introphil_Week 3 - Minds, Brains and Computers_Handout - Philosophy of Mind, Large Format

Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh

MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)

The Chinese Room argument throws up all sorts of tricky questions, discussion of which we shall have to leave for another day. I’ll leave you with one last puzzle.

11

Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh

MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)

Representation is a three way relation

What makes something a symbol or representation? We say that somethingis a representation or symbol if it functions as one. When I’m at the pub, I might use beer-mugs and coasters to represent a particular football formation on the table, and move them around to demonstrate what happened in a game. The beer-mug is functioning to represent me on the football pitch.

What we need to grasp here is that representation (including symbolic representation) is a three way relation: X represents Y to Z; the beer-mug represents my position on the field to my friends. But when it comes to minds, it’s not clear what fills the place of Z: this neuralactivity represents a dog to ???

Conclusions

The aim of this lecture was to introduce some of the core topics in contemporary philosophy of mind. We began by looking at the merits of physicalism over Cartesian Dualism. We then turned to how the physicalist position has played out, first through identity theories and then through functionalism. Functionalist was the catalyst for the popular move to start thinking of minds as computers, information processing machines which operate on the syntactic structures of symbols. By thinking about our minds containing symbols which can represent states of affairs, we begin to address one of the fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind: how can thoughts be about things?

We have not touched on how a symbol-crunching machine could possess consciousness. Indeed, we have side-stepped the issue of consciousness altogether. That would be a topic for another day. We have also passed over the intricacies of these debates: each of these topics would be discussed over two or three weeks in our undergraduate classes! Despite this, I hope the MOOC has given you some insight into some of the puzzles which have inspired, and continue to intrigue, philosophers of mind.

12

Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh

MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)

Further reading

Clark, A. (2001) Mindware: an introduction to the philosophy of cognitive science O.U.P.

Crane, T. (1995) The Mechanical Mind Penguin

D. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (Eds.) The Mind’s I: Fantasies and

Reflections on Self and Soul Basic Books

13

Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh

MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)

Appendix 1: The argument from doubt

There are several arguments which Descartes offers for his dualistic account of the mind, but the most famous is the argument from doubt (Discourse, second meditation):

1.I can doubt the existence of everything around me

2.I cannot doubt the existence of my thoughts (my mind)

3.Therefore, my mind must be made of something fundamentally differentfromeverything else around me.

Descartes believed that this argument shows that the mind must be made of a different substance to his body and other things found in the physical world. This is because it has a property which physical thingsdo not: its existence cannot be doubted. To put it another way: I can imagine that the physical world does not exist, but it is impossible for me to imagine that I don’t exist because there has to be something which is doing the imagining! Hence the famous Cogito: ‘I think therefore I am’. In order to think, there must be something which is doing the thinking (namely, me).

There are significant problems with this argument. Most pressing, as pointedout byLeibniz (in his Philosophical Papers) and Arnauld (a contemporary of Descartes) the argument is revealing about the nature of the imagination (or doubt), but not necessarily about the nature of the mind. ‘Doubt’ is such that we cannot apply it to our own minds but this does not tell us anything about the nature of the mind.

An example might help here.3 Let’s imagine that I am unaware that Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde. I can imagine a scenario where Dr. Jekyll apprehends Mr. Hyde and leaves him in the custody of the police, going home to a warm supper whilst Mr. Hyde languishes in the cells cursing Jekyll. Yet this imagining does not inform me of what is in fact possible. Rather, it reveals a limitation on my knowledge which cannot be appreciated from my current perspective. It is perfectly logical to state that if two things have different properties then those two things distinct. But this doesn’t

3 My thanks to Dr. Paul Sludds who thought of this example!

14

Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh

MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)

hold once we throw psychological terms in there: ‘If I believe two things to have different properties then they are distinct’. This is because my belief mightnot match on to how the world actually is. I believe that Dr. Jekyll has the property of being kind, and that Mr. Hyde lacks this property (being a murdering psychopath), and I infer from this that because Dr Jekyll has a property that Mr. Hyde lacks, they must be distinct people. This believing, however, does not preclude the possibility that they are identical.

15