Philosophy of Mind

Jaegwon Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974489
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book explores a range of issues in the philosophy of mind, with the mind-body problem as the main focus. It serves as a stimulus to the reader to engage with the problems of the mind and try to come to terms with them, and examines Descartes's mind-body dualism.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In coping with the myriad things and events that come our way at every moment of our waking life, we try to organize them into manageable chunks. We do this by sorting things into groups—categorizing them as “rocks,” “trees,” “fish,” “birds,” “bricks,” “fires,” “rains,” and countless other kinds—and describing them in terms of their properties and features as “large” or “small,” “tall” or “short,” “red” or “yellow,” “slow” or “swift,” and so on. A distinction that we almost instinctively apply to just about everything is whether it is a living thing. (It might be a dead bird, but still we know it is the kind of thing that lives, unlike a rock or a celadon vase, which couldn’t be “dead.”) There are exceptions, of course, but it is unusual for us to know what something is without at the same time knowing, or having some ideas about, whether it is a living thing. Another example: When we know a person, we almost always know whether the person is male or female.

The same is true of the distinction between things, or creatures, with a “mind” and those without a mind. This, too, is one of the most basic contrasts we use in our thoughts about things in the world. Our attitudes toward creatures that are conscious and capable of experiencing sensations like pain and pleasure are importantly different from our attitudes toward things lacking such capacities, mere chunks of matter or insentient plants, as witness the controversies about vegetarianism and scientific experiments involving live animals. And we are apt to regard ourselves as occupying a special and distinctive place in the natural world on account of our particularly highly developed mental capacities and functions, such as the capacity for abstract thoughts, self-consciousness, artistic sensibilities, complex emotions, and a capacity for rational deliberation and action. Much as we admire the miracle of the flora and fauna, we do not think that every living thing has a mind or that we need a psychological theory to understand the life cycles of elms and birches or the behavior and reproductive patterns of amoebas. Except those few of us with certain mystical inclinations, we do not think that members of the plant world are endowed with mentality, and we would exclude many members of the animal kingdom from the mental realm as well. We would not think that planarians and gnats have a mental life that is fit for serious psychological inquiry.

When we come to higher forms of animal life, such as cats, dogs, and chimpanzees, we find it entirely natural to grant them a fairly rich mental life. They are surely conscious in that they experience sensations, like pain, itch, and pleasure; they perceive their surroundings more or less the way we do and use the information so gained to guide their behavior. They also remember things—that is, store and use information about their surroundings—and learn from experience, and they certainly appear to have feelings and emotions, such as fear, frustration, and anxiety. We describe their psychological life using the expressions we normally use for fellow human beings: “Phoebe is feeling cramped inside the pet carrier and all that traffic noise has made her nervous. The poor thing is dying to be let out.”

But are the animals, even the more intelligent ones like horses and dolphins, capable of complex social emotions like embarrassment and shame? Are they capable of forming intentions, engaging in deliberation and making decisions, or performing logical reasoning? When we go down the ladder of animal life to, say, oysters, crabs, and earthworms, we would think that their mental life is considerably impoverished in comparison with that of, say, a domestic cat. Surely these creatures have sensations, we think, for they react in appropriate ways to noxious stimuli, and they have sense organs through which they gain information about what goes on around them and adjust and modify their behavior accordingly. But do they have minds? Are they conscious? Do they have mentality? What is it to have a mind, or mentality?

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY OF MIND?

Philosophy of mind, like any other field of inquiry, is defined by a group of problems. As we expect, the problems that constitute this field concern mentality and mental properties. What are some of these problems? And how do they differ from the scientific problems about mentality and mental properties, those that psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists investigate in their research?

There is, first of all, the problem of answering the question raised earlier: What is it to be a creature with a mind? Before we can fruitfully consider questions like whether inorganic electromechanical devices (for example, computers and robots) can have a mind, or whether speechless animals are capable of having thoughts, we need a reasonably clear idea about what mentality is and what having a thought consists in. What conditions must a creature or system meet if we are to attribute to it a “mind” or “mentality”? We commonly distinguish between mental phenomena, like thoughts and sensory experiences, and those that are not mental, like digestive processes or the circulation of blood through the arteries. Is there a general characteristic that distinguishes mental phenomena from nonmental, or “merely” physical, phenomena? We canvass some suggestions for answering these questions later in this chapter.

There are also problems concerning specific mental properties or kinds of mental states and their relationship to one another. Are pains only sensory events (they hurt), or must they also have a motivational component (such as aversiveness)? Can there be pains of which we are not aware? Do emotions like anger and jealousy necessarily involve felt qualities? Do they involve a cognitive component, like belief? What is a belief anyway, and how does a belief come to have the content it has (say, that it is raining outside, or that 7 + 5 = 12)? Do beliefs and thoughts require a capacity for speech?

