What is Philosophy of Mind?

Tom McClelland

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509538782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

We all have minds, but what exactly is a mind? Is your mind the same thing as your brain? How does what's happening in your mind cause your behaviour? Can you know what's going on in other people's minds? Can you even be sure what's going on in your own? Are babies conscious? How about cats? Or self-driving cars?

Philosophy of mind grapples with questions like these, exploring who we are and how we fit into the world. In this student-friendly guide, McClelland introduces the key ideas in philosophy of mind, showing why they matter and how philosophers have tried to answer them. He covers the major historical moments in philosophy of mind, from Descartes and his troubles with immaterial souls up to today's 'consciousness wars'. Additionally, he examines the implications that philosophy of mind has for psychology, artificial intelligence and even particle physics. McClelland lays out the centuries-long dialogue between philosophy and science, presenting a uniquely grounded, practical picture of the field for students.

Rich with real-world examples and written for the absolute beginner, What is Philosophy of Mind? gives students the tools to delve deeper into this dynamic field of philosophy.

1
The Mind and Its Problems

1.1 Philosophizing about the Mental

So what is philosophy of mind? Well, we all know what a mind is. Everyone has one, after all, and nothing could be more familiar to us than the contents of our own mind. Putting into words exactly what it means to have a mind can be very tricky, as can describing the different kinds of thing that happen in the mind. But we at least have some intuitive grip on the mind and on a whole host of familiar mental phenomena like perceptions, pains, beliefs, desires, emotions and intentions. We also know what philosophy is. Philosophy is the discipline that asks the big questions about life, the universe and everything. It asks metaphysical questions about the nature of reality, epistemological questions about our knowledge of reality, and normative questions about the value of things in reality. It grapples with these questions by challenging our most basic assumptions, analysing our most foundational concepts and constructing a clear and coherent framework for thinking about the world.

Putting this together, we can describe philosophy of mind as a sub-discipline that investigates the mind philosophically. It asks metaphysical questions about what the mind is, about which things have minds and about how the mind fits into reality. It asks epistemological questions about how we know what’s going on in our own minds and how we know about other minds. It even asks some normative questions about the value of having a mind and about how things with minds ought to be treated. And philosophy of mind deals with these questions by challenging our everyday assumptions about mental phenomena, probing the concepts we use to describe those phenomena and developing a better framework for thinking about the mind and its place in nature.

Philosophy is not, of course, the only discipline that has the mind as its target. The cognitive sciences are an interconnected family of disciplines that investigate the mind and mental phenomena. Cognitive science encompasses neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence (AI) and aspects of anthropology. Given how successful these disciplines have been at providing insights into the mind, one might wonder what philosophy has to offer. Why not just hand over the big questions to cognitive scientists and give philosophers the day off? The answer is that these disciplines aren’t in a position to deal with the kinds of question raised by the philosophy of mind.

Any scientific investigation of the mind will be built upon metaphysical assumptions: assumptions about what the mind is, about how the mind relates to the brain, and about the nature of specific mental phenomena like pain or love. But these are exactly the kinds of assumption that philosophy seeks to critique. Cognitive science also makes epistemological assumptions about the methods we should use to learn about mental phenomena. But these are again precisely the assumptions that philosophers call into question. One objective of philosophy of mind is to determine whether the cognitive sciences are well founded, and this isn’t an objective that can be accomplished by the cognitive sciences themselves. Trying to use cognitive science to justify its own assumptions is like trying to jump on your own shadow – it’s ill-conceived and ultimately futile. Of course, philosophers too will often have to make assumptions, but the difference is that none of these assumptions are built into the fabric of the discipline. For philosophers, everything is up for debate.

Another reason that the cognitive sciences are unsuited to answering philosophical questions is that these questions are so general in scope. Philosophy explores the big picture of how all of our knowledge fits together – what we know from our everyday experiences, what we know from the natural sciences and what we know from the cognitive sciences. But sciences proceed by zooming in on specific regions of the big picture. Each science picks out a special domain, such as language or intelligence, and investigates that domain without worrying too much about how it relates to the rest of the picture. So philosophy of mind again aims to offer something that science cannot: an overall picture of the mind and its place in the world.

None of this is to say that one way of investigating the mind is superior to the other. Philosophy has one role to play and science another. Nor is it to say that philosophy and science must be kept apart. Philosophy can do conceptual work that helps science to succeed and science can yield empirical insights that help philosophers to answer their conceptual questions. Indeed, a driving message of this book is that the history of philosophy of mind is best understood as a centuries-long dialogue between philosophy and science. Exactly how this give-and-take should work is a matter of some debate, but what’s clear is that philosophical questions about the mental are unavoidable and that philosophy has an indispensable role to play in the study of the mind.

