degree from organisms
  that no one is tempted to suppose include
  nonphysical parts or processes.