A third group of problems concerns the relation between minds and bodies, or between mental and physical phenomena. Collectively called “the mind-body problem,” this has been a central problem of philosophy of mind since Descartes introduced it nearly four centuries ago. It is a central problem for us in this book as well. The task here is to clarify and make intelligible the relation between our mentality and the physical nature of our being—or more generally, the relationship between mental and physical properties. But why should we think there is a philosophical problem here? Just what needs to be clarified and explained?

A simple answer might go like this: The mental seems prima facie so utterly different from the physical, and yet the two seem intimately related to each other. When you think of conscious experiences—such as the smell of basil, a pang of remorse, or the burning painfulness of a freshly bruised elbow—it is hard to imagine anything that could be more different from mere configurations and motions, however complex, of material particles, atoms and molecules, or mere physical changes involving cells and tissues. In spite of that, these conscious phenomena don’t come out of thin air, or from some immaterial source; rather, they arise from certain configurations of physical-biological processes of the body, including neural processes in the brain. We are at bottom physical-biological systems—complex biological structures wholly made up of bits of matter. (In case you disagree, we consider Descartes’s contrary views in chapter 2.) How can biological-physical systems come to have states like thoughts, fears, and hopes, experience feelings like guilt and pride, act for reasons, and be morally responsible? It strikes many of us that there is a fundamental, seemingly unbridgeable gulf between mental and physical phenomena and that this makes their apparently intimate relationships puzzling and mysterious.

It seems beyond doubt that phenomena of the two kinds are intimately connected. For one thing, evidence indicates that mental events occur as a result of physical-neural processes. Stepping barefoot on an upright thumbtack causes a sharp pain in your foot. It is likely that the proximate basis of the pain is some event in your brain: A bundle of neurons deep in your hypothalamus or cortex discharges, and as a result you experience a sensation of pain. Impingement of photons on your retina starts off a chain of events, and as a result you have a certain visual experience, which in turn leads you to form the belief that there is a tree in front of you. How could a series of physical events—little particles jostling against one another, electric current rushing to and fro, and so on—blossom all of a sudden into a conscious experience, like the burning hurtfulness of a badly scalded hand, the brilliant red and purple sunset you see over the dark green ocean, or the smell of freshly mown lawn? We are told that when certain special neurons (nociceptive neurons) fire, we experience pain, and presumably there is another group of neurons that fire when we experience an itch. Why are pain and itch not switched around? That is, why is it that we feel pain, rather than itch, when just these neurons fire and we experience itch, not pain, when those other neurons fire? Why is it not the other way around? Why should any experience emerge from molecular-biological processes?

Moreover, we take it for granted that mental events have physical effects. It seems essential to our concept of ourselves as agents that our bodies are moved in appropriate ways by our wants, beliefs, and intentions. You see a McDonald’s sign across the street and you decide to get something to eat, and somehow your perception and decision cause your limbs to move in such a way that you now find your body at the doors of the restaurant. Cases like this are among the familiar facts of life and are too boring to mention. But how did your perception and desire manage to move your body, all of it, across the street? You say, that’s easy: Beliefs and desires first cause certain neurons in the motor cortex of my brain to discharge, these neural impulses are transmitted through the network of neural fibers all the way down to the peripheral control systems, which cause the appropriate muscles to contract, and so on. All that might be a complicated story, you say, but it is something that brain science, not philosophy, is in charge of explaining. But how do beliefs and desires manage to cause those little neurons to fire to begin with? How can this happen unless beliefs and desires are themselves just physical happenings in the brain? But is it coherent to suppose that these mental states are simply physical processes in the brain? These questions do not seem to be questions that can be answered just by doing more research in neuroscience; they seem to require philosophical reflection and analysis beyond what we can learn from science alone. This is what is called the problem of mental causation, one of the most important issues concerning the mind ever since Descartes first formulated the mind-body problem.

In this book, we are chiefly, though not exclusively, concerned with the mind-body problem. We begin, in the next chapter, with an examination of Descartes’s mind-body dualism—a dualism of material things and immaterial minds. In contemporary philosophy of mind, however, the world is conceived to be fundamentally material: There are persuasive (some will say compelling) reasons to believe that the world we live in is made up wholly of material particles and their structured aggregates, all behaving strictly in accordance with physical laws. How can we accommodate minds and mentality in such an austerely material world? That is our main question.