1.2 A Whistle-Stop Tour of the Mind

Since we’re going to be asking philosophical questions about the mind, it will help to have a clearer idea of our subject matter. The mind is, after all, a highly complex and multifaceted thing. To know your way around the mind, you need to have a grip on the full range of mental phenomena that make up our mental lives. Let’s start by examining the different mental states that someone has at a specific time.

Our subject – let’s call her Mindy – is the striker for her university football team (by which I mean ‘soccer’ team). It’s the cup final and, in the last minutes of the game, her team has been awarded a penalty kick. If she scores the penalty, her team will surely win. As she strides up to the penalty spot, what’s going through Mindy’s mind? She can hear the crowd cheering, taste the sweat dripping into her mouth, and smell the cut grass. She can feel the mud on her knees and the pain in her muscles. She sees a whole visual scene before her: the ball on the penalty spot, the goalkeeper in the goal, the crowd watching behind. She feels a buzz of excitement mixed with a pang of dread. She thinks about where to aim her shot. She wants to score and believes that the best way to do this is to go the opposite way to the goalkeeper. She remembers that the last time the goalkeeper faced a penalty she dived to the right of the goal and Mindy infers that she’ll dive the same way today. She decides to aim for the left and imagines kicking the ball hard into the bottom left corner. She runs up to the ball, kicks it and scores. She feels a huge rush of elation and runs to her teammates to celebrate.

In those few moments, Mindy has experienced a whole variety of mental phenomena. Let’s start with what Mindy perceives. We perceive things through our senses – a set of systems that register information about our environment through our sense organs. Mindy hears the crowd, smells the grass, tastes the sweat, feels the mud and sees the scene before her. This covers the five main senses: hearing, smell, taste, touch and sight. Mindy will also have perceptual states generated by two other sensory systems: the vestibular system, which is responsible for our sense of balance, and the proprioceptive system, which is responsible for our sense of where our body is positioned. Another thing Mindy experiences is the pain in her muscles. This might be classified as a bodily sensation, like the feeling of mud on her knees. Alternatively, it might be classified as a kind of ‘hedonic feeling’. On this view, feelings like pain or pleasure tell us how good or bad something is rather than conveying sensory information.

Now let’s consider Mindy’s emotions. She experiences excitement, dread and – once she’s scored the goal – elation. Each emotion has several different aspects. Mindy’s feeling of elation, for example, has a physiological component: her heart rate and blood pressure go up. The emotion also constitutes a kind of evaluation of the situation Mindy is in: it presents the goal to Mindy as being a good thing in some way. The emotion manifests itself in Mindy’s behaviour: she sprints to celebrate with her teammates. It also manifests itself in her expressions: her eyebrows raise, her mouth opens, her arms go up in the air. It’s a matter of some debate where to locate the emotion itself in all this. Perhaps elation is something that causes these things to happen, or perhaps being elated is just an amalgam of all these things. It’s also hard to pin down what the experience of an emotion contains: is the feeling of elation just the feeling of your heart rate increasing, your facial expression lifting and so on, or is there also some distinctive feeling of elation separate from these peripheral things?

Next up are Mindy’s thoughts. Thoughts come in various forms, many of which Mindy exemplifies. Her thoughts include: a desire to score; a belief that scoring is best achieved by going the opposite way to the goalkeeper; a memory that the goalkeeper went right in the past; another belief that the goalkeeper will go right again; an intention to kick the ball to the left; and an imaginative experience of scoring the goal. The first thing to notice about these different thoughts is how they fit together. Her intention is justified by a rational process involving her beliefs, her desires and her memories. Reasoning is not a specific mental state but rather a mental process that unfolds over time and that encompasses all sorts of different mental states. How Mindy reasons about her situation plays a big role in determining what she thinks. This is quite different to perception – when Mindy looks at the goal she sees the goalkeeper, and no amount of reasoning can stop her from seeing the goalkeeper. It’s also quite different to emotion – when Mindy feels an emotion, she can’t easily reason herself into having a different emotion. We should stop short of claiming that perception and emotion are completely unresponsive to reasoning. Sometimes the way we perceive or feel about a situation is influenced by our rational thoughts. Nevertheless, there is a clear sense in which perceiving and feeling are outside our direct rational control in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Mind and Its Problems
• 2 Descartes’ Dualism
• 3 The Materialist Turn
• 4 Functionalism and the Computer Revolution
• 5 The Problem of Consciousness
• 6 The Mind Today
• Index