But before we set out to consider specific doctrines concerning the mind-body relationship, it will be helpful to survey some of the basic concepts, principles, and assumptions that guide the discussions to follow.

METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES

For Descartes, “having a mind” had a literal meaning. On his view, minds are things of a special kind, souls or immaterial substances, and having a mind simply amounts to having a soul, something outside physical space, whose essence consists in mental activities like thinking and being conscious. (We examine this view of minds in chapter 2.) A substantival view of mentality like Descartes’s is not widely accepted today. However, to reject minds as substances or objects in their own right is not to deny that each of us “has a mind”; it is only that we need not think of “having a mind” as there being some object called a “mind” that we literally “have.” Having a mind need not be like having brown eyes or a laptop. Think of “dancing a waltz” or “taking a walk”: When we say, “Sally danced a waltz,” or “Sally took a leisurely walk along the river,” we do not mean—at least we do not need to mean—that there are things in this world called “waltzes” or “walks” such that Sally picked out one of them and danced it or walked it. Where are these dances and walks when no one is dancing or walking them? What could you do with a dance except dance it? Dancing a waltz is not like owning an SUV or kicking a tire. Dancing a waltz is merely a manner of dancing, and taking a walk is a manner of moving your limbs in a certain relationship to the physical surroundings. In using these expressions, we need not accept the existence of entities like waltzes and walks; all we need to admit into our ontology—the scheme of entities we accept as real—are persons who waltz and persons who walk.

Similarly, when we use expressions like “having a mind,” “losing one’s mind,” “being out of one’s mind,” and the like, there is no need to suppose there are objects in this world called “minds” that we have, lose, or are out of. Having a mind can be construed simply as having a certain group of properties, features, and capacities that are possessed by humans and some higher animals but absent in things like rocks and trees. To say that some creature “has a mind” is to classify it as a certain sort of being, capable of certain characteristic sorts of behaviors and functions—sensation, perception, memory, learning, reasoning, consciousness, action, and the like. It is less misleading, therefore, to speak of “mentality” than of “having a mind”; the surface grammar of the latter abets the problematic idea of a substantival mind—mind as an object of a special kind. However, this is not to preclude substantival minds at the outset; the point is only that we should not infer their existence from our use of certain forms of expression. As we will see in the chapter to follow, there are serious philosophical arguments that we must accept minds as immaterial things. Moreover, an influential contemporary view identifies minds with brains (discussed in chapter 4). Like Descartes’s substance dualism, this view gives a literal meaning to “having a mind”: It would simply mean having a brain of certain structure and capacities. The main point we should keep in mind is that all this requires philosophical considerations and arguments, as we will see in the rest of this book.

Mentality is a broad and complex category. As we just saw, there are numerous specific properties and functions through which mentality manifests itself, such as experiencing sensations, entertaining thoughts, reasoning and judging, making decisions, and feeling emotions. There are also more specific properties that fall within these categories, such as experiencing a throbbing pain in the right elbow, believing that Kabul is in Afghanistan, wanting to visit Tibet, and being annoyed at your roommate. In this book, we often talk in terms of “instantiating,” “exemplifying,” or “having” this or that property. When you shut a door on your thumb, you will likely instantiate or exemplify the property of being in pain; most of us have, or instantiate, the property of believing that snow is white; some of us have the property of wanting to visit Tibet; and so on. Admittedly this is a somewhat cumbersome, not to say stilted, way of talking, but it gives us a uniform and simple way of referring to certain entities and their relationships. Throughout this book, the expressions “mental” and “psychological” and their respective cognates are used interchangeably. In most contexts, the same goes for “physical” and “material.”

We will now set out in general terms the kind of ontological scheme that we presuppose in this book and explain how we use certain terms associated with the scheme. We suppose, first, that our scheme includes substances, that is, things or objects (including persons, biological organisms and their organs, molecules, computers, and such) and that they have various properties and stand in various relations to each other. (Properties and relations are together called attributes.) Some of these are physical, like having a certain mass or temperature, being one meter long, being longer than, and being between two other objects. Some things—in particular, persons and certain biological organisms—can also instantiate mental propert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Mind as Immaterial Substance: Descartes’s Dualism
• 3. Mind and Behavior: Behaviorism
• 4. Mind as the Brain: The Psychoneural Identity Theory
• 5. Mind as a Computing Machine: Machine Functionalism
• 6. Mind as a Causal System: Causal-Theoretical Functionalism
• 7. Mental Causation
• 8. Mental Content
• 9. What Is Consciousness?
• 10. Consciousness and the Mind-Body Problem
• References
• Index